Author Statement: “As a teenager in the 1960s, I first encountered Sylvia Plath through a copy of Ariel borrowed from my best friend, a precocious girl who wrote poetry. Reading “Daddy,” I felt both shocked and elated. Was it possible to talk about oneself and one’s family members this way? Seeing Plath do this—having her venomous, yet liberating words fill my head—made anything and everything seem possible. Her poem was more than a mere roar of anger directed at a parent; it was a declaration of her own power, a power far greater than young women were supposed to be able to access. Later, I read The Bell Jar and felt the same mixture of astonishment and excitement when faced with a protagonist who climbed onto a Manhattan sunroof and flung defiantly into the streets below the clothing that represented the confinement of 1950s femininity. I reveled, too, in the vein of darkly ironic comedy that ran throughout the narrative. My poem is a tribute both to Plath and to that autobiographical heroine who, like her creator, spent one summer as an intern at a women’s fashion magazine (based on the real-life, now defunct, publication titled Mademoiselle), and who also suffered a mental breakdown. For this poem, I employed the rigidly restrictive form of a tanka, which must be limited to thirty-one syllables, as a reminder of the external and internal constraints that were imposed upon Plath and upon other middle-class white American women of her generation—the constraints against which she rebelled. But the title also contains a small joke, as the sound of the word “tanka” is meant to suggest “thank you.” We all have Sylvia Plath to thank for having been such a crucial and influential voice, helping to inspire the Second Wave feminist movement that freed from guilt those of us who grew up rejecting domesticity, conformity, and silence.”