The Ted Hughes Society Podcast

Welcome to the Ted Hughes Society podcast.  As you may know, one of Ted Hughes’s first books, published in 1961, was Meet My Folks, a collection of humorous poems for children about an imagined family. Having reached episode 26 of this podcast, it seems time to introduce some of our folks - the officers of the Ted Hughes Society, who are responsible for such things as building and updating the society’s website; compiling the excellent bibliography which is one of the features of the website; organising the forthcoming conference at Pembroke College, Cambridge this coming September; and acquiring new items for the rapidly growing archive of books and other items associated with Ted Hughes, which is housed at Pembroke, and some choice items from which are now on show in two joint exhibitions at Pembroke College and the Cambridge University Library.The guests for this episode are Catherine Macnaughton and Anna Stevenson - the editor and designer, respectively, of our two regular publications, the peer reviewed academic journal Ted Hughes Studies, and Recklings, the newsletter for members of the Ted Hughes Society which is being put together as this podcast episode is released and will be emailed to society members soon.Catherine Macnaughton is the editor of both Ted Hughes Studies and Recklings, and has a professional background in newspaper and magazine journalism. She recently returned to university to study English Literature and has an MA from the University of Cambridge and from University College London.Dr Anna Stevenson is production designer for Ted Hughes Studies and Recklings at the Ted Hughes Society, and the host of the Ted Hughes Society's Book Club. She is also a trustee at the Philip Larkin Society and currently works at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull. Anna has been a student at the university for ten years. During this time, she completed both her Bachelors and Master of Arts in English and has also recently graduated from her PhD in English, with a thesis titled 'My Sacred Canon': The Influence of Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot on the Young Ted Hughes'. Anna has strong family ties to Patrington, Holderness, where Ted Hughes did National Service, before her studying at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and where Anna's interest in Ted Hughes's connections with the area resides.if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast; it does help others who might be interested in poetry, or the work of Ted Hughes, to find the podcast. The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

This episode of the Ted Hughes Society podcast is a reading of his own poems by Grahame Davies -  poet, author, editor, librettist, psycho-geographer, literary critic and member of the Ted Hughes Society. Graham was brought up in the former coal mining village of Coedpoeth near Wrexham in north east Wales, and received a BA (Hons) in English from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridgeand a doctorate from the University of Wales for research into the writings of R. S. Thomas, Saunders Lewis, T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil. Grahame worked as a journalist, for newspapers and then for the BBC, where he became News gathering Editor for BBC Wales before joining the Royal Household as Assistant Private Secretary to The Prince of Wales, later King Charles, becoming Deputy Private Secretary. Grahame left the royal household in October 2023 to become Director of Mission and Strategy for the Church in Wales.Grahame is the author of 20 books including poetry collections in both Welsh and English, psycho-geography, novels, and intercultural studies. As a librettist and lyricist, he has collaborated with many leading composers including Sir Karl Jenkins, Paul Mealor, Sarah Class, Debbie Wiseman, Roderick Williams and Joanna Gill, and his song Sacred Fire - to music by Sarah Class - was performed by Pretty Yende at the coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla in 2023. As a Welsh language poet, he is the author of three solo volumes. In 1997, his first volume, Adennill Tir (Barddas), a book arising from the 11 years he spent in Merthyr Tydfil in the south Wales Valleys, won the Harri Webb Memorial Prize.[3] In 2001, his second volume, Cadwyni Rhyddid (Barddas), was awarded the Wales Arts Council's 2002 Book of the Year award at the Hay on Wye Festival.As an English language poet, he published a bilingual volume of poetry, Ffiniau/Borders, jointly with Elin ap Hywel, with Gomer press in 2002, and his in English, Lightning Beneath the Sea, was published by Seren Press in 2012. His second, A Darker Way, also from Seren, appeared in 2024.Interfaith relations have been one of his major concerns, and in 2002, Seren published his study, The Chosen People, examining the relationship of the Welsh and the Jewish people as reflected in literature; a second study on Wales and Islam, The Dragon and the Crescent, also from Seren, was published in 2011.Grahame was a board member of the Welsh Academi from 2005-2011 and Welsh language editor of Poetry Wales magazine until 2002. Grahame is a frequent contributor of articles and reviews to journals and his work has been widely translated and anthologised. He was Vice President of Goodenough College in London and an Honorary Research Fellow in Cardiff University. In 2023 Graham was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast - it does help others who might be interested in poetry or the work of Ted Hughes to find the podcast. The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Welcome to a pre-Christmas feast of seasonal and Christmas poetry and story and read by members of the Ted Hughes Society who are also highly accomplished published writers. Many thanks you to James Longwill, Terry Gifford, Matt Howard, Alison Light, Katherine Robinson, David Day and Grahame Davies for such an extraordinarily varied, thought-provoking and in so many ways profoundly engaging collection of seasonal writing. And we wish all listeners to the the Ted Hughes Society podcast a very happy Christmas and a blessed and joyous New Year.if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast - it does help others who might be interested in poetry or the work of Ted Hughes to find the podcast. The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

