The Associative Method: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Brasilia’

In this workshop, participants will develop a poem or short sequence based on the associative method used by Sylvia Plath in her late poem, ‘Brasilia’.  ‘Brasilia’ begins with externally derived content—meditations on the newly constructed (1956-60) modernist capital of Brazil, particularly Bruno Giorgi’s ‘Os Candangos’) sculpture. ‘Os Candangos’ is a tribute to the Promethean vision and heroic efforts of the technicians and workers who built a planned city in the jungle in only four years, and symbolise a confident new world in which rational planning, the use of technology and a determination to achieve goals against the odds made even the impossible seem possible. However, ‘Brasilia’  abruptly cuts to what seems to be the poet’s biographical situation, which combines with a third body of content—images and symbols derived from Christianity—to articulate the gulf the speaker feels exists feels between the ‘super-people’ of the poem and herself.

We know from biographical sources that Plath’s later poems were written in a highly associative manner, with images and ideas drawn from different fields of content flowing freely into and out of each other, often to articulate and explore Plath’s feelings about aspects of her own life, regardless of the apparent content of the poem (Brasilia is not a poem about Brasília).  In this workshop we will use the method embodied in the poem to progressively generate, develop and structure a similarly free and associative piece.

Facilitator biography

Since 2013, Steve Ely has published fourteen books/pamphlets of poetry, including Eely, Orasaigh and Lectio Violant.  He’s also written a novel, Ratmen, and a biographical work about the late poet laureate, Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire. He teaches creative writing at the University of Huddersfield and in a range of other settings: online, prisons, residentials and in the landscape.