Source Poems: "Daddy"

For National Poetry Month 2014, I have invited 17 authors and poets to guest post about source poems. In this series of essays, each writer will describe a single poem's significance in his or her life.

Poet Renee LaTulippe of the blog No Water River is with us today, writing about how receiving a book of poetry as a gift can change one's life.

Renée M. LaTulippe

Sylvia Saves the Day

I did not have a terribly literary childhood. There was definitely no poetry beyond nursery rhymes. But my mother did always have a book going and my father sang constantly, so perhaps something sunk in and made me write my first poem at age seven. It’s a night I remember vividly and that I wrote about here. I guess poetry was just in me.

And it stayed in me through high school; or rather, it kept coming out of me, free verse tumbling down page after page. It was the only time in my life I was prolific. But I wasn’t very good at it, this poetry thing, despite Mrs. Musser’s enthusiasm as my creative writing teacher. And despite the reams of juvenilia, she made me the youngest editor of the literary magazine; she encouraged me and praised me; she held me up. And when I graduated, she gave me the complete works of Sylvia Plath. The woman knew me; who knew? The book is a prized possession.

When Laura announced this blog series, I knew immediately the poem I would choose. I didn’t have to riffle through my bookshelves or my memory for The Poem, because it has been there for thirty years.

Would I have preferred a more positive poem, something full of innocence or beauty or peace? Yes, but that would have been dishonest.

My source poem is “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath and there’s nothing I can do about it.

DADDY

BY SYLVIA PLATH

You do not do, you do not do   

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot   

For thirty years, poor and white,   

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   

Ghastly statue with one gray toe   

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   

Where it pours bean green over blue   

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.   

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.   

So I never could tell where you   

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.   

And the language obscene

Read the rest at the Poetry Foundation

I opened this book and read page after page until “Daddy” stopped me in my tracks. I could not make head or tails of the poem at the time, but no matter. I knew what it felt like, and it felt like liberation. It had crazy sounds and German and a bad word that were like bonbons in my mouth. How I loved the Panzer-man and the brute, brute force of a brute like you and that glorious bastard! I loved the persistent low moan of the long U sounds, the sounds of a poet doubled over from the violence of it all.

You do not do, you do not do   

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot   

For thirty years, poor and white,   

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

I loved it not because I loved the suffering, but because I loved the exit from suffering. I loved the anger of it. I loved the anthem of it. It was a poem full of viper bites. Speaking it was powerful and cathartic. It was better than breaking dishes. It roiled and soothed all at once. Like singing, it lifted me up, even in its negativity. The rhythms and phrases entered my memory and have been there ever since.

I saw, and still see, the poem as a reinvention of self, a rebirth – a concept I’ve always liked, perhaps because it’s what my name means: reborn. Renaissance. A poem of possibility. Negative but hopeful.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through. 

Perhaps “Daddy” resonated because it came to me when I most needed it, at a time of breaking out and becoming and trying not to explode in the process. And Sylvia was there to give me what she had: An exquisite anger. A spitting release.

Ah, Sylvia. Ach, du.

Sylvia Plath
from Harper Collins

Renée M. LaTulippe has co-authored nine early readers and a collection of children’s poetry titled Lizard Lou: a collection of rhymes old and new for All About Learning Press, where she is also the editor, and has poems in the Middle School and Science editions of The Poetry Friday Anthology (ed. Wong and Vardell). She developed and teaches the online course The Lyrical Language Lab: Punching Up Prose with Poetry and blogs on children’s poetry at NoWaterRiver.com. Renée earned her BFA in acting/directing from Marymount Manhattan College and her MA in English Education from NYU, and taught English, theater, and public speaking in NYC. She lives in Italy with her husband and twin boys. Website: www.NoWaterRiver.com. Follow Renée on Twitter: @ReneeMLaTulippe

Previous posts in this series:

Laura Shovan on "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams

Dylan Bargteil on "On Moral Leadership as a Political Dilemma" by June Jordan

J. C. Elkin on "Hannibal Clim" (author unknown)

Diane Mayr on a haiku by Basho

Jone MacCulloch on "We Are Waiting (a pantoum)" by Joyce Sidman

Mary Bargteil on Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot

Jacqueline Jules on "Mother to Son" by Langston Hughes

Pamela Murray Winters on "The Land of Counterpane" by Robert Louis Stevenson

Dennis Kirschbaum on "Rain" by Robert Louis Stevenson
Janet Fagal on "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats

Linda Baie on "The Way It Is" by William Stafford

Pat Valdata on "Sea Fever" by John Masefield

Shirley Brewer on "The Singers" by Eavan Boland