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...

Upon my last flight home from England I wrote a long blog post so felt like it was an appropriate us of time, when not partaking of quantities of free alcohol to neutralize the turbulence of flying against the wind, to do so again. From 21-28 October I was in England, as you might know. The purpose of the visit was a talk at the British Library on the 23rd October with The Letters or Sylvia Plath co-editor Karen V. Kukil, as well as scholar and biographer Heather Clark and poet Mark Ford. I am a terrible judge of my own performance, but I hope the event was conducted and performed, by each of us, successfully. It was terrific to see familiar faces and friends, and, as well, to meet so many new people. I did not get to meet as many people as I had hoped. I have recently learned that the event was recorded! And once it is made available online I will add a link here, as well as sent out a notice on Twitter. An informal pub meet-up at the Lamb on Lamb's Conduit Street, near Ru...

Tomorrow at 19.00, the British Library will host the event " Triple-threat woman: The Letters of Sylvia Plath ". I will be speaking with the co-editor Karen V. Kukil; and we are joined by Heather Clark and Mark Ford. We have, each, fifteen minutes each to discuss various aspects of Plath's letters selected from those included in Volume II. It was difficult to find a few examples from the 575 letters in the book. I have titled my piece "The Reception of Sylvia Plath". Here's my title slide. I am looking forward to the event; to see old friends and make new ones. All links accessed 18 October 2018.

The British Library will host an event on 23 October 2018 entitled " Triple-Threat Woman: The Letters of Sylvia Plath ". Tickets went on sale on 10 September and it has been exciting to see and hear of people making bookings. This blog post is simply to reiterate the information on the British Library events page. Insights into the life and work of a great writer Poet and novelist Sylvia Plath was a great letter writer, and a newly published collection ( The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956–1963 , Faber and Faber) gathers letters from the period when she wrote her best-known works Ariel and The Bell Jar . Join the editors Peter K Steinberg and Karen V Kukil, and leading Plath scholars Heather Clark and Mark Ford, to explore the insights that they provide into her life and work. Alternating reflections on literature with quotidian episodes, the letters offer insights about her life as an American woman in England in the late 1950s and 60s, and her experience wi...

Kate Moses in 2003 ,  P.H. Davies in 2012 , Elizabeth Street , and  Graywolf Press , among others, have made Sylvia Plath's "Tomato Soup Cake." I am with Graywolf here on this, finding the concept "simultaneously repulsive and appealing". I will try it one day, I am sure... However, this blog post is about another Sylvia Plath recipe. In a letter Sylvia Plath wrote to her sister-in-law Olwyn Hughes from May 1959, she included a recipe for her heavenly sponge cake. Plath recommends making the cake in a funneled high cake pan, which my wife tells me is like a angel food cake pan (also known as a tube pan. If you are a fan of a certain Plath scholar you can use a bundt pan and achieve ... wait for it ... Bundt-zen! Sorry.). Plath even includes a drawing of the pan in the left margin of her typed letter. Being wholly culinarily uncoordinated, I begged (it was not pretty) my wife to try the recipe out. The ingredients you will need are: 6 separated eggs; 1½ c...

Reading Carrie Smith's wonderful essay "Illustration and ekphrasis: the working drafts of Ted Hughes's Cave Birds " in The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation (edited by Carrie Smith and Lisa Stead , Ashgate, September 2013) got me thinking about Plath's own ekphrasis-experience with collaborating with a Baskin. The British Library holds a very important collection of Sylvia Plath letters in the Ted Hughes & Leonard Baskin collection (known as Hughes-Baskin Papers). The letters from Plath range in date from circa 1958-1962 and it was in reading these letters on a visit to the British Library  last March that I learned (or, re-learned if I knew and forgot) about Plath's attempt to write a poem based on the work of Esther and Leonard Baskin. Of course there is Plath's poem "Sculptor" which was dedicated to Leonard Baskin, but that was not something Plath did in collaboration with him. In late 1958 and early...

Did you know that on August 22, 1961, Sylvia Plath was efficiently busy. Plath's busyness that day is briefly discussed in " These Ghostly Archives 5: Reanimating the Past ", a paper that I co-write with Gail Crowther. But to give some additional detail... On August 22, 1961: Plath was about nine days away from moving to Court Green... On August 22, 1961: Plath sent her drafts of her poem "Insomniac" to Eric Walter White. Collected Poems generically (generally) dates the poem to "May 1961"; however, Plath dated her final typed copy "May 23, 1961". Good to know. The letter and poetry drafts are held by the British Library in the "Cheltenham Festival prize poems" (ADD MS 52617). On August 22, 1961: Plath sent her drafts of her poem "Tulips" (variant title "Sickroom Tulips") to Jack Sweeney. This poem was written on March 18, 1961, a week or so after her release from hospital from having her appendix removed....

