Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid by Diane Seuss

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 25, 2015   Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid   Diane Seuss

Some women make a pilgrimage to visit it in the Indiana library charged to keep it safe.   I didn’t drive to it; I dreamed it, the thick braid roped over my hands, heavier than lead.   My own hair was long for years. Then I became obsessed with chopping it off,   and I did, clear up to my ears. If hair is beauty then I am no longer beautiful.   Sylvia was beautiful, wasn’t she? And like all of us, didn’t she wield her beauty   like a weapon? And then she married, and laid it down, and when she was betrayed   and took it up again it was a word-weapon, a poem-sword. In the dream I fasten   her braid to my own hair, at my nape. I walk outside with it, through the world   of men, swinging it behind me like a tail.            Copyright © 2015 by Diane Seuss. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “This is one of a series of self-portraiture poems that are part of a larger manuscript of poems about painting. I am gullible to the fetishizing of human relics—hair, teeth, bones—and who has been more fetishized than Plath? I like to believe our poems’ edges are honed when we rescind physical beauty and its dubious benefits.” —Diane Seuss   Diane Seuss is the author of Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015). She teaches at Kalamazoo College and lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Most Recent Book by Seuss   Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015) "Sylvia Plath Is in Paris with a Balloon on a Long String" by Amy Newman "Self-Portrait in a Wire Jacket" by Monica Youn "Sally’s Hair" by John Koethe Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038