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Showing posts from November, 2007

Sylvia Plath event: ICA London on 3 December

THE INSTITUTE of Contemporary Arts’ ( ICA ) Talks Programme for December begins on Monday, December 3 with Sylvia Plath Revisited . In the light of the recent publication of Eye Rhymes , a book of largely unseen paintings and sketches by Sylvia Plath and new essays by Plath scholars, this evening revisits the great poet’s life and work, focusing on the relationship between the visual and verbal. Poet Adam O’Riordan will be joining rapper and star of Michael Winterbottom’s documentary The Road to Guantanamo , Rizwan Ahmed; National Theatre multimedia designer, Mark Grimmer; and award-winning playwright and actor, Elisabeth Gray. The talk will be preceeded by a specially commissioned series of responses to Plath in song, animation, and film. Sylvia Plath Revisited , which will be held in the Nash room at 7pm, will be chaired by Sally Bayley of Jesus College, Oxford. Tickets: £10, £9 concessions, £8 members.

Updated at last!

My web site for Sylvia Plath (www.sylviaplath.info) is in the process of being updated. Please be patient as new pages, content, images, etc. are posted to the site.

Bibliography of works about Sylvia Plath

Bibliography of books about Sylvia Plath Ackerman, Diane, and Enid Mark. 1996. About Sylvia. Wallingford, Pa: ELM Press. Agarwal, Suman. 2003. Sylvia Plath. New Delhi: Northern Book Centre. Aird, Eileen M. 1973. Sylvia Plath. New York: Barnes & Noble Books. Alexander, Paul. 1985. Ariel ascending writings about Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper & Row. Alexander, Paul. 1991. Rough magic a biography of Sylvia Plath. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking. Alvarez, A. 1972. The savage god; a study of suicide. New York: Random House. Annas, Pamela J. 1988. A disturbance in mirrors the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Contributions in women's studies, no. 89. New York: Greenwood Press. Anderson, Robert. 2005. Little fugue. New York: Ballantine Books. Axelrod, Steven Gould. 1990. Sylvia Plath the wound and the cure of words. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bassnett, Susan. 2005. Sylvia Plath an introduction to the poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Becker, Jillian. 2002. Giving up the l

Update: Sylvia Plath website & Ted Hughes links

My website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is, appears to be back online. But, so far without the updates I hoped for this time. They are coming... And... There is a long article by Craig Raine in the Times Literary Supplement on Ted Hughes. Read the article here . Also, Tom Paulin reviews the Letters of Ted Hughes in the London Review of Books.

Sylviaplath.info is down

For any visitors to my Sylvia Plath website, www.sylviaplath.info , the website is down, and may be down for up to a week. I hope no longer than that. If things go well, however, when the site is back up it will be updated for the first time in over two years!! Something I hope you will enjoy!

Plath, in Swedish

For any Swedish readers of Sylvia Plath, Symposium panelist Annika J. Hagström (Saturday afternoon session on Images and Viewers of Plath, paper title "Stasis in Darkness: Sylvia Plath as a Fictive Character") recently published this article in the Helsingborgs Dagblad .

Bibliography of books by Sylvia Plath

What follows is a bibliography of books by Sylvia Plath, including works available commercially and limited editions-including broadsides. I will update this list as I learn about new publications. If you see any gross mistakes, please let me know. Bibliography of books by Sylvia Plath Plath, Sylvia. 1960. A winter ship. Edinburgh: Tragara Press. Plath, Sylvia. 1960. The colossus: poems. London: Heinemann. Plath, Sylvia. 1962. The colossus & other poems. New York: Knopf. Plath, Sylvia. 1963. The bell jar. London: Heinemann. Plath, Sylvia. 1964. The bell jar. London: W. Heinemann. Plath, Sylvia. 1965. Uncollected poems. Turret booklet, no. 2. London: Turret Books. Plath, Sylvia. 1966. Mirror. Edinburgh: Privately printed at the Tragara Press. Plath, Sylvia. 1965. Ariel. London: Faber and Faber. Plath, Sylvia. 1966. Ariel. New York: Harper & Row. Plath, Sylvia. 1966. The bell jar. London: Faber and Faber. Plath, Sylvia. 1968. Three women: a monologue for three voices. London: Tu

Collectors congregate at Convention Center

This weekend is the 31st annual Boston Antiquarian Book Fair at the Hynes Convention Center (Back Bay; T to Copley or Hynes). This is the fifth year I'll be going. Typically there are some Sylvia Plath titles; like her copy of The Colossus inscribed to Theodore Roethke, or the typescripts of the Ariel poems (which recently sold to a private collector). I've seen first editions of The Bell Jar , Ariel , and other poetry and prose collections. One highlight is Jett Whitehead's copy of Ariel , inscribed by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, to his friend and collaborator, the Hungarian poet Janos Csokits, in April 1967. Start your collection, build your collection, or simply come to browse at the beautiful world of antiquarian books.

