Skip to main content

The eve of the Sylvia Plath 75th Symposium

Coming to you live from Oxford, a gray day here, with a chilly raw wind. The schedule for the Sylvia Plath Symposium was updated Monday as I flew to England. The picture to the right is from the Oxford University Press bookshop.

Unfortunately, Diane Middlebrook is a late subtraction to the Sunday schedule.

I was able to buy a copy of Eye rhymes: Sylvia Plath's art of the visual from a bookshop in London. I have not have much time to read it, but a glance through the pages was very rewarding in an of itself. My cursory review and feeling beat my expectations; the reproductions alone of Plath's art work knocked me out. The essays by Kathleen Connors, Diane Middlebrook, Fan Jinghua, Langdon Hammer, Sally Bayley, Christina Britzolakis, and an Afterword by Susan Gubar can only add to the books value and importance to Plath scholarship.
Throughout the Symposium I will try to post impressions, reviews of sessions I attend, photographs, details of Plathian fist fights and pub crawls and brawls. Additionally, if anyone participating wants to write up their impressions on sessions, please send me an email and I'll post it here.


Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous24 October, 2007 21:01

    Thanks for trying to do some updates, can't wait. Have a fabulous time - love the bookshop window pic. Still waiting for my Eye Rhymes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous25 October, 2007 00:52

    Ah, for a fortune of 10,000 pounds a year or a stronger US dollar, I would be with ye now! Looking forward to reading and hearing about your impressions and how your own talk goes on Sunday. Have a wonderful time!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Annie Finch25 October, 2007 12:52

    HI Peter, I have just arrived in Oxford for the conference myself, Thursday evening, and it's still raining. I'm looking forward to watching your news "as it happens" and to meeting you soon--perhaps at Blackwells Bookshop where in a half hour (assuming I can find the right bus in time) I'll be reading from Plath's work and my own poems influenced by her. I am expecting to be moved by this immersion in a great poet and celebrating, in spite of the sad reality, her 75th birthday and the "elder" status never attained by so many women poets of her generation.

    Annie Finch

    PS I had lunch with Diane Middlebrook, my dear former teacher at Stanford, just before getting on the train to Oxford. She sends love and blessings to all at the conference.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
22 comments
Read more