Back Into Poetry via Ted Hughes

'Surely some revelation is at hand ...' - W.B. Yeats

Back in late October 1998, I had lunch in Oxford with the novelist and poet Mark Haddon. We discussed the recently published Birthday Letters and Hughes' poetry in general, and considered where he might go from there. A few hours later, like a bolt of Hughesian lightning, the great man's death was announced on the news, and suddenly our lunchtime discussion had become an act of retrospection.

The death of the Poet Laureate was a seismic shock within the poetry world, and a source of great distress for me, as a lifelong fan. I had studied poems from The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal while at school, thanks to a visionary English teacher named Linda Clayton, and went on to write a rather involved essay on The Feminine in Ted Hughes's Gaudete as a mature undergraduate at Oxford. I had constantly reached for his collections to inform my own poetry, happiest under that influence. Yet he had always felt somehow out of reach for me intellectually, my responses to his work instinctual, even visceral.

So when I spotted that the Arvon Foundation was running a Ted Hughes-related writing course to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his death, I booked immediately. This, despite the fact that I stopped writing poems about eight years ago, feeling that poetry had run dry in me, and moved on to prose fiction instead. But I knew that if anything was going to stir poetry in me again, it would be my love of Hughes.

The 5-day course was held in South Yorkshire at Lumb Bank - a large, eccentric house on a steep bank of the Calder Valley, long coveted and eventually owned by Hughes, who later donated it to Arvon to help other writers.

The tutors were Christopher Reid, Hughes's editor at Faber and a poet in his own right (I thoroughly recommend his comprehensive edition of Letters of Ted Hughes) and Steve Ely, a Hughesian with three poetry collections from Smokestack and a non-fiction book, Ted Hughes's South Yorkshire: Made In Mexborough (2015). The midweek guest was Dr Yvonne Reddick whose recent pamphlet Translating Mountains (2017) won the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition and whose scholarship includes Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet (2017). A surprise drop-in guest at the end of the week was star of the Faber New Poets scheme, Zaffar Kunial, whose debut Us is published by Faber (2018).

'Writing with Ted Hughes' - Lumb Bank, Sep 2018

The format of the course was a Ted Hughes fan wet dream, frankly.

Me, on the road to Mytholmroyd, the small Yorkshire town where Hughes was born in 1930

Our mornings were spent reading and dissecting his poetry in a group, alongside writing exercises in response to what we were learning. In the afternoons, we had one-to-one tutorials to discuss our own material, or wrote poetry in the house where Hughes himself had penned some of the very poems we were studying. We tried physical exercises - retracing Hughes's steps through the Calder Valley on long rainy walks, visiting Plath's grave in nearby Heptonstall churchyard, even throwing handfuls of sycamore keys in the air to recreate specific lines in his poems - and wrote ekphrastic responses to powerful woodcuts by Hughes's friend and illustrator, the artist Leonard Baskin.

Sylvia Plath's grave in Heptonstall churchyard: the quotation is from 16th century Chinese poet, Wu Ch'Eng-En

We considered the mythic and elegiac strains in his work, and deconstructed his poems in search of his favourite imagery and poetic techniques, such as assonance, alliteration and visual elements. The midweek guest, Yvonne Reddick, read an unpublished poem by Hughes, 'The Grouse,' which is included in her recent book, and discussed both its fascinating origins and its significance within the canon. For myself, I came across a dead creature in the bee-bole garden at Lumb Bank - I thought this was a young crow, but fellow attendee Abi Matthews says it's a mole!  - whose black, melting corpse was reminiscent of Baskin's sketch that inspired 'The Knight,' one of Hughes's strongest pieces in Cave Birds. Naturally, I then wrote my own poem on the find.

The dead crow-mole I found at Lumb Bank, the position of its limbs uncannily similar to a sketch by Baskin that inspired Hughes' poem 'The Knight'.

Before arriving at Lumb Bank, I had not written any new poems for about eight years, though I'd occasionally picked at extant work. I work as a writer, but in prose. I wasn't even sure that I could write a poem (or not what I would term a poem) and imagining my likely failure was a source of private terror for me. It felt as though somebody else had written my previous poetry, and I had no idea how to get back to that person.

