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. 

Mslexia Workshop: Encouraging New Poems

The next instalment of my writing workshops for the Mslexia 2011 Poetry Competition, judged by Jo Shapcott, is now up on the Mslexia website.

It's entitled Encouraging New Poems.

Poems beget poems. The more poems you write, the more you will find waiting to be written. So when you hit a rich vein, don’t rest after you’ve finished your first draft and put it aside to mature. Keep hammering away at the wordface. 

Ted Hughes believed that poem sequences are a good way of generating new poetry, particularly during a creative dry spell. Sometimes you sit down to write something new and the words won’t come. Linking poems together can help to maintain the momentum of previous inspiration ...

Read more and follow the exercises for this instalment.

Letting it all hang out

I suffer from a major conflict in my poetry writing, between the in-built compulsion to be neat and tidy - to an almost anal extent - and a desire to stuff all that prissy nonsense and just bloody well write.

I was looking a few nights ago at Vidyan Ravinthiran's excellent article on Ted Hughes and Poetic Embarrassment at Frances Leviston's Verse Palace (over a year old now, I think, but well worth a revisit) and thinking, YES! What the hell am I doing, shaving lines to a bare minimum, fussing over commas and spaces and 'poetic tone' in what must ultimately become heavily engineered poems?

I should be writing poems whose truth and meaning are just as important as their look on the page or their sound on the air - if not more important.

It's easy to forget, when lost in the idea of crafting a poem, of being a poet, of not only publishing each poem you write but actively expecting to publish it, that a poem exists for a reason beyond careerism and craft. Or it should do.

In his article, Vidyan describes what I call just bloody well writing the poem as humiliatingly akin to 'heading out to a party with your flies deliberately left undone, bra straps on show, then doing drunken impressions of David Brent. Not fashionably mussed and crumpled – just wrong, embarrassable, vulnerable.'

He then compares the cringe-making but raw and startling electricity of some of Ted Hughes' wilder work with what we tend to see in the better magazines and on well-bred publishers' lists these days: 'so many finicky, unambitious, slightly self-regarding poems, whose aim seems simply to get from the top of the page to the bottom without tripping up, without using any excess adjectives, without putting themselves on the line, being photographed from their less flattering side.'

Vidyan hits it right on the head. I thought about all this at the TS Eliot Prize readings the other night, where the work on show was beautifully-written, resonant, polished, poetic, yet rarely gave me a glimpse of the sheer urgency and violent poetic drive and power that one gets from even the slightest of Ted Hughes' poems. (With the exception of Brian Turner's work, perhaps - though I'd like to see him achieve that sledgehammer effect without having to use the bodies of unknown civilians to do it.)

So, what does this mean? That I should write poetry with my breasts hanging out and my hair unkempt and a slightly Ancient Mariner look to my eyes? Well, maybe I should.

It can't be any worse than writing poems in the mealy-mouthed, cold-sweat fear of the embarrassment of 'getting it wrong'.

Birmingham Book Festival - coming up!

I'm extremely pleased to be running a day of one-to-one poetry surgeries on Saturday October 10th at the Birmingham Book Festival, under the auspices of The Poetry School and along with Mimi Khalvati.

Here are some more details of the festival:

The Birmingham Book Festival (6th – 29th October 2009), in its tenth glorious year, presents... Nick Hornby on ‘Juliet, Naked’, Kate Mosse on novels and readers’ groups, novelists Sadie Jones and Kate Pullinger in conversation, BBC Radio Four’s A Good Read and the final of the BBC Radio Four Poetry Slam (recorded for broadcast), John Boyne, author of The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, David Edgar on writing plays, Paul Griffiths on Ophelia, Robert Goddard, the crime writer, George Monbiot on the future, Karen Armstrong on faith, Richard Hamblyn on extraordinary clouds, Jo Toye on The Archers, thriller writer Roger Ellory launches his new novel, Lindsey Davis talks about her new book, Brian Keenan on his life and times, the Tindal Street Booker Prize authors (Catherine O’Flynn, Gaynor Arnold and Clare Morrall ) and many more writers and performers, also workshops and seminars.

