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Thanks Dad March 28, 2007

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My dedication knows no bounds! I was just about to take a nap when I got this e-mail from my dad (this is truly becoming a collaborative project) and I knew I had to blog about it. I have been keeping him updated on these really strange series of events that i’ve been encountering regarding Plath’s unpublished works, and my own personal concerns that i’ve misconstrued the situation or perhaps am creating drama where none acutally exists. He found this posting on a site called sylviaplathforum.com. The site is actually really irritating, it’s comparable to what my blog would look life if there were two of me and we both had multiple personality disorder. Any Plath nut can go and post and rant away, but no one really responds to one another, so there is contradiction and repetitive chaos all over the place. But there was this one posting around the time when “Ennui” was published that says:

“Can I just point out that a list of Plath’s Uncollected Juvenilia
appears at the back of her Collected Poems. These may well appear in
print at some stage, making the Collected Poems change its title to
‘Collected Poems (1956 – 1963)’ similar to that of Eliot’s
poems….Sounds a bit iffy but there are in fact many more unpublished
poems listed here which Hughes writes in his note are kept at the Sylvia
Plath Archive at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. So it’s not like
a previously unknown poem has appeared out of the blue, so to say.
‘Found by student’ has the uncanny whiff of Charlie Bucket finding the
golden ticket in a gutter!”

Rehan Qayoom
London , England
Sunday, November 12, 2006

MY THOUGHTS EXACLTY!!! So, while no one responded too or repeated these sentiments, it is nice to know that I am not the only Plath nut who noticed this problem. Unfortunatly, this also makes it clear that the Plath forum is not the right audience, I might try to write an artilce and reach a wider one.

FYI: I was reviewing an older post from when I met with Dr. Donovan and so I have a record of how he told me the story and my reaction to it. It is also worthy of note that I have gone through the EXACT same process as Anna Journey. She did not, in fact, visit the Lilly Library, but “found” the sonnet in the same manner I did.

Still no word from the library about publishing…but the idea of being able to post this poem is getting more and more exciting. Owning a copy of a poem that I can’t share is really proving how outrageously strange this whole sitauation is.

ps. Professor Emerson and I will be talking about this blog and blogging in general at the student academy on Saturday morning….bright and early! feel free to join us 🙂

So Weird March 26, 2007

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Linda Wagner-Martin, author of “Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life,” thinks there might be more early, unpublished works by the prolific writer.

Okay, so now that i’m pretty much just waiting to for the Lilly Library to decide whether I can publish that Plath poem on this blog, I’ve been reviewing the articles that came out around the time that “Ennui” was published in Blackbird and I am continually surprised by the quotes I find! For instance the one listed above which I found in both The Washington Post and USA Today. In an effort to remain unbaised and fair I was giving Dr. Donovan (the editor of Blackbird) and Anna Journey (the graduate student who “found” “Ennui) the benefit of the doubt and hoping that they had just been rather vague in describing how she “found” the sonnet, rather than simply claiming it a true discovery (in every sense of the word). However, it seems that everyone i’ve spoken with, and everyone in conjunction with Sylvia Plath (ie: Linda Wagner-Martin) were all under the same assumption I was: that Anna Journey did find an undiscovered poem. It seems completely inconceivable that no one ever flipped to the end of Plath’s Collected Poems and saw the list that allowed me such easy access to Plath’s unpublished poetry! I hate to harp on this, but i’m going to…All of Sylvia Plath’s unpublished juvenilia is accounted for and catalogued and safely stored in her archive at the Lilly Library. For a minimal fee, and a reasonable reason, any student/teacher/scholar can get a copy of these poems and a chance to try to get them published. It is criminal, in my opinion, that this is not common knowledge, and has been, in effect, further hidden from the public due to the publication of “Ennui”.
I really hope that they do allow me to publish the poem here, not simply because I want a chance to share this poem, but because maybe it would give me the chance to tell people (even a small number of people) what the situation really is. I am also working on a letter to Dr. Donovan that urges him (if he gets anymore attention from the press) to set the record straight.
Maybe I am naive, and i’m certainly idealistic, but I truly think that if enough poetry loving people understand the situation, steps will be taken to get all of these poems published once and for all. I also think this would happen quickly because if I were an editor or worked for Faber and Faber, I would see this as a deeply embarrassing oversight!
Poetry is pointless if it just sits in some library, where no one reads it and hardly anyone knows of its existence. Even if it only benefitted the small minority of scholars (as Hughes predicts) at least it’s serving some kind of purpose, and I really think it would get more attention then anyone is giving it credit for.

