Links, Reviews, etc. - Week ending 11 April 2009

Just a few things to point out and/or promote this weekend...

Recently I found a very lovely blog: Sylvia and Ted Collection. In Sylvia and Ted Collection, Laurie is highlighting rare, limited, first, signed, and other editions of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, etc. in her personal collection. It is an extremely generous offering with very lovely images as well as bibliographic and other commentary. Collecting Sylvia Plath (or Ted Hughes or another author) can be a very rewarding experience. Although some of these books, broadsides, long playing records probably cannot be or have not been read, handled or even opened, there must be a huge amount of joy in just getting to look at them daily. I've worked with many of these book myself at rare book rooms and I've gazed admiringly at them at Book Fairs. What Laurie is doing is something unique and fantastic for those who find themselves to be inclined to Plath.
Plath Profiles, Volume 2, is really coming together. Are you working on a paper or poem or book review for submission? According to the deadline I actually set, you have only until 15 April to submit! I'm not sure how hard a date that is really, but if you've got something we'd love to consider it.
The Woodberry Poetry Room hosts listening hours of its archival poetry recordings most Friday's during the academic year. On Friday, 17 April, I'll be introducing a listening hour of Sylvia Plath's poetry, as well as selecting those poems that will be heard. The Woodberry Poetry Room is open to the public, so come on by. We start at 3 PM. I'll also be showing off some of the Woodberry's holdings: such as the proof's of The Colossus (Heinemann) and Ariel (Faber) and the original reel-to-reel tape containers from June 13, 1958 and February 22, 1959 with the poems handwritten in by Plath.

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...

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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