“Open windows in the art studio, and the mercuric twinkling April air flows in across the desks and laps about my ankles. Spring is in the pink and lavendar paint stains on the floor; in the pink and orange neck of the girl in front of me; in the crooked part in her yellow hair, drawn back into two uncombed blonde braids; in the easy stride of the thin blackhaired man in the light gray suit, walking down below on the pale pink sidewalk.”
–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry no 78, April 1951
HAPPY 65th BIRTHDAY Frieda Rebecca Hughes!!!
(born 1 April 1960 in London, England)
…
MOTHERS
My mother’s death left the child that I was
Lop-sided because of the hole.
As I grew older that hole became a kind of cave
In which my cry for my lost parent
Would echo plaintively. For years
I dragged that hole around with me
Like a piece of missing ground
For other women to fall into.
But if I saw a mother in them
They saw my mother in me,
And heard my mother’s voice
Pleading for attention
Or asking for ice cream.
I could hear their cries as they fell
Past the threshold of that gap in my side,
Unable to fit, or unwilling to take on the challenge,
Or live long enough.
That mother-shaped hole let in the wind to chill me
Right down to my kidneys. Eventually,
I realized that no unrelated woman
Could resolve this; I stared at the hole
And wondered what to do with it,
Since it seemed that it would never heal over.
I stood back from the edge, as falling in
Would be to lose myself to loss
And become pointless.
Denial hadn’t reduced it in size or importance,
So acceptance was the only alternative,
And to acknowledge what it was; a bottomless pit
That would always be part of my life
And into which no one would fit.
–Frieda Hughes, in Alternative Values – Poems & Paintings, 2015
…
Photo credit: Frieda Hughes photographed by Colin McPherson at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 12 August 2003
via https://www.thoughtco.com/
… I don’t believe in God as a kind father in the sky. I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth: The meek get ignored and trampled. They decompose in the bloody soil of war, of business, of art, and they rot into the warm ground under the spring rains. It is the bold, the loud-mouthed, the cruel, the vital, the revolutionaries, the mighty in arms and will, who march over the soft patient flesh that lies beneath their cleated boots.
“
| — |
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary enry no. 48, 1950
|
[…] in March I’ll be rested, caught up and human.
The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956, from a letter to her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, written Monday, 2 February 1953
The “Sylvia Plath Calendar” - 69 years ago today:
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes met on 25 February 1956 at party in Cambridge!
..
“Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: "most dear unscratchable diamond” and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, “You like?” and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into the next room past the smug shining blub face of dear Bert, looking as if he had delivered at least nine or ten babies, and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.“
–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry for "February 26: Sunday”, 1956
..
Photo: Plath and Hughes in Annisquam, Massachusetts in May 1959
!NEW RELEASE!
Title: The Poet and the Bees: A Story of the Seasons Sylvia Plath Kept Bees
Author: Amy Novesky
Illustrations: Jessica Love
Publication date: 11 February 2025
Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers
Pages: 32
About the book:
“Love, bees don’t live long.
But honey lives forever. Words, too.
Sylvia Plath is remembered for her stirring poetry and the tragic legacy her work left behind. But it is lesser known that she was a beekeeper and completed her last book of poems while tending to her bees and harvesting honey.
Author and beekeeper Amy Novesky shines a new light on the life and work of Plath through the lens of her last seasons with her beloved bees—and how during their short and busy lives, they filled her with inspiration and hope—while the evocative paintings by Stonewall Book Award winner Jessica Love reveal the tenderness and wonder of one of America’s most iconic poets.”
“Where apple bloom ices the night
I walk in a ring,
A groove of old faults, deep and bitter.
Love cannot come here.”
Sylvia Plath, from ”Event“, 21 May 1962
Today marks the 62nd anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death! RIP!
27 October 1932 Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, USA - 11 February 1963, Primrose Hill, London, England
…
“Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.”
–Sylvia Plath, from “Years”, 16 November 1962
…
Photo: Sylvia Plath (cropped from a photo with Ted Hughes), photographed by David Bailey, at 3 Chalcot Square, London, c. July 1961
!NEW RELEASE!
Title: The Search for Sylvia Plath
Author: Peter K. Steinberg (editor of The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, 2024)
Publication date: 11 February 2025
Publisher: Independently published
Pages: 356
You can buy it on amazon.com and on other Amazon websites in Europe.
About the book:
“The Search for Sylvia Plath collects a selection of writings—some of which have not been published previously—on the American writer and poet who is most well-known for her novel, The Bell Jar (1963). The pieces in this volume are concerned primarily with Plath’s biography and bibliography and make intensive use of Plath’s archival materials.”
!NEW RELEASE!
Title: Sylvia Plath: A Bibliography
Author: Peter K. Steinberg (editor of The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, 2024)
Publication date: 7 February 2025
Publisher: Independently published
Pages: 372
You can buy it on amazon.com and on other Amazon websites in Europe.
About the book:
“Sylvia Plath: A Bibliography presents listings of Sylvia Plath’s periodical and book publications of individual works, of monographs and limited editions where she is the author, of articles about the writer, reviews of her books, and finally of books about her including biographies, literary criticism, memoirs, and more. It is the first-time since the 1980s that this kind of aggregated information is available in book form.”
“This man makes a pseudonym
And crawls behind it like a worm.”
Sylvia Plath, from ”The Fearful“, 16 November 1962
“How they hate you.“
Sylvia Plath, from ”Gulliver“, 6 November 1962
“Now he is gone
In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.”
Sylvia Plath, from ”Stings“, 6 October 1962
“a liar, a vain smiler, a twister“
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry for May 19: Monday, 1958
“He is shamed, shameful and shames me & my trust, which is no plea in a world of liars and cheats and broken or vanity-ridden men.”
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry for May 1958
