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The Leap: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and a Mesmerizing Season

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The Leap: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and a Mesmerizing Season FALL NEWS 2015 POET’S CORNER It is rare for arts awards to be announced without seeing the name of a Yaddo artist – or two. This year, however, four Yaddo poets were longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry: Marilyn Hacker A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems, 1994- 2014 (W.W. Norton & Company) Jane Hirshfield The Leap: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath The Beauty (Knopf) and a Mesmerizing Season Patrick Phillips Elegy for a Broken erhaps no two figures in twentieth- the young couple arrived at Yaddo (Plath Machine (Knopf) century Anglo-American poetry had been recommended by Alfred Kazin have given rise to more partisanship as “the best writer at Smith, and a very than Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. remarkable girl in every way”) it was the Lawrence Raab It’s a commonplace that interest first time in three years of marriage that Mistaking Each Pin the personal — their marriage, his they’d had separate, private workspaces. Other for Ghosts philandering, their separation, her suicide — Hughes worked on his second book of (Tupelo Press) has clouded interest in the purely literary. poetry, Lupercal, and an oratorio based Jonathan Bate’s new and well-received on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, while biography, Ted Hughes: An Unauthorized Plath dug in on a large number of new CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL! Life, takes the experiences of Hughes’s poems that were ultimately collected in life and shows how he fashioned them her first book,The Colossus and Other Plath had dreamed of gathering forces into his robust, earthy poetry. (Hughes was Poems. Plath and Hughes, who were into a tight tense ball for the artistic leap. a compatible subject for Bate, an Oxford practicing meditation daily and interested At Yaddo, she made that leap.” (Excerpt don and Shakespeare scholar — during in hypnotism, were part of a lively group follows.) national service at a tiny RAF outpost that included Malcolm Cowley, Ned in Yorkshire, Hughes passed the time Rorem, and May Swenson. Bate writes: addo is an artists’ community memorizing Shakespeare’s plays.) “Very few Plath poems written before located on a 400-acre estate in The excerpt here details Hughes’s Yaddo stick in the mind; almost all the YSaratoga Springs. It was founded and Plath’s time at Yaddo in the autumn hundred or so that Sylvia wrote thereafter in 1900 by a wealthy financier called of 1959, representing it as the fulcrum sear themselves into the consciousness Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina, of Plath’s development as a poet. When of the attentive reader. Years earlier, who wrote poetry herself. Left without immediate heirs by the deaths of their ABOVE: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Concord, Massachusetts, December 1959. Photo by Marcia Brown Stern. continues on page 4 Courtesy of Smith College. AT LEFT and on mailing panel: Photo by Meredith Maran. NEWS Blaze of Color l A Magnificent Stained Glass Window Restored t the time the Yaddo Mansion was Though it had undergone conservation in Art and The Arrival of the Halve Maen, 1609 completed in 1893, stained glass was the 1980s, a recent assessment determined (1908), which decorates the Reading Room the height of fashion. It represented that the central panel of the window was in of the New-York Historical Society. craftsmanship, spirituality, and critical need of attention. In October 2014, Over the next ten months, principal uniqueness – qualities that mass it was removed and delivered to Venturella restorer Tom Venturella and his colleague Aproduction threatened to make obsolete. Perhaps no one was more sensitive to the costs of industrial growth than the agents of change themselves. Like other people of their time with industrial and stock market fortunes, Spencer and Katrina Trask were patrons of the revival of Gothic and English Renaissance styles and commissioned numerous stained glass windows for their Saratoga Springs and Tuxedo residences. In subject matter, they range from simple forms drawn from nature, such as the airy pink roses in Katrina’s bedroom, to more complex narrative scenes. The window in the foyer of the Mansion depicts a romanticized encounter between Studio in New York, whose previous Jim Murphy cleaned each of the window’s indigenous Americans and settlers on the land commissions include works in the Tiffany 1300 individual pieces of glass. Once every that would become Yaddo. collection of the Morse Museum of American piece had been treated, it was fitted into a 2 Fall 2015 Tiffany pattern made of new lead. While most celebrate. Guest speaker Jennifer windows of this size are comprised of small Anderson, associate