Sylvia Plath Conference Summary by Bella Biddle

There are two many things that Bella Biddle is to try to define her. Meeting her at the Sylvia Plath conference in Belfast, hearing her paper, and a choral composition of "Nick and the Candlestick" was a definite highlight.

Bella kindly wrote up some summary thoughts of two panels on the second day that she attended and I cannot express how grateful I am for this as it provides a concrete review of talks I would have liked to have heard. Without further ado:

For the 11:30 panel, I opted for Panel A: 'Now there are these veils' which saw Cathleen Allyn Conway, Georg Nöffke and Dr Gary Leising discussing theoretical interpretations of Plath's poetry. Cathleen discussed the vampiric identity Plath builds for herself in poems such as 'Lady Lazarus', comparing them to vampires from Bram Stoker's Lucy to Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She discussed the issues of consent and empowerment vampirism provokes in literature, and described how she uses found phrases from Sylvia Plath's canon to create her own "franken-poems", which were both moving and enlightening. Georg Nöffke's paper - "Dying As an Art: Performing Suffering, Suffering the Performance of Death in Sylvia Plath's 'Lazy Lazarus'" gave us an insightful overview as to how Plath's death might be interpreted as her rejection of a patriarchal society. Dr Gary Leising finished the panel with great flair, exploring Plath's use of synedoche, and the way that Plath breaks down her body in poems such as 'Daddy', and prompting some great discussions in the subsequent panel as to how Plath might have used her own poems as synedoche within her collections.

At 14:45, I attended the panel; "Personal Reflections: A Safe Space to talk about what Sylvia Plath means to us as fans and readers" which was nothing if not intensely moving for all of us. Alexandra Davis spoke beautifully on her experience as both a student and a teacher, and how the ways we teach Plath can impact children both for better and worse. Lisa Wagoner read a personal essay, documenting the emotional and academic impacts Plath's poetry had on her as a person, and showed us her "I am I am I am" tattoo - which Anna Dykta recognised from her blog! Finally, Jennifer L. Reiger read an excerpt from her essay "You Mean Ted Hughes' Wife?" which had the entire room misty eyed. The subsequent discussion was rich and personal, as the audience attempted to tackle the ways we feel about Plath emotionally. From the way that we all feel so personally linked to her, and yet are aware that love for Plath is so common as can fill a conference, to the way that we fetishise and/or elevate her work, her life, her death, it was the most sensitive and raw talk of the conference so far.

Thank you so much, Bella! If anyone else wants to contribute their own commentaries, thoughts, reviews, of any aspect of the Conference please just get in touch!

All links accessed 13 November 2017.

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'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...

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