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Reading Wednesday
Mar. 6th, 2013 09:28 pmWhat are you reading now?
American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson. I had feared that this would be a retread of the previous Plath biographies, but fortunately this doesn't seem to be the case. I particularly like what Rollyson has to say about Plath's embrace of popular culture as well as literature: "In the spring of 1959, The New Yorker rejected a poem, 'A Winter's Tale,' but the editor suggested that Plath resubmit her work after changing a line in the third stanza, 'hair blonde as Marilyn's.'" (She changed the line to "Haloes lustrous as Sirius," and the poem was published.) It's too bad Plath didn't hang out with Frank O'Hara and his ilk, rather than Ted Hughes...the author of "Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)" would surely have understood Plath's Monroe obsession.
I'm also slowly savoring I'll Stand By You: The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland.
What did you just finish reading?
Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. A rapturous and painful prose poem about an adulterous triangle. (It reminded me a bit of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood.) We learn very little about the man at the fulcrum of the triangle--but we don't need to: "he never passes anywhere near me without every drop of my blood springing to attention."
What are you going to read next?
Seanan McGuire's Midnight Blue-Light Special, which I just got for the Kindle.
American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson. I had feared that this would be a retread of the previous Plath biographies, but fortunately this doesn't seem to be the case. I particularly like what Rollyson has to say about Plath's embrace of popular culture as well as literature: "In the spring of 1959, The New Yorker rejected a poem, 'A Winter's Tale,' but the editor suggested that Plath resubmit her work after changing a line in the third stanza, 'hair blonde as Marilyn's.'" (She changed the line to "Haloes lustrous as Sirius," and the poem was published.) It's too bad Plath didn't hang out with Frank O'Hara and his ilk, rather than Ted Hughes...the author of "Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)" would surely have understood Plath's Monroe obsession.
I'm also slowly savoring I'll Stand By You: The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland.
What did you just finish reading?
Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. A rapturous and painful prose poem about an adulterous triangle. (It reminded me a bit of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood.) We learn very little about the man at the fulcrum of the triangle--but we don't need to: "he never passes anywhere near me without every drop of my blood springing to attention."
What are you going to read next?
Seanan McGuire's Midnight Blue-Light Special, which I just got for the Kindle.
