The Day Ted Hughes Died

Ted Hughes died on 28 October, 1998, aged 68. He had been suffering with colon cancer.

Just about everyone I know who reads and writes poetry seriously owes a debt to him, directly or indirectly. Even though I never met him (the nearest I came was receipt of a hand-written note in the summer before he died) I still think of him as the single biggest influence on my poetry-writing (and therefore reading) life. As I think Peter Sansom said at the time, his death was the first of a public figure that moved me personally.

These are grand claims, but they are true. It was the poetry of Ted Hughes which first alerted me to the concept of poetry which was not a hymn or a nursery rhyme. It was the poetry of Ted Hughes which I first understood as belonging to and coming from 'a poet', a living one at that, and not just a name in an anthology. And finally it was in Ted Hughes's poems which I found for the first time, aged thirteen, a sense of excitement in the act of reading.

Specifically, this was the first time I remember experiencing that vertiginous yet intimate sensation of reading poems which were not about me whilst sensing that they knew aboslutely everything about me at the same time. In the English lessons of Tim Borton we looked at 'Retired Colonel', 'Thistles', 'Pike' and (of course) 'The Though-Fox'. Later I remember being given the poem 'Wind' to write about in an exam, and found that I could. I can still remember the weird and not altogether comforting sense of self-awareness that interpreting the poem gave me. I particularly enjoyed the 'black-/back gull bent like an iron bar slowly'.

In the week that Ted Hughes died I was staying at the house he had owned and lived in, Lumb Bank, now owned by the Arvon Foundation, near Heptonstall in Yorkshire. My colleague and friend Siân Hughes (no relation) and I were acting 'in loco parentis' for a group of young poets who were being tutored by poets Jo Shapcott and Roger McGough, as part of their prize in the first ever Foyle Young Poets Award (then called the Simon Elvin Young Poets Award).

In the way of the old joke, it only rained twice that week, once for three days, and once for four. In the brief hiatus between these downpours, the sun did shine with what the poem 'Wind' calls 'blade-light'. It filled the dining room where we sat writing, the only time we saw it that week. After setting us our morning exercise, I noticed Jo Shapcott leaving the room. Five minutes later she silently beckoned Siân and me to follow her into the kitchen, where she whispered to us the news. At that exact moment telephones began ringing in the house, which Jo wisely told us to ignore.

From then on we had two main concerns: to protect the young poets from the gaze of the outside world (there were sightings of film crews near the grave of Sylvia Plath in Heptonstall); and to honour the memory of this great man whose life had touched all of ours so deeply. The first we achieved quickly. Jo broke the news to the group around the table, and we held an impromptu minute's silence. We got them to agree to a self-imposed curfew, also immaculately observed. As Seamus Heaney says in one of his sonnets of grief for his mother 'we all knew one thing by being there'.

Later that night, around the hearth of the house, Jo read 'Wind' in his honour, and we toasted his memory. The windows did indeed tremble to come in and we all felt the roots of the house move below us. Every one of us understood that this was the very house Hughes wrote about in the poem we were hearing taking place inside our heads and in the elements outside.

Jo closed by saying that her lasting memory of Ted Hughes would be one of personal encouragement, particularly in letters and in personal conversations. 'It is the side of him the world will never see,' she said, 'because kindness does not sell papers. Let that be your legacy to each other.' 

Like reading one of Hughes's poems, it was not a comfy experience to live at the centre of the storm of interest in his life that week. But I was pleased to have been there because the experience reminded me what made me want to write poems in the first place.  Now I also felt I had the resources to keep going. 

 

Lifesaving Poems: James Schuyler's 'June 30, 1974'

 

James Schuyler is probably best known for being a central member of the New York School of poets comprising Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. Having said that, it is probably fair to say that he is not as well known as his compatriots, a state of affairs which is neither just nor entirely explicable.

I was reminded of Schuyler's delicate, unnerving, gossipy and immediate poems this week as I read an essay of my friend Cliff Yates in which he describes the composition of poetry as an act about itself as much as the 'subect matter' at hand. 

Schuyler's project can be categorised in this way, it seems me. His long poems 'The Morning of the Poem', 'A Few Days' and 'Hymn to Life' range widely in their content but are all ultimately about themselves as constructed annotations of minute lived experience. They do not pretend to have been written at one sitting, often notating changes in weather, seasons and news of friends and in the wider world; in this way they are catalogues of experience, more akin to albums of snapshots than portraits in close-up. 

What makes Schuyler such a delight to read and re-read, is that he was no less accomplished at the short lyric 'poem of the moment'. 'June 30, 1974' is a good example of how these poems often proceed: there are mentions of specific friends and places, gossip, tabletalk, and a rapturous adoration of the natural world. It is also a good example of the poem as enactment of its own composition.

I like spending time with Schuyler's poems very much. In contrast to his perhaps more famous colleagues I feel the need to read him very slowly, one poem at a time, savouring the experiences that are being described. I do think he was a great love poet, by which I mean he was in love with every second he was alive and with the process of writing it down.

The poem below feels casual, almost throwaway. Can serious poetry be written at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning after a dinner party, while the rest of the house is asleep? Schuyler seems to imply not only that it can but that it is the true fountain spring of writing, among the dishes and the coffee cups, alone and in perfect quiet.

 

June 30, 1974

for Jane and Joe Hazan

 

Let me tell you

that this weekend Sunday

morning in the country

fills my soul

with tranquil joy:

the dunes beyond

the pond beyond

the humps of bayberry -

my favorite shrub (today,

at least) - are

silent as a mountain

range: such a 

subtle profile

against a sky that 

goes from dawn

to blue. The roses

stir, the grapevine

at one end of the deck

shakes and turns

its youngest leaves

so they show pale 

and flower-like.

A redwing blackbird

pecks at the grass;

another perches on a bush.

Another way, a millionaire's

white chateau turns

its flank to catch 

the risen sun. No

other houses, except

this charming one,

alive with paintings, 

plants and quiet.

I haven't said

a word. I like 

to be alone

with friends. To get up

to this morning view

and eat poached eggs

and extra toast with 

Tiptree Goosberry Preserve

(green) -and coffee,

milk, no sugar. Jane

said she heard

the freeze-dried kind

is healthier when

we went shopping

yesterday and she

and John bought

crude blue Persian plates.

How can coffee be 

healthful? I mused

as sunny wind

streamed in the car

window driving home.

Home! How lucky to

have one, how arduous

to make this scene

of beauty for 

your family and

friends. Friends!

How we must have

sounded, gossiping at

the dinner table

last night. Why, that

dinner table is 

this breakfast table:

"The boy in trousers

is not the same boy

in no trousers," who

said? Discontinuity

in all we see and are:

the same, yet change,

change, change. "Inez,

it's good to see you."

Here comes the cat, sedate,

that killed and brought

a goldfinch yesterday.

I'd like to go out 

for a swim but

it's a little cool

for that. Enough to 

sit here drinking coffee,

writing, watching the clear

day ripen (such

a rainy June we had)

while Jane and Joe

sleep in their room

and John in his. I

think I'll make more toast.

 

James Schuyler, from Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993)

Lifesaving Poems: Cliff Yates' 'Boggle Hole'

This has already been a memorable year, for I have seen my old friend Cliff Yates twice, both at poetry-related events. This increases my average sightings of Cliff in any given year by about 2000% and is a cause for clebration.

Cliff popped into my head again this week. He had emailed me a piece he has written called 'Flying: A Poetics' and wanted to know what I thought. It is lovely, and very typically Cliff, by which I mean it is generous and thoughful and gently provoking. Its subject is how the writing of poems itself becomes the experience or the subject of the poem.

If you do not know his work, you could worse than start with Frank Freeman's Dancing School (Salt, 2009). Reading the poems in this book, from which the poem below is taken, is a bit like watching the best kind of slapstick comedy: each gag is inevitable, hilarious and sad all at once. In his poems you see the wooden plank on the shoulder of one man as it spins around, misses his friend as he ducks out of the way then catches him in the face on the return circuit.

What Cliff also shows us, and this is what give the poems a special kind of resonance, is the following shot where you can catch the same man scrabbling around on the floor, looking for a contact lens, perhaps, or perhaps just scrabbling around on the floor. Cliff does not moralise or attempt to persuade us what this might mean.

'Boggle Hole' is funny, and lyrical and a bit sad all at once. I do think it displays Cliff's unique way of looking at and experiencing the world. I think the established trope to describe an oblique take on experience is now 'surreal'. This is not quite true of Cliff, since his poems are not voyages into the unconscious, even though there are unusual juxtapositions to be found (horses chewing at bike tyres, a donkey drawn on the sand).

In his own way I think the view of England that Cliff protrays is as distinctive as those created by Hughes or Larkin:

There used to be 

smugglers here and someone wrote 'LULU'

four feet high in the slipway's wet concrete.

It is a vision of inbetween places, where nothing much happens or promises to: where the horses snack on bike chains, boats are called Freedom, dogs run sideways, and the seaside donkeys are virtual.

 

Boggle Hole

 

Two new mountain bikes chained to the fence,

three horses lean over, bite at the tyres,

get the chain between their teeth,

eat most of a saddle and a hadlebar grip.

 

Boggle Hole Youth Hostel and someone

has written 'welcome to BOGGLE HELL'

on the bottom of the bunk above this one

in red felt tip and shaky writing.

 

A gang of bikers comes in late - a bottle

smashes outside the door then it's quiet

but for the talking, distorted, muffled

through the wall, apart from that voice...

 

After breakfast a tractor tows a boat

named Freedom into the sea. There used to be

smugglers here and someone wrote 'LULU'

four feet high in the slipway's wet concrete.

 

Freedom is oil-grey, just below the horizon

when a dog tears along sideways, its tongue out,

tasting the salt on the wind, and, in the first

drops of rain, a boy draws a donkey in the sand.

 

from Frank Freeman's Dancing School  (Salt, 2009)

Lifesaving Poems: Robert Rehder's 'Corminboeuf 157'

 

I was very sad to read yesterday that the American poet Robert Rehder died in 2009. I had no idea.

He was from Iowa, educated at Princeton and lived in Corminboeuf, a tiny hamlet in French-speaking Switzerland, which no one, not even the Swiss, have heard of.

Robert Redher's poems are an absolute delight, if you do not know his work. He published two collections with Carcanet, The Compromises Will be Different (1995) and First Things When (2009). I urge you to read him.

I discovered his work through a review of his first book by Ian MacMillan. I seem to remember him saying there was something kind of Huddersfield and kind of New York in his work, mixed with kind of something else he could not put his finger on. Labels are always a bad place to start when discussing poetry, a topic Rehder wrote much about in his academic work (when people ask me what kind of poetry I write I say 'The good kind, of course!'), but as it happens MacMillan was onto something, particularly the thing he could not put his finger on.

Mark Halliday has a line in one of his essays about contemporary poetry making intense investigations into ever smaller units of experience (I paraphrase). This seems to me much of what Rehder was up to. In 'Hidden Agenda' he details the 'crisis' of losing his favourite diary (I always trust a poet with the statienery thing), only to find it down the back of a sofa a few days later, having made the trip into to town to buy a new one. The effect is self-deprecating and charming: 'An event of this magnitude//Overshadows the destruction of the Berlin Wall/And the troubles in the Caucasus.'

In 'The Pequod Meets the Virgin' he details receiving an indifferent review of his poems by 'A would-be poet whom I will call D/Because you have never heard of him//And I hadn't either -':

When the first blind unreasoning rage had passed,

My implulse was to smash his face in

 

And knock him down.

He's smaller than I am

 

Even if he is a pretentious cretin.

I have no problem with criticism

 

As long as it's constructive,

But kicking him very hard in the crotch

 

Might not hurt him enough

Since he's a eunuch,

 

Therefore, it might be better

Just to beat him to a pulp.

 

These lines had me laughing out loud when I first read them. It seems to me they are a very accurate description of the rewards of life as a poet. I dare you not to recognise this.

A Redher poem is often about nothing very much at all: 'I am so bored by Corminboeuf/That I can't stand it -//My boredom, that is./ I lke Corminboeuf.//Only about half a dozen times a day/I wish I was somewhere else' ('Corminboeuf XXXIX').

When nothing dries up there is always the subject of the poems' composition to write about. I am still not sure if Rehder chose to do this as an act of defiance or desperation. 'I have just composed the first/Corminboeuf poem.//If this doesn't put Corminboeuf on the map,/What will?' ('The Affidavit (Corminboeuf II')). 'Corminboeuf III', the next poem in the book, begins less certainly: 'The third Corminboeuf poem is going/To be more difficult'. 

Writing in a foreign country in the middle of nowhere seems to have energised Rehder hugely. The poems in First Things When are still about themselves, about nothing and about Corminboeuf, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes as if they each represent each other. But there is wonderful satire on the America of George W Bush and on mall-culture, too. It is darker, perhaps, and tinged with sadness.

Here is the poem of Rehder's I read first. It is quoted on the back cover of his first book and does give a good idea of what he was up to.

I am so sorry to have just typed that last sentence in the past tense.

 

Corminboeuf 157

 

I am writing these poems

As fast as I can

 

So that I don't miss out on my late style

Which will be extremely allusive,

 

Very simple,

Freer than anything I've ever done.

 

(The compromises will be different.)

When I get there, the work

 

Will be already changing,

Further from everything,

 

Although I don't want to say goodbye,

And yet closer,

 

As the saucer reminds us of the cup.

The things that are not mentioned

 

Will go on existing,

Exerting their unspeakable presence

 

Like childhood

Or the books beside the bed in the next room -

 

I have my Montagne Sainte-Victoire.

The poems will be the wonder of the future

 

And totally American

Like all of the poets

 

From Eastern Iowa

Who live in Corminboeuf.

 

Robert Rehder, from The Compromises Will be Different (Carcanet, 1995).