Now that Plath Profiles 6 is in production, I thought I might give a sneak peek at the paper Gail Crowther and I wrote: "These Ghostly Archives 5: Reanimating the Past". As you may know, Gail and I read a part of this paper in March at Plymouth University, England, where those in attendance heard some previously unknown Plath letter's read, as well as saw newly found photographs of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes that Gail found. We generally try to keep our findings under wraps but feel like now would be an appropriate time to possibly drum up some interest in the paper. The paper begins with this brilliant quote taken from Anita Helle's The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath : "Archival histories consist of tales we tell about the archive, and of tales the archive tells" (5). This quote was a guiding force in this installment of the "These Ghostly Archives" series. We visited or corresponded with eleven archival collections at nine differe...

In her March 2004 article, "Subject Sylvia" ( Poetry , pp. 335-344), Meghan O'Rourke writes the following: Plath took pains to invest her poems with a mythic severity, and in the weeks before she died spoke on the BBC about the need for the modern poet to draw on myth while making " the metaphor-moral ... intrinsic to the poem, working back and forth on itself, not expressed prosaically at the close, like the moral of a fable ." ( full text of article ; link accessed 10 May 2013) I am hoping that the power of social interneting can help to identify the source of this quote (above, in bold). "We" know Plath prepared a script of poems for the BBC circa 13/14 December 1962. These include poems such as "The Applicant," "Fog Sheep" ("Sheep in Fog"), "Lady Lazarus," "Ariel," "Death & Co.," "Nick and the Candlestick," "Letter in November," "Daddy," "Fever 1...

For the next seven days, I am going to suggest a perfect Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa - er, Holiday - gifts by or about Sylvia Plath. These are perfect gift ideas for friends, lovers, acquaintances, or enemies. On the first day of Plathmas my true love gave to me: A CD of rare recordings.... Day 1 - The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath (British Library Publishing, 2010) ( Order from British Library ) ( Order from University of Chicago Press ) The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath , with an introduction by - ahem - Peter K Steinberg, is the perfect gift for the holidays. Offering a range of rare Plath recordings, The Spoken Word is an instruction audio compilation. As you listens to Plath's speaking voice, you learn how to read those poems: the meter, the stresses, the line breaks, etc. The interviews add a human dimension to Plath, and Ted Hughes, too. The "Two of a Kind" recording is worth the price of the CD alone, offering glimpses at the poetic ideology of the 20th ce...

Two poems by Plath - "Hardcastle Crags" and "Wuthering Heights" (the latter read by Ted Hughes) are part of the current British Library exhibition "Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands." The exhibit list is posted online here ; and you can read a little bit about the exhibit here, too . Archival materials from Hughes's River and the Elmet books are included as well, and the exhibit runs until 25 September 2012. A thoroughly modern sounding exhibit that features a plethora of different information formats including "sound recordings, videos, letters, photographs, maps, song lyrics and drawings - as well as manuscripts and printed editions." Thanks to ~VC for the information. And... Plath Profiles 5 is in the final stages of production. Who's ready for it?

Although I received notice in February, it is only now that I realized I never posted about this archival update. The collection of Olwyn Hughes Correspondence is now open for research at the British Library. Back in September 2010, the British Library issued this press release about the acquisition. This blog made reference, too. Additional papers of Olwyn Hughes' are held at Emory University; visit the Archival Materials page over at A celebration, this is , for more information. You can access the full catalog descriptions of the collection via the British Library's website. To read the description of the collection, please go to the British Library search page , type in Add MS 88948, and you will see all the records which are applicable. The "details" option gives very good information on what is contained in each series/fonds. In addition to letters and poems sent from Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes to Hughes' sister, which are bound to garner the most atte...

The Daily Mail in England published an article on some of the content of the letters between Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar, which is soon to be published by the British Library. In " The string of bad luck and accidents that killed Sylvia Plath: Letters reveal former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes was haunted by wife's suicide ," article author Chris Hastings sensationalizes what is likely a minor aspect of the forthcoming book, Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar , regurgitating what is old news to Plath's &Hughes' readers. Eleven years ago, when the British Library first acquired the Sagar-Hughes correspondence, Emma Yates at the Guardian - among others - published " Drugs a 'key factor' in Plath's suicide, claimed Hughes ". Now, it was "news" then. It is not news now. Now, that being said, genuine thanks to ~VC and KZ for passing on the link! Poet and Critic is on sale in May 2012 and can be purchased fr...

