Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath Influencer

The year 2021 is a quarter over. That may be a good thing. That may, of course, be a bad thing. Who is to tell? But, while many of you have been obsessing over the wrong things (clearly), a US-based man has been building an Empire (think Darth Vader, only more nefarious) in the field of Sylvia Plath. 

Who was Sylvia Plath? Sylvia Plath was an American-born poet who died in England. (Is that the briefest biography published to date? Certainly seems to be an easier read for our consumers than a than the two ludicrously long volumes of her letters and a recent biography. (Think of the forests, people, please!) But we digress.)

Sylvia Plath, it seems, is important. It seems she has a worldwide following both physically and virtually. Her works have been translated in to dozens of different languages and, even, Braille. In addition, more importantly, she has been referenced in the iconic television show The Simpsons and is a frequent question (or answer) on Jeopardy! 

Once we became aware of her, we turned to the internet, where all information is good information no matter how bad the information, and found a balding fellow who has, it seems, too much time on his hands.

His name is Peter K. Steinberg. He has thousands of followers on Twitter, though most of them are bot accounts. He's on Instagram, too, but he's relatively inept at that medium. He co-edited the aforementioned volumes of letters, but the book has sold so poorly it will be out of print by the end of the year. Poor man. You might not know it from looking at him (pictured, left) but he is what's known in the Sylvia Plath Circle as an Influencer.

An influencer is, according to Influencer Marketing Hub, someone who has
  • the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience.
  • a following in a distinct niche, with whom he or she actively engages. The size of the following depends on the size of his/her topic of the niche.

Steinberg started the most popular activity of the pandemic: Plath Yoga. Think Goat Yoga but more literary. It has figuratively swept the world, literally speaking. Here he is, in action, as it were.

Plath Yoga: Plank


Plath was clearly pro-Pirate and pro-plank walking, using the phrases "walk the plank" and "walking the plank" in "Southern Sunrise" and "The Swarm", respectively.

Plath Yoga: Cow and Cat


This is fairly meta as it is done with Sylvia Plath: Drawings open to Plath's drawings of bulls and a cat.

Plath Yoga: Happy Baby


Plath undoubtedly was a happy baby in the early 1930s and certainly had her two children in happy baby position at nappy-changing time. For modesties sake we asked him to cover his crotch.

Plath Yoga: Shavasana


The corpse pose; relaxing and letting it all hang out. Like Sylvia Plath sun-worshipping off Marblehead in the July 1951.

Namaste.

This post written partially Under the Influencer.—ed.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Read more

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...
Read more

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...
Read more