Smith College Research Articles

Transforming Inspiration into Practice: How an Advanced Certificate Program in Spirituality Changed the Clinical Practices of Its Participants

The Advanced Certificate Program in Contemplative Clinical Practice at Smith College School for Social Work emphasizes the use of contemplative practices to develop awareness in two areas: the spiritual aspects of the therapeutic relationship and the influence of the clinician's spirituality on the therapeutic process. Utilizing responses from a qualitative questionnaire that was administered to students who completed the program in 2008, this article describes the ways in which the program inspired change in the spiritual lives and clinical practices of its students. Some of these changes included renewed dedication to the regular practice of contemplative activities and a greater ability to attend to spiritual issues in the therapeutic process.

Clorinda Low Lucas: Hawaii’s Social Work Pioneer

This article examines the professional life and work of Hawaiian social welfare pioneer Clorinda Low Lucas. Educated at Smith College and the New York School of Social Work, Lucas worked with several organizations, including the New York Young Women’s Christian Association, the Hawaiian Humane Society, and the Hawaiian public schools. Lucas’s career, which spanned more than 40 years from the early 1920s to her retirement in 1960, advanced the social work profession, often setting the tone for professional practice in Hawaii. Lucas’s life embodies a personal and professional struggle with cultural awareness and acceptance. As she engaged in the politics of social work and social welfare, Lucas alternately accepted and rejected her native Hawaiian cultural ways of being. As this article shows, Lucas’s ambivalence about her cultural heritage may well have been the motivating force behind her work.

The Flame Photometer as Engine of Nephrology: A Biography

In the 1940s, the flame photometer made possible for the first time relatively simple and quick measurements of sodium and potassium in serum and urine. During World War II, it unexpectedly fell into the hands of John P. Peters of Yale University, who sought to understand water and electrolyte physiology and apply such knowledge to patient problems. Pupils and young associates of Peters would seed the early nephrology divisions and training programs in the United States; the flame photometer was essential to their work and that of their trainees, both Americans and international visitors. Hyponatremia and the syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone secretion became the "attribute" disorders of nephrologists. Invention of a microflame photometer fostered the revival of micropuncture and transport studies. In the 1960s, the flame photometer was linked to Leonard Skeggs' sequential automated analysis system, leading to enormous numbers of routine measurements of electrolytes. The growing number of nephrologists, then based mostly at teaching hospitals, thus found plentiful instances of sodium and potassium abnormalities to address. The autoanalyzer also catalyzed use of the anion gap, another emblem of nephrology in its early decades. Not only ideas and theories, but also the usually invisible machinery, enable the growth of a knowledge base and formation of a scientific discipline or medical specialty. Of course, the flame photometer did not itself shape the agenda of nephrology, but it allowed the most influential group of progenitors and their progeny to explore normal function and bring a strongly physiologic imperative to their daily work with patients.

Condoleezza Rice Challenges NASPA Student Affairs Leaders

Condoleezza Rice Challenges NASPA Student Affairs Leaders

Gender Dimorphism in the Exercise‐naïve Murine Skeletal Muscle Proteome

Skeletal muscle is a plastic tissue with known gender dimorphism, especially at the metabolic level. A proteomic comparison of male (n=5) and female (n=5) murine (C57BL/10ScSnJ000476 +/+) biceps brachii was undertaken, resolving an average of 600 protein spots of MW 15–150 kDa and pI 5–8. 24 unique full‐length proteins spanning 11 KOG groups demonstrated statistically significant (p<.05) abundance differences between genders; the majority of these proteins have metabolic functions. Identified glycolytic enzymes demonstrated decreased abundance in females, while identified oxidative phosphorylation enzyme abundance differences were specific to the proteins rather than to the function group as a whole. Myoglobin and GRP78 showed the largest abundance increases of 3.9 and 5.8‐fold, respectively, whereas dihydrolipoamide S‐succinyltransferase showed the largest decrease of 5.9‐fold in the females. All three phosphorylation states of creatine kinase were decreased in females. Expression differences were significant but many subtle, usually 2‐fold or less. We conclude that while gender dimorphism is present in non‐exercised murine skeletal muscle, the proteome comparison of male and female biceps brachii in exercise‐naïve mice does not indicate any apparent hormonal regulatory basis for the dimorphism. Supported by NSF 0420971, the Smith College Blakeslee Fund and HHMI.

