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Showing posts from August, 2015

Additional Articles on Sylvia Plath's Disappearance

Those familiar with this blog know that Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt is a topic I have covered in years past. Not just in blog posts, but at length in my article " 'They Had to Call and Call': The Search for Sylvia Plath ", published in 2010. Since that time, many new articles have been located. In fact, the bibliography of articles that appeared in that paper had the number of found articles at 172. As of today, including recently found articles listed below, there are 196. This increase of 24 articles shows that the search for Sylvia Plath continues. So far this year, I have found four new (to me) articles. Two articles each from the Detroit News and the New Orleans Times-Picayune . For those not up on the lingo of our suthun' Cajun-Creole-French brothers and sisters, a picayune is actually not a great thing at all. Of its uses, it can mean "petty; worthless" (as a adjective) and "a small coin of little value, especially a 5-cent

'The Perfect Place': Sylvia Plath’s Whitby

The following is a guest post by writer Gail Crowther and artist Anthony Cockayne . Please read more about Crowther and Cockayne's collaboration: The Collusion of Elements . Sylvia Plath, 'The Perfect Place', My Weekly , 28 October 1961 On 28 October 1961 Sylvia Plath was published in a UK women's magazine called My Weekly . This, she hoped, would be the start of a career in which she would break into the 'slick' women's magazines and hone her skills writing playful short stories alongside her poetry and novels. As she stated in a letter to her mother on Christmas Eve 1960, 'The wonderful thing about these stories is that I can do them by perspiration, not inspiration, so I can work on them while Frieda is playing in the room . . .' ( LH p. 403) The story published was called 'The Perfect Place' (working title 'The Lucky Stone') and the genesis of this piece can be found in an earlier blog post by Peter , and in his Plath P

Sylvia Plath's "Mules That Angels Ride"

Back on 9 January 2012, I gave an "Update from the Archive" during a week spent at Smith College. In that post, I wrote the following: One abandoned Plath poem that I have often wondered about is "Mules That Angels Ride"! I know! The title is from a line in part VII of Wallace Stevens' "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle". In Karen Kukil's Unabridged Journals , the index lists this as a provisional title, which Plath planned to write during her spring break from teaching in 1958. We know she turned to ekphrastic poetry, writing on Klee, Gauguin, etc. She planned to write "on a new poem" which was for a contest. She saw it as being 350 lines and as an "exercise to set me free" (350). Plath saw the poem as containing the "naturalness & implicit form (without glassy brittleness)" that she said affected "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" (350). Plath later said that "Mules That Angels Ride" would be "about