Those familiar with this blog know that Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt is a topic I have covered in years past. Not just in blog posts, but at length in my article " 'They Had to Call and Call': The Search for Sylvia Plath ", published in 2010. Since that time, many new articles have been located. In fact, the bibliography of articles that appeared in that paper had the number of found articles at 172. As of today, including recently found articles listed below, there are 196. This increase of 24 articles shows that the search for Sylvia Plath continues. So far this year, I have found four new (to me) articles. Two articles each from the Detroit News and the New Orleans Times-Picayune . For those not up on the lingo of our suthun' Cajun-Creole-French brothers and sisters, a picayune is actually not a great thing at all. Of its uses, it can mean "petty; worthless" (as a adjective) and "a small coin of little value, especially a 5-cent ...

Back on 9 January 2012, I gave an "Update from the Archive" during a week spent at Smith College. In that post, I wrote the following: One abandoned Plath poem that I have often wondered about is "Mules That Angels Ride"! I know! The title is from a line in part VII of Wallace Stevens' "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle". In Karen Kukil's Unabridged Journals , the index lists this as a provisional title, which Plath planned to write during her spring break from teaching in 1958. We know she turned to ekphrastic poetry, writing on Klee, Gauguin, etc. She planned to write "on a new poem" which was for a contest. She saw it as being 350 lines and as an "exercise to set me free" (350). Plath saw the poem as containing the "naturalness & implicit form (without glassy brittleness)" that she said affected "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" (350). Plath later said that "Mules That Angels Ride" would be "about...