"So much so, she has written a book about the billionaire singer-songwriter, or rather, a joint analysis of Swift and Sylvia Plath, who recurs in much of Nelson's oeuvre. The notion of uniting these two cultural titans, who are seemingly poles apart in sensibility one a melancholic American poet, the other an all-American poster girl came to her when she heard Swift's 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department."
"I thought that was funny because I'd written my undergraduate thesis on Plath and I was [almost] 40 years older than her. So I said: I have heard of Sylvia Plath.' As I sat there, I thought, these kids don't want to hear me talk on this topic but I have a lot to say because I've been thinking of it all. From that clarifying moment came The Slicks, a book-sized extended essay that is, sweetly, dedicated to Alba."
Maggie Nelson links Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath by tracing shared registers of introspection, emotional tumult, and poetic intensity. Swift's The Tortured Poets Department contains explicit literary references to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare alongside resonances of Plath's bleak, inward gaze. A conversation with a thirteen-year-old named Alba crystallized the project and inspired a dedication. Nelson emphasizes the prolific, almost uncontrollable creative surge in Swift's songwriting, likening it to Plath's image of the "blood jet" as poetry. Nelson's grounding in poetry and her history with formally experimental nonfiction shape the comparative analysis.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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