I interviewed Sarah Corbett who directed the Sylvia Plath Festival and has four poetry collections, a verse-novel and an upcoming collection to her name. Sarah says about her writing, “My second collection, The Witch Bag (2002) also from Seren, addressed what were then really quite taboo subjects – abortion, miscarriage, motherhood, as well as my father’s death.” Sarah is a poet interested in using multiple forms in her pursuit of, “The human and non-human experience, the female embodied experience, desire, the search for connection, nature, motherhood, trauma, art… and history. ”

Leslie: As the Festival Director of the Sylvia Plath Festival, how did you choose your featured writers? What qualities were you looking for and, if you took risks with ‘less-well-known’ voices, how did you ‘place’ (and boost) them to try to get an audience?  

Sarah: First of all there was a focus on female voices – academics and poets/writers and artists and performers who have and are writing/producing innovative and important work either about Plath, or work that speaks to a Plathian universe. Top of the bill of course were writers such as Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Other featured speakers included writer and academic Gail Crowther, whose work on Plath and Anne Sexton I have long admired. Her wonderful short dual biography about Plath and Sexton Three Martini afternoons At the Ritz, was published in 2022. I wanted an American presence, and Emily Van Dyune was able to make it to the UK, and there was a very special event at Nelson’s Wine Bar with Gail and Emily with some fabulous martinis! An online programme allowed other key American Plath scholars to take part. It was equally important to showcase some of the up-and-coming young Plath scholars, and many of these fabulous young women contributed voluntary work to the festival, as did the local community. I wanted a fun, upbeat and positive programme, with lots of variety, big names in the poetry world – we had quite a coup getting Ruth Fainlight to speak alongside Heather Clark – as well as a stream of good female poets writing exciting and important work.  There were poets whose work I admired immensely, such as Jamaican poet Shivanee Ramlochan and Irish poet Victoria Kennefick, as well as space for local and less well-known writers to read their work. I was very lucky to have the help of the excellent poet and producer Katie Ailes who covered all of the Social Media with a stellar campaign, as well as acting as my (unofficial) Assistant Director. My son also pitched in with covering a lot of the admin! The festival pretty much sold out the first weekend the ticket went on sales, and I have the very dedicated international Plath community to thank for this, and for making the festival such a success.

Leslie: Tell us about the events at Heptonstall Museum you’ve been part of. What do these venues add to the reading?

Sarah: Heptonstall Museum was one of the venues for Plath Fest in 2022 as part of the Heptonstall arm of the festival, and the idea was to start to establish the museum as a place for poetry in the valley. I co-ordinated a series of readings and workshops throughout 2023, but apart from hosting an event and workshop with American poet Jodie Hollander as part of a residency she took up at The Elmet Trust (Ted Hughes’ birthplace in Mytholmroyd) this April, I have since decided not to continue with this partnership. This said, the museum was a beautiful and atmospheric location for poetry readings and workshops.

Leslie: What’s the story behind how ‘After Sylvia’ came about? What role did you play in getting it to publication and what did you learn from editing (or curating?) an anthology?

Sarah: After Sylvia was the sister project to Plath Fest, and whereas I co-edited the anthology with poet Ian Humphreys, Ian took the lead on the project (as I took the lead on producing and directing the festival), getting Arts Council Funding to support publisher Nine Arches Press, who were on board from the outset, and running the Sylvia Plath Poetry Prize. We also had help from the Poetry Society and the Foyles Young Poets Network. Again, we knew we wanted a largely female presence, and commissioned 40 UK and Irish poets to produce original poems responding to Plath, as well as publishing the winning poems from the Plath Prize and the YPN prize. We also commissioned five new essays on Plath. The anthology has been very well received and there are plans to pursue an American edition in the next few years.

What did I learn? I enjoyed the editing process, and it was a great pleasure to award the Plath Prize to poet Rebecca Goss, whose work I have long admired. Her poem was also turned into a film for the festival. You have to trust your instincts on most things I feel – instincts honed through many years writing and teaching practice I have to say! But we also had a very clear idea about what we were looking for – poems that had power, took risks, showed erudition and craft. I think it helped that Ian and I share common values about what we think poetry is and should do.

Leslie: Your own poetry has developed into unusual forms. Take us on a Cook’s tour of your books – their successive subjects, styles, influences and ambitions. What do you think is your best work – and why?

