Sylvia Plath Info (Free subscription) | yesterday
In today's Observer is " My Space: Frieda Hughes, poet and painter ." The article subtitle is "The daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes on the Welsh home she shares with three dogs and an owl." This must be ironic as as in the article Hughes writes, "I hate forever being known as Sylvia Plath's daughter – I'm my own person."
P. Viktor (Free subscription) | 12/03/2009
Occasionally I do write about things other than music, though recently it would be hard to know it. Thanks to Peter K Steinberg and his blog I have been alerted to these recordings of Ted Hughes reading two of Sylvia...
Sylvia Plath Info (Free subscription) | 12/03/2009
This seems to be a week for Ted Hughes. In today's Times , Ben Macintyre writes " Ted Hughes was a prophet of climate change ". Also, someone put two readings of Sylvia Plath poems by Ted Hughes on YouTube. The clip features Hughes reading "Wuthering Heights" and "Crossing the Water". "Wuthering Heights" is likely from the British Library CD Ted Hughes: Poetry...
Character Sketch (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Anyone who knows the story behind Ted Hughes' poem, "The Thought Fox", will have a good laugh at this one. A conversation my workshop group had last night rang through my dream: no matter how hard a publication tries, there are always some small mistakes. No publication is perfect. I was back in my marketing career, and responding to an add in an old music newspaper that was not mine, but...
Stick Poet Super Hero (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
Ted Hughes has been dead about eleven years now and legacy as a poet is again in public view as some have taken up the cause of him being honored by inclusion in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner - poetry's holiest of holies. Those enshrined there include Chaucer, William Shakespeare, TS Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, William Blake and Sir John Betjeman the last admitted in 1984. Nobel...
Sylvia Plath Info (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
Two articles to bring to your attention today. The first is " Icons Among Us " by Caleb Daniloff in BU Today (or, yesterday, or 30th November 2009, depending on when you view). This is about Room 222 at Boston University, where Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, among others, attended Robert Lowell's poetry courses. Thanks to Amanda Golden for sending the link. Please note, I've found the link...
Evening Standard - News (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
He was the poet laureate whose harsh, dark evocations of nature made him a staple of the school curriculum even as his doomed marriage to fellow writer Sylvia Plath made him a hate figure for extreme feminists
Poetry & Poets in Rags (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
of the great bird poets. This is an orgiastic firework display of common hens calling to the dawn, as seen from the height of the hill. The Exposed Nest by Robert Frost. The lines "We saw the risk we took in doing good,/but dared not spare to do the best we could/though harm should come of it" stay with me. It's about covering up an exposed bird's nest, but it could be about Iraq, Afghanistan...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 11/24/2009
Not since judges of the Whitbread Prize shrugged off accusations of sentimentality to name Ted Hughes as the posthumous winner in 1998 has there been a dead author in line for a major book award.
Sylvia Plath Info (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
In October, my review of Alix Strauss' Death Becomes Them , led to some temporary uncertainly over Aurelia Plath's whereabouts on 24 August 1953 - the afternoon of Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt. Was she at the theater? Was she at a friends? In Wellesley? Or in some other town? Thanks to BrigetAnna, ~VC, and Jim Long for pointing out that this is something Strauss got right (see the comments...
Character Sketch (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
Last night I dreamed that Tom and I opened our front door, and there on the porch was a red fox. Except this wasn't an ordinary red fox, it was a RED fox--scarlet--cardinal red! I was mesmerized. Our little kitten Rufus ran out to play with it and at first I was frightened, but then I realized he'd be fine. I awoke to be clear that this fox was the perfect unity of Ted Hughes ("The Thought Fox"--one...
Character Sketch (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
I wanted to write about my dream last night, but I didn't have time this morning. SO here it is: My family and I all lived at my house...but it wasn't my house... it was larger, and in a sort of jungle setting. It was like a series of vacation condos. Ross was following me around, and he would swing back and forth, from almost-18-year-old Ross, to 8-year-old Ross (which is really how teenagers kind...
Lorcaloca (Free subscription) | 11/12/2009
The Thought-Fox I imagine this midnight moment's forest: Something else is alive Besides the clock's loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move. Through the window I see no star: Something more near Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness: Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now...
Poetry & Poets in Rags (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
who would also take his own life years later, that stands out as one of the most tender expressions of paternal love and encapsulates [Ted] Hughes's sentiments: "The only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough . . . didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all." from The Observer: Letters of Ted Hughes selected and edited by Christopher Reid ~~~~~~~~~~~
Sylvia Plath Info (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
At 5 p.m. on 13 November 2009, Catherine Bowman will be at the Woodberry Poetry Room. She will be both reading from her collection of poems The Plath Cabinet and playing recordings of poems by Plath (and possibly Ted Hughes and Anne Sexton, too). If you are in the area, please come to the informal event, it is free and open to the public. The Woodberry Poetry Reading is in Room 330 of Lamont Library...
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