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.)

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The second episode of the Ted Hughes Society podcast to feature the English poet and educationist Pie Corbett. In the previous podcast Pie talked about how Ted Hughes had been an inspiration to him, as a student, as a young poet, and in his early teaching career how Ted Hughes's 'Poetry in the Making' was an invaluable resource in developing his own strategies for encouraging pupils’ poetry writing and in developing their language and thinking skills in general. In this episode, Pie talks about his work outside the classroom - as an inspector of schools, as an English advisor, and as a freelance consultant. Pie recounts how he was able to ensure a central place for poetry in the UK’s National Literacy Strategy, which was the foundation of English teaching in British schools from 1997 to 201; and how his involvement in the International Research Centre Project ‘language teaching through stories’ led to his establishing the Talk for Writing Project, built on four stages: imitation, innovation, independent application and invention - similar in many ways to Ted Hughes's ideas for encouraging children's writing in 'Poetry in the Making'. Pie also talks about his 'Reading Spine', an initiative to encourage the reading and study of the very best books in schools and not just the most fashionable or popular. This naturally includes the poetry of Ted Hughes, and not what Pie describes as ‘the bum and bogey’ school of children’s poetry. Pie closes the episode with two poems: one of his own, which he has never read publically before, and a poem by one of his pupils based on Ted Hughes's 'Amulet' showing the quality of work which is possible for a young writer to achieve through well-planned and sympathetic teaching of the kind which 'Talk for Writing' and 'Poetry in the Making' exemplify.

Pie has been a regular contributor the Times Educational Supplement  and among his many publications are his outstanding collection of poems for children Evidence for Dragons  (Macmillan 2011); Rice Pie and Moses (Macmillan 1995) a collection of poetry for children with fellow poets John Rice and Brian Moses; Talk for Writing Across The Curriculum (Open University Press 2020) with Julia Strong; and as an editor, A First Poetry Book  (2012 Macmillan) with Gaby Morgan) and The Works series of anthologies (Macmillan various).

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.) 

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Our guest for this episode is Pie Corbett, a highly respected author, poet and a highly influential educationist. He has written or edited more than two hundred books, including poetry collections, anthologies and books which are widley used in schools to encourage pupils' personal writing and the development of communication skills. 

Pie has been a classroom teacher, a head teacher and an Ofsted Inspector. He regularly lectures on education, has advised UK governments on education, and was responsible for the prominence of poetry objectives in the UK’s National Literacy Strategy. Pie was also heavily involved in the creation of the i-read software to help children learn how to read via visual and auditory props and he created the Talk for Writing teaching framework to enable children to write creatively, powerfully and independently.

In this first of two episodes, Pie talks about his own primary schooling and contrasts it with the much more creative and child-centred approaches which formed the basis his own teaching. He also talks about the importance of Ted Hughes’s Poetry In The Making and poems - particularly ‘The Thought-Fox’ - in developing his own approaches to encouraging pupils’ writing, and his partnership, as a writer and performer, with fellow poet and teacher Brian Moses. Pie ends the episode with two poems from his outstanding collection of poems for children, Evidence of Dragons.

Pie has been a regular contributor the Times Educational Supplement  and among his many publications are Evidence for Dragons  (Macmillan 2011), Rice Pie and Moses (Macmillan 1995) a collection of poetry for children with fellow poets John Rice and Brian Moses, Talk for Writing Across The Curriculum (Open University Press 2020) with Julia Strong; and as an editor A First Poetry Book  (2012 Macmillan) with Gaby Morgan) and The Works series of anthologies (Macmillan various).

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.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the third episode in our short series on Ted Hughes and Education, and looks at how Ted Hughes's poetry, and especially his justly famous book on writing Poetry in The Making (Faber & Faber, 2008), can encourage secondary school pupils to not only enjoy reading and writing poetry but also grow in self-confidence. 

Di Beddow - who in the first episode of season 3 recalled some of the highs (and some of the lows) of her experiences as a doctoral student during and immediately after the covid lockdown - makes a very welcome return to the podcast. In this episode she reflects on how Ted Hughes poetry and his ideas on helping children to express themselves through their personal writing influenced a distinguished career teaching English; and she shares some of the fascinating discoveries she made in the course of her doctoral work concerning Hughes’s own short, but evidently inspiring, career as a teacher at Coleridge Secondary Modern School in Cambridge. 

