“Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid” (Diane Seuss)

Many thanks to my guest today, poet Jessica Cuello. Jessica’s newest book, Feral, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2027. She is also the author of Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023), Hunt (The Word Works, 2017), winner of The Washington Prize, Pricking (Tiger Bark, 2016), and Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize. Cuello is the recipient of a 2023 NYSCA Artist Grant and is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review. She teaches French in Central NY. I’m a big fan and I really appreciate this conversation.

In this episode, we discuss the brilliant poet Diane Seuss and her poem “Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid.” Seuss is the author of many books of poetry, including frank: sonnets (2021), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She also has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Prize, and more. The poem we discuss today comes from her collection Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018). See the links below to find out more about both Cuello and Seuss.

Links: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/diane-seuss

https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/interviews/an-interview-with-diane-seuss

https://jessicacuello.com/

Theme music for Walking Inside Poems (“Girl in a Green Dress”) by Krajicek & Shafer, from the album Blue Midwestern Dream (Borderline Social Club).

“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.