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Today New Statesman published "Last Letter," a previously unseen Ted Hughes poem about the three days before Sylvia Plath's suicide. Drafts of the poem, which begins, "What happened that night? Your final night," were found in the British Library's archive. More »
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The new online magazine Hardly aims to be the next Sassy — but can that mag's marked-up Chuck Taylors really be filled? More »
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Oh, God. Nicholas Hughes, 47, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has committed suicide in Alaska, where until recently he was a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences. [Guardian] More »
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It's easy to vilify Ted Hughes as the callous philanderer who broke Sylvia Plath's heart, had a suspiciously high number of suicidal wives, and went on write increasingly bombastic poetry. A somewhat different picture of Hughes, who died ten years ago, emerges from The Letters of Ted Hughes, which was just published. Papercuts runs the letter Hughes wrote to Plath's mother, Aurelia, after Sylvia's suicide, and its heartbreak has none of his poetry's remoteness. "Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her, and certainly no living American." Yes, "woman poet" and the dig at Americans, - he couldn't help it! - but still - you'll cry. It's always a revelation, too, to be reminded of what a loss letter-writing was for emotional expression! [NY Times] More »
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There's an article in today's Guardian asking Can a feminist really love Sex and the City? The short answer: yes. A woman's pop cultural affections often have very little to do with her belief system. But the other question implicit in this article would be "Is Carrie Bradshaw a proper feminist icon?" That question is more difficult to answer. One passage, where author Alice Wignall is making the argument against Bradshaw's feminist status, stood out to me: "[The] central relationship is clearly problematic. Mr Big is arrogant, egocentric and apparently unable to see a good thing when she is standing in front of him in four-inch heels. Carrie's own inability to wake up and realise what a terrible cliche she is dating renders her, at best, pretty dumb and, at worst, passive and weak." In some ways, Carrie's "problematic" love for a terminally egotistical man makes her very similar to a lot of the women in the feminist pantheon, specifically Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, and Rebecca West. More »
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Writer Diane Middlebrook, author of the seminal Anne Sexton biography, has died at the age of 68. Middlebrook was born in Idaho and published her first poem at the age of eight. She got her Ph.D. in literature at Yale and taught at Stanford for 35 years. In addition to the Sexton bio, Middlebrook wrote well-received portraits of a female jazz musician, Billy Tipton, who passed as a man throughout her career, and of the epic marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The Sexton tome got the most attention, though, because Middlebrook used confidential tapes given to her by Sexton's shrink as a foundational source for the biography. Eulogist Carole Angier says of Middlebrook in the Guardian: "She kept the courage and conviction of the child who invented herself, who made herself a poet and professor when there were no such things in her world." [Guardian] More »
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