Coming Soon: The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath

Look for a new CD, The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath, published by the British Library, on 14 April 2010. Advanced orders will be accepted via the British Library's website in mid-March. Readers of this blog will be eligible for a 10% discount; look for an update here about that, also in mid-March.

This is a major publication and one that will mean incredibly much to the readers of this blog. For those unfamiliar, the Spoken Word is a series by the British Library, taken from their own Sound Archives as well as from the BBC's. Of interest possibly are the two, double CD's of Ted Hughes. Other poets included in the series are Edith Sitwell, W. H. Auden, and Stevie Smith, to name but a few. Each CD in the series has an introductory essay in the booklet, which also lists the tracks, recording dates, series, etc. I'll continue below, but please read the advanced notice announcement:

"Sylvia Plath is widely regarded as one of the most influential poets and authors of the 20th Century. Her frank, confessional style of writing won her many fans around the world, and she remains very popular over forty years after her death. This new CD from British Library Publishing brings together BBC recordings from the British Library Sound Archive, and includes Plath discussing and reading from her work. A particular highlight is a 1961 recording of a BBC programme Plath recorded with her husband, Ted Hughes, where they talk about their marriage and what it means to live with your muse. Many of these recordings are being published here for the first time."

The previously unpublished recordings include the interview Two of a Kind: Poets in Partnership, surviving extracts from A World of Sound: What Made You Stay?, a review of Donald Hall's Contemporary American Poetry, and the poem "Tulips" recorded live at the Poetry at the Mermaid Festival in London on 17 July 1961, and more. This is an amazing collection of audio tracks, one that will continue to lend vigor to the study of Sylvia Plath.

This is the first Plath audio release in more than three decades with new, previously unreleased recordings!!

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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