Writing the Outrageous Life

Research Article| March 01 2010 Writing the Outrageous Life: Blanche Wiesen Cook and Eleanor Roosevelt Paula J. Giddings Paula J. Giddings Paula J. Giddings is the Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor of Afro-American Studies at Smith College and the editor of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. She is the author of four books, including When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America; In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement; Burning All Illusions: Writings from the Nation on Race, 1866–2002; and her most recent work, IDA, A Sword among Lions, which won the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and the Letitia Woods Brown Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians, among other honors. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Meridians (2010) 10 (2): 96–101. https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.2010.10.2.96 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paula J. Giddings; Writing the Outrageous Life: Blanche Wiesen Cook and Eleanor Roosevelt. Meridians 1 March 2010; 10 (2): 96–101. doi: https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.2010.10.2.96 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsMeridians Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2010 by Smith College2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Introduction

Introduction| March 01 2010 Introduction: Ways of Framing Paula J. Giddings Paula J. Giddings Paula J. Giddings is the Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor of Afro-American Studies at Smith College and the editor of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. She is the author of four books, including When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America; In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement; Burning All Illusions: Writings from the Nation on Race, 1866–2002; and her most recent work, IDA, A Sword among Lions, which won the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and the Letitia Woods Brown Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians, among other honors. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Meridians (2010) 10 (2): v–vii. https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.2010.10.2.v Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paula J. Giddings; Introduction: Ways of Framing. Meridians 1 March 2010; 10 (2): v–vii. doi: https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.2010.10.2.v Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsMeridians Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2010 by Smith College2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Importance of the Peer Group in the Israeli Kibbutz for Adult Attachment Style

In this study we investigated attachment styles of kibbutz‐raised adults as related to their childhood experiences (392 adults from 50 kibbutzim). Various instruments were used to assess parental and group relations in childhood, adult attachment style, and adult attachment to groups. We found that there were similar distributions of attachment styles among those participants from familial and communal sleeping arrangements. Caring parents and peer groups were associated with secure adult attachment; further, caring peer groups were associated less frequently with insecure styles than less caring peer groups were. Caring peer groups partly compensated for less adequate care by parents. Higher overprotection by the peer group was associated with later social anxiety/ambivalence and personal preoccupation. We raise the question of how the child peer‐group supports or harms adult attachment style. This research was presented at the 2005 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Atlanta, Georgia. The study is based on Yona Weiss's Ph.D. dissertation at the Smith College School for Social Work, directed by Robert Shilkret. We thank Joan Berzoff and Joyce Everett, members of the dissertation committee and all the adults from the kibbutzim who participated in the research.

SYLVIA PLATH'S MYSTERIOUS LOVER

8 8 Y S Y L V I A P L A T H ’ S M Y S T E R I O U S L O V E R J E F F R E Y M E Y E R S Sylvia Plath’s short life and intensely emotional poems have been extensively studied, but at least one major gap remains. Ever since her death in 1963 many journalists and scholars have tried to track down Richard Sassoon. But none of her biographers has found or talked to this mysterious and elusive figure in her life, her first great love, the subject of ecstatic entries in her journals. Like the late J. D. Salinger, he is reclusive and proud of evading his pursuers . No one has ever interviewed him; none of the five biographies of Plath has reproduced his photograph. I have always been curious about Sassoon’s character, the nature of their liaison, why it ended and what became of him afterward. I did finally find him, but in a roundabout way. Though he refused to respond to my letters, I managed to discover – by interviews and by examining his writing – some interesting details about his background, life, and work, material which illuminates his relationship with Plath and explains why he was important to her. Plath’s first biographer, Edward Butscher (1976), cautiously hid Sassoon’s identity and inaccurately called him ‘‘Richard S— —, French grandson of a British poet.’’ One of the leading poets of the Great War, Siegfried Sassoon came from a Jewish family, was 8 9 R brought up as a Protestant, and converted to Catholicism. Linda Wagner-Martin (1987) said Richard was related to Siegfried; Anne Stevenson (1989) described him as distantly related; Ronald Hayman (1991) did not mention his connection to the poet; Paul Alexander (1991) said that Richard’s father was Siegfried’s cousin. Butscher provided some basic information, Wagner-Martin and Hayman added nothing new, and Stevenson filled in some background from Plath’s point of view. Alexander published some of Richard’s letters to Plath, now in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Richard Sassoon has never published the letters Plath wrote to him. All the known facts about him can be listed in one paragraph. Richard Laurence Sassoon was born in Paris in 1934 and brought up in Tryon, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina . He met Plath at Yale in April 1954, during their junior years, when she was a student at Smith College. In May, after they’d spent the first of many weekends in New York, he became Plath’s lover and was passionately involved with her for the next two years. He graduated from Yale in 1955, attended the Sorbonne during 1955–56, and during that Christmas holiday, when she was a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, they spent a week in Paris and then traveled to the south of France. She was particularly impressed by the chapel in Vence, decorated by Henri Matisse. In February 1956 she met Ted Hughes in Cambridge, marked him as her prey, and began as she ended: passionately and violently. She famously wrote of their first encounter: ‘‘When he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. . . . The one man since I’ve lived who could blast Richard.’’ Plath liked to have several competing suitors at one time. Though instantly besotted with Hughes she was still involved with Sassoon. On 25 March she spent the night with Hughes in London on the way to meet Sassoon in Paris, a trip that became one of the great turning points of her life. Though Plath did not find Sassoon attractive, she was drawn to his mind and could not imagine a sexual relationship without a powerful intellectual bond. He gave her a taste of the good life: cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and committed to high art. At ease in France, he introduced the provincial New Englander (who could 9 0 M E Y E R S Y read but not speak French) to French food and wine, literature and culture; he showed...

