NEWS

By RICHARD RAY
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- British poet laureate Ted Hughes shocked the literary world in January with the surprise release of his collection of poems "Birthday Letters."

The book’s 88 largely narrative poems focus on Hughes’ relationship with late wife Sylvia Plath, ending decades of stone-faced silence from Hughes on the subject. The couple met and married in 1956, but in 1963, after Hughes left Plath and their two children, Plath rested her head on a cloth in a gas oven and committed suicide by inhaling the fumes. She was 30 years old.

Plath’s suicide and the postmortem release of her collection of poems "Ariel" in 1965 launched her into the ghostly realms of immortality. These events simultaneously left Hughes, considered one of the greatest poets of the century, targeted by feminists as an abusive, uncaring husband. Plath fans have gone as far as periodically filing Hughes’ name off her tombstone.

Dr. Linda Wagner-Martin, Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will thread the Hughes-Plath life and literary tapestry together in a workshop Tuesday (March 31.) "Ted Hughes’ ‘Birthday Letters’ & Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel’: A Workshop" will begin at 5:30 p.m. in Wilson Library’s Pleasants Family Assembly Room. Coffee and refreshments will be served at 5 p.m. The program is free and open to the public.

Wagner-Martin, who wrote "Sylvia Plath: A Biography" (Simon & Schuster) in 1987, said the program will be a literary workshop. "I’ve printed separate sheets with poems from ‘Ariel’ and the Hughes poem that is his response to it," she said. "He has rewritten their story from the time he first saw her in a photo of Fulbright Scholars clear through to just before the book was published. One poem refers to the day it would have been her 60th birthday."

In October, Wagner-Martin gave a talk on Plath in connection with an exhibit of rare Plath manuscripts donated to UNC-CH by the Patton family. That presentation went very well, she said, but no one knew anything about the impending Hughes release. "When ‘Birthday Letters’ was released, we thought it was too bad we weren’t doing the talk now," she said. "Both the American and British publishers sold out before it had even hit stores, and it landed on the bestseller list. Then we thought, ‘Why not?’"

The workshop, which will also include a brief slide presentation of Plath and Hughes photographs, is sponsored by the UNC-CH Rare Book Collection. The James R. and Mary M. Patton Collection, donated to the Rare Book Collection in 1995 and still on display in Wilson, includes first editions, printed proof states, rare periodical versions of poems and stories and other manuscripts of both Hughes and Plath.

James Patton graduated from UNC-CH in 1948, and Mary Patton studied at UNC-CH, as well as at George Washington University and Rhode Island School of Design.

For more information on the Wagner-Martin workshop, call 962-1143.

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(Ray is a senior journalism and mass communication major from Greenville, N.C.)