I’m proud to celebrate Trader Joe’s, one of my favorite stores (even though I am hours away from one where I live now). I love their products, the customer service has always been wonderful, and they really seem to try to be fair in their dealings with…
Farmers Markets Are Actually Cheap—So Where Are the Low-Income Shoppers? http://wp.me/s2G6Rg-113
Reblogged from Age-friendly Clackamas Communities Blog:
A new study suggests lack of information—not price—is what keeps low-income individuals away
Despite the fact that many urban farmers markets now accept nutrition assistance programs like WIC and…
Full Fathom Five
Sylvia Plath
Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide’s coming
When seas wash cold, foam-
Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
Crest and trough. Miles long
Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives
The old myth of origins
Unimaginable. You float near
As kneeled ice-mountains
Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
Starts with a danger:
Your dangers are many. I
Cannot look much but your form suffers
Some strange injury
And seems to die: so vapors
Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
The muddy rumors
Of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow,
For the archaic trenched lines
Of your grained face shed time in runnels:
Ages beat like rains
On the unbeaten channels
Of the ocean. Such sage humor and
Durance are whirlpools
To make away with the ground-
Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole.
Waist down, you may wind
One labyrinthine tangle
To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,
Skulls. Inscrutable,
Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head,
You defy questions;
You defy godhood.
I walk dry on your kingdom’s border
Exiled to no good.
Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.
(via cicaadasandgulls)
“Who is this girl I hear talking?” Sylvia Plath, Journals, 1950
Ouija candle from BellaMorta
ouija by sylvia plath
It is a chilly god, a god of shades,
Rises to the glass from his black fathoms.
At the window, those unborn, those undone
Assemble with the frail paleness of moths,
An envious phosphorescence in their wings.
Vermillions, bronzes, colors of the sun
In the coal fire will not wholly console them.
Imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark
For the blood-heat that would ruddlr or reclaim.
The glass mouth sucks blooh-heat from my forefinger.
The old god dribbles, in return, his words.
The old god, too, write aureate poetry
In tarnished modes, maundering among the wastes,
Fair chronicler of every foul declension.
Age, and ages of prose, have uncoiled
His talking whirlwind, abated his excessive temper
When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air
And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.
Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur
Ravel above us, mistily descend,
Thickening with motes, to a marriage with the mire.
He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair
Who has saltier aphrodisiacs
Than virgins’ tears. That bawdy queen of death,
Her wormy couriers aer at his bones.
Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.
I see him, horny-skinned and tough, construe
What flinty pebbles and ploughable upturns
As ponderable tokens of her love.
He, godly, doddering, spells
No succinct Gabriel from the letters here
But floridly, his amorous nostalgias.
From under the crunch of my man’s boot
green oat-sprouts jut;
he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a rout
legging it most nimble
to sprigged hedge of bramble,
stalks red fox, shrewd stoat.
Loam-humps, he says, moles shunt
up from delved worm-haunt;
blue fur, moles have; hefting chalk-hulled flint
he with rock splits open
knobbed quartz; flayed colors ripen
rich, brown, sudden in sunlight.
For his least look, scant acres yield:
each finger-furrowed field
heaves forth stalk, leaf, fruit-nubbed emerald;
bright grain sprung so rarely
he hauls to his will early;
at his hand’s staunch hest, birds build.
Ringdoves roost well within his wood,
shirr songs to suit which mood
he saunters in; how but most glad
could be this adam’s woman
when all earth his words do summon
leaps to laud such man’s blood!
—Sylvia Plath, 1956
“Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
The even-handedness of Rollyson’s rendering of the Plath-Hughes relationship, which presents the volatile marriage as one made impetuously by two people of mismatched backgrounds but dangerously alike in ambition and competitiveness, breaks down in a final chapter on the aftermath of Plath’s suicide. He blames Hughes for a “dogged but futile effort to dictate the gospel of Sylvia Plath’s biography.” But here too, Rollyson offers a biographer’s sympathy: “It does not seem possible to discern any consistency or logic in Hughes’s management of his papers and Plath’s, perhaps because his view of their marriage kept changing.” Had Hughes lived to read “American Isis,” even he might have found passages to admire in this reverent work of resurrection.
Final draft, “Ennui” Sylvia Plath
Discovered in the British library 47 years after the death of his wife Sylvia Plath, here is Ted Hughes’ “Last Letter” poem to Plath, read by Dave Stewart.
I wonder if Plath would have been saved had she been born in a different time: in a time when psycho-pharmacologists are no more shameful to visit than hairdressers and women write celebrated personal essays about being bad mothers and cutters and are reclaiming the word slut. Would she have been a riot grrrl, embracing an angry feminist aesthetic? Addicted to Xanax? A blogger for Slate? Would she, like me, have found a cosy coffeehouse environment on the internet, a way to connect with people who understood her aesthetic and validated her experience? Would she have been less dependent on the approval of viewers and critics and more aware of the positive effect her book was having on splintered psyches and girls with short bangs everywhere? Or would that kind of connectedness and access to unmitigated and misspelled negativity have driven her even madder?
I’ve been digging around for some obituaries or press coverage of Sylvia Plath’s suicide 50 years ago, and I’ve been very surprised at how little I’ve—well, at the fact that I’ve been able to find none. It sounds like something similar happened to you.
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think part of it is that it was a suicide. There’s a scene in The Bell Jar where Esther Greenwood says that the only newspaper they read in their house was the Christian Science Monitor, which treats suicides and murders as though they never happened. So part of my thinking is that possibly, [her mother] Aurelia Plath didn’t want the actual details of Sylvia’s death to be known. I certainly think Ted Hughes didn’t either.
The death notices that I did find were kind of curious, because they were about the death of “Sylvia Hughes.” That was her legal, married name, and they were mostly in the local Boston papers. Most didn’t mention that she was a writer. One full obituary was published in The Wellesley Townsman, and it said that she’d died of viral pneumonia. Obviously that’s a lie—and that was done, I think, to try to draw away a connection to the 1953 suicide attempt. That was one of the earlier obituaries, about 16 days after she died. I think that had something to do with the fact that a lot of people didn’t take notice.
