Scattered Updates March 14, 2007
Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , trackbackSorry, still no pictures! but they’ve been delivered to Giant so hopefully they’ll be up by Friday (cross your fingers that they come out okay).
On the plus side, I e-mailed the Lilly Librarian again and this time I gave her the name of a specific unpublished piece of juvenilia and asked her for the address or contact information of the owner of that poem. She responded very quickly again and a letter is on its way to a Ms. Ros Edwards in London, owner of the Edwards Fuglewicz Literary Agency asking for a permission for the library to send me a copy of that poem….so cross your fingers again!
Dr. Scanlon was very nice to cut out a book review from USA Today that was published while I was in Spain. The article is called “Doomed Love’: The other woman in poet Hughes’ life” and talks about a new book about Ted Hughes’ mistress Assia Wevill called Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love. The article says that the book paints a sympathetic portrait for all of the members of this love triangle, and I’d be interested to read more about Wevill. In some ways, and from the very little I know about her life, she seemed to idolize Plath to the point of wanting to BE Plath (hence: stealing Hughes, and her suicide). However, I hadn’t been aware of the fact that Hughes’ never married Wevill or that he treated their daughter differently than he treated his two children with Plath. Wevill has always seemed like the villified and untalented version of Sylvia Plath and so it might be interesting to read this and know more about her. Professor Emerson and I also discussed the interesting dynamics at play simply through the publication of this book. It is especially interesting in light of my recent discovery of all of that unpublished juvenilia. It proves (not that it needed proving) that Sylvia Plath is really more of a personality then an artist in the public eye. The mere fact that someone would be interested in writing a novel about “the other woman” and Plath’s “love triangle” but not in publishing every poem she’s written is pretty outrageous!
Finally, Professor Emerson lent me this short work of creative scholarship called My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe. It is a very interesting work that makes a really cool comparison between Dickinson and Emily Bronte, but it also has a passage that I think perfectly explains my mission in this project.
Howe writes:
“In some sense the subject of any poem is the author’s state of mind at the time it was written, but facts of an artist’s life will never explain that particular artist’s truth. Poems and poets of the first rank remain mysterious” (27).
Interesting Note: On page 289 of Plath’s Collected Poems there is literally an interesting note concerning her poem “Mushrooms” (the poem from which I titled this blog) that has an excerpt from her journal which reads, “Wrote an exercise on Mushrooms yesterday which Ted likes. And I do too. My absolute lack of judgement when I’ve written something: whether it’s trash or genius” (note 121).
*it is very important to note that throughout these notes at the back of this book, she is quoted as describing her poems as “trash” or “book worthy” proving once again that she had both skill and an eye for good poetry, not simply rash intuition.
Comments»
I found a ton of Sylvia Plath videos using the stumbleupon video tool, it was uncanny how many showed up. So, I obviously thought of your work and here you are:
http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv=4gixYZrmayA
http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv=v3IijkIQzUY
http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv=esBLxyTFDxE
http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv=BJbX5o2gqhM
http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv=igQI3n4UCz4
WOW! Thanks so much! You tube is constantly surprising me with just how many videos you can find on almost any subject. On another note I’m almost done with my student academy proposal, I’ll be able to submit it soon.