Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She graduated summa cum laude from Smith College and held a Fulbright Scholarship at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met Ted Hughes. Her only collection published in her lifetime, The Colossus and Other Poems (Heinemann, 1960), was followed posthumously by Ariel (1965). The Collected Poems (Harper and Row, 1981), edited by Hughes, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, awarded posthumously. She also wrote the autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963).
Who was your "gateway poet," the poet whose first book or poem made you want to write?
Sylvia Plath! Introduced to me in 11th grade through the Voices and Visions PBS documentary. It changed my life; I had always enjoyed storytelling and theater and poetry in school before that, but after seeing that documentary, I sought more writers like her, with her vibes. Her cadences resonated with me. There is a physical thrill to reading her work aloud, one I had not experienced before except maybe in drama class. My American Lit teacher taped the episode and we watched it on a small TV. Her voice and the poem's imagery mesmerized me. I thought why don't we read this kind of poetry in school? And we did, much to my delight, but never enough for my appetite.
Who was your "gateway poet," the poet whose first book or poem made you want to write?
Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. I read Ariel in an undergraduate poetry class taught by one of my favorite professors at the University of Kentucky, Jane Gentry Vance, a poet herself, with whom I also studied The Odyssey and read Sappho’s fragments. From the first page of Plath’s collection–“Love set you going like a fat gold watch” (“Morning Song”)–I was entranced by the metaphor, the music, how the three monosyllables at the end of the first line suggested the way the “midwife slapped” the baby’s “footsoles.” I hadn’t realized language could do that in such a visceral way. Plath’s surreal and strange imagery, the audacity of her voice and truth-telling in “The Applicant” and other poems similarly thrilled me. This was nearly 30 years ago, and I was recently out of high school, during which I had been assigned poems by Poe and Blake to memorize and recite (a formative experience I also treasure), but had not really been exposed to contemporary poetry. Basically, reading Plath made me feel as if the top of my head were coming off, to paraphrase another of my gateway poets, Emily Dickinson.
Who was your "gateway poet," the poet whose first book or poem made you want to write?
In English, that role belonged to Sylvia Plath. Discovering her work was a revelation. I began with her fiction first, in high school as a new immigrant in America, then realized she was a poet and became quickly attached to her poems. She molds language and expands it in ways I did not think possible. Unlike the Persian poetry I grew up with, her language is not filigreed or embellished. It is straightforward, at times even bare, but extremely incisive and profound. The subjects she takes on, the dance between existence and death, despair and ache, felt entirely new to me from a female perspective. It was a form of sorcery. I was completely entranced by her work, and still am, so much so that I have translated most of her poems into Persian.