We shall by morning/Inherit the earth/Our foot’s in the door.

Back To The Real World March 12, 2007

Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , trackback

I’m back from Barcelona, which is perhaps the most beautiful place on Earth. I took some special Sylvia Plath related photos which I’ll post if the disposable camera I used actually develops them. But, now it’s time to get back to work. Over Spring Break I read through some of Plath’s Collected Poems and I noticed something that I hadn’t ever looked at before: There is an entire section at the end containing fifty of her Juvenilia works. There is also a complete list of all of her Juvenilia and a short paragraph explaining that it can all be found at the Lilly Library at Indiana Univeristy. Most of these poems were written while she was an undergraduate student at Smith and the Lilly Library even has the first drafts with the comments and editing suggestions made by her poetry professor. I was then further surprised to notice that among these poems, the sonnet “Ennui” was listed (though obviously not published in this volume). I guess I had understood that the student at VCU who found the poem had actually “Found” the poem. This is not to discredit her hard work in helping Blackbird gain publishing rights or bringing the poem to the public’s attention, but rather the attention it gained seems extraordinary when you read the extremely long list of unpublished works of juvenilia. There are whordes of rarely read, unpublished, privately owned poems by Sylvia Plath just hanging around in the that library. So, I wanted to investigate this further and I went to the Lilly Library’s website where I was able to print a fifty-four page catalogue of everything they have in their Sylvia Plath archive, a brief description and the contact information of the private donors who have purchased each piece. At this point, my curiosity was peaked even more, and so I e-mailed the library (which is extremely easy to do and they seem to encourage it) and explained my project and asked why there wasn’t an existing volume containing all of her juvenilia or why it wasn’t simply available to the public when it was obviously so very popular (i.e. the world-wide reception of “Ennui”). I was totally expecting to have to wait for a response but I got an e-mail just this morning. The librarian explained that these poems remain unpublished, not because the publishers wish to only publish works that Plath intended to publish (as I had previously been lead to believe but argued against due to the publication of her journals) but rather and I quote: The answer is simply that no one has chosen to pursue publication of all of the poems. It’s possible that sometime in the future someone may choose to seek the rights to publish all of her unpublished poems, but they may never be published in their entirety.

HOW CRAZY IS THAT?
She went on to say that if I wanted to access the unpublished poems I could do so at the permission of the owners which, as i’ve said, are listed in the catalogue, but that she could do nothing more to help me. I guess that I can only hope that the attention garnered by “Ennui” will help more schools or lit magazines pursue the other unpublished poems, but I can’t help but feel sad that these independently wealthy people go so far as to purchase these poems only to keep them locked up and out of the public eye. It seems like if you’re going to “own” a Sylvia Plath “original” you might as well publish it and get some credit, if you can’t actually own it outright, I mean it’s not the same as owning a piece of visual art. As an undergraduate student I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see more of Plath’s juvenilia and in particular the marked up first drafts because seeing a poet’s process (especially at the stage i’m currently at) seems totally priceless! As it stands, I have really enjoyed reading the Juvenilia that is published in this collection. I’ve been able to read it critically, both as a student of poetry, and as it compares to her later genius. It’s like reading the birth of a poet.
I might choose a poem and begin trying to contact the owner just to see how far I can get in getting a copy (cross your fingers). I figure if Blackbird only had to pay 200$ for publishing rights from Faber and Faber, how much could the owner possibly charge for me to get a scanned copy???
Maybe i’m being naive and this is a far more complicated process than I can possibly comprehend, but it doesn’t seem so. It seems more like apathy to me. I’ll keep you updated on this little side project.

ps. just as a funny side note: despite the librarian’s response that the library and Plath collection are open to the public, the front page of the catalogue declares that it is only open to “bona-fide Plath scholars”. I can’t tell if they’re being glib, but I wonder what it takes to become “bona-fide”?