But, as my psyche presumably knew, Ted Hughes was a bridge between those two halves of myself. Reading his work closely, considering his various influences - including visionary poets who have always excited me too, such as Yeats, Eliot, Blake, Hopkins etc. - and allowing his cadences to ring in the dark crevasse that yawned between me and that world, all these fed something inside me that made poetry possible again.

One of the industrial chimneys of the Upper Calder Valley that inspired poems like 'Lumb Chimneys' in TH's Remains of Elmet, clearly visible from Lumb Bank

By the end of the second day, I had begun to sense what Lawrence Lipking refers to in The Life of the Poet (University of Chicago Press, 1981) as a moment of 're-initiation'. Suddenly, I understood again how to write poetry, and in fact felt the most incredible pressure to do so, the pressure of dammed-up poems - not a meagre few, but enormous numbers of the bloody things, unwritten yet already formed and perfectly alive in my lizard-brain, just waiting to be accessed.

The danger is that away from that rarefied air, the sacred ground of poetic initiation, once more earning my daily crust by writing popular fiction, perhaps I'll be unable to tap into that treasure-house of unwritten poems. That's a genuine risk. And it's not one I can avoid. We all have to work and pay our bills somehow, and my day job - a demanding job too - is writing genre fiction.

The view from my bedroom window at Lumb Bank, where I wrote several new poems

But with diligent watchfulness, I hope to build and protect a few spaces within my life as a prose-writer where poetry has a chance to breathe. To that end, I'll be going back to Ted Hughes - reading, studying, dissecting his work on my own, and hoping to recreate at least a little of the magic I felt at Lumb Bank.

I also hope to keep in touch with my fellow Hughesians from the course, whose poems, discussions, and intelligent insights made the week particularly special. 

On Friendship

Why does truth always sound more ironic than lies? Or is that just my jaded ear? Thus Oscar Wilde: 'True friends stab you in the front.'

Find other quotations by writers on the delicate art of friendship at the Arvon Foundation blog.

Arvon Writing Retreat

The Arvon Foundation: Lumb Bank, Summer 2007. That's me at the front on the far left, in case you weren't certain; I nearly missed this group photo because I'd fallen asleep over my manuscript! Tutors Lee Weatherly and Malorie Blackman are sitting at the front. Lee is grasping the bench with both hands, as though afraid it may fly away with her at any moment, with Malorie Blackman beside her, clearly less horrified by the lens. On the far right, for some reason looking as though she only has one leg, is Bridget Collins, author of a debut teen novel due out from Bloomsbury this autumn.

This photograph appears courtesy of Claire McNamee.

At the end of this month - I'm not quite at packing stage, but am gearing myself up mentally - I shall be going on a five day Arvon writing retreat. It's untutored, which means there'll be plenty of time for some actual work instead of the more dubious options of chatting, lazing about and generally getting sloshed that are available on most writing courses.

Though having said that, the last Arvon course I attended was probably the one where I worked - or was worked - the hardest. It was a course on Writing Teen Fiction, and the tutors were Malorie Blackman and Lee Weatherly, both of whom are very stern disciplinarians. We had a two-to-three hour group workshop in the mornings, wrote up our daily assignments during lunch breaks and early afternoon, then would meet again for a slightly shorter workshop or reading after supper. At least two out of the four afternoons each of us would meet a tutor individually to discuss work in progress. We then had to present said work on the final two evenings in a series of individual readings of about ten minutes each.

Although that may not sound desperately arduous, by the time fifteen people have got their own lunch in a galley kitchen, sorted out any photocopying or typing that needed to be done, and found a quiet spot to compose for a few hours, suddenly it's supper time and after that, the late reading or workshop. So if you want to work on your own stuff beyond those few hours in the afternoon, you have to burn some serious midnight oil. Which means rolling into bed in the early hours ... and bleary eyes the next morning if you actually make the 9am workshop!

Don't think I'm complaining though. I thoroughly enjoyed the Teen Fiction course, and took away some brilliant advice from Blackman and Weatherly, even though my year has been utterly consumed by the Warwick Laureateship and the new editorship of Horizon Review!

