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General Sylvia Plath Info Blog Update

Well, things have been kind of crazy for the last six weeks or so. With the publication of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956 in the UK and the US, and then participating in one event, following other events, looking for reviews, etc. it is not hard to imagine why! But I wanted to give a general update at this point in time on a few things.

First up, those reviews: I have started to list review of the Letters on my website for Sylvia Plath, A celebration, this is. in the "Reviews of works by Sylvia Plath" page. This will be updated as I learn of reviews. The good people at Faber and HarperCollins have sent several to me which is wonderful. If you know of any not list please do let me know about it. I do not read them all but it will be helpful I think to have them tracked.

In August and September I did three posts on "The Education of Sylvia Plath", looking at her courses and writings for each academic year: 1950-1951, 1951-1952, and 1952-1953. I do have two more posts planned so fear not! Those will appear before too long.

One thing I have not blogged about since 10 April of this year is the Belfast Conference: Sylvia Plath: Letters, Words, Fragments. The programme was recently made available and it looks positively, mind-bogglingly awesome. This is the fourth major international Plath conference following ones held at Indiana University in 2002 and 2012, and one held in Oxford in 2007. Just a few of us will have been to all four of them and what I find most awesome is how each conference produces a new crop of people with unique tastes, interests, and perspectives. Maeve O'Brien deserves major congratulations for organizing the conference. I am leaving tonight for the conference and hope to blog about Belfast and the presentations. If you are attending and want to write up your observations and feeling about anything in a guest post, please do reach out to me there or via email!

After The Letters of Sylvia Plath were published I decided to treat myself to a purchase or two. I did not know what I was going to buy, but them stumbled on a publication that I did not previously know about.

In their Spring 1978 issue, Antaeus published two poems by Plath: "Stings (2)" and "Words heard, by accident, over the phone". The poems appear on pages 41 and 42 respectively. These are missing from Stephen Tabor's otherwise excellent Annotated Bibliography and were the first periodical publications for each (both did appear in the limited edition Pursuit, published in 1973). The cover and poems are both now on my website.

The other purchase I made was the November 1965 issue of Mademoiselle which printed Plath's poem "November Graveyard." A mostly random publication of this poem, for sure.

Since I drafted this blog I got another special treat and will blog about that later on in the month.

With the end of the year fast approaching it is time to start trying to make sense of Sylvia Plath in 2017. This year has seemed a convoluted whirlwind of activity for me. What about for you? I will try to summarize the year as I have done in the past with a Year in Review piece.

Additionally, I look forward to some updates to my website that I hope you will like in early 2018. Speaking of 2018: did you know that my website will be 20 years old in 2018? Twenty!

All links accessed 28 October 2017.

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