Every Woman Adores A Fascist

I have begun to read Bitter Fame, a biography of Sylvia Plath that has languished unread on my shelves for, I think, five years. I’d resisted it (though I loved owning it) because I understood there were some objectivity problems; the author had received a great deal of help from Ted Hughes’s sister Olwyn, [...]

Nicholas Hughes Commits Suicide

Sheila sent me a note with the terrible news this evening.
This post is not thought out so please forgive me.
Nicholas Hughes, the son of Slyvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has committed suicide. I talked to Nicholas a few times last year and he was very bright, very engaging…
I didn’t know him.
But I knew [...]

Rules and Rebellion

Re-reading “A Birthday Present” by Sylvia Plath, I am struck by these lines:
Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.
I have had similar thoughts before; it’s a strange experience to see them reflected back by someone you respect a great deal. My way of expressing the same thing was: [...]

Sylvia Plath’s Birthday

Today is a special day for me. It’s Sylvia Plath’s birthday.
It was, I don’t know – three years ago? Four? – that Sheila wrote a birthday post about Sylvia Plath. (UPDATE: check out the yearly post here!) Knowing nothing about the poet, I found Sheila’s essay compelling. [...]

The Word As Flesh

My agent’s assistant had written two comments on a page of my manuscript. I had written the sentence:
He was eager to be at home.
In the margin, in her flawless penmanship, the assistant wrote, “Sounds like Hemingway. Short declarative sentence. Beautiful.”
The other sentence was:
Uranium brains.
In the margin she wrote: “Very Plathian. Beautiful.”
This was before I knew [...]

Sylvia Plath and God

My Sylvia Plath obsession continues apace.
As I read her poems, I recognize her complex relationship with sight, eyes and eyeballs. Poems from 1960 and 1961 are abrim with eyes: ‘white as a blind man’s eye’, ‘mobs of eyeballs’, ‘my small bald eye’, ‘deeps of an eye’, ‘put her heart out like an only eye’, [...]

Plath Journals: I Call Shenanigans

Right here, right now, I am calling bullshit on the Plath Journals.  I have been reading the unabridged version for about a year.  I can’t read it all at one time – it’s too much, too intense – so I dip in, read a few pages, let it marinate and collate with the other things [...]

Today In Plathian History

The Writer’s Almanac reminds us: 
On this day in 1956, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes met at a party in Cambridge, sparking one of the most famous literary marriages in history. 
 

The next morning she wrote about the encounter in her journal. She spent most of the evening talking to someone else, whom she described as “some ugly, gat-toothed [...]

Sylvia in The Wee Hours

I am writing, concentrated writing, words and words after midnight.  My method is unusual for writers, I think: I require noise to write.  Television, usually.   Sometimes traffic sounds, particularly in Boston or New York, or the static and lap-lap-lap of rolling waves, or music, if I can’t find a nook that makes organic sounds, I will [...]