The morning started with an informal, optional forum of a new journal called Plath Profiles, conceived by Prof. Bill Buckley of IU Northwest. The journal, which will be online and in print, though in print less frequently, will feature a variety of content ranging from standard academic essays to note and reactions to single poems or groups of poems, to interdisciplinary thoughts to Plath’s work. And much, much more. A second part to the Forum will take place today, to further brainstorm.
Following this, Lynda K. Bundtzen and Tim Kendall presented on very interesting subjects. Bundtzen’s paper “Confession, Contrition, and Concealment in Ted Hughes’s Howls and Whispers”; which is a chapter, or part of a chapter of a longer work on Hughes. Howls and Whispers, for those who do not know, is a small, eleven poem collection printed in limited numbers (110) and intended for ownership by rare book rooms, special collections, or very wealthy private owners. They are poems written in a similar mind to Birthday Letters, but left out for reasons she explains. Unlike Birthday Letters, the poems in Howls and Whispers do not follow a set chronology, which makes it more difficult to get into and through the poems. I likely did her talk no justice just now, but please look forward to her book…
Tim Kendall’s paper, “Sylvia Plath and the purpose of poetry” went through some poems of Plath’s that he called failures. Poems like “Winter Trees”, “Stillborn”, and “The Jailer”. These are poems Plath perfects in other ways, using similar imagery. “Winter Trees”, composed on 26 November 1962, he contends is a “transitional poem”, caught in the unfortunate position between the Ariel poems and the 1963 poems. He gave a careful, considerate reading to both “Winter Trees” and “Words”.
After lunch, I sat in on the panel Plath and Hughes Manuscripts Verso, which featured papers by Emma Hoare (“Double exposure: Plath’s poetry drafts”), Helen Decker (“The shared sheets of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: The double-sided manuscript collection”) and Uta Gosmann (“Double inscriptions: Plath’s “Amnesiac” and Hughes’s “The Calm”).
Decker stepped up first and talked about a Christmas card from Plath and Hughes in 1960 to their friends Ann and Leo Goodman. Ann, nee Davidow, and Plath met at Smith in the fall of 1950; but after the first semester, she did not return. They maintained friends as correspondents, only occasionally seeing each other before Plath’s death. The paper was well researched and presented, featured nifty PowerPoint slides, and was very enjoyable. Decker compared Hughes’s handwritten note to Plath’s typed note in the card, which harks back to Plath’s description of their writing desk on their honeymoon; Hughes’s side was unkempt; Plath’s in perfect order.
Emma Hoare conducted research at the Lilly Library, and discussed Plath’s re-use of her own manuscripts, which is a very nice and welcome change from the focus of just those manuscripts that Plath and Hughes both wrote on in the creative process. She concentrated on a short story from 1955 titled, “Home is where the heart is” and a nine poems that appear on the verso, each poem written between 1952 and 1955, but most undated. The poems and short story do have an element of “call and response”, to quote Diane Middlebrook. Thoroughly enjoyable.
Uta Gosmann’s paper argues that Plath’s manuscripts develop a character of their own; though she writes on the back of something Hughes composed. In “Amnesiac”, as with other poems, Plath takes ownership through “writing over” and writing “against” Hughes’s play “The Calm”. She points out that Plath tended to write “upside down”, in that she flipped Hughes’s draft over, and the wrote from bottom to top. A nice talk, with the use of an overhead projector which is a lost, but welcome art.
There is so much more to say…Steven Gould Axelrod discussed Plath and Torture, a talk that combined modern day war and its consequences to Plath’s use of torture in her poetry, both as a victim and perpetrator. Linda Wagner-Martin, whom I met that morning over breakfast, discussed her experiences in the Plath archives dating back to the late 1970s and talked, in particular about Plath’s poetry sequence “Poem for a Birthday” which ends the British edition of The Colossus, but was broken apart for the American edition printed two years later.
More to say more to say, but later!
Following this, Lynda K. Bundtzen and Tim Kendall presented on very interesting subjects. Bundtzen’s paper “Confession, Contrition, and Concealment in Ted Hughes’s Howls and Whispers”; which is a chapter, or part of a chapter of a longer work on Hughes. Howls and Whispers, for those who do not know, is a small, eleven poem collection printed in limited numbers (110) and intended for ownership by rare book rooms, special collections, or very wealthy private owners. They are poems written in a similar mind to Birthday Letters, but left out for reasons she explains. Unlike Birthday Letters, the poems in Howls and Whispers do not follow a set chronology, which makes it more difficult to get into and through the poems. I likely did her talk no justice just now, but please look forward to her book…
Tim Kendall’s paper, “Sylvia Plath and the purpose of poetry” went through some poems of Plath’s that he called failures. Poems like “Winter Trees”, “Stillborn”, and “The Jailer”. These are poems Plath perfects in other ways, using similar imagery. “Winter Trees”, composed on 26 November 1962, he contends is a “transitional poem”, caught in the unfortunate position between the Ariel poems and the 1963 poems. He gave a careful, considerate reading to both “Winter Trees” and “Words”.
After lunch, I sat in on the panel Plath and Hughes Manuscripts Verso, which featured papers by Emma Hoare (“Double exposure: Plath’s poetry drafts”), Helen Decker (“The shared sheets of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: The double-sided manuscript collection”) and Uta Gosmann (“Double inscriptions: Plath’s “Amnesiac” and Hughes’s “The Calm”).
Decker stepped up first and talked about a Christmas card from Plath and Hughes in 1960 to their friends Ann and Leo Goodman. Ann, nee Davidow, and Plath met at Smith in the fall of 1950; but after the first semester, she did not return. They maintained friends as correspondents, only occasionally seeing each other before Plath’s death. The paper was well researched and presented, featured nifty PowerPoint slides, and was very enjoyable. Decker compared Hughes’s handwritten note to Plath’s typed note in the card, which harks back to Plath’s description of their writing desk on their honeymoon; Hughes’s side was unkempt; Plath’s in perfect order.
Emma Hoare conducted research at the Lilly Library, and discussed Plath’s re-use of her own manuscripts, which is a very nice and welcome change from the focus of just those manuscripts that Plath and Hughes both wrote on in the creative process. She concentrated on a short story from 1955 titled, “Home is where the heart is” and a nine poems that appear on the verso, each poem written between 1952 and 1955, but most undated. The poems and short story do have an element of “call and response”, to quote Diane Middlebrook. Thoroughly enjoyable.
Uta Gosmann’s paper argues that Plath’s manuscripts develop a character of their own; though she writes on the back of something Hughes composed. In “Amnesiac”, as with other poems, Plath takes ownership through “writing over” and writing “against” Hughes’s play “The Calm”. She points out that Plath tended to write “upside down”, in that she flipped Hughes’s draft over, and the wrote from bottom to top. A nice talk, with the use of an overhead projector which is a lost, but welcome art.
There is so much more to say…Steven Gould Axelrod discussed Plath and Torture, a talk that combined modern day war and its consequences to Plath’s use of torture in her poetry, both as a victim and perpetrator. Linda Wagner-Martin, whom I met that morning over breakfast, discussed her experiences in the Plath archives dating back to the late 1970s and talked, in particular about Plath’s poetry sequence “Poem for a Birthday” which ends the British edition of The Colossus, but was broken apart for the American edition printed two years later.
More to say more to say, but later!