Tag: ted hughes

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A quickfire ‘personal canon’

poetry books well loved

The other evening I was in Lewes listening to Jackie Wills and Grace Nichols being interviewed by Mark Hewitt. One of the topics they discussed was the idea of having a ‘personal canon’, in other words those poets or poetry collections that have either been formative influences, or that you dip into regularly for inspiration. The talk was of how important it was to remember that poetry is very much a matter of personal taste, and that it’s pretty difficult for everyone to agree on ‘the poetry canon’, except perhaps for Shakespeare and a handful of other ‘greats’.

It made me think of the huge variety of ‘exemplar’ poems you come across in poetry workshops. On Grace’s list were Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Jennings and Sylvia Plath. She very cannily declined to mention the names of any living poets, for fear (she said) of upsetting anyone, since many of her contemporaries are her friends.

I started wondering who would be on my list. Of course, like any of those ‘desert island discs’ questions, it becomes impossible to choose between X, Y and Z. So I did it as a kind of ‘quickfire’ exercise – not taking too long to think about, just put down some names and stop when you get to 10. I too have deliberately avoided my contemporaries some of whom I think produce brilliant work.  But what will stand the test of time? That feels to me like a key ‘canon’ criterion. Having said that, there are some people on the list who are actually not dead.

So here’s my quick list, at this moment in time, but in no particular order…(*those still alive have an asterisk!)

Ted Hughes – we studied his poetry at school and I fell in love with his work, in particular his poem ‘Hawk Roosting’, waxing lyrical about it in my English exam. Oddly enough I assumed he was dead – when in fact if I’d asked our English teacher she might have been able to secure a visit, since that was a period when Hughes was reading at schools across the country.

Eavan Boland – I came late to the party on this, only discovering the late, great writer after she’d died. Boland broke away from the Irish literary status quo, writing on topics considered ‘unpoetical’ by her male contemporaries. Stunning poetry and inspirational essays.

Geoffrey Chaucer – Although the general prologue to The Canterbury Tales was on the reading list for aforementioned English A level, I wasn’t that engaged to be honest. But encountering House of Fame late in life gave me a new-found enthusiasm for Chaucer. He was educated and cosmopolitan, and yet very English, unafraid to cock a snook at the likes of Dante yet capable of the most glorious poetry. And many of his themes are very much relevant today.

*Mary Ruefle – An absolute one-off. Ruefle is famous for her erasure poetry (of which she’s written a ton) and books of essays. Poet Tania Hershman gave me a copy of The Most of It a few years back – it’s a collection of short prose pieces, although where is the boundary between prose poems and short poetic prose? Either way, her work is so crazy-creative I can’t think of a decent adjective to describe it.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha – I came Cha’s Dictee via my podcast partner Peter Kenny. It’s a postmodern hybrid collection like no other, and years before its time. A few pages of this and for several hours I’m physically unable to write anything in neat quatrains.

*Kim Addonizio – I devoured her selected poems Wild Nights – vital, sexy, funny, moving, just extraordinary. I always, always get an injection of energy and creativity when I dip into her work.

Walt Whitman – I admit I only really got into Leaves of Grass after singing in a performance of Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony, featuring extracts of Whitman’s wonderful, exuberant poetry. I found the whole thing as a PDF on the web, then realised it was 674 pages. So no, I haven’t read it all.

Tomas Transtromer – spare, beautiful, always surprising. A workshopping favourite I know, but for good reason.

*Roger McGough – as a teenager I loved the Liverpool Poets and I still read McGough for his wit and humour. A nice reminder of how a light touch can pack a huge punch in political poetry.

Alfred Lord Tennyson – I never thought I’d be including a Victorian poet in this list, but In Memoriam AHH had a big impact on me, and still serves as a model of how to write about grief.

Others I seem to have left off – oh no! Dante, Heaney, Auden etc etc. Yikes.

 

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The Reading List, week 2

The Reading LIst, week 2 - Poetgal

The weather has been so good lately it’s tempting to go out for a walk (or a pub lunch!) rather than read. But I’m enjoying the discipline – I find last thing at night and first thing in the morning are good times to read. This week I read through five more collections.

Hangman’s Acre – Janet Sutherland (Shearsman 2009)

I love the way this collection is shaped, framed by poems of love, separation and reunion. In between there are tender explorations of ageing, loss and grief. But there’s much more than that: Janet’s poetry of the South Downs, spirituality as seen through nature, the death of animals and a powerful rage against female genital mutilation. And more – such as the short ‘Bone Monkey’ sequence, a precursor to the more recent collection of that name. Janet’s poems are spare and precise, a joy to read over. Favourite poem: ‘A Walk with Five Dewponds’.

