Author Statement: “Sylvia Plath’s luminous writings, nestled in library corners at my Manhattan selective high school and at universities, seemed to always be relegated to a dusty bookcase’s bottom shelf, belying her work’s continuing mystique and movement – like a spray of ruby pomegranate seeds clattering against an ivory porcelain bowl – in the minds of teenage girls everywhere within America’s national boundaries. However, Shakespeare and Hemingway were also pigeonholed in the classics section in favor of YA and children’s lit, so that bookshelf may just reflect Plath’s enduring legacy as one whose works have transformed the world, and first inspired me to be a poet. I can’t recall ever reading her poems in a 2010s English classroom, within the progressive racial and gender diversification of curricula as a hallmark of literary change from the repressive 1950s, whose gender subliminations took a toll on Plath as it was a time when women could not buy or sell property, control earnings, or create contracts or wills. Plath's transgressions of these limitations made her a feminist icon in my fourteen-year-old eyes, whose poetry and prose intervened politically through her voice’s eternal preservation amongst male authors, and garnered her independent income. I related to how her creative work helped her gain success even as her personal relationships and psychological state deteriorated, as my first-generation immigrant family has relied on freelance income beyond 9-5 roles, where harassment and promotional discrimination is common. There are stark divides between those who enjoy the benefits of a welcoming creative writing community and those who do not. Plath’s courage helped bring about my transformation into womanhood, as I wrote about controversy, mental illness, domestic entanglements, abstract symbolism enlarged through free verse, and performed original work on the vestiges of her legacy. Her name became a beacon for success as a creative writer, from the earliest traces as a Scholastic Art and Writing Awards winner which she won in 1947 and me every year from 2011-2017 when the internet made submissions easier, to applying for fellowships and grants, which led me across the country on paths immigrant parents may never before have imagined for their ancestors, brethren, or posterity.

“Tulips” would probably be the singular example as part of many poetry handouts that led me to experience both life-saving psychiatric treatment and poetry readings and awards, otherwise inaccessible and unconventional for a Chinese American girl. Throughout my coming-of-age years, I always wanted someone to kneel beside my hospital bedside and plant a bouquet of fire-red tulips in a frosted vase – which would be banned within the children’s psychiatric ward, where pint-sized guys and gals who looked barely out of elementary school bawled and screamed without their parents for weeks, and the doors and closets were pried free of hooks and valet rods. Soon after reading Ariel and The Bell Jar, Plath’s narrative was internalized in my psyche and body, as my release from the ward coincided with a first-place win in CCNY’s citywide high school poetry contest where I wrote and read with Plath’s voice and psychiatric encounters and treatment in mind, sublimating and often replacing my own body and heritage as a woman of color. Plath’s life was one of the only ways I could envision life as a poet, and I found that as long as I followed her physical trail, I would succeed and have an explanatory example for other people when they questioned my future as a writer – if they overlooked her final end for the energy and perceptivity of her writing. Through word of mouth and turn of phrase, I discovered other teenage girls and boys who had passed through the psychiatric institution, their personalities like comets whose icy nuclei turn into gas and dust tails when falling toward the sun – a doubly affectionate and verbally harsh will-they won’t-they American boyfriend from upstate who spent what seemed like years with an eating disorder in a Wyoming hospital – two immigrant girls, both only children and predicted to be brilliant writers and future humanists, one of whom passed away young from the same disease or nasty shock plaguing Plath in the final year of her life with abuse, infidelity, career stalls – who were my classmates – a Chinese American third-generation son diagnosed with bipolar and schizophrenia after what I imagined was a dramatically culturally resistant entry to the ward – authorial icons who shared traces of my journey, including Yiyun Li whose college intertwined with my life-changing scholarship to the Iowa Young Writers Studio while her linguistically gifted sons battled their mother’s and Plath’s challenges through a different lens, because first-gen people from East Asian cultures do not have strategies to overcome the negative impact of individualistic systems in European American cultures, leading to decreased well-being – and Esme Weijun Wang’s hallucinatory meditations on everyday survival. The gleaming subversions of Anne Sexton and vibrant social justice experimentalism of Seo-Young Chu, were also intertwined with interactions with the mental health care system, discovered in the online world of collegiate women poets, with their frequent confessional approach to the genre. Womanhood and survival – survival and womanhood – these ideas seemed to be synonymically interchangeable, and harbingers of trailblazing writing craft. But reading Plath means rediscovering the dazzling life and energy which helped her contribute greatly to literature even in the depths of her despair, and analyzing how her vision for human experience unites all ages and cultures. I found myself desiring to conduct distillation and extraction of her literary work to help heal the overburdened youth I’d known while coming of age, and to provide intersectional relationality and community in girlhood storytelling.

I continued to find myself inexplicably drawn to Plath’s alma maters, taking a Greyhound bus rattling over potholed highways through damp morning mists, to Smith College’s Poetry Prize Workshop with Marilyn Chin in 2016. Two years later, I would step onto Mount Holyoke’s campus as a college freshman within the Five College Consortium representing UMass at the Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest, whose contestants included Sylvia Plath. Following her footsteps by physically passing through the memories of her life in and around Amherst, as she and Ted crisscrossed the chilly Massachusetts landscape when Plath was an English instructor at Smith College from 1957 to 1958, while her husband taught English literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at the Amherst campus, was a marvel of affective hermeneutics paving my lifelong dream of becoming a writer. I gained a first-hand introduction to New England even as I left the NYC streets of my upbringing, memorializing in my bones how Sylvia Plath herself traveled to New York City the summer before senior year of college for Mademoiselle magazine's guest editorship. Recently, her origins and journey have continued to influence my geographical and academic movements, as seen in a recent field trip to Oxford University before bussing to Leeds for study abroad program in a multicountry voyage across the European continent this summer. Plath’s life mapped locales and situations onto my body as if I were passing through a white-filtered prism, within which my Singaporean Chinese American identity could only fracture and fragment. After personal and professional letdowns I dye my hair platinum blonde and have re-bleached the front side pieces for the past year – another vision of Plath’s ghost, whose image was heavily controlled by others after her death – this too was her chance to help others see how she wanted herself to be seen, a Plath-lite for the books and criticism on the record. Despite her written racial prejudices and psychiatric failures, I continued to idealize her and her work as groundwork for understanding the Northeast and its histories of experience, in the honesty and vulnerability of her voice, and in every stanza that forms like sugar in boiling water around a silken thread – inpatient, corrosive, and with a homemade fifty-fifty chance of condensation or solidification, but behaving with the same ethereal beauty.

Through continuing discussions of energy futures and infrastructure, vulnerability of marginalized groups, sustainable climate futures in science fiction, colonization and indigenization, electricity and fossil fuels, and gender and sexuality that transformed my experiences as an early twenty-first century English major venturing beyond the canon during the centennial anniversary of the roaring twenties, I find Plath to be a pertinent addition to the workshop experience. While it may be redundant to see how her work has been phased out of its position in English syllabi in this day and age, as an aspiring English instructor I predict making photocopies with Plath’s excerpts for the most curious students to hand out with reverence after class, and receiving email notifications from students of all backgrounds emulating Plath in their self-worked persona and poetry. I never forgot over the past decade since I first encountered her work how flowers themselves rupture time and space, and how like the self-made imposition of Plath's life over my own, I did nothing in poetry without sufficient love to resist discouragement: “And I am aware of my heart: / it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. / The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, / And comes from a country far away as health.” The ashes of the scarlet phoenix rise, immortal – her legacy cannot be ignored through an autobiographical reading of the melancholy and inspiration she forged throughout The Bell Jar and the most haunting poems of Ariel, navigating sickness and health like a master captain and shipmate. She rotates between the two polarities of control and release through her vulnerabilities and dependencies, and alternatively with each line which visually clarifies visceral experiences, beneficial to universal cross-race and cross-gender connection across time and space.

Nowadays I see her walking in her girlhood locales and the places that transformed her into maturity, my imagination stimulated by the help of personal experience with tracing her pathways geographically and living life in the same global locations. The sun’s metamorphic splinters glide through her lashes, like alternating current through an open oven as she strides briskly over campus cobblestone, the intensity of her mood overflowing to everyone she knows like electrons flowing from the negative to the positive. In the happier instances of her life, her words are laying autumn’s cement in the many abbey ruins and festivals that dot the British landscape, poems raffled at street auctions, constructing dreamscapes small enough to perch atop a gilded keychain of a ring of crimson poppies, which I bought during my trip alongside a bejeweled bumblebee brooch in a black velvet box the length of my thumb. Across the pond, at a Central Park picnic, we meet across the decades – tracing lanyards and beaded bracelets, hallucinating in the peaks and valleys of girlhood games, speaking against neurodiversity stigma where our shared suffering, hundreds-strong, has refined our moral judgment in embracing others with kindness. How her poems sit in a field barred for miles by skyscrapers, the diamond district enfolded within our calves as we sit cross-legged, piercing blades of grass with razor nails, rolling popsicle wrappers into powder kegs. She hands me the vermilion net of her art – woven into images. Behind us is a three-legged race, volleyball doubles that flay palms into smears of peach. The chalice, containing fresh copies of a new print run enclosed in express mail – opening. Pandora grasps the lid, speaking seven thousand languages, before opening the archives, swooning with delirium tremens. I sometimes visualize our family kettle over five years in America – evolving from iron to glass with a heatproof handle. Decanter mounted, mouth to stern. Interior divided into azure skies. The falling sparrow of a depressive disorder twisted into the conjugations, she-her-he-they which I fumble on Latin worksheets and mislink chemistry molecule structures. Night startle: [he/Ted] begs for [me/Plath] to unlock the door, rain pouring in rivulets, the moment [I/she] does he ruffles [my/her] hair and grabs me/her around the thighs, swinging [me/her] up toward the ceiling. Seeking love and success beyond institutionalization, and it will happen. It will. In our hands is a fig tree studded with purple stars that none of us wish would ever decay, our combined desire making it possible, and less tragic when it ends - to live by Plath’s mantra from adolescence to adulthood, “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.”