So I'm eagerly looking forward to my writing retreat this summer, and spending some quality time alone in a room with my manuscript. One day soon, it will be ready to send out to some lucky, lucky agent ...

White-Hot First Draft?

There are two very basic schools of thought when it comes to drafting a novel.

Plan A: The White-Hot First Draft Method of Writing a Novel
As I recall, which means I could be wrong, this method was first made popular by John Braine in his book How to Write a Novel.

The writer should dash through the first draft of their novel at white-hot speed, ignoring mistakes and bad writing, just concentrating on totting up the page count and finishing the damned thing. Only once it's finished is the writer allowed to return to his or her mss with a cooler head and rewrite, tidying up erratic spellings or punctuation, and smoothing out bumps in the story detail, plot or character arcs.

Clearly, this approach requires the ability to 'switch' between writing brains: the creative brain, working at full tilt, and the editor's brain, moving critically and methodically through the finished mss.

Unfortunately, I'm not terribly good at switching off my inner critic. This means the white-hot draft option, though appealing, is never going to be the easy one for me.

Mistakes leap off the screen at me and demand instant revision. Characters insist on changing their dialogue as soon as it's spoken. And the plot ... well, the plot either has to follow a smooth and unvarying schedule or be kept under constant supervision, with each new plotpoint demanding a quick fix or rewrite in the previous chapter(s).

So I'm the sort of writer who prefers ...

Plan B: The Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back Method of Writing a Novel
This is the way I write novels, mostly. I do plan some within an inch of their lives, prior to starting work, but still can't quite bring myself to ignore what I've just written.

The writer constantly scrutinises their work for possible errors: these can range from spelling mistakes or unhappily placed colons (see ten words back) to major problems like poor character development, jumping tension within scenes, and implausible or disastrous plot points.

There are advantages to stopping every few pages to keep your writing under control. It means you have far less editing and polishing work to do, theoretically, when you finish the book. It also means you shouldn't have to scrap the novel in the closing pages and start again at the beginning because Daisy turns out to be a man in drag on page 347 which means the man she married on page 12 is either into men in drag or has never shared a bed with her. Either of which needed to be made clear to the reader before the last chapter of the book ...

So here I am at the start - or restart, due to structural and other changes suggested on my recent Arvon course - of my teen fantasy novel. Do I write a white-hot first draft, as advocated by both Lee Weatherly and Malorie Blackman, our tutors, and also by Melvin Burgess, our mid-week reader, or do I continue with my plodding knit-one, purl-three approach to novel making?

I'm rather inclined, in my present mood, to rush into a white-hot draft. Onward and upward! But can I sustain such a punishing pace or will I start backsliding in a few days by making secret corrections while my other brain's sleeping?

And if I type too fast, will my dreaded RSI problems resurface?

Back to the Wordface

I'm just emerging from a long dark tunnel brought about by a week at Arvon and moving house at the same time. I've got my computer up and running, my printer connected and my favourite books out - though not yet on shelves - and have at least a rough outline prepared for what I'm meant to be doing, work-wise, over the next few weeks.

My Arvon course was for writers of teen fiction. (I've had a teen fantasy novel on the back burner for the past year or so.) I turned up at Lumb Bank tired, preoccupied with the house move, and not really in the mood to write. On the first day, I considered myself an experienced writer who only needed help with the structure of teen fiction. By the last day, I felt I'd be better employed as a plongeuse in a backstreet café, so greatly had my sense of ability as a novelist been shaken.

But all this is good. I now have a far stronger vision of where my story is going and, importantly, why it's headed in that direction.

I have also learnt a few stylistic tricks from the two tutors, Lee Weatherly and Malorie Blackman, which will stay with me forever in every type of writing I attempt. For a writer, even a published novelist and poet, it seems there's always something more to learn.

Before I moved house two weeks ago, I was absolutely intent on building up a portfolio of new poems towards my third collection. That work will continue - my third collection is scheduled for publication in 2008 - but with less immediate emphasis, as I put the bulk of my efforts into finishing this teen fantasy while the inspiration and desire to write is still inside me.

Thanks to the Arvon course, I have a solid synopsis prepared, and a strong story structure in place; now all I need is to sit down at the keyboard every day for the next few months and grow me a novel!