On 28 January 1963 Sylvia Plath was hard at work. On that day she completed her "Landscape of Childhood" (later titled "Ocean 1212-W"). She may have also recently completed "Snow Blitz" and was hard at work on poems. She revised the ending of "Sheep in Fog" first composed about eight weeks earlier, and then wrote "The Munich Mannequins", "Totem", and "Child". Did you know that "Child" was once featured at a "Poems on the Underground" in London? The program started in 1986. In addition to being readable on the Tube, once upon a time, posters were sold for these, too. 

Recently the Lilly Library has been awarded a $10.9 million grant and part of these funds, given by the Lilly Endowment, will go towards renovating the library. The Library has created a special web page that will provide news and updates on the renovation. This will have an affect on researchers going to look at the Sylvia Plath collection. And, because they do actually hold more stuff than Plath materials, it will also affect those collections, too. Chances are if you have plans to visit the library this spring and summer you will be fine and not experience and delays or disruptions. But visitors later in the year and toward the end will definitely want to double-check their plans and thus plan accordingly. Smith College is also in the midst of a several-year renovation project affecting their Sylvia Plath papers, too. (I presume they have non-Plath holdings, too, but let's be honest, they hardly matter.) Normally housed in the Neilson Library, their special col...

David Trinidad's phenomenal essay " On the Road with Sylvia and Ted: Plath and Hughes's 1959 Trip Across America " was one of the best pieces I had to pleasure to read and work on when I was co-editor of Plath Profiles . And it in part led me to start thinking about Sylvia Plath picture postcards. I got to see, as part of the Letters of Sylvia Plath project, as many postcards as was possible. And so now that her texts are available, I thought I might write a post that might become a series which looks at the picture side of the postcards Plath sent. The idea came to me in June 2012, the year after publishing David's essay, when I did a little research into the postcard Plath sent to J. Mallory Wober circa 17 November 1955 of Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy . The letter is printed in  Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1 , pp 1011-12. The original painting is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Plath visited the MoMA several times on...

The following letter was sent from Sylvia Plath to me via David Trinidad's Ouija board early this morning. It will be included in the paperback edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 3: 1963-2019 . Sylvia Plath 7 Bright Stupid Confetti Lane My Zen Heaven Peter K. Steinberg Earth 1 April 2019 RE: Cease and desist from everything Dear Peter K. Steinberg: This CEASE AND DESIST ORDER is to inform you that your persistent actions including but not limited to transcribing and annotating my letters; tweeting, blogging, websiting and otherwise attempting to represent me on the Internet (not for nothing, the wifi is awesome up here) have become unbearable. You are ORDERED TO STOP such activities immediately as they are being done in violation of the law. I have the right to remain free from these activities as they constitute [harassment/stalking/etc.], and I will pursue any legal and spirituous remedies available to me against you if these activities continue...

I was invited me to give a talk on Sylvia Plath and the Letters at Stockton University, in Galloway, New Jersey and it was an offer I could not refuse. So, this is a blog post to inform and invite anyone who is in the area to attend the talk which is open to the public. Time: 6 pm Date: 1 April 2019 Place: Campus Center Theater On that Monday before the talk I will be sitting on on two of Emily's classes to talk Plath. She is teaching the Beuscher letters and The Silent Woman as part of a comparative study. That afternoon, as well, I will sit in on a psychology class taught by Kaite Yang. On Tuesday, I look forward to sitting in on her colleague Thomas Kinsella's class. Funding for this opportunity was provided by a 2020 Learning Grant, as well as the American Studies and Literature programs at Stockton. All links accessed 28 February 2019.

Last evening was the a wonderful WSJPlus/HarperCollins event on Sylvia Plath's recently published short story Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom  at the showroom of MM.LaFleur on 42nd Street at Bryant Park. Manhattan is always a whirlwind experience--a hullabaloo, as Plath said. It was a terrifically Plathian day all around, receiving interesting emails from people and also getting the proofs of the paperback editions of both volumes of  The Letters of Sylvia Plath . When it rains, it Plaths. My thanks to Carla Zanoni for asking me to participate and for being a wonderful host and conversationalist. The room was full of people and I enjoyed the rapport, the questions and chatting, and in particular just seeing and reading the genuine interest in peoples faces. Here is a clip of Carla reading from the story. Feeling incredibly fortunate to discuss the work of #SylviaPlath with Peter K. Steinberg, aka @sylviaplathinfo , and @wsjplus members. Was full on in my elemen...

Faber and Faber has reissued Sylvia Plath Poems Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy today. The book is 160 pages, the ISBN is 978-0-571-34851-0 and it retails for £9.99. Copies are available, as you might imagine,  from the publisher as well as from sites like Amazon.co.uk . All links accessed 6 March 2018.