Aha Moment: An Odd Path to Plath

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2018

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One day at school in the early 1990s, Shane McCrae watched a TV movie about teen suicide. The first half was all exactly what you would have expected: cheesy platitudes, heroic teachers, and feathery haircuts. Then, a character quoted the poetry of Sylvia Plath. “I don't want to be hyperbolic, but it did feel like a kind of an electric shock,” McCrae remembers. “I had never heard anything like it. I never had a feeling like that.” That day, he wrote eight poems at school. Then he took the bus home and wrote some more. From there, McCrae dived deeper into Plath’s life, checking out a book of her poems from the library and never returning it. Today, McCrae is a professional poet. And even though Plath is no longer his “central poet,” she remains his emotional and creative bedrock. We talked to McCrae to learn how a long-dead, white, East Coast writer known for her depressing verse gave purpose and uplift to a young black teenager living in suburban Oregon. This podcast was produced by Justin Glanville for Studio 360.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From PRX.
0:07.0	This is Studio 360. I'm Kurt Anderson.
0:12.9	Hi. Welcome to the latest Studio 360 podcast Extra. This one is a brand new installment of aha moments, our series featuring people's stories about
0:23.6	encountering works of art and culture that change the course of their lives.
0:30.2	Such as Shane McCrae.
0:33.0	In 1990, he was going to high school in Oregon, a suburb of Portland.
0:37.1	He was a certain kind of typical 10th grade kid.
0:41.3	Kind of angry, kind of unhappy, not excited by much, except sad music and skateboarding.
0:48.3	But something was about to change for Shane.
0:51.3	Change everything.
0:53.3	I was very depressed when I was a teenager and I probably started to be depressed younger than I knew.
1:00.0	Aloa High School was a white school and Aloha was a very white town and I was a black kid who was into alternative music, into goth things.
1:13.6	And in 1990, that wasn't an accessible identity.
1:19.6	The Cured had a black drummer in like 87 or something for maybe a minute,
1:24.6	and so I felt I was very by myself in this identity.
1:33.0	I used to dress in all black because I thought that that's what Goths did.
1:37.1	And I wore this trench coat.
1:38.1	It was a trench coat that was a little bit too small for me, but it was black, and it had,
1:42.4	the lining was kind of red plaid but I didn't have black socks
1:46.5	I don't think I even really knew I could get any other color of socks I really thought white
1:53.0	was it
1:54.0	there was nothing wrong with lights I tried to laugh about it.
	...

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