How did it happen, after this spectacular coincidence, that Ted Hughes, the Poet Laureate of England, in an auditorium full of fans, wrote a poem for me on the back of a ticket?
This is the story of that night. Of that poem.
In 1983, I left my husband, my home, my friends, my family and my country to live with my lover, an artist from Toronto. In the months while waiting for his divorce to come through, we produced a show there, the first Canadian production of LETTERS HOME, by Rose Leiman Goldemberg. It was the story of Sylvia Plath’s life from 1950, the year she entered Smith College, to 1963, when she committed suicide. The story was told in letters written to her mother, Aurelia Plath.
In this production, a mere twenty years after her suicide, I performed the role of Sylvia Plath, who was 31 in 1963. She had two children, and a cheating ex-husband in 1963, during one of England’s coldest winters when she put her head in the oven and towels in the cracks around the kitchen doors.
A week after the show closed at The Adelaide Court Theatre in Toronto, Ted Hughes, Sylvia’s husband at the time of her death, now the Poet Laureate of England, was the guest of honour at the 5th International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront. At this event, with hundreds of fans in line to get his autograph, I am somehow sitting next to him.
How did it happen, after this spectacular coincidence, that Ted Hughes wrote a poem for me on the back of my ticket?
This is the story of that night. Of that meeting. There are two poems here. That back-of-ticket-poem which began with my name, “For Caitlin . . .” The second poem is one I wrote which further tells the events of the evening.
Link to The 5th International Festival of Authors an article from the Kingston Whig Standard in 1983.
