One Life: Sylvia Plath, Revisited

Over the Christmas holiday I visited my family which is always really nice and they wanted to see the One Life: Sylvia Plath exhibit which is still on (through May 2018) at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. I had donated a piece, so they wanted to see that, but also to see a little bit about Plath herself, too. They enjoyed the exhibit, and I think walked away with a greater appreciate for the poet, the artist, and the person (Plath, not me!).

When we were discussing this visit I knew I had to bring Brandi Rund's gift to me of that Ricoh Theta 360 camera and so I'm happy to share here the seven images I took:

1. | 2. | 3. | 4. | 5. | 6. | 7.

Sorry that I am in so many of them; it is fortunate the camera did not break.

While in the exhibit, I also tried doing a live Tweet via Periscope, something I had never before done. The quality is wanting of course and the camera itself is a bit wobbly…

Lastly, some more photos! I know many of you saw my first blog post on this back in July, but in that visit I had only my cell phone camera and I wanted shots on my more reliable Canon point-and-shoot. So here they are.

I do hope as many of you as possible can visit the exhibit. It it wonderful to see these bits of Sylvia Plath assembled together from the collections at the Lilly Library, Smith College, and from a couple of "private" donors. I put private quotes because as the donor is listed on the exhibit labels that person is not necessarily private.

All links accessed 26-28 December 2017 and 2 January 2018.

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'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...

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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