Event: Sylvia Plath in the Domestic Sublime

The following event will take place on 5 December 2013 at 7:30 pm at the Helen Hills Hills Chapel at the esteemed Smith College. Please see the flyer below for all the great details on this Sylvia Plath related event.

BACH Goldberg Variations, BWV 988
SCHOENBERG Drei Klavierstücke, Op.11
and Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, Op.19

PLATH Kindness, Totem, Cut, Nick and the Candlestick, Mary’s Song, Child, Contusion, Words, and Balloons

Sylvia Plath in the Domestic Sublime celebrates the visionary voice and breathing spirit of Plath, 50 years after the poet’s death in 1963.

Like Plath’s late poems, Bach’s Goldberg Variations are at once intimate, personal, domestic; and macrocosmic, baring the deep architecture of the universe and the sufferings of the Platonic world-soul. With musically dynamic magic, the Goldberg Variations (inward as a dream, expansive as sunlight) transform the involutions of their close-hearkening dwelling-space within the human heart into a gothic cathedral reaching toward spiralling stars; while from the polyphonically woven body of the Goldberg, Plath’s words of domestic apocalypse bloom like stigmata; bleeding into the postapocalyptic beautiful world and abyss of Schoenberg’s Klavierstücke.

This performance is a creative outcome of Danaë Killian's postdoctoral research project at the University of Melbourne, Transformations and Initiations: Sylvia Plath in Flames, in Performance. In this research, Danaë Killian seeks like Plath to performatively cross flaming thresholds between biography and art, existence and death, potential and actual selves.

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

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

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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