Sylvia Plath went missing 59 years ago this week. Her disappearance was in more than 170 newspapers around the country and was reported on the radio and television, as well. The majority of the newspaper articles were understandably in Massachusetts. Many, but not all, of the stories ran photographs of Plath. This was done to help readers identify the missing student and also to illustrate the adjectives such as "beautiful" that were used to draw in readers attention in the headlines and in the stories. In all, there were five-to-seven photographs/images of Plath used by the newspapers. More on this below... One of the photographs appeared in The Boston Globe , in an article titled "Day-Long Search Fails to Locate Smith Student" on 26 August 1953. The photograph that ran was of Plath, her mother, and her brother. One of the more sensational newspaper of the time, The Boston Daily Record , ran a number of articles on the missing Plath in several daily editions....

Did anyone read the list of featured speakers at the Sylvia Plath 2012 Symposium: The October Poems that I posted on 19 July" ? Did anyone see the subject of Heather " The Grief of Influence " Clark's talk? Well, here it is, again: Heather Clark on Otto Plath's FBI files, Plath’s German heritage? Journalist Dalya Alberge has written an article for The Guardian newspaper in London titled "FBI files on Sylvia Plath's father shed new light on poet." The focus of the article is Heather's subject, and how recently uncovered archival documents provide insight into Sylvia Plath's father, Otto Plath, who was briefly investigated by the FBI in October 1918. But if you cannot wait until October to hear what promises to be a gripping talk, click here to read the article . Update: 18 August 2012 Daily Mail runs similar report: but with more photographs... Read "FBI files on Sylvia Plath's father show he was investigated during World War I...

You know Sylvia Plath Info loves to be snarky about Sylvia Plath publications (not about Plath's per se, but books about her), but today he brought the snark to ESPN and Baseball Tonight. Real blog post tomorrow!

Faber & Faber is releasing a new selected poems of Sylvia Plath this fall: Sylvia Plath: Poems Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy . Duffy is the current Poet Laureate of England. Weighing in at 160 pages and sporting hardback cover, Sylvia Plath: Poems Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy will be available on 4 October 2012. Other details: ISBN: 9780571290437; retail price: £14.00 ($19.19). Order Here! The stunningly beautiful cover image features a close-cropped detailed from Plath's painting "Two Women Reading."

What are we supposed to believe? We rely on technology: some more than others. We use it for its convenience and generally for its swiftness. No longer does one really have to remember on their own where we read something because we can keyword search, highlight, makes notes, and bookmark passages that we read. Saturday night, while working on one of my papers for the Sylvia Plath 2012 Symposium, I tweeted that Sylvia Plath mentioned The New Yorker 58 times in her journals. I got this number by searching my Kindle for PC app on my computer. There were 61 results, but three of them were in the front matter (list of illustrations), notes, and the actual caption for the illustration. (Maybe I should add that I searched for the term in quotation marks; repeating the search just now without quotation marks I got 62.) To my consternation, I woke up this morning to see that someone else found 63 results. Of course we all want to be right! I thought: How could this be? So, I searche...

Sylvia Plath's great friend, and college roommate Marcia "Marty" Brown Stern passed away on July 25, 2012. In addition to being mentioned in Plath's journals dozens of times, Plath wrote more than 20 letters to her friend, all of which are available for reading in the Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College. These letters show a close friendship and a very warm and caring side of Plath that is often ignored. In October 1961, just after Plath and her husband Ted Hughes moved to Court Green in North Tawton, Plath wrote the poem "The Babysitters" which reflects on her summer experiences in 1951 when she worked as a nanny in Swampscott, Massachusetts. Marcia was also a nanny, a few houses away. Plath's journals also chronicle this summer. From the The Concord Journal , July 31 to August 7, 2012: "Marcia Marty Brown Stern, a long-time resident, teacher and prominent child advocate died after a difficult struggle with recu...

Trying to have a little fun this summer, below are attempts to construct sentences out of the poem titles in Sylvia Plath's Ariel (both the 1965/1966 Ted Hughes version and those from her original order, first published in 2004). I have endeavored to not employ additional words (to, at, the, are, etc.) to connect things up; however, in some instances I found it beneficial to do so... And in some cases I brought in titles from other 1962 poems. Getting there by candlelight, the applicant Gulliver cut the fearful eavesdropper for a fatherless son. The arrival of the bee box, a secret event (a birthday present), stopped dead the detective burning the letters. Medusa stings Daddy; the other magi- the jailor - on the tour wintering among the narcissi: Berck-Plage, Lyonnesse, Ariel, Lesbos, has the courage of shutting-up the elm and death & co. The Munich mannequins totem: a paralytic thalidomide child, sheep in fog, pheasant, balloons, the swarm, the moon and the yew tree....