We also have a wonderful Readers’ Afternoon on Saturday 24th October with novelists Jenn Ashworth, Mark Illis, Jeremy Page and Amanda Smyth with special group booking discounts for readers’ groups and groups of readers!

Do come to events, take part in workshops, become a Festival Friend... for more details of everything and to join the e-list visit Birmingham Book Festival | 6-29 October 2009. Follow us on facebook, on twitter and read our blog.

Gawain, Again

I'm rather relieved this week because, after months of impasse on my Gawain and the Green Knight sequence, I am finally clear about its structure and general direction.

It all happened rather suddenly. I was just browsing my file of poems, tidying things up and pondering the shape my fourth collection might take, when it struck me that instead of just vaguely picking out key moments in the poem, or key emotions, and writing poems around them in an ad hoc fashion, I should follow the traditional division of the poem into four Fitts and restrict myself to writing only three or four poems for each Fitt.

For this new-and-improved sequence, I selected four of the poems I had already written and jettisoned the rest. Then I started writing some new poems in a more linear way, choosing key scenes rather than floating about the topic.

I was also concerned to change the style of the poems themselves. To regiment my earlier disorganised margins, I pulled in all off-set lines to the left-hand margin and capitalised the first word of each line. This seemed to give the growing sequence an air of "difference" from the other poems I've written this year, and also some faked, much-needed gravitas.

Having done that, and written some new poems in this new format, I then discarded the capitalisation, which had served its purpose, and allowed some of the lines to drift back into their earlier positions, away from the left-hand margin. But I am keeping the majority of lines flush with the left for the moment, as that formal discipline does seem to be working on the whole.

I'm still not sure whether the sequence is any good, by which I mean worth publishing. But it has some good moments. It's definitely something to keep tinkering with, on and off, with a spanner and an oily rag. My Sunday sequence.

Looking Back

I've written a handful of poems in recent weeks about my childhood and teenage years: Proustian reminiscences, holiday snapshots, family portraits, that kind of thing. It's a well-worn genre within poetry, and that fact alone makes me worried. Is it the poetic equivalent of a mid-life crisis to suddenly start writing poems about one's youth?

They're not desperately bad, these poems. One has just been accepted at Poetry Review, and I'm fairly confident of placing a number of others in magazines over the next year. They are honest poems, written - thanks to a general lack of it in my family - without sentimentality. They appear to work well in a stand-alone lyric sense, and easily earn their place in my fourth collection.

Yet somehow I'm uneasy about having written them and about wishing to write more, which I definitely do. There seems to be a positive wellspring there, looking back at my past with older eyes, and any gush of new, publishable poetry must surely be welcome after twelve years in the game.

But am I really the sort of poet who writes 'nostalgia'?

Being Honest

Hopefully not another blind alley, since I've lost myself in a few of those recently, but I'm writing poetry again after a short break (not dried up but forcing myself to concentrate on prose this summer, since, as David Morley advised me a few months back, we all have to eat and prose tends to pay where poetry doesn't).

I didn't want to write any poetry again until the autumn, but my poetry had other ideas ...

The most important thing for me at the moment, in terms of writing poems, is to be honest and not get sucked into making empty gestures, by which I mean the 'telling' last line which explains the poem, or the genre piece which points to nothing beyond itself, and other crimes against poetry.

The danger is that in not wishing to be too damned honest - i.e. gushing or becoming too realistic/mundane for poetry to bear it, so that it breaks apart into prose - I may err on the side of being too laconical or obscure.

Artifice or artistic integrity. Dirty great hints to the reader or embarrassed dumbshow. Where are the dividing lines? What are the differences?

The Gawain sequence & an angry squeak

My exams are finally over and I can return to writing the historical novel that I was entangled with before revision began in earnest. This summer will be given over, by and large, to writing prose. The thought gives me pause, and no little emotional anguish. I'm beginning to realise that I simply can't afford to write poetry. It doesn't pay well enough - if anything at all, in the majority of cases - and with the economic downturn, I don't have the luxury of being able to work without at least the potential prospect of payment.

