At 5 p.m. on 13 November 2009, Catherine Bowman will be at the Woodberry Poetry Room. She will be both reading from her collection of poems The Plath Cabinet and playing recordings of poems by Plath (and possibly Ted Hughes and Anne Sexton, too). If you are in the area, please come to the informal event, it is free and open to the public. The Woodberry Poetry Reading is in Room 330 of Lamont Library at Harvard. In conjunction with this event, I've created a little exhibit entitled "Sylvia Plath: The Disquieting Muse". Items featured in the exhibit include a first edition Heinemann The Colossus , a typescript of "The Disquieting Muses" with a typo, the reel tape boxes from Plath 1958 and 1959 Harvard recordings , and a few other items and photographs. The exhibit will be up for a while. The picture here is intentionally small... Also coming up next weekend, 13-15 November 2009, the 33rd Boston Antiquarian Book Fair is on at the Hynes Convention Center (T t...

There is an article in The Times by Ben Hoyle today on Ted Hughes and his recently discovered children's story, Timmy the Tug , written in 1956. The article, " Ted Hughes’s first children’s story has emerged after 50 years " is online here. This is the first time I remember reading about Jim Downer - and that Plath visited down in the winter of 1963 shortly before she died. Downer, and his wife Wendy, lived, according to Plath's addressbook (housed at Smith), at 214 Old Brompton Road in London. The article includes some of Downer's illustrations. Look for Timmy the Tug on 21 September. There is a companion article to the one above, entitled " Jim Downer and Ted Hughes's excellent adventure " by Alan Franks. An article that ran in the Marin Independent Journal mentions one of the most unique uses of Plath's poetry I can remember. In Jane Scurich's " Master Gardener: Garden Show focues on climate change, drought and sustainability ...