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at [email protected]

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.) 

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This special Christmas edition of the Ted Hughes Society podcast, and the society’s gift to all lovers of fine poetry, is a reading by Matt Howard from his second collection Broadlands, published earlier this year by Bloodaxe Books. 

Matt is a member of a gifted generation of younger poets who have found inspiration and encouragement in their work from reading the poetry of Ted Hughes. Matt was born in Norfolk in 1978 and is a poet and environmentalist who has worked in various roles for the RSPB for more than a decade. He is currently manager of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre.

Matt’s first collection, Gall,  was published by in 2018 and won the inaugural Laurel Prize for Best First Collection in 2020 and the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize.

Matt has been poet in residence for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and also the Wordsworth Trust. Since 2018 he has been a trustee of The Rialto, and was Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds 2021-2023.

The Ted Hughes `society would like to thank Bloodaxe Books for their co-operation in making this podcast and for their permission to record and share this selection of poems from Broadlands. 

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at [email protected]

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.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the second Ted Hughes Society podcast in season three and also the second in our series on Ted Hughes and Education. Our guest contributor for this podcast is Max Raab. After a career in investment banking, Max Raab enrolled as an MA student on the Poetics of Imagination course at Dartington Arts School, Devon. In this podcast, Max talks about his experience of creating Who or What Is Crow? a project based on interviews with storytellers, folklorists and scholars of Ted Hughes. 

Towards the end of this podcast, Max hoped to read two of his favourite poems from Crow: ‘Crow Blacker Than Ever’ and ‘How Water Began To Play’. For copyright reasons this wasn’t possible, but Max did record his thoughts on both poems. If you have a copy of either Crow or the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes  at hand you might want to have the poems ready to read for yourself. You can find ‘Crow Blacker than Ever’ on page 62 of the anniversary edition of Crow,  published in 2020 by Faber and Faber, and ‘How Water Began to Play’ on page 87; and in the 2003 edition of The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes edited by Paul Keegan and published by Faber and Faber ‘Crow Blacker Than Ever’ is on page 244 and ‘How Water Began To Play’ on page 257. There is also an edited recording of a Webinar on Ted Hughes’s Crow featuring contributions from a number of the people Max interviewed on the You Tube channel of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnJ2c8iJRBc

In the podcast Max cites as a major influence on his project the Belorusian journalist and author Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2015. Alexievich has crafted non-fiction narratives of oral history from the statements of witnesses to some of the darkest episodes in the history of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. English translations of her work include: Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (1992) translated by Julia and Robin Whitby and published by W. W. Norton; Chernobyl Prayers: Voices from Chernobyl (2016) translated by Ann Gunin and Arch Tait and published by Penguin; and The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II (2018), translated by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Peaver and published by Penguin. 

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at [email protected]

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 Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The first of a new series of podcasts looking at Ted Hughes In Education, starting with Dr. Di Beddow reflecting on her experiences as a PhD student at Queen Mary University London, researching and writing her thesis on 'The Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath'.

Di Beddow was born in Cambridge and has spent much of her life living and working in or near Cambridge. She was educated at the Cambridgeshire County High School for Girls (which is now Long Road Sixth Form), Middlesex and Roehampton Universities and the University of Warwick.  She taught in Surrey, Essex and Cambridgeshire and rose to be Acting Head at both Hinchingbrooke School in Huntingdon and Ernulf Academy in St. Neots. Di’s passion in her own school days, during her teaching career and after has been the work of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

You can read more about Di's fascinating research into the importance of Cambridge for both Hughes and Plath in the following papers, which are available online:

'Poetry and Place: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Cambridge - The Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: https://christstreasures.blogspot.com/2021/12/poetry-and-place-sylvia-plath-ted.html

'Not the colleges, or such precincts: https://dibeddow.co.uk/ths-jul-19/

Also featured in this podcast are extracts from Chapter 1 of Reading Otherways (The Thimble Press, 1998), Lissa Paul's brilliant short book on critical reading, arising from her practical experience as a teacher and her reading in feminist theory .

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at [email protected]

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.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A reading by Mark Haworth-Booth from his second collection of poems The Thermobaric Playground,  published in 2022 by Dempsey and Windle under their Vole imprint.

