Forum / A brief essay on poetry, "I Am Vertical"

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Nov 14, 08:23pm

  This essay is the second-most accessed post at my blog, Ana Verse, and has been accepted to appear in a planned anthology, not centered on her suicide, of Sylvia Plath's poetry.

  Comments encouraged. I'm revising everything I have written since 2000, with a bias toward less is more, the slighter the change the more powerful, and I could use your takes on it.

  http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/i-am-vertical

• 
  Sam Rasnake

  Nov 14, 09:23pm

  It's a great piece, Ann. Enjoyed the read. Wonderful that it will be included in the anthology.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Nov 14, 09:41pm

  Thanks, Sam. The planned anthology is of essays not centered on Plath's suicide about her poetry. I misstated that.

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Nov 15, 12:27am

  I enjoyed the essay, ann. thanks for posting it. I am trying to figure out how to write a parallel piece but have been unable to decide how personal to make it. So this was helpful to me in addition to being interesting to read and think about.

  I wondered a little about the last line, though: it seems to enter a different area and i wonder whether that would need a bit of fleshing out. As it is, the line reads as almost a throwaway. It seems to me more interesting than that.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Nov 15, 05:34am

  Stephen, thanks for the feedback. Yes, how personal to make it is a pivotal question. Too personal is not only too revealing (too vulnerable), something it might also be, but distracting perhaps as well, if it takes one away from the "subject at hand"--if it digresses unproductively. After I loaded the essay to the Fictionaut platform, and only then, I thought it read (at the end) as if it cuts off, as if there were a word-count restriction. Not so, no such restriction. I could flesh it there. The platform (layout design) let me see that, too, and your comment confirms it.

• 
  eamon byrne

  Nov 15, 08:13am

  There really should be more examples of the "essay" form in this site.

  Ann, your's is an interesting variant on the format. Most would probably not describe it as such - it's, typically for your work, a departure point for some self-exloration.

  But that extra agenda is what makes it worth reading beyond what the "subject" promises us. In a word, it's a "personal" treatment - and the personal often leads to it being an "original" one.

  (Pardon my quote marks - once started difficult to stop.)

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Nov 15, 12:47pm

  Thanks for your feedback, Eamon. Yes, I, too, use quotation marks around words, dashes within sentences. I even went through a colon phase, and I have overused semi-colons as well. I define these as prose tics. Each phase lasts about a year. Later, when I edit, I want to switch all the tics to some other form of punctuation, and that leads to rewriting. I rewrite, but the sentences mean approximately what they did in the original instance, punctuation out of the way.

• 
  Darryl Price

  Nov 18, 05:33pm

  The only thing I can see is way too brief. "Literary history has taught us to see Plath as “confessional” and to think of her suicidality as the subject of her poems, perhaps even the form of her poems, yet in “I Am Vertical” (and in “Mushrooms”) we read about the coming of nature, of night and time." The media has shaped her into the Sylvia they want her to be, but her poetry lets that shape out. It stretches her boundaries and doesn't so neatly define her,as present her, and that's what her poetry does for me--it gifts me with her presence, and I love that feeling, even when it gets scary, but in this particular poem what I see is the sure head and heart of a realized poet, admiring the way nature works its charm, but knowing that sense of beauty has its own meanings, its own natural yoke. Yeah everything and everyone folds into everything else, but the human condition I think is one, or can be, of lonely isolation, not so much remorse as restlessness that stirs underneath the days and nights of a passionate mind such as hers. Even the words she chooses, in this particular piece, give us what we came for,poetry pure and true,but also something more--a small gliver of a glimpse into a sad soul, still capable of acute observation and genius art,but more than aware of what it might add up to in the end.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Nov 18, 06:42pm

  Darryl, lovely interaction with my sentences. Thanks much for it.

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