These Ghostly Archives 5 & Ann Skea on Sylvia Path, Ariel and Tarot

Yesterday's preview of "These Ghostly Archives 5: Reanimating the Past" was very fun to do. A very big thank you to Plymouth University and to Rachel Christofides, Robin Peel, and Kathryn Gray for hosting us and coordinating the event, and to all of those who attended, including - & I only know a few people's names - Elizabeth and William Sigmund, Andrew Wilson, Marcus, Nick Smart, and Rosemary Clark. There was a lively question and answer session after a drinks reception and no doubt the wine helped with that!

Gail and I had to massively cut down our paper for the talk, but the full contents will appear this summer in Plath Profiles 6, though the summer seems quite far off with the wind and rainy howling outside. The advantage to the talk was that we could quote from the letters Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes wrote, as well as show images of the manuscripts we discuss, too. Please know that with rare exception, you can request and order photocopies or scans of anything we talk about it you are so inspired to do so.

Today, on our way to spend the afternoon with Elizabeth and William Sigmund, we stopped for some treats in the ultra nice town of Tavistock, and found this very Plathian bottle, which I clutched (cf. "Cut") after stepping on it. Very poignant given what Plathing Gail and I got up to today...

I was just set to hit "Publish" when I got the news that Ann Skea's recent work in Sylvia Plath, the Ariel poems, and Tarot has been updated with chapter 6, which looks at the following poems: "The Other," "Stopped Dead", "Poppies in October", and "The Courage of Shutting-up." This chapter concludes her look at Plath and Tarot, the conclusion of which is very well written and thought provoking. Skea finds that "Plath did use the Tarot to order her Ariel manuscripts and that at least some of the poems were written with a particular Tarot card in mind. But given that the chronological order in which the poems were written is markedly different to the order in which the cards are arranged in a traditional Tarot journey, her method of using the cards is still a puzzle." Skea's work on examining these poems well illustrates and supports the seeming puzzling nature of Plath's use of these cards in her work. I find particularly, beautifully written, Skea's final thoughts on the subject:

Words, as Plath wrote are like axes. The echoes of their strokes can travel "off from the centre like horses". And there are so many echoes in Plath's poetry – echoes of her life, the people she knew, her loves and her hates; echoes of mythology, folk–tales and magic – that her poems can mean many different things to many different people. Perhaps she did use the Tarot in Ariel, perhaps not. Whatever one believes about that, Plath's Ariel poems are remarkable poems written, as Ted Hughes said, "with the full power and music of her extraordinary nature". Ariel, as he also said, "is not easy poetry to criticize. It is not much like any other poetry". But "It is her… It is just like her – but permanent".

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last

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