Historians on Writing

Historians on Writing Michael Kammen (bio) Historians distinguish themselves in diverse ways, yet relatively few are remembered as gifted prose stylists, and fewer still have left us non-didactic missives with tips about the finer points of writing well. Following his retirement from Cornell in 1941, Carl Becker accepted a spring term appointment as Neilson Research Professor at Smith College. Early in 1942 he delivered a charming address in Northampton titled “The Art of Writing.” Although admired as one of the most enjoyable writers among historians in the United States, Becker’s witty homily for the young women that day concerned good writing in general, and his exemplars ranged widely. He cited Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, because “the author’s intention was to achieve a humorous obscurity by writing nonsense. He had a genius for that sort of thing, so that, as one may say, he achieved obscurity with a clarity rarely if ever equaled before or since.”1 Other notable historians have shared Becker’s belief that writing about the past is a form of art—or ideally, at least, ought to be. Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1912 capped the generations that so admired Francis Parkman and Henry Adams by designating his subject “History as Literature.” All too soon, however, TR’s highly idealized perspective seemed unattainable by the new professionals in academe. Even Becker swiftly became pessimistic about the prospects for historical “literature,” especially as he observed his guild developing in its formative years. He wrote candidly to a friend in 1915: It would be possible to get perhaps 20 men who could write good history in a straightforward and readable manner; but if they should be expected to raise their work to the level of real literature—to the level of [J. R.] Green or Parkman, for example—I fear it can’t be done. Men of high literary talent unfortunately do not go in for the serious study of history very often; and the study of history, as conducted in our universities, is unfortunately not designed to develop such talent as exists. Besides, history is I should say one of the most difficult subjects in the world to make literature out of; I mean history in the general sense, as distinct from biography or the narrative of some particular episode. Nevertheless, he went on to add: “Yet it is possible, and in my opinion highly desirable to come as near doing just that thing as possible. With all our busy activity history has less influence on the thought of our time than it had in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and one principal reason is that it isn’t read.”2 A generation later Samuel Eliot Morison, who took Parkman as his model, lamented that American historians “have forgotten that there is an art of writing history,” and titled his homily “History as a Literary Art.” Subsequently Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., George Kennan, and C. Vann Woodward also provided instructive essays explaining how and why historical writing might flow in a creative manner that can engage the general reader.3 In the mid-1980s, when the Library of America produced stout volumes of works by Parkman and Adams, Woodward seized upon those occasions as opportunities to explain why these authors once enjoyed popular appeal and remained eminently worthy of visitation: narrative power, irony, subtlety, and [End Page 17] ambiguity in Parkman, wit, irony, humor, and a love of paradox in the case of Adams, whom Woodward called a “master of English prose.”4 J.H. Hexter devoted at least half a dozen droll essays to the challenges of Doing History, and the particular problems faced by academic historians. After describing just how arduous historical research can be, he turned with characteristic whimsy to the equally demanding challenge of first-rate prose. [Once] the research ends, the working up of the evidence into a finished piece of history writing starts, and the historian at last tastes the pleasure of scholarly creation. Or does he? Well, if he has an aptitude at the management of evidence and a flare for vigorous prose, perhaps...

