Bracelets

I remember one Fall in Northampton I helped this very bubbly man put on a Sylvia Plath day on her birthday. I think he does it every year and I am very glad if he still indeed does, but I only helped out one year. It was great. During the day, scholars talked about her poems, singers sang songs they wrote about her, people who had met her once gave long accounts of her––all of it was amazing. Not a lot of people came the year I helped, which is probably my fault cause I was supposed to do most of the publicity. Still, I sat in the paltry audience and swooned at the magnitude of the whole thing. Some of you out there might not like Sylvia Plath, but I am fanatic about her. She is, and always will be, my hands-down favorite poet. We as a poetry society haven't even begun to realize what a genius she was.

Anyway, one of the speakers told a story about how she was in a workshop with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Someone from the audience (not me) asked her to describe what it was like to be near them––what they looked like and dressed like and so forth. The woman (I wish I could remember her name) said that Sylvia Plath was very neat and proper and energetic and driven and that Anne Sexton was kind of ethereal and quiet, except for her ringing bracelets. She told us how Anne Sexton had these long arms full of bracelets that would ring and jangle as she spoke and moved her papers around and that it was enchanting. And as she told the story, in my mind, I saw this large person––larger in her grace than she could ever be––full of bracelets that rang like bells. It was around this time of my life that I started collecting bracelets.

I have quite a collection now and I just bought a small glass case to house them and so here they are in the below picture. I think collections are important. Someday, I would like to have a collective collection website for people to put up their collections up on it for everyone to see, but it might be some time before I get a chance to undertake such a project. If anyone out there starts one, let me know!

Here are some of my bracelets: