hmmmmmm... it could be too soon to jump into her diaries. yesterday, i spent a pretty hefty chunk of the day with them, off and on between projects, and by 4 in the afternoon i was beginning to feel more than slightly disillusioned and sad about life. no good. but the writing is just so beautiful and i can run around in it because i know these things she's describing... and reading her work makes my writing better- more intricate, more subtle, more meaningful. i don't want to back away from her art just because it might make me sad. my work does the same thing to people sometimes and i've always counted that as a good quality... that the work can be responded to emotionally, intensely... not that i am comparing my paintings to a Plath poem, just that the experience of sadness isn't something i should use to run away from good work- work that sparks and flies around the room and makes you look at your own life from a new and different angle... work that makes your own work grow and turn.
i will have to take the diaries in doses though, i think. they're pretty intense. the last time (the first time) i read them, i was in my last year in college and had other things to read so it took me about 4 months to read them all. i read it on the train to school and back home everyday. i read it on the weekends after my projects were satisfied. sometimes i even left the house to do "errands" so that i could sit somewhere and read them without any interruption or outside expectation. it's when i started writing again. seriously writing. my love of poetry woke back up because of this collection and i've been hot for it ever since. it's a slightly painful form of inspiration, i will admit. it takes a lot out of me. i've always thought that poetry is harder than painting. a landslide harder. a piece of writing seems to ask more from the person with the pen than a painting does. paintings seem to have an outside opinion that, at some point (for me anyway), i can relinquish control to and the work becomes itself. it stops being my work. it's its own work.
in the end, the work takes care of me... not the other way around.
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