...and I eat men like air
I've been listening to the new British Library Sylvia Plath CD ("The surviving BBC broadcasts"), which is marvelous and contains a lot of material I've never heard before. But one cringeworthy bit occurs when an unidentified male announcer introduces Plath at a poetry reading in London, 1961 (she reads "Tulips"):
"It's a pleasure to present a woman poet. We have such a predominantly masculine week here, a fact that didn't really strike me till the programming was complete. What it shows about my taste, I don't know, but I'm very glad that we have, at any rate, one very fine woman poet this evening: Miss Sylvia Plath, as I refer to her by her maiden name, before she was Mrs. Ted Hughes."
"It's a pleasure to present a woman poet. We have such a predominantly masculine week here, a fact that didn't really strike me till the programming was complete. What it shows about my taste, I don't know, but I'm very glad that we have, at any rate, one very fine woman poet this evening: Miss Sylvia Plath, as I refer to her by her maiden name, before she was Mrs. Ted Hughes."