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The winnter of the 2009 Sylvia Plath Poetry Tournament is "Three Women". "Balloons" gave its all, but could not rise above "Three Women". Thank you to all who read the poems, voted, and gave wonderful statements about their choices.


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Today is the first of three posts for a forthcoming novel entitled The Lost Papers of Sylvia Plath by Grace Medlar. Today's post is the blurb about the novel; this will be followed by the novel's Prologue and then Chapter 1. The Prologue and Chapter 1 will appear later this week.

The Lost Papers of Sylvia Plath follows the questionable literary escapades of undergraduate Sandra Kohl and her advisor Diane Richmond at a sleepy Midwestern campus in winter 1997-98. As the student struggles with metap

The finals are set! The voters have spoken.

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In this corner, weighing in at three voices, with too many lines and too many stanzas to count right now and representing Crossing the Water/Winter Trees Region we have "Three Women". Plath triple-voiced monologue tour de force which beat out The Colossus' seven part extravaganza "Poem for a Birthday" in a fairly close race.

And in this corner, weighing in at 30 lines in six, five-lined stanzas and representing Ariel we have "Balloo

Well, the final four are set. Thanks to those who voted by comment and by private email - I am so pleased that more people participated. The accompanying conversation to the posts is, I feel, a wonderful step in this blogs development. I hope it continues around other posts.

Round 3 was decisive only in the Ariel Restored region, with "The Rabbit Catcher" amputating "Thalidomide". Each of the other races was decided by one vote each.

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So, we have "Poem for a Birthday" vs. "Thr

Linda Gray Sexton, the daughter of poet Anne Sexton, contributes the Op-Ed "" in today's New York Times. The Op-Ed is on the recent death of Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes which of course gripped worldwide attention the week of March 23.[image error]

Round 2

One word: Bloodbath. "Sheep in Fog" and "Balloons" obliterated their challengers. Poor "Years" was left, like "Words", 'dry and riderless'. "Years", I'm sorry, but everyone "can tell what [you:] lack": votes. "Candles" torched "Parliament Hill Fields" (something Guy Fawkes didn't even get to see) but the other competitions were all ties. How interesting!

Round 3 features some really interesting match-ups. "Black Rook and Rainy Weather" versus "Poem for a Birthday" and "Candles" versus "Thr

Round 1 Recap...

Well, competition was as fierce the 2009 Sylvia Plath Poetry Tournament got under way - however with only three votes there were quite a few ties. I'll accept write-ins (Jim!), but with only one vote, Fever 103 sadly didn't make the cut.

In Round 2 we'll hopefully see more votes and opinions from the blog's readers? I ought to lay off the wine, quite a few typos in the bracket.

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Everything is March Madness here in the US. In keeping up with the times...



Vote for your favorite poem in the competition by emailing me or leaving comments... There are four regions in the 2009 Sylvia Plath Poetry Tournament: The Colossus Region, the Ariel Region, the Crossing the Water and Winter Trees Region, and the Restored Ariel Region. Poems were selected mostly at random; the selections in the two Ariel regions reflect those selected by Plath (Restored Ariel) and those selected by Ted Hu

The poems in Catherine Bowman's new poetry collection The Plath Cabinet (Four Way Books, 2009) are inspired by Sylvia Plath. This is the second full length collection of poems about Plath to come out since Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes in 1998. The first collection was Stephanie Hemphill's Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath in 2005. While Hemphill's collection was a biography with line breaks, Bowman's work is something else altogether. Hemphill's book works because the biograph

In the Sunday Times, March 29, 2009, Joe Saxton remembers his friend Nick Hughes. Read "".

This is a long, thoughtful, considerate remembrance of a man we as Sylvia Plath readers, fans, scholars, etc. "knew" only as a baby. Thank you, Mr. Saxton.[image error]