"An Open Wound": Two Poems in Conversation with Plath
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The following poems were written as responses to Plath’s poems “Tulips”, “Sheep in Fog” and “Ariel”. In them, I explore the experience of post-traumatic stress disorder in conversation with Plath’s poetry. The first poem, “Tulips and Bees” compares the sensation of being triggered, the wound “reopening”, to the tulips in Plath’s hospital room, and imagines that my open wound were one such tulip. The second poem, “A Heavy Heaven” responds to Plath’s comparison of heaven in the final line of her poem “Sheep in Fog” to “a dark water”. I explore the experience of emotional numbness that is frequently a symptom of PTSD, and express that Plath’s life, though brief, was a social, vibrantly lived and far from numb one, a life of which a person suffering from PTSD can easily be envious. Plath's own suffering, which comes through in her poetry, is here enacted as something guiding, supportive and conducive to therapeutic conversation. The widespread notion that her life unfolded tragically is upended with an insistence that tragedies are never tragic until their very end, and that Plath's life, while it was lived, was full of power and strength and endurance. A person with PTSD can aspire to such modes of living.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".