Crow – Ted Hughes (Faber 1972)

At school, we read half a dozen Ted Hughes poems and I memorised ‘Hawk Roosting’ for my A level English. Reading Hughes got me interested in writing poetry and I’ve always regarded him with awe. And yet reading Crow made it so obvious that I’ve only scratched a very small bit of the surface when it comes to his work. This was actually a two-day job, even without re-reading as I went along (one of my ‘reading list’ rules). What to say about Crow? A masterclass in extended metaphor. I would say ‘a roller coaster ride’ if that weren’t such a  stupid cliche – gruesome, comedic, horrifying, tender and raging, you could say it was all those things. Above all it challenged me, pushed me into things I didn’t like, made me want to put the book down, but just as strong was the urge to read on. I had a few nightmares. But it was worth it. Favourite poem: ‘Lovesong’.

Earthworks – Jacqueline Gabbitas (Stonewood Press, 2012)

More lovely poetry of nature, from close (and slightly spooky) encounters with creatures both dead and alive in forests, on hills and in the garden (‘Bird Buried’) to pagan celebrations, and everywhere the feel and smell of clay, soil, peat, coal and all that lies buried in the earth. There’s a touching memorial which appears to be to the poet’s mother (‘In principio’) and a couple of poems in some kind of dialect – which I struggled a bit with as I couldn’t ‘hear’ the voice, but no doubt would come to life in a reading. Many rich seams of meaning and experience to be uncovered in this short (and neatly packaged) collection. Favourite poem: ‘Bird Buried’.

Hugo Williams – Dear Room (Faber, 2006)

I think Hermione Lee in the cover blurb nicely sums up what I think of Hugo Williams – “.. a poet of such intimate charm, such grace and cunning, and such ordinary comical sadness”. I’ve dipped into this collection many times and it was easy to read it all through in one go. I know Williams’ work is regarded in some quarters as less than heavyweight. But personally I love the ‘accessible’ poems with their deadpan delivery and crushing irony, the small poems telling of big joy (eg ‘Pieces of Sky’) and even bigger melancholy (eg ‘The Cry’).  So much to love in this collection – OK it’s not Crow, but who says you can’t enjoy both chocolate and curly kale? Favourite poem: ‘All the Way Down.’

Kim Lasky – Petrol, Cyan, Electric (Smith/Doorstop 2013)

This pamphlet is a real gem which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks award in 2013 and I don’t know why it hasn’t had the sort of widespread publicity and acclaim that it deserves. The poems link seemingly diverse topics as the science of colour (‘Newton Sees the Seventh Colour’), early experiments in electricity, a mother’s gradual loss of speech and slow descent – ‘We are past the fact of muscle, flesh and nails.’ (‘As if the very air’) and the poet’s imagined meeting with her father in 1944. It really does get better with every reading because there is always something more to discover and enjoy. Favourite poem: ‘There are not enough words in the language.’

This post is the latest update to my ‘Reading List’ project begun in July 2015.

Inspiration/

Ted Hughes on ‘the problem with writing directly of recent experiences’

Frieda Hughes

I’ve just finished reading The Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber 2007 edited by Christopher Reid). There is so much in this book that I’ve found illuminating and inspiring. Yes, there were quite a few detailed accounts of fishing trips which I couldn’t quite get into, and I’m sorry to say a fair bit of the erudition of Ted’s letters to fellow writers and his publishers did rather go over my head. But it’s an extraordinary window into his personality. I really felt for him as regards the whole Sylvia Plath ‘fantasia’ as he called it, there’s such a strong sense of him boxing himself into a corner from which there was no escape until he published ‘Birthday Letters’.

Towards the end of the book, Ted writes to his daughter Frieda, who has sent him some of her poems to critique. We don’t get to read his comments on the poems themselves, but his summary comments were, as always, very interesting. In particular, here’s something that really rang a bell for me:

The problem about writing directly of recent experiences is – the memory is simply too unfinished. And the feelings are still too engaged in the real situation. They are too painful and unresolved to say anything about. You can try – but they, those attempts to express those feelings, will always seem shallow, one-sided, exaggerated, false etc.

At the same time, they will find expression through some image that seems to have nothing to do with them – ie where you can deal with them because they are disguised. So your attempts to express the feeling of an experience directly, in the terms of the experience, will be blocked, false, cramped etc and yet if at the same time you wrote a story about witches and demons, or mechanical dogs, it would be full of wild feelings and and you would feel the release. The emotions of a real situation are shy, but if they can find a mask they are shameless exhibitionists. So – look for the right masks. Cast about and experiment. A feeling is always looking for a metaphor of itself in which it can reveal itself unrecognised.

When you find yourself writing directly about something that preoccupies you with rage etc – just remember that. A metaphor provides the escape route.

I love that – “a feeling is always looking for a metaphor.”