Mark studied English Literature at Cambridge University, Art History at Edinburgh University and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. However he is probably best known for his work in photography. Mark served as senior curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, helping to build up its great collection of photography, and from 2002-2009 Mark was the first Visiting Professor of Photography at the University of the Arts in London. Mark is now an Honorary Research Fellow at the V&A and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. 

The Thermobaric Playground is in four sections: Habitat, The Headlined World, For the Birds and Presences, and many of the poems express Mark's passionate commitment to protecting and conserving wildlife - animals, birds, plants and insects - and the habitats in which they live and on which they depend.

Reviewing The Thermobaric Playground, the poet Fiona Benson wrote: 'These are poems with an edge; there are excoriating indictments of enivironmental damage, both local and global, and fury at the greed driving the sixth extinction. Wonderfully attentive to sound and song, these poems are bursting with exquisite visual detail. Haworth-Booth's world is ripe with human and animal wonder, humour and love. It is a world I wish to live in; it is a world worth saving.'

If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at [email protected]

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.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode of the Ted Hughes Society Podcast is a reading of a selection of his own poetry by Terry Gifford.

As well as being a poet, Terry is also a distinguished critic and scholar, particularly of the works of Ted Hughes and D.H.Lawrence and the genre of pastoral literature, a writer of popular non-fiction books on rock climbing and mountaineering, and a past chair of the Ted Hughes Society. Terry is a pioneering and highly respected ecocritic, and he is currently Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University's Research Centre for Environmental Humanities and Professor Honorifico at the University of Alicante, Spain where he co-supervises PhD students in ecocriticism and conduct research with staff in English. 

Terry has, so far, published eight volumes of poetry, with a ninth awaiting publication. For this podcast, Terry will be reading from his unpublished ninth collection, and from his most recently published eighth collection, A Feast of Fools (Birmingham: Cinnamon Press, 2018), in which he asks the the question: Who are the fools in our world of climate change? And he admits, in this seriously playful collection, he is one among many. Terry's poems are notable for wryly celebrating people - both joyously at home in their landscapes and increasingly uneasy about what is happening around them.

Among Terry's many other publications are:

Pastoral, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2020).

Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry, 2nd edition (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2011).

The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Ted Hughes (London: Routledge, 2009).

Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006).

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A reading of his own poems by Hugh Dunkerley, poet, Professor of Literature and a member of the Ted Hughes Society. Hugh has published two collections of poetry with the Cinnamon Press, Hare in 2010 and Kin in 2019, from which he will be reading.

Hugh grew up in Edinburgh and Bath and studied at the universities of Southampton and Chichester. His PhD thesis was entitled Poetry as Via Negativa: A Creative Enquiry. Via negativa means the study of what not to do and was originally a theological term for explaining what God is by examining what he is not.

Hugh’s other academic writing includes Earthographies, Ecocriticism and Culture co-authored with Wendy Wheeler and published by Lawrence and Wishart in 2008; a chapter on religious poetry from 1960 to 2015 in the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to British and Irish Poetry which was published in 2020; and an essay on Ted Hughes and Creative Writing in Ted Hughes in Context which was edited by former chair of the Ted Hughes Society Terry Gifford and published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

Hugh has received an Eric Gregory Award and a Hawthornden Fellowship and was the Sussex Poet Laureate.

Gregory Leadbetter, reviewing Hugh’s most recent collection Kin in The London Magazine wrote that Hugh’s poems ‘present humane and often moving explorations of life both within and beyond the self. Children parents and parenthood, ecological and psychological crises and meditations on the interconnectedness of living things are its principal themes. the collection more often reveals its ecological anxieties in their chronic effects on human beings – not least, the reader can assume, on the poet himself. Despite bearing witness to that experience, Kin ultimately embodies a structure of affirmation: a coming-through, and a testament (in the words of ‘First Contact’) to ‘life’s / infinite scribblings’.

Hare (2010) was published by Cinnamon Press. ISBN: 978-1-907090-08-0

Kin (2019) was also published by Cinnamon Press. ISBN: 978-1-78864-017-6

At the time of releasing this podcast both books were avilable from Amazon.co.uk. For more information on Hugh Dunkerley you can go the University of Chichester's website https://www.chi.ac.uk/people/hugh-dunkerley/ and you can follow Hugh on X at @Hughdunkerley1.

 If you would like to find out more about the Ted Hughes Society, you can visit the society’s website at thetedhugessociety.org, or you can email me, Mick Gowar, at [email protected]

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.) 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.