Somehow, in and among the editing and the proof checking and the invention of workshop syllabi and the cooking and the cleaning and the animal feeding and the wood splitting and the carpooling and the reading and the boy nagging, I have talked myself into starting that essay about Plath, Sexton, et al. And when I say et al., I mean that I think this essay may attend to the family members of writers as much as the writers themselves . . . though, of course, some of those family members are themselves artists. But what was it like to be Branwell Bronte, watching his industrious sisters accomplish what he could not? What was it like to be Cassandra Austen or Lavinia Dickinson or Jane Carlyle or Dorothy Wordsworth or Catherine Dickens or Leonard Woolf or Eleanor Frost or Adrienne Rich's husband, Alfred Conrad, who, after their separation, "drove into the woods and shot himself"?

The list is infinite and heartbreaking, and I have not even added any children's or parents' names to it, not yet.

I'll give you the one paragraph I've written so far.

***
Long after Sylvia Plath extinguished herself in a whirlpool of despair, illness, theater, and vengeance, her husband Ted Hughes tried to describe the ecstatic, suffering anxiety that was a central element of her personality:

Searching for yourself, in the dark, as you danced,

Floundering a little, crying softly,

Like somebody searching for somebody drowning

In dark water,

Listening for them—in panic at losing

Those listening seconds from your searching—

Then dancing wilder in the silence.

I think about him, battered relic of Plath, composing those lines so many years after the fact; still struggling against her terrible allure, against his own rash and fumbling failures as her dance partner. The powers-that-be, it seems, saw fit to inflict him with a lifetime spent facing the music—though he hobbled onward, grievously damaged yet wielding his vocation to the end. If not sustenance, poetry was at least a few scant drops of water in the wasteland.