The editorial collective here at t&p was thrilled to receive a very cordial letter this morning, addressed to the “Dear Texts & Pretexts folks” from a colleague of sorts: Gregory Donovan, Senior Editor at Blackbird (“an online journal of literature and the arts”) published by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of English down in Richmond, Virginia (we are always astonished — and pleased beyond words — to discover that our scribblings are read at all). Mr. Donovan had noted our recent posting of Sylvia Plath’s newly discovered poem “Ennui”, and he reminds us — very gently, very correctly — of the constraints of copyright, which frowns upon such wholesale propagation.

By doing what we had done (Donovan notes, although not in these exact words) we diverted food and drink from the tables of Sylvia Plath’s own children. He asks us — very gently — if we would be so good as to take down the copy of the poem which we had posted: “we’re under a legal obligation to request that.”

It has been done; we apologize to the smaller Plaths and beg their forgiveness, and we direct all those who wish to read Plath’s sonnet to check out Blackbird’s (legally posted) copy here. We suspect, however, that Mr. Donovan’s battle is not yet done: in this brave, new digital world — the world that all we online journals live in — it’s difficult to completely beat a loosed genie back into its bottle.

In search of some form of cosmic balance — take a sonnet there, give a sonnet here — the resident scribes at t&p have put their collective heads together and offer to (both of) you, our gentle readers, this modest riff on Plath’s “Ennui”; feel free to republish as you see fit:

Ennui // On you

Coffee grounds, which fuel the fools who spend
their days with pen in hand, cannot confer
a tale, nor fortune-teller recommend
a writer’s style. You must, we fear, defer
to time, and hope. The future holds your death
writ in the tragic form: a Celtic raven’s
“Nevermore”; the question from Macbeth
forever answered “not”; the end a haven.

Did you expect your adolescent scrawls
to haunt you still? You left them here, and passed
through doom’s blank door, beyond recall.
That fourteen lines — so marginal, so slight —
could cause all this furor. But marginal
or not: whatever’s left is copyright.