This is the second podcast of this fourth season, and also the second to feature the poetry of Steve Ely.  In this episode of the podcast, Steve reads from three long poems which look at the struggles of particular species to survive in the Anthropocene -  the present geological era which is defined by the significant and lasting impact of human activities on Earth’s ecosystems and the physical structure of the planet. Steve reads first from Lives of British Shrews (published by Broken Sleep in 2023), a long poem which as the title indicates records, in vigorous and powerfully expressive verse, the challenges which these tiny but fascinating little creatures face in simply surviving for a single day. Steve then reads two sections fromThe European Eel (Longbarrow Press, 2021) which portrays with great imaginative and scientific clarity the extraordinary life cycle of this exceptional fish - from its birth in the Sargasso sea as a leaf-shaped leptosopholus, then drifting as a glass eel the 4,000 miles to Europe on the Gulf Stream, where transformed into first an elver and then a mature eel, it live in fresh water streams until, after a life of up to 20 years, the adult eel then swims the 4,000 miles back to the Sargasso Sea where it was born, there to mate and then die. And so the cycle begins again.Steve concludes the reading with a three poem sequence from Orasaigh (published by Broken Sleep in 2024 with photographs by by Michael Faint). Described by Steve as an example of ‘apocalyptic landscape’ writing about the history and threats facing a ting Hebridean island. Steve is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield and Director of the Ted Hughes Network and a founding member of the Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire) a community-based organisation which seeks to develop the legacy of Ted Hughes in and around Hughes’s childhood home of Mexborough. Steve is Director of the Ted Hughes Network, and led the consortium that developed and launched the Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire literary trails which includes guided trail walks, engaging local, poetry readings, creative writing workshops. Further information cane be found on https://discoveringtedhughesyorkshire.co.uk/ Steve also played a leading role in establishing the Ted Hughes-focused archive at the University of Huddersfield’s Heritage Quay and led the team which acquired the Mark Hinchliffe Ted Hughes collection.Steve is currently writing a novel -The Quoz - described as ‘a folk-horrific bildungsroman set in a West Riding pit village in the Sex Pistols summer of 1977’ and completing a collaboration with the artist Alan Parker entitled White Pony.  The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

