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Showing posts from July, 2019

Guest Blog Post: Cornucopia, Wisconsin

The following is a guest blog post by Amy C. Rea about her recent visit to Cornucopia, Wisconsin. All text and photographs are copyright to her. Thank you, Amy! ~pks 60 years ago, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes undertook a road trip circling America with visits to Canada and Mexico tucked into the northern and southern ends of the expedition. (For a wonderfully detailed and researched overview of this trip, see David Trinidad's On the Road with Sylvia and Ted: Plath and Hughes’s 1959 Trip Across America .) They began their trek on July 7, and a week later, found themselves in a small north-central Wisconsin town called Cornucopia. There they found a farm on the shores of Lake Superior owned by Andrew and Helen Nozel, who graciously agreed to let them camp on their property for two nights. Recently my husband and I took a road trip from our home in Minnesota to Bayfield, a charming small town on Wisconsin's Lake Superior shore (called the South Shore, as opposed to Minnesota&

Sylvia Plath Email Query

In June I received an email asking about something that was said back in 2017 during the Q & A of a talk that I gave with Heather Clark and Karen V. Kukil at the Grolier Club. If I knew it, I had forgotten, that a  video was available online of the Symposium which was done in conjunction with the exhibit from the collections of Judith Raymo. At the start of the Q & A, Richard Larschan, who was a great friend of Aurelia Plath's in Wellesley, asked if we had gotten access to sealed letters at the Lilly Library. He had asked this of me a few times but I never really did much investigating about it. But later, as we were in the throes of preparing Volume II of The Letters of Sylvia Plath , I did write to the Lilly to ask if they have or had any sealed materials. I was informed that they do not presently have any sealed Plath materials. However, I learned after the good archivists did some digging, that when Aurelia Plath sold the collection to the Library in 1977 that

Sylvia Plath: The Living Poet

One of the most remarkable aspects that the British Library Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath CD—published in 2010 and lamentably out of print—captures and presents can be found in tracks 8-16, or, those from "The Living Poet" broadcast on the B.B.C.'s Third Programme. "The Living Poet" aired just about monthly and featured other Americans in 1961: Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Stanley Kunitz. Plath was the first female that year and shared the reading of her work with the American actor Marvin Kane. He read five poems and she read four. The introduction to that broadcast, written and spoken by Plath, is very clearly by the author of the poems of The Colossus . What I mean by this is it is eloquent, yet kind of floral. The poems, as they were recorded, are: "The Disquieting Muses" (read by SP); "Sleep in the Mojave Desert" (read by Kane); "Suicide Off Egg Rock" (read by Kane); "Spinster&q