Anyway, there’s a small rant just to let you know i’m still here, still obsessing and still haven’t heard back from the library…so keep those fingers crossed 🙂

On another note, thanks to Jim Groom my Flickr photos from Barcelona are up now, and he also got rid of that stranger who was making meaningless comments!!! Awesome 🙂

SUCCESS!!! March 19, 2007

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Very exciting stuff!!! I just got a letter from the Lilly Library with a copy of the poem I had requested along with all the paperwork I will need to get publishing rights. I might try to get rights to reproduce the poem on this blog, because it seems like everything is running so smoothly that I might as well try. I cannot believe how quickly I was able to get a copy of this poem. The poem is titled “Words of Advice to an English Prof” it’s actually not a great poem. I mean it’s fine, it’s cute but it’s not written in any precise form although it does have a tight end rhyme. The neat thing is just that i’m reading it, that I own a copy and that it was so SO easy to get. It is also fascinating to see something so mediocre by such a fantastic poet, it really shows her progress. I would love to get the original draft with her professor’s notes on it. It’s late, and I don’t have anything specific to say right now other than to spread the news that I have the poem and hopefully soon I can share it with everyone right here on this blog!

cross your fingers!

Also I promise that my special Barcelona photos will be up as soon as I figure it out (meaning of course, as soon as Jim Groom gives me step-by-step instructions) 🙂 so sorry for the misleading post.

Barcelona Pictures March 19, 2007

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Here are the pictures I took in Barcelona…..we can call them “Where’s Sylvia Plath?”

Scattered Updates March 14, 2007

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Sorry, 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.

Back To The Real World March 12, 2007

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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”?

SPAIN SPAIN SPAIN February 28, 2007

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So, on friday I get to go to Spain for Spring break!!!!
My roommate and I will be in Barcelona for a week and i’m totally excited. My original plan was to find out where Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes spent their honeymoon so that it would be a relevant vacation rather than just a vacation vacation. Unfortunatly, they stayed in Benidorm, Spain and that is pretty far away from where we’ll be, so we probably won’t make it over there. Fortunately, I found this Ted Hughes poem “You Hated Spain” from Birthday Letters so if I decide to trust Ted Hughes just this once I can feel guilt-free for not pursuing Plath in Spain. I don’t know if I can or can’t, I need to review her journal entries from that trip but in either case, here is a link to Ted Hughes reading the poem. Although it might not be him….this is debatable
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/288371

HAPPY SPRING BREAK MARY WASHINGTON ENGLISH DEPARTMENT!

I am SUCH a nerd February 27, 2007

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okay so the title to this post is the truth…..but anyway, I was looking through Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters and I came across this poem “Wuthering Heights” which is a response to Plath’s response to Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights which we’ve just read in the Bronte seminar and I completely loved!!!
SO, then I googled it and found another poem called “Wuthering Heights” by Sylvia Plath herself 🙂

I LOVE THESE CONNECTIONS!!!

so just for fun here is a link to the Plath poem (which is way better than the Hughes poem and also I couldn’t find a link to the Hughes poem)

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/wuthering-heights/

Enjoy!

Your Poetry Is Great….How Surprising! February 27, 2007

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Last night I read the foreword to the 1965 version of Ariel (Hughes’ version) by fellow confessionalist poet Robert Lowell. I was totally shocked that in this barely three page document Lowell manages to insult and discredit Plath a vast majority of the time. Of course his insults are under the guise of compliments but they are weak pseudo-compliments that strip her of her title “poet”. I can see how he could have had the misogynistic notion that he was honoring her memory but the way every sentence is worded implies that she had zero command over her poetry and she was really more like a witch with spells that created the poems rather than a skilled poet. For instance in the first few lines he writes, “Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created-hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another “poetess,” but one of those super real, hypnotic, great classical heroines” (vii).
Then, he goes on to guess about the overall conciet of the volume and in a desperate attempt to tie it to her suicide writes, “This poetry and life are not a career; they tell that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it” (viii). (AHHHH that quote made me really mad)
Then, he ends the foward with a lengthy paragraph in which he describes their brief encounters (she casually attended his poetry seminar at Boston University), complete with a detailed description of how she looked: “She was willowy, long-waisted, sharp-el-bowed, nervous, giggly, gracious- a brilliant tense presence embarrassed by restraint” (ix). Finally, he ends with a casual sentence about how he was totally shocked by her sucess…..how nice.