I've spent the past two decades without a regular income: first, as a semi-pro snooker player, then as a full-time poet. The handful of novels I've published in the past ten years have been genre, written under a pen-name, low-paid, as my numerous attempts at mainstream fiction since Kissing the Pink (Sceptre, 1999) have proved impossible to place. Yet I seem reasonably talented at writing the shorter, genre novel. Which is just as well, frankly. Since my Gregory Award in 1996, I've published five collections of poetry - three long, two short; the money I've received from sales of all five poetry collections would not even amount to the money garnered from one genre novel.

I enjoy writing prose. It can be a rich and highly entertaining canvas to work on, even in the relatively narrow field of genre fiction. But poetry is - and always has been, since I was a young child - my vocation. I had hoped that the next few years would see me working more fruitfully in poetry. But a recent application for a poetry 'job' for which I was more than qualified, and which would have secured me enough money over the next two years to continue writing without fear of eviction, was turned down out of hand. In the meantime, like many people at the moment, I've reached a critical point cash-wise and can't ignore my financial problems any longer.

So, as I mentioned earlier, I'm going to post up the unpublished Gawain sequence poems I've written so far - removing a few of them later, as I may yet send some of them out to magazines - and then make a stab at actually writing some new ones, which I will then post up as drafts whenever they appear in my notebook. Two of the early Gawain poems have already been posted here, and a few have been accepted for publication elsewhere, but the rest are fair game.

I'll start either tomorrow at at the weekend, then post up one Gawain poem every other day, until I run out of poems. And what will happen then?

My Po Mo

I've been writing nothing but prose recently, and have exams coming up at the end of this month, so poetry has been the poor relation this spring.

It takes me ages to get back into writing poetry after a few months away from the habit. To counteract that effect, I'd rather like to try a month of poems in June or maybe July: writing one poem a day if possible, or every other day if that's too difficult. And posting them up here on Raw Light. I can always delete them after a few days, and just leave the first few lines behind. That's acceptable practice, isn't it?

July would probably be best, as June will be filled with all those things I'm putting off until after my exams. It would be an excellent discipline, I think. Though I'm not sure it will result in any good poems.

Post-Baby Book Boom

I was speaking to the poet David Morley yesterday at Warwick University; his wife recently gave birth, and he was telling me how he had been writing furiously ever since the event, poems shooting out of him.

I was reminded by his story of my own experience back in 2002 in North Cornwall when, having just given birth to twin boys, I found myself writing a novel some 100,000 words long. I wrote at night largely, in an annex of the renovated barn we were renting, with one ear open for any squeaks from the baby monitor.

This system worked well for about five or six weeks postnatally. The boys slept in Moses baskets in the living room and I tapped away most of the night. It was the summer holidays and my husband, a teacher, was not at work, so he was able to look after the babies during the daytime while I caught up on my sleep - though breastfeeding meant having to be at least vaguely awake some of the time - and I would take the night shift.

The oddest thing was how little sleep I seemed to require. I've always been able to survive on five or six hours a night for long periods of time without too much trouble, but during those six weeks after the birth of my twin boys, I was almost electric. I would plug myself into a couple of hours' nap to recharge, and then stay awake for the next twenty-two, not only functioning normally, but super-normally, writing thousands upon thousands of words as they just flew out of me.

That novel was never published; it remains one of those bottom drawer efforts that I still wonder about. But I do wonder now, far less electrically charged these days, what it was about the post-birth period - traditionally held to be so exhausting, particularly with twins! - that suddenly lit me up creatively in that bizarre, almost painful fashion, forcing me to write and write as though I were running out of time to do so.

It occurs to me that some kind of adrenalin must kick in at times following a birth - not for every birth, not for every person - that leaves you in that super-charged state. A natural reaction, perhaps, designed to allow you to cope with a three month period of such profound lack of sleep that it would knock most people sideways.

For creative people, it may also result in a period of the most astonishing fecundity.

At the time, I assumed it was because I had been dragging around for nine months with this double burden, this sense of gravity and vulnerability that can occasionally kick in when pregnant. I was certainly vast with the boys, and carried them full term, so wide towards the end that I had to shuffle sideways through doors. So when their birth finally released me, I was filled with such restless energy that I felt I could do anything. Super-human ...

So how to recapture that state of being super-charged, of being creatively electric and lit up from within - without having to produce twins beforehand?