Sylvia cries, “Shirley! Come let’s be grisly and girly together!”
She looks at the light streaming through the cracks in her quill feather.
Words arrive incandescent and spare;
Sylvia cries, “Shirley! Come let’s be grisly and girly together!”
Another angle flares the passage of time as it weathers;
They are friends forever called and rise to eat men like air.
She looks at the light streaming through the cracks in her quill feather
She hopes and wonders beyond whether—
Photographs and interviews to begin a love affair.
Sylvia cries, “Shirley! Come let’s be grisly and girly together!”
Which is worse, fanciful madness or madness that fancies whatever?
Beef, books and babies wrapped up in bi-carbonate dusted basketware;
She looks at the light streaming through the cracks in her quill feather.
She looks at the blonde girl in the mirror — tight, tense and in tether.
Wrapping the glass and the ghost in a sheet she saves her from disrepair;
Sylvia cries, “Shirley! Come let’s be grisly and girly together!”
Those ugly chalk masks shall be poisoned in equal measure.
If they don’t like our peaches, we can tell them, then don’t shake our pair!
She looks at the light streaming through the cracks in her quill feather;
Sylvia cries, “Shirley! Come let’s be grisly and girly together!”
Shirley thought, “Brave girl, she wants her cup of stars—and so do I”.
She looks at the sheeted mirror and sings her darlings a sweet lullaby.
It all starts to happen in the suburbs somewhere between celebration and calamity.
Shirley thought, “Brave girl, she wants her cup of stars—and so do I”.
She gazes at them waltzing deliberate and free in the black night sky.
One world is writing, the other is not, she scribbles emphatically.
She looks at the sheeted mirror and sings her darlings a sweet lullaby.
Demons within and demons without galloping nearby;
She watches Sylvia howl at the moon serenading her insanity.
Shirley thought, “Brave girl, she wants her cup of stars—and so do I”.
Together let’s write ourselves into our houses and bid the world goodbye.
We will find a way to stand and walk alone in our duality.
She looks at the sheeted mirror and sings her darlings a sweet lullaby.
Gold-trimmed dishes, a white cat and the sweetness of apple pie.
A simmering housewife and mother mixing darkness with dreamed reality;
Shirley thought, “Brave girl, she wants her cup of stars—and so do I”.
With eyes wide shut the world drops dead so don’t bother to apply.
Captain, oh captain, laughter is at once possibility and fatality.
She looks at the sheeted mirror and sings her darlings a sweet lullaby;
Shirley thought, “Brave girl, she wants her cup of stars19—and so do I”.
I said, “A pair of villanelles the perfect partner to this crime”.
“We are imprisoned in the cell of our own limitations”, Sylvia shakes her head.
I said, “A pair of villanelles the perfect partner to this crime”.
“Writing is the way out”, Shirley offers, taking a bite of her homemade gingerbread.
The house is haunting on the hill and fills me with dread;
My feet patter the pavement carved with angles of time.
“We are imprisoned in the cell of our own limitations”, Sylvia shakes her head.
I found sparkles of serendipity in the sink and tied them with thread;
One eye saw golden and orange the other shades of blue and lime.
“Writing is the way out”, Shirley offers, taking a bite of her homemade gingerbread.
We smiled at one another when we met unexpectedly in pages laced with lead;
One 30 years, the other 48 and the third 51 already past her prime.
“We are imprisoned in the cell of our own limitations”, Sylvia shakes her head.
We find solace in darkness with leaves, branches and firewood blanketing a bed;
A small glass of brandy, cigarettes, matches, an ash tray and a buried dime.
“Writing is the way out”, Shirley offers, taking a bite of her homemade gingerbread.
I had planned to compose six but ended up with half instead;
Raising demons is harder than you think when they chant their own rhyme.
“We are imprisoned in the cell of our own limitations”, Sylvia shakes her head.
“Writing is the way out”, Shirley offers, taking a bite of her homemade gingerbread.
A note on a post in May which began in April
There’s always a back story to the story, the story that sits there in secret waiting to be told behind that story that is—that’s how stories seem to go. The story behind this post goes something like this. During April 2023, I was reading Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories while at the same time reading a biography of Sylvia Plath by Linda Wagner-Martin. It had not crossed my mind to put the two writers together—one a gothic feminist novelist, the other a confessional poet and autobiographical fiction writer—but then Sylvia made the connection for me. The story goes that in June 1953, while a student at Smiths College in Massachusetts, Sylvia was offered a month long placement as a guest editor with the prestigious magazine Mademoiselle. To enhance the experience, Mademoiselle arranged literary activities that might be of interest to the interns and Sylvia specifially requested interviews with authors she admired, including Shirley Jackson. Sylvia was drawn to the exploration of madness and psychological breakdown in Shirley’s writing, and was inspired to find ways to fictionalise her own, which she did in The Bell Jar (1963).
Reading about Sylvia’s fascination for Shirley mirrored my own at precisely the same time. Originally titled The Lottery or, The Adventures of James Harris, Shirley’s collection of short stories is macabre, gruesome and sinister, and peppered throughout by a character called James Harris—he is never seen, he never speaks a word—but he is there all the same, just out of reach, disrupting and destroying the lives of those he slips in and out of. The story goes that Shirley quite possibly learnt the English ballad known variously as the “Daemon Lover”, “James Harris” and “A Warning for Married Women” from her mother. The story in the song goes something like this—a pretty young maiden takes a sailor lover, he dies at sea, she marries another, he returns as a spirit to persuade her to come away with him, she does, her real-life husband takes his life and their children are orphaned.
The story then goes that I thought I might try to mimic Shirley Jackson by having Shirley appear as a returning character in a set of villanelles riffing off lines from my favourite Sylvia Plath villanelle “Mad Girl’s Love Song”. The lines of verse presented in this collection of three are drawn from the synchronicities I sense between Sylvia and Shirley, words of theirs and mine sifted and shifted across and between. What would happen if three of us came together to sing a ballad of our own?—that’s how this story went.
i love how this story goes 🙂 And the serendipity of it all, just life-affirming eternally. You’ve captured a joyous sisterhood, full of the madness of moons, mirrors and mothering. Thank you, sweet insister x