Living at Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’ “Poetical” Boston Address / Jessica Vestuto. In: Lit Hub January 8, 2019

Outside, a woman is yelling the name of the street.

Willow, Willow, Willow.
It is ten o’clock. I consider insanity, then intoxication, and then I remember where I am. I am not in a neighborhood prone to senseless, after-dark yelling. I am in Beacon Hill, where gaslit street lamps are left on all day and flower boxes look prideful and sidewalks decay attractively. After some time, I realize that Willow is not only the name of the street, but also the name of the woman’s dog in the building next to mine. I have never seen her or her dog. In fact, I am only aware of their presence when the dog is not where he should be.
Someone once told me that you should give your dog a name you take pleasure in saying, because you will have to yell it often. Since I moved here, this logic has never seemed sounder.

In person, the studio looked remarkably like its picture online, which immediately made me trust the room, gave me reason to believe it had good intentions. There is no kitchen, but a kitchenette—a small oven, half-fridge, and bar sink. There is no closet, but a tall cabinet with a rod running across the top. The walls are pale yellow, a color you could imagine a person choosing with the hope of “opening the space up.” You cannot play hide-and-seek in this room. You cannot wash a sheet pan in the kitchen sink. You can, however, vacuum in less than 10 minutes.
The room is the smallest in the building, an anomaly in both square footage and cost. The building itself is tall and narrow, eight stories high with only two apartments per floor. The higher floors have large, boxed bay windows visible from the street, giving the appearance of richer lives being lived in those rooms, lives with time to spend window-gazing. When the rental agent who showed me the room learned I was in a graduate program for writing, she told me a famous writer used to live in the building. She smiled, handed me an application, and said, “I can’t remember which one.”

Which ones, it turns out. In 1958, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes moved to 9 Willow Street. “We’re planning to write here,” Plath wrote of the new residence in a letter to a friend. “We are investing our time & going to work like fury for the first year in our lives at nothing but writing.” During the year they lived in Beacon Hill, Plath compiled a first collection of poems and Hughes taught poetry at the University of Massachusetts. Plath received her first acceptance to The New Yorker. Hughes won the Guinness Poetry Award. This was two years into their notorious marriage and five years before Plath killed herself by inhaling oven fumes. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/living-at-sylvia-plath-and-ted-hughes-poetical-boston-address/