Sylvia Plath’s Last Plan
Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond. Paid subscribers also receive book picks.
Books
Sylvia Plath’s Last Letters
A new volume of her correspondence is suffused with a sense of foreboding—portents of the looming tragedy that has come to define the poet’s legacy.
By Dan Chiasson
2018 in Review
The Poetry I Was Grateful For in 2018
One of the oldest problems in poetry—how to render the hectic presence of the person in the static notation of the written word—has, in the Internet age, been rebooted.
By Dan Chiasson
Video
Breaking Down Tracy K. Smith’s Poem “Solstice”
Jia Tolentino on poetry as a refuge, and finding meaning in Tracy K. Smith’s “Solstice.”
Books
The Poet Who Took It Personally
Delmore Schwartz tried to change poetry, often by putting his own painful life on the page. The cost was that failure felt all the more acute.
By Maggie Doherty