MY ARIEL AN EXTENSION OF PLATH CLASSIC
Writer Sina Queyras’ gutsy, personal work wins in risky game of engagement
Never underestimate the attachment a reader can feel with a favourite book. It goes, in many cases, beyond the book’s contents to the physical object itself: a cover design can become personally totemic, carrying a lifetime’s memories and associations.
Imagine that you have such a book in your life, and a new book comes along that, in an act somewhere between homage and vandalism, essentially overlays itself on your beloved original. You might be a bit upset, right?
That is precisely the case with Montreal writer Sina Queyras’s My Ariel (Coach House Books, 159 pages, $19.95), whose cover takes the original design for Sylvia Plath’s seminal final collection Ariel, published two years after the poet’s 1963 suicide, and, via brash insertions of the word “My” and the author’s name, makes it something else.
“I had this visceral reaction when my publisher first sent me a mock-up,” the poet said in the Mile End home she shares with her partner and their six-yearold twins.
“My immediate response was, ‘No! You can’t do this!’ But I realized it was what it had to be.”
And how long was that realization in coming? “A few seconds.” Queyras’s conviction befits a project that took total belief to carry off. Employing the titles of the poems from Plath’s book, My Ariel then takes the poems in a variety of directions, some roughly congruent with the originals, others veering off into very different territories.
It’s a gutsy thing to do: Queyras is setting herself up for direct comparisons with an icon of modern poetry and feminism, and for accusations of presumption and hubris. But as you proceed through this intensely personal and unflinching work, it hits you that Queyras has paid Plath the best kind of tribute. My Ariel is not a copy, but an internalization and an extension.
Despite what many readers coming to Queyras’s fifth book might well assume, it is not the product of a lifelong Plath fandom.
“Like most people, I think, I wrote poetry before I read it,” the 53-year-old recalled of her working-class childhood in Winnipeg. “The first poem I remember seriously reading was by Margaret Atwood. I was 10. My brother-in-law, who was 10 years older, had The Journals of Susanna Moodie and The Circle Game, and I basically stole them from him. I still have both of them. But I feel like I jumped over (Plath) at first, and I’m sad because those early Atwood books were written at pretty much the same time, and they really were in conversation with each other.”
Plath’s work has remained so much in the culture since she died at 30 that it’s easy to forget she was the product of a specific time.
“Yes, it’s my mother’s era, not mine,” said Queyras. “Every generation thinks they own Plath, but she’s solidly in that Atwood-Munro generation. Not long ago in New York I found myself hanging out with all these 85-year-olds, which was very apropos, because (Plath) would be 85 now. I love that generation of women born from 1930 to ’35, this short stint of extremely powerful women, slightly overly determined, who’ve gone through so much and had to work so hard to keep their careers on trajectory.”
The seed for My Ariel, as Queyras tells it, was very different from what it grew into over the course of five years and multiple rewrites.
“I was still in recovery from the arrival of the babies, and I wanted to do poems that felt more like playing,” she recalled.
“So it was a benign way in. But pretty soon the curiosity about Plath’s life took me into the rabbit hole, and eventually I could see that I had enmeshed myself in this narrative that I wasn’t particularly enamoured of. I had to keep going deeper and deeper into this really painful place, and for me it was very particularly painful because it connected with a lot of unrealized dreams in my own family trajectory. I naively did not think about that when I started.”
The manner of Plath’s death, of course, looms large. Even leaving aside the still-contentious subject of estranged husband Ted Hughes’s role in Plath’s final crisis and in the posthumous dissemination of her work, it’s a fact that is never far out of range when Plath is read and discussed.
“I’m actually not a fan of suicide,” Queyras said dryly.
“I remember being 19 and a friend of mine claiming to have tried to commit suicide and then telling me she was just kidding. I said, ‘F--- you, I’m not playing this game.’ I do realize that I’ve now obsessed over two writers who have done it, Virginia Woolf being the other. Maybe I’m delusional, but I don’t think that’s what interested me so much about them.”
My Ariel lands in the #metoo moment, a social revolution that Queyras says she sensed coming at Concordia University, where she has taught poetry for 10 years.
“There was a definite time, around 2014, where I noticed that young women were saying ‘We’ve had enough,’ ” she said. “But the question of professionalizing in a sexist world is something I’ve been talking about for a couple of decades, so for me it’s not new. I often, jokingly but not really jokingly, ask my male colleagues at social events, ‘How many unwanted advances have you had to deflect on your way up?’ They look at me like, ‘What are you talking about?’, but that’s a conversation that women often have.”
Is a grounding in Ariel a prerequisite for appreciating My Ariel?
“I would hope that it would stand alone, but I’m not entirely sure,” Queyras said. “We’ll see, I guess. Not long ago, a bunch of cousins of mine came to a reading in Winnipeg, and their response was very positive. But I didn’t know if they were impressed by the poems or by the fact that it was me who had written them.”
Given My Ariel’ s parenthoods purred origins, it seems fair to ask how Queyras accommodates writing — she has a new project in hand, of which she sensibly chooses to say nothing — among her other pressing responsibilities.
“Women still try to have it all,” she said with what sounded like a sigh. “We’re told and believe that we can have children late in life, but it isn’t easy. I try to write early in the morning, and I try to run every day, to create a certain amount of balance between my mental and physical requirements. It’s hard, but you know, especially when it comes to raising kids, you just do it. You carry on.”