Dear Sylvia

Dear Sylvia,

I never imagined I would be writing you a letter that you could receive.

It wasn’t until I opened myself up to the idea that once people pass on into the next place, they are still able to be accessed, and are able to experience the thought objects we communicate–both in the endless empty space within our heads, as well as when we create templates of those thought objects through words written outside our heads–that I realized how literal this type of exchange can be. This opening up happened for me when people who had passed on communicated direct, real information to me that I could not have otherwise known into my mind. It was through this, and an unfolding of other things, that I understood that I could write letters to others who had passed, and that you would actually be able to, somehow, receive it.

I don’t understand it. But I’m glad it works.

Like any fan of any artist, the first thing I want to tell you is how grateful I am to your work. I remember being on my Mormon mission in Venezuela and someone mentioning a poem you had written (I remember it as “Ariel” but the memory isn’t clear) and thinking “I want to look that up when I get home.” I hadn’t read much poetry at the time, but I knew I wanted to read yours.

I arrived back in the US and the Internet was finally in full swing, and I did look you up. I devoured your collected poems and your journals. Your command of English was so delicious to me–your poetic voice still speaks to me.

It wasn’t long before I found criticism of you, and saw the way some circles regard (or regarded) you as something of a juvenile, something of a joke, something to not be taken seriously despite your contributions to the canon and your posthumous Pulitzer.

I didn’t understand much about patriarchy back then, or the way our literary canon has been absolutely overbearingly sexist and disgustingly misogynist, just like so much in our culture. I just remember, at the time, being totally baffled.  (Also, the not-out-gay-kid in me felt very embarrassed that I loved you so much, I’m sorry to say; I felt embarrassed that important men might think I was “girly” for liking something girly–falling victim to the repulsive threshing that masculinity does to its own: threats of disavowal to any male person who glorifies the feminine in any way.)

I was baffled, though, because it was easy for me to see the trenchant and fearless arrow of your work flying true toward the target one might call “literary contribution.” If anything, your voice has a masculine quality (or is a delicious blend of masculine and feminine). I suspect it might have to do with autism (I am obsessed with neurodivergence lately so this might be projection). But: daughter of an aloof biologist; so cogent about all things sensory; always aloof yourself; in the world but one with the world–observant of its vagaries with a feeling of remaining outside them.

Genderqueer as I am, I find myself strangely drawn to all female writers. This is something I have always felt and I think it might also have to do with my own probable autism (correlations, correlations, correlations). I adore strong female voices–feel drawn there, feel kinship there. The voice of straight white men is something I find so completely bland. I remember you writing about your attraction to that voice–to the masculine voice (or was it just to masculinity, and the way men are perceived and received in this world?) And so, the patterns of admiration and mimicry and adoption go, I suppose? You to them, me to you, and so on–a melange of the full spectrum of gender.

Your Ariel poems still cut to the bone for me. The thought of you in 1963, with a toddler and a baby, alone in that flat in London. The thought of the way Hugh just abandoned you–just left you there to tend to them by yourself, as if he had no responsibility for his own children at all. Somehow he had created this family, and then he just left you alone in the wintertime, and you with that sinus infection, sick, massively depressed, alone, fatherless, husbandless, motherless, caring for two tiny children in a country not your own.

I can scarcely imagine the terror, the isolation.

And then those poems that came burning out of you  in that bleakness–the way they scorch the atmosphere in their crispness, their knife-edged incisiveness, cutting into space and time with such perfect, distanced, righteous, poetic rage.

It fascinated me then, and broke my heart because I couldn’t quite understand it. My anger at Hugh meant I partially understood it–my outrage that he had not one, but two wives that killed themselves at his cruelty. And then he just moved on, a celebrated poet, given credence by his (male) peers, somehow still admired. 

But now I feel I understand it a bit better. Having sat as a therapist with many people, and having seen the ways our culture insists on using up the free labor of women–no matter who they are, no matter how gifted, no matter how deserving of an empty room and time to put art into the world. The ways young mothers are crushed by motherhood without a community. The way traumas repeat generation after generation. The way people who are “gifted” are so often neurodivergent, and tortured and celebrated in their uniqueness in equal measure.

There is no greater indictment of the patriarchy than those poems. There is no more tragic emblem of the way patriarchy kills women than the way your body chose to exit this world.

As if you don’t already know these things… I suppose I’m just processing these thoughts now for my own purposes.

So yes, I became an English major, and I started writing my own poems. I even mimicked your habit of mastering sonnets and villanelles so that I could have a solid poetic footing before venturing out into where my mind would take me. 

It was you I mimicked. You were my first foray into my own poetics.

And I had my first publication two years later. I wasn’t even a student at BYU (a Mormon University–I doubt you’ve heard of it) yet, but I submitted a poem to their literary magazine which was called Inscape and they accepted it, not realizing I wasn’t yet a student. And that felt so amazing.

The internet has changed the landscape of things, so I ended up pursuing other writing ventures, but poetry and being a poet is always something my heart comes back to. Which means my heart also continually comes back to you, and the way you lit up my passion for this art.

One odd thing–I still haven’t seen the movie “Sylvia.” I remember reading about it on message-boards in the BYU library the year after that first publication (when I actually was a student there). I was still fully submerged in my hyperfixation on you. I remember watching the trailer again and again, seeing all of the people in your journals come to life, and getting chills at how amazing it was. I remember longing to watch it. But I didn’t. I didn’t because a religion told me not to. I didn’t do something that was right and good for me to do as a budding writer, something that was aligned with who I was, and that was so perfectly suited to where I existed at that time, because some religious within the same patriarchy that led to your death, told me not to.

I find that vignette to be very frustrating. I’m frustrated by the way patriarchy insinuates itself into every level of our lives, even though it kills people. 

Anyway, I should go. I might write to you again. But today I wanted to sit down and write you some thoughts, and just reflect and see what came. And to thank you, I guess, not only for the way you inspired me to write my own fledgling poems in my early 20’s, but also for the way you helped me understand the cruelty of the systems we live in.

I’m open, always, to any communication you might have for me, and any influence or inspiration in my own poetic journey.

With affection, admiration, and gratitude,

Joshua Mayorga-Weed