Welcome to the first episode of the fourth season of the Ted Hughes Society podcast and the first of two recordings of poems by the poet and leading Ted Hughes scholar Steve Ely. The two readings together will cover the seven books of poetry and three pamphlets which Steve has published since 2013. In this first reading, Steve will be reading poems from Oswald’s Books of Hours (Smokestack Books 2013), Englaland (Smokestack Books 2015), Incendium Amoris (Smokestack Books 2017), Jubilate Messi (Shearsman Books 2018) and Lectio Violant (Shearsman Books 2021). Steve’s poems are frequently concerned with themes of loss, damage and degradation - the degradations of habitats and the loss species of animals and plants. Steve’s concern is also with the loss and degradation of the deep and foundational cultural roots of England and Englishness, but Steve’s focus on England Englishness does not come from any conventional conservatism - as he has made abundantly clear: ‘I’m a utopian in the tradition of William Morris’, he has written, ‘seeking to bring to light neglected aspects of Englishness – the Anglo-Danish heritage, the pre-Reformation English Catholic Church, the traditions of resistance running through the silvaticii rebels against the Norman occupation, the Peasant’s Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the radicalism of the English revolution, the nineteenth and twentieth century working class movements and the particular experience of ‘the North’.Steve is Reader in Creative Writing and Director of the Ted Hughes Network and a founding member of the Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire) a community-based organisation which seeks to develop the legacy of Ted Hughes in and around Hughes’s childhood home of Mexborough. Steve is Director of the Ted Hughes Network, and led the consortium that developed and launched the Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire literary trails which includes guided trail walks, engaging local, poetry readings, creative writing workshops. Further information cane be found on https://discoveringtedhughesyorkshire.co.uk/ Steve also played a leading role in establishing the Ted Hughes-focused archive at the University of Huddersfield’s Heritage Quay and led the team which acquired the Mark Hinchliffe Ted Hughes collection.Steve is currently writing a novel -The Quoz - described as ‘a folk-horrific bildungsroman set in a West Riding pit village in the Sex Pistols summer of 1977’ and completing a collaboration with the artist Alan Parker entitled White Pony.  The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)

For this episode of the Ted Hughes Society podcast, we are delighted to welcome back Ann Skea - one of the world's leading Ted Hughes scholars, and surely the greatest living authority on the place of myth, legend, the magical and occult in Ted Hughes’s poetry and prose. Many of Ted Hughes best-loved and most distinctive poems are concerned with the outer and inner lives of what some critics have called his 'totemic' animals. In her preliminary comments, Ann mentions the crow, but one might also add the fox, the salmon and the pike. In her latest fascinating contribution to this series of the podcast, Ann talks about Hughes’s poems about another bird, the swallow. These poems include 'A Swallow' and ‘Swallows’ (Collected Poems Faber & Faber 2003 ps 604; 634), the four swallow poems numbered from what Hughes himself called a ‘farmyard fable’ for young readers, What Is The Truth (Faber & Faber 1995 ps 43-48), and  ‘A swallow’ and ‘Work and Play’ from Season Songs (Faber & Faber 1985 ps 23-24; 48-49).  Ann also reflects on Hughes’s translation of the story of Tereus and Philomela in Tales from Ovid; and other examples of mythological characters, with whom Hughes was familiar, who are transformed into swallows, including Isis in her attempts to bring Osiris back to life; and she recalls the closing passage of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the envious cry of ‘O swallow, swallow’ - the speaker yearning for flight and escape, to become a swallow. Ann Skea is the author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (University of New England, 1994), and is an internationally recognized and widely published scholar specializing in the work of Ted Hughes. Her Ted Hughes web pages (https://ann.skea.com/THHome.htm) are archived by the British Library. She is a regular book reviewer for various magazines and is a freelance writer and photographer specializing in travel, myth and culture. She has also published widely in magazines and journals. In 2016, Ann Skea was elected as an associate scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.This is the final episode of this third season of podcasts, but the Ted Hughes Society podcast will return in the autumn with a new season of readings from their works by poets who are society members, talks by leading Ted Hughes scholars and interviews with some of the many admirers of Ted Hughes poetry and prose who are actively promoting his work and ideas in schools, colleges and universities in the UK and abroad. In the meantime, if you have any comments about the podcast, any suggestions for furture episodes, or would like any information on the Ted Hughes Society, please contact me by email at membership@thetedhughesssociety. I look forward to hearing from you, and please do subscribe, rate and review this podcast - it does help others who might be interested in poetry or the work of Ted Hughes to find the podcast. The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)