Event reminder: Tracy Brain on 20 November

This is an event reminder that on 20 November, 2007, Tracy Brain will give a seminar titled "Representing Sylvia Plath". Brain spoke on this topic during the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium, impressively weaving into her paper events and "representations" taking place during the conference. With nearly three weeks passing since the end of the Symposium and this talk, the evening promises to be even more informative. The Programme for the Autumn 2007 term of the MSS: Modern Manuscript Studies Seminar at the Institute of English Studies includes the following event: Speaker: Tracy Brain (Bath Spa University), "Representing Sylvia Plath" Date: 20 November 2007 Time: 17:30 - 19:00 Venue: Room NG14 The event will be held in the Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. Tracy Brain is the author of numerous articles on Sylvia Plath, as well as the book, The Other Sylvia Plath (Longman: 2001). If anyone who reads this blog attends, please feel free to pos

Extra-curricular Sylvia Plath events at Oxford

The Sylvia Plath 75 th Year Symposium featured several extra-curricular events for delegates and attendees. Each night during the symposium, Elisabeth Gray performed the one woman play Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath. I had the opportunity to see the play Friday night, which featured a lively but curtailed introduction by Dr. Barbara Mossberg , of California State University at Monterrey Bay. The play itself is somewhat reminiscent of Paul Alexander’s Edge, whereas Edge takes place in the last day/night of Plath’s life, Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath takes place in the last ten minutes of her life. Gray’s character is Esther Greenwood, and the play starts with her head in an oven. In fact, when you enter the theatre, she’s already there. What followed was an emotional adventure. Alternating between deeply funny and tear-inducing sad, Gray hallucinates her way through a re-creation of events. She converses with her oven in a voice ripped off from the teacher in Charlie Brown, “ waa - waa whaa -

More reviews of the Letters of Ted Hughes

Recently The Scotsman and the Daily Mail reviewed The Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid. The Daily Mail review includes some photographs, including a "new" one of Sylvia Plath at which her fans and scholars alike will marvel.

Sylvia Plath's Knopf editor

Sylvia Plath's editor at Knopf was Judith Jones. Jones was an ardent and early supporter of Plath's poetry and fiction up to, and likely through, the publication of Ariel . Knopf lost the battle for Ariel to rival publishing house Harper & Row. Ms. Jones recently published The tenth muse: My life in food . She will appear at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. on Tuesday 13 November. Tickets are on sale via the Harvard Book Store . Tickets are $5. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds the correspondence between Jones, Plath, Hughes and others at Heinemann and Knopf. I posted on this collection back in July. The correspondence, negotiations, etc. makes for very interesting reading and is certainly worth of further study and publicity. For more information, please click here .

Sylvia Plath collections: Atlantic Monthly Magazine records, 1969-1974

The Massachusetts Historical Society holds the Atlantic Monthly records, 1969-1974. Of course the Atlantic has been around a long time, but these records relate to the editorship of Robert Manning. The collection includes correspondence with and records that relate to 3,200 authors. The records are stored offsite, so advance notice is required if anyone seeks to consult these records. The finding aid is online here . There is correspondence between Olwyn Hughes and the editors at the Atlantic relating to publishing some of Sylvia Plath's and Ted Hughes's poems. These can be found in carton 9. There are two letters from February and two from May. 1) From: Olwyn Hughes, To: Robert Manning, 2 February 1970. This letter discusses Olwyn's assembling two volumes of Plath's uncollected poetry. She offers the following Plath poems: "Last Words," "The Tour," "Submerged", and "Gigolo" as well as six Crow poems by Ted Hughes. The year

Two new reviews of the Letters of Ted Hughes

The Guardian recently ran two articles on Ted Hughes, both concerned with the recent publication of the Letters of Ted Hughes . The first article, " More than a wood-full of cats ", ran on Saturday 3 November. The second article, " Portrait of a poet as an eco warrior ", ran on Sunday 4 November. A focus of each review, naturally, is Sylvia Plath.

Books about Plath in non-English languages

Please help me out... Would readers be interested in a list of books about Sylvia Plath which were never in English, like Marianne Egeland's Sylvia Plath? Or, would you be interested in a list of books that were in English but translated into a foreign language, such as Janet Malcolm's The Silent Women , translated to German Die schweigende Frau : die Biographien der Sylvia Plath . Or both?