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#ellie :)#get high draw character that has only ever been alluded to! do it!#the pitt #ezdraws #jack abbot #ellen west

“—The gossip in Milan was that Callas / had swallowed a tapeworm. / But of course she hadn’t. / The tapeworm / was her soul … / —How her soul, uncompromising, / insatiable, / must have loved eating the flesh from her bones, / revealing this extraordinarily / mercurial; fragile; masterly creature … / —But irresistibly, nothing / stopped there; the huge voice / also began to change: at first, it simply diminished / in volume, in size, / then the top notes became / shrill, unreliable—at last, / usually not there at all … / —No one knows why. Perhaps her mind, / ravenous, still insatiable, sensed / that to struggle with the shreds of a voice / must make her artistry subtler, more refined, / more capable of expressing humiliation, / —Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps her spirit / loathed the unending struggle / to embody itself, to manifest itself, on a stage whose / mechanics, and suffocating customs, / seemed expressly designed to annihilate spirit …”

Frank Bidart, from Half-light: Collected Poems; “Ellen West”

#frank bidart #half-light: collected poems #ellen west #words #poetry #god i am !!!!#this is exactly it #opera tag #everyone loves to hold up callas as la divina. opera at its peak. but they conveniently talk about her downfall as something mysterious #and unknowable. it's not mysterious. it's the opera industry and what it does to the spirits of singers. it's the way they uphold #the art form as something worth stripping away the humanity for the sake of the performance. the way they chew up and spit out any singer #who doesn't conform to their ideal. who doesn't meet their impossible standards. it's why i'm still trying to remember who i was when #i still loved to sing. when the act of singing wasn't a reminder of everything i lost in that world. ugh #when people say that the art form died w the greats like callas it makes me want to scream. can you imagine the talent we would have #onstage if the industry weren't burying itself w its own exclusivity and abuse #anyway. today i offer content specifically curated to my own interests slkdfjsjljfs #callas herself couldn't sustain her role in opera. it caused her mental and physical deterioration. and we're supposed to aspire to that??#her musicality was unparalleled. but the things they said about her voice. about her body. like she wasn't even human to them #like she existed purely for their criticism. the way nothing has changed since then. the way it's only getting worse ughhh #body image cw

she had long before lost weight, her voice had been, for years, deteriorating, half itself …

Frank Bidart, “Ellen West” from In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-1990

#Frank Bidart #Ellen West #Bidart

—My doctors tell me I must give up this ideal; but I WILL NOT … cannot.

Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.”

But he is a fool. He married meat, and thought it was a wife.

Ellen West - Frank Bidart

#littérature #citation #Ellen West #Frank Bidart

quick before they actually talk about her in the show! here's some of my mrs. abbot headcanons :)

#this is borderline an OC but im having fun #she died as a complication of her heart meds/a clot bc the doctors refused to see beyond her weight. and jack was away when it happened :)#:) :)#jack abbot #the pitt #ezdraws #ellen west

January 21. Has been reading Faust again. In her diary, writes that art is the “mutual permeation” of the “world of the body” and the “world of the spirit” Says that her own poems are “hospital poems ... weak—without skill or perseverance; only managing to beat their wings softly.”

Frank Bidart, from Ellen West

#Ellen West #bidart #frank bidart #poetry #poem #poems #words #lit #!!

#ellen west #ca. 1920

#ellen west

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