Phenomenal Woman, a celebration of poetry by American women; a live performance of some of the best poetry written by women in America, from the 19th century to the present day. Poets featured include Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Sara Teasdale, Dorthy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Lisa Zaran, Erica Jong, Sharon Esther Lampert and Maya Angelou.

Thursday 30 June, 6pm
£3 on the door

The poems will be performed by women from Glasgow, all professional and emerging performers working in theatre, film and television, skilled actors, who will use their talent and ability to capture and convey the emotion and drama of each poem. Performers will include Natalie Clark, Deborah Mair, Mandy Sykes, Clare Sheppard, Mandy Edgar, Gillean Young, Kim Hughes and Megan Green.

Radio Theatre Group has been producing drama for broadcast and live performance since 2004. Recently, RTG presented a live performance of the radio sci-fi classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as part of the Glasgow Comedy Festival. Previous poetry collections include Bronte, which included some of the best poems by the Bronte sisters.

To listen to previous recordings by Radio Theatre Group, visit their Youtube Channel or join them on their Facebook page.

Booking is essential, please complete the quick booking form below, or if you are not a member of the library already you can join here

This is a collection of Sylvia Plath’s prose – short stories, journalism along with a few journal extracts – some of which had been thought lost for years. It’s a fascinating collection for many reasons. You can play the autobiography game, with some stories touching on electroshock therapy, suicide, and the difficulties of fitting in as an American housewife in Devon – or compare source journal entries side by side with the fiction they inspired. Ted Hughes has separated the prose into “the more successful” and the rest, and on the whole I think he has made a good call, but even the more contrived stories for women’s magazines have a lot to recommend them before their final pat twists. If you thought Sylvia Plath was just poetry and The Bell Jar, think again and investigate this collection.

CANCELLED!
Glasgow Women’s Library would like to invite you to this new staging of Sylvia Plath’s performance poem, Three Women.

Wednesday 18 November 2009, 7pm to 9pm
Glasgow Women’s Library, 81 Parnie Street, Glasgow
Requested minimum donation of £3 per person

Focusing on the experiences of pregnancy of three different women, the play deals with the women’s lives and personal circumstances in a non-judgemental and insightful manner. The theme of pregnancy and maternity is dealt with in a way which is highly subjective and personal but also manages to say something of universal significance by dealing with the strong emotional experiences some women go through during their lives but few probably voice in public.

We are luck enough to have the group Three Voices, made up of Susan Hansen, Felicity
Thomson and Arlene Wood performing the play. The event is B.Y.O.B. and any funds
raised will go towards Glasgow Women’s Library’s move to The Mitchell.

Sylvia Plath and Three Women
WORDS SUCH as heartbreaking, highly complex and uncompromising have often been used to describe the poetry and prose of Sylvia Plath. The dramatic poem Three Women was first published in 1962 and it does very much encompass such descriptions.

When Plath tragically committed suicide with cooking gas in 1963, just 30 years of age, her only play Three Women was performed on BBC Radio that same year. The verse play combines a timeless quality of writing with a strong experimental and artistic expression and an honesty, which can seem brutal at times. Some critics believe that the density of Plath’s poetic work equals that of Shakespeare’s and it can be argued that this is evident in Three Women.

It is hard not to feel moved by the deep search for purpose and meaning when presented with any piece of writing by this extraordinary American writer. It very quickly becomes apparent that every word, every line and every piece does not just mean something. In Plath’s case it will inevitably mean a lot, and this is what gradually becomes clear to any reader or student of her work.

By focusing on the experiences of pregnancy of three different women, it deals with the women’s lives and personal circumstances in a non-judgemental and accurately insightful manner. While the poem’s first woman, or First Voice, wants to be a mum and ends up giving birth to a baby boy, the same cannot be said for woman behind the Second voice, who suffers a traumatic miscarriage. The Student, who appears in the play as the Third Voice, experiences the emotional consequences of giving a child up for adoption when she declares that she is not yet ready to be a mother. In the case of Three Women the theme of pregnancy and maternity is dealt with in a manner, which is highly subjective and personal but also manages to say something of universal significance by dealing with the strong emotional experiences some women go through during their lives but few probably voice in public.