"An Open Wound" Two Poems in Conversation with Plath

Abstract

The following poems were written as responses to Plath’s poems “Tulips”, “Sheep in Fog” and “Ariel”. In them, I explore the experience of post-traumatic stress disorder in conversation with Plath’s poetry. The first poem, “Tulips and Bees” compares the sensation of being triggered, the wound “reopening”, to the tulips in Plath’s hospital room, and imagines that my open wound were one such tulip. The second poem, “A Heavy Heaven” responds to Plath’s comparison of heaven in the final line of her poem “Sheep in Fog” to “a dark water”. I explore the experience of emotional numbness that is frequently a symptom of PTSD, and express that Plath’s life, though brief, was a social, vibrantly lived and far from numb one, a life of which a person suffering from PTSD can easily be envious. Plath's own suffering, which comes through in her poetry, is here enacted as something guiding, supportive and conducive to therapeutic conversation. The widespread notion that her life unfolded tragically is upended with an insistence that tragedies are never tragic until their very end, and that Plath's life, while it was lived, was full of power and strength and endurance. A person with PTSD can aspire to such modes of living.