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They were wet as red mellow wood, slimy as leather, fruit rotted together on the forest floor. She had become Venus herself, fiercely in love with her old beauty and her ripened fruit she named Pleasure. In the fridge, the gun barrel spouts of vodka bottles stack like a watch-tower, clear rimmed eyes darting and bubbling in the bottles. Diver after diver he chases down his funnelled throat burning sharp as glass. He turns on the television and watches, soundless. It is more trustworthy to invent his own words. I am Bogumil, a doctor with no medicines! I swap twelve hours of my life for ten litres of petrol.
I retreat from the city when the carpet beaters smack like rifle fire in the gullies surrounding my block. And I weep for grease drops hanging under the grill mesh like beads of mist on a cobweb — mementoes of burnt flesh. Will your rucks and landscape be soft and padded or ridges of slatted wood? Will I toss against pillows that are hard and white as crops of ice where mattresses striped with barbed wire and crowded pallets shake in my head?
My thoughts divide and cross to the end of that line. Newer Post Older Post Home. A Poet's Guide to Britain: Photographs used Connell, Elaine.
He apostrophises to his drunken bed. Images provided Steinberg, Peter K. Silhouetted above the ancient capital of Poland is a sleeping soldier prince, turned into a mountain long ago. What is better than the first day of a Sylvia Plath Conference? Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Memory". A Sylvia Plath Bookmark. Thank you all for sharing your time and work with us.
Killing the angel in the house. Acknowledged in Crowther, Gail and Peter K. Crowther, Gail and Peter K. Looking for New England.
The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath. Death Be Not Proud: The Graves of Poets.
Tales of the Siana: Fragments - Kindle edition by J P Murphy. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like. The Wise King: Volume 2 (Fragments: Tales of the Siana) - Kindle edition by J P Murphy. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or.
Elements of Literature, Third Course. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Photograph used Gill, Jo. Photograph used Helle, Anita Plath. Essays on Sylvia Plath. University of Michigan Press, I am certain the readers of this blog would enjoy it. The Conference closed with talks by Karen and me on Plath's Letters.
It was particularly thrilling for me to sit in on the papers and hear how so many people had already made use of the letters for their presentations. It also makes me feel that many of them were written really in the last few weeks since the book has not been out for that long! Karen spoke most eloquently on "Beyond Letters Home: Sylvia Plath's Unabridged Correspondence". Karen expertly illustrated Plath's different voices to her correspondents and show that these letters are an art form, pieces carefully and conscientiously constructed with all her thought and energy.
My own talk was called "Sylvia Plath's Letters and Traces". I spoke for about twenty minutes on my role in the editorial process and then spent the last ten minutes showing the work I did on that piece of carbon typing paper I found at the Lilly Library with hidden, lost Plath poems impressed into it. I hope it went over well. And, following that a closing wine reception in the Foyer though I never made it out there: I'm grateful to Maeve for bringing the wine to me.
In the reception and in fact over the course of the conference, I met so many kind people and felt I really got a good handle on names, faces, and projects. It is an exciting time in Sylvia Plath studies and an event like this shows that Plath's works and words do and have and will, as she writes in "Context", traveled "farther than a lifetime.
When I initially conceived of the idea to do this I thought "Oh, I'll assemble everything and it'll be about images. There are more than of them and some slides and two to four images! Jonathan Stephenson suggested five second per photo which meant the loop took about thirty minutes to cycle through. Hope it was enjoyable. I was able to have a nice quiet dinner with Gail Crowther and catch-up with her.
Afterwards we joined many in the loud Duke of York pub for many drinks. I planned to stay until 10, so when I got home at 1 am I was mightily confused at how the time fly by. Lots of laughs, lots of Plath, lots of Guinness and wine and other drinks whose names I know not. Here's a few of us at the end of the night: Hope you don't mind my sharing it! Sorry I look like a dork.
Being at a Sylvia Plath Conference often means you end up, quite quickly, in a stupor of over-stimulation from the talks. This conference is, thus, typical. Even the act of collecting my name tag and programme took on a kind of wonder as you meet people that you have emailed with or conversed with over social media. This is what happened when I met Eilish, who was on the desk helping out and doing a wonderful job of it.
Letters Words and Fragments Conference. Today begins the Ulster University Conference: Letters Words and Fragments. The conference was organized by Maeve O'Brien and a massive thank you is due to her for that. Last night there was a pre-conference meet-up a the Sunflower on Union Street. Though it was raining there were some 20 or so people there. New faces, familiar faces and lots of camaraderie.
Look for conference updates here throughout the two days of the event, I hope.
But certainly by next week after everything is said and done and processed. Newer Posts Older Posts Home.
A Poet's Guide to Britain: