Promoting the Scholarly Reading and Discussion of the work of Ted Hughes
We’re delighted to announce the publication of Recklings, a quarterly bulletin for Ted Hughes Society members. The first issue was published at the Summer Solstice, featuring a mixture of thoughts, news, reviews and recommendations from a diverse and interesting community of Hughes enthusiasts.
If you’re a member, you’ll have received a link to access the bulletin last month. If you’re not yet a member, click here for details of how you can become one.
The new issue of the Ted Hughes Society Journal has just been published and is available as an open access download here - Volume 9, issue 2 (2024) ISSN 2051-7270 (Download)
Contents include:
Little Cub Hierophant: Shamanic Election, Magical Flight and Ted Hughes’s Protagonist of Crow Michael Jones
Ted Hughes – ‘No Falsifying Dream’ Mike Sweeting
Ted Hughes, the Chthulucene, the Cyborg and the child audience Jessica De Waal
Review Article: The Letters of Seamus Heaney Mark Wormald
Reviews
Ted Hughes died on 28th October 1998. Twenty-five years on, two events are being held to mark this anniversary. The first, ‘Re-reading Lupercal’, coincides with the publication of a new ‘heritage edition’ of Hughes’s great second collection and takes place at the British Library on 7 November. The event promises an evening of conversation chaired by Carol Hughes in which the poets Alice Oswald and Zaffar Kunial and the novelist Jane Feaver will discuss what remains one of Hughes’s most popular and influential books.
Further details of the event can be found on the British Library website. The event is in-person, and tickets can be booked through the British Library.
A week later, on the evening of 14 November, the Ted Hughes Society and the Elmet Trust will be hosting a joint online shared reading from and discussion of the poet’s work. The event is for members of the Society and the Trust only. To join the Society click here; to learn more about the Elmet Trust visit their website. Details of the evening will be circulated in due course to Society and Trust members.
The British Library has announced an event which will be of interest to all readers of Ted Hughes. To mark the publication of the new ‘heritage edition’ of Hughes’s second collection Lupercal, on the 7th November 2024 the Library is hosting ‘Re-reading Lupercal’, an evening of conversation chaired by Carol Hughes in which the poets Alice Oswald and Zaffar Kunial and the novelist Jane Feaver will discuss what remains one of Hughes’s most popular and influential books.
Further details of the event can be found on the British Library website. The event is in-person, and tickets can be booked through the British Library.
The Ted Hughes Network have issued a call for papers for a symposium, jointly organised with the British Library, entitled Ted Hughes’s Expressionism: Visionary Subjectivity, to be held at the British Library on Friday 15th September 2023.
As the Call for Papers explains:
This symposium is designed to explore and investigate the claim that Hughes’s most characteristic, distinctive, and innovative work—wherein lies the weight of his claim to be regarded as a major poet and an internationally significant artist—is essentially Expressionist, characterised by a rejection of objectivity in representation in favour of a Visionary Subjectivity that draws on inner life and imagination to transform and distort content, deploying abstraction, typologies and symbols to shape presentations in an essentially didactic manner.
Full details on the Symposium can be found here on the Call for Papers, and the deadline for submission is Friday 12th May 2023.
The Ted Hughes Society is delighted to announce the publication of a new issue of the Ted Hughes Society Journal.
This issue of the Journal, whilst much-delayed, arrives just in time for the 9th International Ted Hughes Conference (7th-9th September 2022, University of Huddersfield) and features a range of new essays including: Ann Skea discussing ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’, Catherine Macnaughton on Hughes’s engagement with Phèdre, Maria Kaminska’s exploration of irony in Zbigniew Herbert and Crow, and Mark Wormald on the place of John Montague in the web of friendships connecting Barrie Cooke, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
Alongside these substantial essays you’ll find reviews of works including Heather' Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.
The journal is open access and can be found here.
The Ted Hughes Society is delighted to announce the launch of our new monthly podcast: The Ted Hughes Society Podcast.
Hosted by the Society’s Secretary, Mick Gowar, the first three podcast episodes will feature recordings from the recent launch reading and discussion of society chair Mark Wormald's excellent new book The Catch, and will include contributions from poet, critic and priest Malcolm Guite, author and storyteller Martin Shaw, scholars and writers Terry Gifford and Katherine Robinson, and of course Mark himself. There will also be contributions from writers, critics and storytellers who were not present at the launch event, but nevertheless have interesting insights to cointribute to the project of 'fishing for Ted Hughes'.
Future episodes will include discussions with leading Hughes scholars, interviews and other material.
The podcast can be accessed through all the major podcast platforms, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Acast.
In April 2022, the Society hosted the first public reading and discussion of The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes, the critically-acclaimed book by Mark Wormald.
Whilst this event was only available to members of the Ted Hughes Society at the time, we have now made the recording available through our Youtube channel:
For more information on the event and the participants, please visit the dedicated Event page.
In an exciting development which holds very significant potential for future study of the work of Ted Hughes, the University of Huddersfield recently announced that it has acquired the substantial Hughes collection of the late poet, scholar and member of the Ted Hughes Society, Mark Hinchcliffe.
Ceramic jaguar sculpture made by Ted Hughes, included in the Mark Hinchcliffe Collection at the University of Huddersfield
The collection will be freely available to the public for research at the University’s Heritage Quay Archive, and includes some truly outstanding items. As Steve Ely, director of the Ted Hughes Network at the University of Huddersfield explained:
We’re delighted to have acquired Mark Hinchliffe’s outstanding collection. It comprises over one hundred and seventy items, including signed first editions of dozens of Hughes’s trade, limited-edition and fine-press publications; original letters written by Hughes and his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath; signed and annotated books from Hughes’s personal collection; and, some absolutely unique items: a very fine ceramic jaguar sculpted by Hughes in 1967, the only intact example anywhere in the world of Hughes’s work in the plastic arts; an album containing hundreds of photographs, including some previously unknown photographs of both Hughes and Plath; a holograph manuscript of the radio play ‘Orpheus & Eurydice’ with some significant differences to the broadcast and published versions, and, a bespoke edition of the Gehenna Press’s limited edition Howls & Whispers, comprising the original fine-book, 8 original watercolours by Leonard Baskin and a unique copper-plate, engraved portrait of Sylvia Plath
A long-time member and former chair of the Elmet Trust, Mark Hinchcliffe is much-missed in the community of Ted Hughes scholarship, and it is a fitting tribute to his years of devoted study that his collection will now afford future generations of scholars a unique and exciting entry into such crucial aspects of Hughes’s life and work.
Today (28th April 2022) marks the publication of The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes (Bloomsbury) the long-awaited book by Mark Wormald, the Chair of the Ted Hughes Society and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge.
The book had its first public reading and discussion at a Ted Hughes Society online event earlier this week, and a recording of this event will be made available soon.
Mark has also read from and spoken about the book under the auspices of Orvis (the leading fly-fishing brand) and you can see this event here:
The book has already started to receive laudatory reviews, with Alex Diggins in The Critic observing that the book
is most convincing as an account of care, love even: for fish, but most significantly for the rivers they swim through. You can’t shake the feeling that the most central relationship Hughes had was with his two beloved home rivers, the Taw and the Torridge, in Devon. Knowing how quickly rivers sicken, he became vocally involved in their protection […] Wormald, like Hughes, is intensely alert to fishing as a calendar of time’s helter-skelter rush.
And Cal Flyn writing in The Times that
In The Catch, Wormald offers a partial biography of the former poet laureate […] by filleting Hughes’s literary output – specifically, the long and complicated genesis of his 1983 collection River and the poet’s private fishing journals. The result is a fine book, penetrating and poetic, filled with honeyed prose and thoughtful criticism.
Those interested in experiencing what is a deeply moving, personal book as well as a brilliant exposition of a whole aspect of Hughes’s life and work that has been hitherto little appreciated or understood, can find more details of The Catch here, and pick it up in any good bookshop in the UK as of today.
The Ted Hughes Society is delighted to announce that our next online event for members will be a reading and discussion of The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes by Mark Wormald, the Chair of the Ted Hughes Society. The event takes place at 18.30 on Monday 25th April 2022, ahead of the book’s publication by Bloomsbury on 28th April 2022.
The event will be introduced and moderated by Katharine Robinson, and will include contributions and responses from Aoine Landweer-Cooke, Malcolm Guite, Martin Shaw and Terry Gifford. It will be open to subscribing members of the Ted Hughes Society only.
The Catch tells the story of Ted Hughes's journey, as a fisherman, poet and father, into and beyond the collection River (1983), and chronicles Mark's own journeys, fishing in Ted's footsteps, his fishing diaries in mind, into the poems of River and other deep waters.
The reading and discussion is likely to concentrate on a few of these poems, so an advance reading of them may be useful: 'Strangers', 'Go Fishing', 'The Kingfisher', 'A Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan' and 'That Morning.'
The event is free of charge for Society members, and to register to attend please visit the Eventbrite page.
Last week Pembroke College, Cambridge made the exciting announcement that the Barrie Cooke Archive - a collection of papers and artwork related to the artist Barrie Cooke and his close friends Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, is now open to researchers.
Barrie Cooke in 2012. Photo by Mark Wormald.
Mark Wormald, Fellow of Pembroke College and Chair of the Ted Hughes Society wrote:
Pembroke College is delighted to announce the opening today of the internationally significant literary archive of the British-born expressionist artist Barrie Cooke (1931-2014), fisherman and friend of poets, and an associated collection of 150 images he made in response to their work. Cooke moved to Ireland in 1954, and the archive represents an extraordinary record of creative collaboration across geographical borders as well as between visual and literary art.
The full catalogue of the Barrie Cooke Archive can now be accessed online.
For more information on the discovery of the archive and its acquisition see this article in the Guardian.
The Barrie Cooke Archive will undoubtedly have a great effect on the study of the work of Ted Hughes, and one which will no doubt unfold over several years. The Society will be excited to see what researchers find in this treasure trove.
The Ted Hughes Society are delighted to announce that our patron, Dame Marina Warner will be giving the keynote lecture at the forthcoming ‘Conversation with the World’, 9th International Ted Hughes Conference at the University of Huddersfield, 7th-9th September 2022.
Marina Warner, eminent novelist, mythographer and memoirist, wrote the foreword to the recent anniversary edition of Hughes’s Crow, and spoke at the Society’s Ted Hughes’s Crow at 50 event in 2021.
For those still considering submitting a proposal to speak at ‘Conversation with the World’, we are also happy to announce an extension to the deadline of the conference’s call for papers. The new deadline for submission is 31st January 2022. For more details and the full call for papers, please visit the conference website.
On Thursday January 27th 2022, renowned poet and Ted Hughes scholar Steve Ely will lead an online, collaborative close reading of Hughes’s poem ‘Mayday on Holderness’.
Steve describes the event:
In a letter to Keith Sagar (16th May, 1974), Hughes’s sister Olwyn passed on his description of ‘Mayday on Holderness’ as:
the introductory poem to what was to be a series, and which included the better poems in LUPERCAL. The whole thing was to be a celebration of the serpentine spirit of the hungry erg [sic]. That serpentine course threads them all together (PC 33).
However we read ‘erg’ – urge? – the ‘serpentine course’ is, of course, the digestive system: in a letter to Leonard Baskin in July 1959, Hughes describes ‘the general drift of the [Lupercal] poems’ as “Man as an elaborately perfected intestine, or upright weasel” (LTH 147). At around the same time Hughes wrote to Olwyn explaining that Lupercal expresses ‘an entire vision of life’ arranged around ‘the notion of God as the devourer –as the mouth & gut’, and asserts that ‘mother-love’ (associated with the sexual urge through the fertility rite of the Roman Lupercalia) is the only ‘defence’ against the ‘natural appetite of everything living to devour everything else’ (LTH 148).
The dominant theme of Lupercal is thus the struggle of vitality against death – or, as Leonard Scijag puts it, between ‘eros and thanatos’, the two principles existing in an explosive, symbiotic, endlessly creative balance.[i] ‘Mayday on Holderness’ is a manifesto-like expression of this essentially Heraclitean or Epicurean (Lucretian) worldview – a worldview that would inform Hughes’s work throughout his career. It is this that makes ‘Mayday on Holderness’such an important poem in his oeuvre; indeed, there is a sense in which the poem provides an ‘embryonic template’ of his later work in the same way that T.S. Eliot’s early poem ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ (according to Hughes in ‘A Dancer to God’) did to Eliot’s later work.[ii]
Steve will open the session with an introductory talk of around fifteen minutes before leading a line-by-line collaborative close reading of the poem in which all present are invited to contribute. Society members who wish to take part should register via Eventbrite by 20 January, when an annotated copy of the poem and a handout will be distributed.
[i] Leonard M. Scijag, The Poetry of Ted Hughes (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986). p.75.
[ii] Gillian Groszewski, ‘A Dancer to God’, http://thetedhughessociety.org/dancertogod
The Ted Hughes Network have issued a call for papers for the 9th International Ted Hughes Conference, entitled ‘Conversation with the World’ and hosted at the University of Huddersfield, 7-9th September 2022.
Engaging the 15th anniversary of the publication of Christopher Reid’s landmark Letters of Ted Hughes volume, the conference calls for papers considering the full range of Hughes’s poetic and epistolary ‘conversation with the world’. The deadline for submission of proposed papers and panels is 17th January 2021.
More details of the conference, including the full CFP can be found on the event’s website.
Cave Birds is the least well known and understood of Hughes's major collections. This is partly because some of the poems are difficult, but the difficulty is increased by the fact that it has never been republished with the Leonard Baskin drawings that are an integral part of the work. Words and images are more closely connected than in any other book by Hughes. It doesn't help that Hughes himself seems not to have liked Cave Birds.
Neil Roberts and Kate Robinson disagree with Hughes and will be leading a discussion which they hope will enhance understanding and appreciation of this neglected masterpiece. Neil will be exploring the way the sequence developed in response to Baskin's drawings. Kate will discuss the collection’s debts to early Welsh literature. These Welsh underpinnings provide a window into the book’s narrative and into Hughes’s evolving syncretism in this 'Alchemical Cave Drama’.
The event takes place online: Wednesday 3 November, 18.00-19.30 GMT, to register please follow the link below.
Ted Hughes Society members Carrie Smith and James Underwood will be holding an online launch of their new books on Monday, October 25th from 6:00pm-7:00pm.
Carrie’s The Page Is Printed is a study of Ted Hughes’s composition methods, which includes a consideration of the physical circumstances - the places, paper, ink, number and variety of drafts - and also the ‘intellectual and creative environments’ in which the poems were made.
James has recently published Early Larkin, a study of the early career of a poet who Ted Hughes held in a warm personal regard, which was not always reciprocated. Of particular interest is James’s investigation of the schoolgirl stories of Brunette Coleman, a pseudonym of Larkin’s, and how writing these books encouraged Larkin’s ‘interest in everything outside himself’ and ultimately helped the poet discover his distinctive voice.
If you’d like to attend, please click on this link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hughes-and-larkin-book-launches-registration-181946796767
The British Library have announced an online event which will be of interest to all Society members and readers of Hughes: Ted Hughes and the Theatre takes place at 19.30 on Wednesday 15th September 2021.
The event brings together Ted Hughes Society Patron Melvyn Bragg, and the award-winning theatre and opera directors Tim Supple, Jonathan Kent and David Thacker for a discussion of Hughes’s work in the theatre and, most fascinatingly, a conversation around Kent, Supple, and Thacker’s collaborations with Hughes.
The event costs £5.00 and more information and registration can be found on the BL’s event page.
Admirers of Ann Skea’s work will be delighted to see that she has just made available, online, and via her website, an ebook version of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest, which was first published by the University of New England Press in 1994. The book examines Hughes’ creative alchemy in Cave Birds, Remains of Elmet and River, and draws on Skea’s own correspondence with Hughes and on unpublished material from original manuscripts.
While preserving the essence of her argument and the bulk of her text, Ann Skea has taken the opportunity to provide some discreet but important updates, both in format — re-organizing the illustrations from Alchemical manuscripts and from the work of William Blake she originally provided to ensure a more dialogue between her text and images, and adding images, including book covers and her own photographs and illustrations — and in other details, including discreet rephrasings where the passage of time since her book’s original publication demands it. Other deft and graceful additions include incorporated addenda and appendices she has published elsewhere, for instance about the negotiations between Hughes, Peter Keen, and the publishers that led to the publication of River in 1983; and she has also revisited footnotes and in-text references to acknowledge Paul Keegan’s edition of the Collected Poems and Christopher Reid’s edition of the Letters.
The Poetic Quest is freely available at: https://ann.skea.com/PQIndex.html
On 17th March 2021, the Ted Hughes Society and Pembroke College, Cambridge hosted a seminar, ‘Ted Hughes’s Crow at 50’, an event which brought together a highly distinguished panel of speakers together with Society and Pembroke members to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Hughes’s seminal collection. A recording of the seminar has now been made available by Pembroke College:
For more details of the event, including a full bibliography, links and further reading and discussion, please visit our Crow at 50 page.