Sarah: My first collection, The Red Wardrobe, (Seren books, 1998), won an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the T.S. Eliot prizes in 1998. I’m still very proud of this book, born from ‘fierce flames’ as I think the best poetry always is, and it launched my career. The book ‘took flight’ when I began to write about my mother, who left me when I was very young. My second collection, The Witch Bag (2002) also from Seren, addressed what were then really quite taboo subjects – abortion, miscarriage, motherhood, as well as my father’s death. I think the book was, in many ways, ahead of its time. Much headway has been made in the decades since, but these subjects can still be side-lined. I would say that poets such as Plath, Sexton and the generation of female poets that emerged in the 80’s (Duffy, Feaver et al), were hugely influential on my early work. My third, and last collection, from Seren, Other Beasts (2008), was born out of a long struggle to return to writing after a number of personal difficulties, the breakdown of my marriage, a long and lonely struggle with single parenthood and mental health. I then undertook a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing at Manchester University with a focus on the verse-novel. I have a long interest in story, either in film, where I have collaborated with the film maker Gabrielle Russell, or the novel, which is becoming my ‘second string’ (I’m currently working on a second novel). I read Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red way back in 1998, then Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune (which I wrote my critical thesis on), and knew I wanted to tackle this tricky and challenging, but liberating form one day. My verse-novel And She Was, was published by the fledgling Pavilion Poetry (Liverpool University Press) in 2015, followed by a book of lyric poems, A Perfect Mirror (Pavilion 2018), which takes inspiration from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal, as well as responding to poets such as Plath, John Clare, Rilke, Blake and Emily Bronte. I guess the book is an attempt to situate my work within a certain tradition – women’s writing, the Romantics. The book very much responds to locale and landscape. Nature, as well as the numinous, has always underpinned my work. My new book, The Ishtar Gate, forthcoming from Pavilion in 2025, is a triptych of sequences that begins with the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall in 2019, and responds to European film of the late 20^th century, and in a key group of poems, the work of Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic. Questions of history, war, environmental collapse, and the importance of art in responding in times of crisis, thread through the book. Of course, we always think our latest work to be the best, but I do think my 2015 verse-novel And She Was is ground-breaking (and a lot of fun), and still finds new readers. I love collaborating with other writers and artists, and working across art forms, and one of my ideas is to adapt the book as a ballet.

Leslie: Much creative writing teaching produces high-standard ‘tasteful’ work that conforms to the expectations of its intended audience. Either that, or shallow writing designed to ‘grab’ the reader. How do you teach to encourage technical expertise without losing originality?

Sarah: In teaching, I encourage students to develop skill and craft, but always to find their own voice and to take risks. I apply the same principles to teaching as I do in own creative work, and encourage each student to find and create the best work they are capable of. I have little interest in safe or tasteful work. However, I do try and instil in students ambition and a sense of reality about the writing and publishing industry, and to develop a broader idea of what a writing life might look like, as opposed to one based on merely commercial success.

Leslie: Are poets like Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes jazz musicians with unique voices? How have you experimented with your own unique voice?   

Sarah: Plath and Hughes are the two most significant poets of the twentieth century. They brought modern poetry in English into being and smashed through the post war conservatism that was strangling poetry. Almost every poet writing in their wake has been influenced by them, and has much to thank them for, Plath especially. I don’t think we would have the incredible legacy of women’s writing without Plath. In my own practice, I am constantly trying to push at the boundaries of my own voice and craft. Although I have concerns I continue to return to – or that underpin all of my work – the human and non-human experience, the female embodied experience, desire, the search for connection, nature, motherhood, trauma, art – I am trying to make in this new book bigger statements about history, how the past, present and future interconnect, and the complex threads that bind us. I am very interested in form, whether in individual poems or across the work as a whole – as with my verse-novel, The Ishtar Gate is highly structured and complex, with layered images and themes, and multiple uses of form. I am also extending, in this new book, my interest in how poetry ‘performs’ the page, with at times a very considered use of from, structure and space. I am currently working on a collection of erotic poems and love lyrics, and plan to continue with my engagement with Abramovic’s work.

Next week I talk to Councillor Rachel Smith-Lyte about her love of nature and environmental activism.

ABOUT LESLIE TATE’S BOOKS:

1. Love’s Register tells the story of romantic love and climate change over four UK generations. Beginning with ‘climate children’ Joe, Mia and Cass and ending with Hereiti’s night sea journey across Oceania, the book’s voices take us through family conflicts in the 1920s, the pressures of the ‘free-love 60s’, open relationships in the feminist 80s/90s and a contemporary late-life love affair. Love’s Register is a family saga and a modern psychological novel that explores the way we live now.
   • A signed copy of Love’s Register is available in pounds sterling here.
   • The paperback in other currencies is available here.                                                 
   • Ebook for Kindle in £s here and in $s here.                                                           
   • For other ebook reading devices here (all currencies). 
2. Heaven’s Rage is a memoir that explores addiction, cross-dressing, bullying and the hidden sides of families, discovering at their core the transformative power of words to rewire the brain and reconnect with life. “A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage” – William Blake. You can read more about/buy Heaven’s Rage here.
3. The Dream Speaks Back, written by Sue Hampton, Cy Henty and Leslie Tate, is a joint autobiography exploring imagination and the adult search for the inner child. The book looks at gender difference, growing up in unusual families and mental health issues. It’s also a very funny portrait of working in the arts, full of crazy characters, their ups and downs, and their stories. You can buy a signed copy of The Dream Speaks Back here.
4. Ways to be Equally Human tells the inside story of coming out as a non-binary person, from being ‘othered’ in gendered toilets to stepping up on stage & radio and taking action with Extinction Rebellion. Full of lyrical writing, humour and quirky insights, this is a book for lovers of language, nonconformists and passionate thinkers. You can buy a signed copy here.