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Lovely example from Ted Hughes’ letters

Letters of Ted Hughes edited by Christopher Reid

Letters of Ted Hughes edited by Christopher Reid

It is now 1974. At least, that’s how far I have got with Ted Hughes’ letters, through which I’m getting a stronger impression of him than I think I’ve ever got from another source. Perhaps that’s not surprising, as he valued his privacy. And in the letters, there’s a clear sense of his growing frustration at how journalists, commentators and Plath biographers were representing his life.

Weird to think that in 1974 (or thereabouts) I was slouching my way through Dr Upadhayay’s English lessons, reading ‘View of a Pig’ and not even giving a thought to who the poet was, assuming he was long dead rather than a man of forty-something very much in the land of the living and with a daughter the same age as me.

As you might expect in the book there are letters to friends, publishers, other writers and family, sometimes talking (or not talking) about the same events. From about 1971 these included letters to his children. In a particularly charming one of November 1973 Hughes wrote to his daughter Frieda at boarding school, giving her advice for an English project she’s clearly asked him about. It’s a wonderful letter, bursting with life, full of detailed advice, fun and enthusiasm. He tells her firstly to seek out a copy of PLUTARCH’S LIVES (his capitals, and underlined three times): “While telling about Antony, Plutarch tells all about Cleopatra. You must read that. It’s quite short. In the same book, there’s also a life of Julius Caesar, but in that Plutarch gives only a couple of paragraphs to Cleopatra. But you must read those 2 paragraphs.”

Then there are his tips for writing up her material as a play or screenplay: “break up the story into scenes. As many as you like. You can write the scenes as you like – as you go along – in any order – you can fit them together at the end. If you write it as a film you can add bits all over the place. Describe lilies on the Nile. Caesar shooting a hippopotamus etc.” By the time I’d finished this letter I was ready to go find ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ and write a play myself. It all sounded so brilliant.

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Holiday reading part 1: Ted & Sylvia

Letter of Ted Hughes

Christmas. I wish I could play up to the seasonal stereotype of the busy ‘mum’ with a house full of over-excited children and the prospect of hoards of rellies to cook for and entertain. I don’t even have to search the internet for ’10 top things to do with left over turkey’ or whatever – our Christmas Day lunch à deux will be courtesy of Cook. (The shop, I mean. We don’t  actually have staff.)

Yes, there’ll be various family meals, a Boxing Day lunch excursion with my mum, an untypically high number of drinks parties to go to (yay!)… but as my husband works on Christmas Day morning, I’ve got into the habit of insisting we keep the rest of the day just to ourselves.

Which brings me to holiday reading …  although I’m still a member of a book group, where we read anything from Murakami to Chatwin, I’m wondering if I might give it up. Mainly because I’d rather be reading poetry, or poetry-related stuff. There are two new poetry reading & workshopping groups which I’m going to start attending regularly in 2013, and something’s got to give. We’ll see.

By the side of my bed are various piles of books I’m currently dipping and diving through. There’s also a bookshelf, but the shelf heights are fixed, so quite a lot of things have to be laid flat. And because they stick out they often fall when I squeeze past. So it’s all a bit messy. Here are a couple of items on top of the pile:

Letter of Ted Hughes

Inspired by a post on Josephine Corcoran’s blog, I reserved a copy of The Letters of Ted Hughes (edited by Christopher Reid) from the library, and couldn’t resist also borrowing Sylvia Plath Selected Poems at the same time. I’m reading the Letters from the beginning and am just at the point where he and Sylvia are married. Fascinating to read the advice they give each other. “Don’t be take back by those rejections, but don’t send them straight out. Do as you are doing, sending out your latest. If you keep up your writing you will see, after a few weeks, where you can improve the rejected ones, or whether they are better let lie.”

I’m tempted to skip forward to the juicy bits, but on the other hand I’m enjoying all the little details of these glorious, long letters which even as a teenager are full of fun and energy ( “we now possess a gramophone which you must hear at work, and I must have your opinion on the wreck of my hair”) as well as various schemes and ideas of how he might make money, or at least enough money to allow him to write.

As for the Plath – I wasn’t steeped in Plath as some women of my generation and younger appear to have been. At our school we read Ted. There was no mention of Sylvia. I can still recite ‘Hawk Roosting’ and large chunks of   other Hughes poems, but hardly read anything by Plath until a few years ago. Maybe our English teachers were disapproving of the whole Plath-Hughes debacle. Perhaps they sided with Ted. Or maybe they didn’t believe in bringing a poet’s private life into the reading of their work. I don’t know, but I do find Plath’s writing challenging and I’m enjoying the ‘Selected’ (as selected by Ted Hughes) in conjunction with the letters.

More in a later post (still to come: Heaney, Olds, Armitage & A C Grayling – yes really.)