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...

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business. Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known. However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images. There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's Stendhal-c...

Amy C. Rea Reviews Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Here’s a thing about me: I’m a voracious reader, but very rarely have a physically based emotional response to something I’m reading. I don’t laugh out loud, I don’t cry, both of which I do when watching movies. It’s not that I don’t find things funny or sad when I read, but apparently I need more of a visual cue. So it’s telling that when I got to the end of Dr. Heather Clark’s new biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet , I cried. It’s not as if I didn’t know how the story ended. But the level of detail and analysis Clark brings to her study of Plath is so detailed, and her examination of those brutal last weeks so deeply explored, that it broke my heart. Clark has done some tremendously important and much-needed work with this biography. It would be remiss of me not to note the aid she received from Peter K. Steinberg and the work he did compiling Plath’s Letters . Clark clearly spent a great deal of time studying these source materials, as well as others that were not available ...

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