Armance, ou la liberté de Stendhal by Jean-Jacques Hamm

Stendhal’s America, but also about the context of French opinion generated as a response to the new American democracy, a context that extends beyond Stendhal alone. Boston University (MA) Dorothy Kelly HAMM, JEAN-JACQUES. Armance, ou la liberté de Stendhal. Paris: Champion, 2009. ISBN 978-2-7453-1807-7. Pp. 280. 55 a. In Armance, ou la liberté de Stendhal Jean-Jacques Hamm proposes a comprehensive exploration of the multiple facets of a novel that has often been read as a roman à clef to which a letter from Stendhal to Mérimée supposedly gives the key: the hero Octave de Malivert’s impotence. Having extensively studied and written about Stendhal, Hamm refuses this—and indeed all—univocal interpretations of Armance. His thesis is that in Armance, Stendhal’s least appreciated but most original work, the author successfully inaugurates a new approach to writing, where the protagonist’s secret becomes the secret of the novel. Just as Octave never reveals what underlies his inscrutable behavior toward Armance, the woman he loves, so too the text withholds meaning—evoking, sketching, then abandoning explanations, but, in the end, preserving a core of silence that is its most defining feature. It is up to the reader to choose from the half-formulated meanings proposed, or to accept, as does Hamm, that the secret of Armance is that there is no secret. To explore the poetics of concealment through partial revelation, Hamm orients his analysis around the question that one of Octave’s perplexed rivals asks him: “Que diable es-tu?” Five major chapters form the armature of Hamm’s insightful study. “Obliques” treats the palimpsests, fissures, precautions and ambiguities attendant upon the genesis of Armance. “Protagonistes” exposes the limits of a hermeneutics of character, through in-depth consideration of psychological duality, intertextual influences, points of view, transparencies and opacities in the presentation of love and sexuality (both Octave’s and Armance’s). “Représentations ” probes strata of narration in Armance: theatrical aspects, realistic elements, physical dimensions of closed spaces and dynamic movements of escape, archetypal underpinnings. “Ecritures” offers micro-analyses of Armance’s prose—its erudition, its figures of omission, its “style vrai,” its multiple modes of irony. “Extérieurs” explores relations between Stendhal and his public, the influence of Armance on other writers, and ultimately the construction of Stendhal as an author, by this work. Hamm convincingly concludes that Armance is an open synthesis, a work that creates a new form for the novel, complete without imposing closure, suscitating with its reader a “conversation infinie” that valorizes freedom—its own, its author’s, and its reader’s. Hamm brilliantly orchestrates references to an exceptionally broad range of critical studies (including English language ones), detailed objective analyses (of the numerical kind enabled by computer), and lucid, personal readings. Readers of this volume will come away with the conviction that Armance is a major, innovative novel. Their understanding of its strategies of secrecy, which constitute strategies of freedom, will enrich their readings of all of Stendhal’s fiction. Smith College (MA) Mary Ellen Birkett 164 FRENCH REVIEW 84.1 ...

Uncovering the hidden actors with the help of Latour: the ‘making’ of The Second Sex

This paper seeks to respond to current and on-going criticism of the first and only English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxieme sexe. It reconsiders the translator-publisher dynamic by applying Bruno Latour’s sociological framework in order to arrive at more detailed and comprehensive conclusions. After briefly presenting the publication, reception, and the criticism of the English translation, this paper investigates into the case study with the help of Latour and the letters from the Smith College Archives. The study was based on the reading of historical documents – more than a hundred letters between the translator, Howard M. Parshley, and the publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf. A brief overview of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is presented and then followed by two examples of application of the theoretical framework. The paper concludes by insisting that the involvement of multiple actors and their influence on translation products should receive more attention when considering the work of translators.

Value of an Endogenously Asymmetric Toehold: Estimation of a Dynamic Auction Game