Bahmer, F.A. 2012. "Charles Bukowski and Sylvia Plath on Moles and Melanoma." Archives of Dematology . Vol. 148, no. 1: 108. Bryfonski, Dedria. Depression in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar . Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2012. ( amazon.com ) Raza, Raihan. The Poetic Art of Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study of Themes and Techniques . New Delhi: Sarup Book Publishers, 2012. Emelia Fredlick reviews "With Love" an exhibit on at Emory University's Woodruff Library.  In addition to the circa 1958 photograph of Plath and Hughes described in the review, the exhibit ironically (and distastefully) features two late 1963 (15 November and 24 November) love letters from Ted Hughes to Assia Wevill. [ Press Release ] A "love letter" in the form of a poem by Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath is included in Andrea Clarke's recent book Love Letters: 2000 Years of Romance ( British Library, 2011 ). This might be another one of those Birthday Letters outtakes such as ...

Carl Rollyson, who is working on a new biography of Sylvia Plath, has recently published a " London Diary " over on BiblioBuffet. In this piece, he discusses a bit about researching Sylvia Plath in the British Library and in person with two of Sylvia Plath's friends, A. Alvarez and Elizabeth Sigmund. Certainly gives a brilliant teaser when he writes: "I imagine Sylvia found it restful to be in Alvarez's company. He was such a receptive listener and an astute critic. I can't tell the whole story here, but by the end of my three hours with him, he was reading to me from his diary, which recounted a shocking event that will have its place in the last chapter of my Plath biography."

Even after all this time, I'm still digesting "Last Letter" but finding it easier to read now that the hoopla has died down a bit. The news stories on its publications were just atrocious and sometimes it is hard to shake initial feeds, impressions, reports, and rushed judgments. As a result, though, what was reported has to be discredited largely, and ignored & forgotten. Looking back to those long gone halcyon days of early-to-mid October 2010 and those news stories ... I can't read them anymore. They, in fact, they quite privately bore me...(in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival). I'd like to see the manuscripts of the poems, all of them. Hughes's handwriting is difficult at best, but a little time with them and I think much more could be known about the poem. That being said, this post isn't looking at the whole poem, but just a little bit of it. First, though, with this archive of material now available, this te...

The Guardian Books section recently posted a Podcast in which they discuss, among other topics, National Poetry Day and the "difficulties surrounding the publication of a newly discovered Ted Hughes poem written immediately after Sylvia Plath's death." Written immediately? Seriously?

The Independent 's Cahal Milmo writes " The Ted Hughes lost poem: Who wants to live forever? " This is almost a moralistic "high road" piece of journalism which calls into question to appropriateness of publishing unpublished or unfinished works by dead authors from their archives or estates. However, the article concludes on a note of support I completely agree with by Anthony Thwaite who says, "There is always a difficult judgment to be made in these cases. In the case of Ted Hughes, if Carol Hughes has said that it is time for this poem to be published then that is right and we should be happy about it." I couldn't agree more. The article includes links to other related articles such as John Walsh's " Hughes's inner turmoil laid bare " and the Independent 's "leading article" " Shock of the new ." Walsh's article leaves me wanting; he simply misreads the poems or has misread accounts in memoirs an...

Hear more of Ted Hughes' "Last Letter" to Sylvia Plath read by Melvyn Bragg on BBC Devon .

The BBC Reports " Ted Hughes poem on Sylvia Plath's death published ." "A poem in which Ted Hughes describes the night his first wife Sylvia Plath took her own life in 1963 has been published for the first time." The poem, called "Last Letter" appears in the New Statesman and was culled from the recent British Library acquisition of Ted Hughes' papers which opened for research earlier this year. The BBC report says, "The poem begins: 'What happened that night? Your final night.' "It then details, in chronological order, the last weekend of Plath's life, in February 1963, when she and Hughes were still married but living apart. "It begins with Plath sending Hughes a letter, which is intended to arrive after the weekend, but is delivered early. "The poem goes on to describe Hughes rushing to her house, where Plath reassures him that everything is fine. He leaves and she ultimately takes her own life." See the Ne...