professor panels connected by a lap joint, ours is a of history at SUNY Stony Brook, single panel, and the restoration team had to spoke of the window as a historical build a wooden frame in order to flip it. (Tom artifact, observing that that the Venturella said it “wanted to fold like a large 1890s marked the end of armed piece of cloth” and they “had to move like conflict between Native Americans ballet dancers” to hold it steady.) It weighs and settlers that there was a approximately 325 pounds. The window was cultural trend toward recasting reinstalled on August 28. the past in a benevolent light. The Two days later, around fifty friends of medium itself lends itself to that Yaddo, including elected officials, gathered to use: as she noted, the purpose of stained glass, with its ecclesiastical associations, is “to elevate, to inspire.” She finished by likening the window’s glass fragments to pieces of a shared American identity. Following her remarks, New York State Senator Kathy Marchione, whose help was instrumental in securing for Yaddo a combined $500,000 in state funding to begin restoration of the Mansion, and who called Yaddo a “gem of the community,” introduced Congressman Paul Tonko. The congressman said that as a “member of the Congressional Arts Caucus and the National Heritage Areas Caucus, [he] look[s] forward to supporting Yaddo and all it gives back to the Capital Region each and every day.” The two raised their glasses and led everyone in a toast to a job well done. The restoration of the window is just the first step in what will be a multiyear undertaking to preserve the house for the benefit of the more than two hundred artists who come to Yaddo each year to work. It is the acknowledged heart of the artist retreat, which was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2013 in recognition of its contribution to American culture, and an iconic sight for the fifty thousand annual visitors to the Yaddo Gardens. OPPOSITE PAGE Top: Once cleaned, the fragments were fixed in place with pins until the glazing process – the final step – began. Left: Each piece of glass was assigned a number corresponding to a place in the lead network. Note the coins for scale. Photos by Peter Peregrine. THIS PAGE Top: Congressman Paul Tonko (center) talks with restorers Jim Murphy (at far left) and Tom Venturella and State Senator Kathy Marchione. Left: The window is a testament to the superb craftsmanship of its original makers and restorers. Photos by Lynn Farenell. Yaddo is grateful to American Express, Nana Lampton, and the Charles R. Wood Foundation for their generous support of this project. 3 NEWS THE LEAP continued from front cover in the woods – the perfect place for him. ‘A the Intermediate State’. These ‘intermediate four young children, the Trasks decided regular little house to himself’, Sylvia wrote states’ included the dream state, the moment to bequeath their palatial home to future to her mother, ‘all glassed in and surrounded of death in which the clear light of reality is generations of writers, composers, painters by pines, with a wood stove for the winter, experienced, and the ‘bardo of rebirth’, which and other creative artists. Katrina had a vision a cot, and huge desk’. A writing hut away involved hallucinatory images of men and of generations of talented men and women from the main house would be his salvation women erotically entwined. The project was yet unborn walking the lawns of Yaddo, at Court Green in later years. The chance to never finished, but it took Ted into territory ‘creating, creating, creating’. The idea was live together but work apart was exactly what that he would make his own in almost all his to nurture the creative process by providing they needed. Meals were taken care of and later mythic works. an opportunity for artists to work without the food was very good, a welcome change His main project at Yaddo was his play (now interruption in peaceful, green surroundings. from the campground cookery of the summer. lost, save for a few fragments), ‘The House The great American short-story writer John Breakfast was available from eight till nine, of Taurus’. Sylvia described it in a letter home Cheever would write that the ‘forty or so lunchboxes were then collected and taken to written in early October: ‘a symbolic drama acres on which the principal buildings of each resident’s studio, and in the evening they based on the Euripides play The Bacchae, all gathered for dinner. only set in a modern industrial community Being a quiet season, under a paternalistic ruler’. She hoped that there were only a dozen it would at least get a staged reading, but artists in residence, explained that she had not yet typed it up. including painters, an During the weeks at Yaddo Ted also revised interesting composer and one or two of the poems in his forthcoming a couple of other poets ‘Lupercalia’ collection, but for poetic whose names were not development it was more of a breakthrough familiar to them.
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