In this paper, we formulate and estimate a dynamic auction game where asymmetry is endogenous. The seller sells multiple goods via a sequence of rst price auctions. While bidders are ex-ante symmetric, the rst period winner has an informational advantage in the second period bidding game and becomes a strong bidder. This creates an asymmetric informational toehold in the second stage. This endogenous creation leads to overbidding in the rst period relative to a one period game. We characterize the equilibrium in terms of the observed bid distribution and entry behavior. We suggest a two step estimation procedure to estimate such a dynamic game of creation. The OCS oil tract auctions exhibit one such phenomenon. We apply our method to data on OCS oil tract auctions. We nd that the federal government is only recovering 23% of the ‘strong’buyers’willingness to pay in the second period. Bidders perceive the value of information to be at most 12% of their rst period’s informational rent. A new semiparametric structural test cannot reject the hypothesis of the strong bidder’s informational superiority in the second period and sets it at 18% relative to the weak bidder. We use the estimates to design alternate mechanisms and empirically show that government’s revenue increases when the asymmetry is taken into account in allocating the goods. Keywords: Endogenous Toeholds, Dynamic Auction Estimation, Informational Asymmetry, NonParametric Identi cation and Estimation, Value of Information, Test of Asymmetry, Copulas. Sudip_Gupta@isb.edu. I am indebted to Profs Ken Hendricks, Joris Pinkse and Rob Porter for sharing the data used in this paper. For helpful discussions, without implicating I am thankful to Profs. Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, Juan Carranza,Yeon Koo Che, Sudipto Dasgupta, Phil Haile, Bruce Hansen, Ali Hortacsu, Sergei Izmalkov, Dennis Kristensen, Jon Levin, David Mcadams, Antonio Merlo, Harry Paarsch, Jack Porter, Lucia Quesada, John Rust, Larry Samuelson, Deepayan Sarkara and seminar participants of the 2005 World Congress of the Econometric Society, seminar participants of the Price College of Business, Oklahoma University , Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Smith College of Business. All remaining errors are my own.

Warriors and Healers: Preparing for Returning Veterans

Despite its ideological differences, social work has had a long history of affiliation with the military. In 1918, the Smith College School for Social Work was established to respond to the mental health needs of “shell‐shocked veterans.” In 2008, the School renewed this commitment by sponsoring a three‐day conference aimed at preparing social workers to respond to the new and complex needs of veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A joint planning process effectively developed a program that helped military and civilian social workers gain insight into the impact of multiple deployments, traumatic brain disorder, post‐traumatic stress disorder and other factors present in today’s new military culture.

Smith College School for Social Work and Combat‐Related Trauma: Allegiance, Scholarship, and Commitment

The Smith College School for Social Work (SCSSW) was founded for the purpose of treating soldiers returning from World War I who suffered from shell shock, conditions that are now described as combat‐related trauma. As history evolved, America found itself embroiled in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and contemporary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. With each conflict clinical social workers have played a pivotal role in the care of active‐duty soldiers and returning veterans. This article explores the School's historical contribution to the treatment of combat‐related trauma through its curriculum, theoretical perspectives, and endorsement of different treatment paradigms over the last century. The earlier decades and Vietnam–era time involvement of the SCSSW in clinical social work practice with service members and their families is of particular interest. Specific recommendations are offered to the School that may benefit those practitioners entering the field of combat‐related trauma.

The Response of Schools of Social Work to the Return of Uniformed Service Members and Their Families

The following article is designed to provide an historical overview of the role that the Smith College School for Social Work has played in serving U.S. service members and their families throughout the past 91 years. Particular attention is paid to the building momentum of interest and activity at the School since 2005.

Back to the Future: George Kubler, Lawrence Alloway, and the Complex Present

Lawrence Alloway was my teacher—my mentor, really, in all of the profound senses of that word—and it was Alloway who handed me my first copy of George Kubler's The Shape of Time. I had transferred from Smith College to SUNY Stony Brook, where Alloway was a professor, in 1969. My first course with him began the next semester, early in 1970. It was a new class, something between a lecture and seminar, and it was called “Art and Communication,” though it could have been subtitled “The World According to Alloway.” Whatever was on his mind that week was the subject of our class, and the improvised topic could be Edouard Manet or Charles Baudelaire as easily as Barnett Newman, Norbert Wiener, or Robert Rauschenberg. The “Art and Communication” course was the turning point in my education and the impetus for my decision to become an art critic. Not only did I love Alloway's classes, I loved his life-style, the mixture of students and creative people, and his intense interactions with the academy, the art world, and publishing. But above all, I loved the fact that, as Richard Kalina has recognized, “his critical universe was, unlike that of many others, an expanding one.”1

Commencement

J. Courtney Sullivan’s debut novel, Commencement, is an engaging piece of fiction about four young women attending the all-female Smith College in the late 1990s. The four women, Celia, April, Sally, and Bree, are thrown together as roommates during their freshman years of college and continue living all four years at Franklin King House, a real residence hall that provides the backdrop for the first part of Commencement. The second half of the novel is dedicated to following the lives of these women as they navigate their first jobs, graduate school, marriage, and pregnancy. In depicting their post-college years, the novel emphasizes the impact of their college experiences on career and personal decisions and the influence of these experiences in creating their lasting friendships.

