In 1 November 2014, I posted on "Collecting Sylvia Plath" . This post was originally part of that, but I decided to break it out for a special occasion. That occasion is today, just after the 52nd anniversary of Sylvia Plath's death. The following document was acquired from The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, and was something also formerly belonging to long-time BBC producer Fred Hunter ( obit ; another obit ). Truly this is a piece of ephemera: a single-sided leaflet produced by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, for a "Sylvia Plath Memorial Evening" which was (to be) held on 29 April. The full text reads: INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS 17 Dover Street W 1 Sylvia Plath Memorial Evening The ICA are arranging a memorial evening for Sylvia Plath on thursday, april 29th at 8.15 pm The speakers will be Ian Hamilton and M L Rosenthal and Al Alvarez will be in the Chair. The evening will be illustrated with recordings of Sylvia Plat...

In a letter to her mother dated 24 June 1960 and excerpted in Letters Home , Sylvia Plath wrote about attending a cocktail party for W.H. Auden "last night" at Faber and Faber's (then located at 24 Russell Square ( map ). On this occasion, Plath witnessed Hughes being photographed with T.S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and W. H. Auden . After the party, she said: "Then we went to the Institute of Contemporary Arts and read our poems to an audience of about 25-30 young people with another poet (or, rather, non-poet; very dull)" (386). I was curious about this poetry reading, about who the "dull" "non-poet" was, and so searched to see if the Institute of Contemporary Arts had an archive anywhere. I started at the ICA website and then learned that the records for the period covering Plath's lifetime are held in the Tate Museum archives . The ICA London is among the Tate's list of all archival collections ( TGA 955 ) and ...