Letter in The Guardian

Letter to The Guardian

By Sandra Lahire

28 June 1991

YOUR Profile (June 24) showed us how biographies and critiques continue to dismember Sylvia Plath and often lose her voicebox, even though her own poetry readings and interviews can be heard in our National Sound Archive. No, she did not leave a will  —  but she did write her own view of her posthumous existence. Miraculously she survives the blame-throwing for her suicide and rises out of the ashes to inspire other youthful minds by her intelligence in addressing our most terrifying experiences, like madness and being tortured.

Sylvia did forecast the roles of the retailers of her image:

The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves into see Them unwrap me hand and foot.

Against the disposable news headline she asserts:

The blood jet is poetry. There’s no stopping it.

She worked at the craft of her voice and radio-poetry as Dylan Thomas did. A medium like film, in which she can speak for herself and make poetry a communal cinematic act is one way out of the treadmill of personal invective. Funded by the British Film Institute, I have directed a short film called Lady Lazarus. Permission was given by Olwyn Hughes to use recordings made by Sylvia around her 30th and last birthday. All locations are Plath’s. In the words of “Lady Lazarus”, she is a smiling woman who is only thirty. She will always be around with her ironic “dying is an art” tones. If she could see her media-circus striptease, and our gullibility, she would be in stitches.

Sandra Lahire. British Film Institute, 29 Rathbone Street, London W1P.