I guess this shouldn’t be surprising because it seems as though Lowell really hardly knew Plath, so what’s he going to say on her behalf, but at the same time I was expecting a tribute of sorts or at least some aknowledgement of her honest-to-goodness, hard-fought, deeply earned poetic skill! Another reason why this bugs me so much is that it is just another totally uninspired, uncomplimentary foreward to a mounting collection of poorly delivered forewards in Plath’s volumes (ie: Frieda Hughes in the restored edition….read a previous blog entry). Everyone has an agenda, and that agenda is never “oh wow this is a totally amazing collection of poems….let’s celebrate it because that Sylvia Plath is/was one amazing poet!”. It’s just so weird that when someone famous dies everyone rallies around to claim a relationship with that person and yet at the same time they all justify their ignorance.
I don’t know why I expected more from Robert Lowell but I did. His foreward seemed far too reminiscent of the letters exchanged between Charlotte Bronte and Southey (see Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte). It seems like another established male poet not wanting to over-gratify the aspiring ego of the female writer, simply because she’s female, only in this case it is an even more confusing stance because the writer in question is dead, so why not compliment her?

I dunno, this strange “alterior-motive/hidden agenda” motif in Plath’s forewards seems like something to pursue…

Sylvia Plath The Ambivalent Bee God February 26, 2007

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I met with professor Emerson today and we (finally) got to discuss the bee poem sequence at the end of Ariel. It was nice to validate my idea that the poems are extremely scattered in their assertions and ideas about the bees and that the only consistency is the use of perfect dichotomies (ie: power vs. powerlessness). By “scattered” I mean that they present this chaotic web of descriptions about various ways and situations in which Plath kept or encountered bees and in all four poems (not including “The Swarm) she never comes to a clear conceit as to how she feels about the bees or herself or her relationship with the bees. This ambivalency to make definite assertions is heightened by Plath’s seeming innablility to characterize herself; throughout the poems she is Plath the poet, Plath the eager bee keeper, Plath the fearful beekeeper, Plath a bee, Plath a vengeful domineering god, and Plath a benevolent god. I have read (and blogged about) many different critical takes on these bee poems, including the article that says that they are all about her father and her father as a nazi, but i think these poems are actually about herself and how she see’s herself in the world (shocking, I know). True, she may have gotten the idea to try her hand at bee keeping from her father, and she may have originally become inspired to write poems about bees because of her late father, but I think the poetry produced from her adventures (and misadventures) with the bees is incredibly self-reflective and has very little to do with Otto Plath. The bee sequence becomes this tiny meta-world of self-evaluation, that consequently turns out to be her final attempt at self-evaluation, and I think it ends on a very hopeful note. Throughout the poems she grapples with her own humilty, self-worth and power. The bees are merely a catalyst for this self-analysis, they provide for her a maleable subject that sometimes bends to her will and at other times tests her power. They also mirror her existence in a convenient way, at times being separate bee armies apart from the world and at times being one single bee-mind-entity working together against the world; much like Plath herself could often view herself in a secular light as a working single mother or in a kind of other-worldly light as a removed troubled poet. To view the bee poems in this way is at once nicely consistent with Plath’s confessional poetry and in another way troubling and reductive because it allows me to simply shrug and claim purposeful inconclusiveness on the part of the poet. I am beginning to accept that for the most part all I can do is shrug and pick an argument when it comes to Sylvia Plath because there are so many presented for me to choose and they are all (for the most part) convincing, so when I pose my own suggestions, even if they are inconclusive, only partially substantiated and slightly reductive, at least I trying to think on my own!
Professor Emerson and I did discuss at legnth the final idea in the poem “Wintering” which is the final poem in Plath’s Ariel. The last line reads, “The bees are flying. They taste the spring”. This final line of the final poem is so startlingly resolute and satisfying. Plath’s poems are many things but satisfying is rarely one of them, at least in the literal sense of having a concrete, hopeful, quasi-certainty. This line implies that the bees have made it. That after months in her cellar, and even longer as her property with her as their ambivalent god the bees are going to live and thrive after all. It seems then that Plath also “tastes the spring” and feels as though she may live another year. Professor Emerson told us in poetry about the southern superstition that if an elderly person lives through february they will live for another year and this poem seems to fit that notion. It almost makes Plath’s suicide seem more like a test (like how she tested her skills at bee keeping) and if she were found she’d have had another year. Plath successfully committed suicide on February 11 and so I know that makes this idea even more tragic but it’s something to think about…

anyway this idea is far more streamlined then my last few posts…so that’s a nice change and here is another video, just a short video about bee keeping!