An Unacknowledged Publication by Sylvia Plath

AN unacknowledged publication by Sylvia Plath has been discovered in joint research investigations.1 An unidentified magazine publication is referred to by Plath in a letter to her mother dated 9 November 1961: I’ll send for a copy of my awful first ladies’ magazine story—very stiff and amateurish. It came out my birthday week. I got a very sweet fan letter for it in which the woman, also a writer, took me for an expert on Canada and Whitby, the sailing port I visited for a day. Very flattering! …2 Smith College also holds a draft manuscript of ‘The Lucky Stone’. From reading this it was possible to verify that this was indeed the story Plath discusses in Letters Home through the protagonist Joanna's association with Canada (‘She might even, she thought longingly, be home in Canada again’), and, although the town is not named explicitly, the description of Whitby (‘The few remaining visitors hadn’t yet come down to stroll along the harbour from where the fishing fleet anchored, or across the bridge leading to the old section of the town under the ruined abbey perched atop its headland like a great, grey seabird.’).3 Plath's Chalcot Square address appears on the draft, dating it to sometime between January 1960 and August 1961. Also on the draft, in Plath's handwriting, is ‘Sold £15.15.0 by Jennifer Hassell’. An entry for Jennifer Hassell was located in Plath's address book, also held in Smith College. Hassell's business address was care of A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd., then located at 35 Dover Street, London W1, which suggests that she was Plath's agent in these transactions.4

Parade of Possibles, and: Late Love, and: He Brings Wood

Parade of Possibles, and: Late Love, and: He Brings Wood Ellen Doré Watson (bio) Parade of Possibles The Broker adored Hildegard of Bingen— but was a pussycat like my ex before the X. Flannel Shirt was into conspiracy theories and Sportswriter wanted a wife bad— and found one a couple weeks after I passed [End Page 39] on the job. Bob #2 had some cockamamie ideas about harnessing sexual energy. I knew he was right, but he so wasn’t. Head of Hair had a retainer and wore funny underwear. Either three ex-wives or permanently single, none of them could be called Que Será or had, to my knowledge, a tattoo. One had a performance problem and ate alone (neither of which was the problem). Baby Poet had a head of hair, too, but O so much blather. I am not a bitch and yes have many flaws, but the old friend is way too old a friend and the high school geek, while handsome now, is still one. The whole lot of them were too damned eager. That anti–death penalty activist, though, he saw through me in a way I don’t yet get. This has me considering invisibility. OK, a counter-intuitive and possibly counter- productive strategy, but perhaps a good cover as I scan the crowd for a tattooed, bald widower not named Bob, reluctant, loose- limbed, and wearing linen, who gives good talk. Late Love The fourth month flowers waxy and small. Grief is like sleeping in water, he thinks. Like throwing light onto the smallest stone. It is like scolding a doorjamb for crushing a finger in third grade. Her finger. Now in the ground. The same one she fractured flying off a treadmill the day her first husband walked away. Why [End Page 40] these bits of her, that long preceded him, now, his ninety-first day without her? Long week after week in a world now narrow. A runner instead of a proper rug. If he could stand her there, across the disbelieving room, he’d ask, all sheepish, how she was doing without hunger. He could hear her smile: “Look at the lake. Tell me I can’t have it.” He Brings Wood He brings wood, soup, family photos, dear nearness—and I remain friendly but strange, waiting out dormancy, wishing for swoon. Once upon a time was a woman, spreading but longing, set in her ways: proud and unsure whether to take reluctance for weakness or wisdom. The stars in night sky say what? On one hand, intensity is distant; on the other, the Pleiades are a smudge only without my glasses. Bird, good faithful bird, voluntarily, wooingly, in hand, am I not grateful? Once upon a time was a loneliness— hypothetical or real? Warm arm fallen to thigh, fingers drawn along the nape, can they be welcomed? She could reveal her sins: love of surface, betrayals of the body, fears of the bodily, an inventory of fault-lines and hearth-quakes. Face to face with palpable, does she mean to deter or solidify capture? Words open doors this woman I am seems ready for, but to translate the mouth back to wordless, to flesh: must there be rapture? [End Page 41] Ellen Doré Watson Ellen Doré Watson serves as director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review, and a member of the editorial board of Alice James Books. Her most recent book is This Sharpening, from Tupelo Press. Individual poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including the American Poetry Review, Tin House, and the New Yorker. “In the 70’s & 80’s, when I was immortal, being a Boomer meant having way too much fun to write seriously or well. Now, with the big scythe looming around whichever corner, serious fun is shirking inferior must-dos whenever possible in order to write like a maniac.” Copyright © 2009 University of Nebraska Press