A little triple round-up.
Ted Hughes: not for an age, but for all time?
Poets’ Corner in Wesminster Abbey is about to become the richer by one contemporary – if deceased – poet. As most people interested in poetry already know, Ted Hughes has been approved by the committee and in 2011 will receive a plaque in the most famous
What most people don’t know is that he’ll be joining John Ernest Grabe, Mary Eleanor Bowes, Richard Busby, Connop Thirlwall, George Grote, Arthur P. Stanley and Eva Marie Veigel.
Little-known fact: It’s not just poets in Poets’ Corner. The people who named the august memorial spot evidently took a more catholic view of the role of culture and the nature of achievement generally. He’ll also be joining George Friedrich Handel, Jenny Lind, Margot Fonteyn, Laurence Olivier, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, a mathematician called Isaac Barrow, and Old Tom Parr, who supposedly lived to 152.
Alice Oswald wins first Ted Hughes award
The first-ever Ted Hughes ward for new work has gone to Alice Oswald for her book Weeds and Wild Flowers, a sort of special edition hardback with line drawings. There has predictably been a bit of interest in this new award, with much scrutiny of the shortlist for signs of what the award is intended to do. Or be. “New” as in “new under the sun,” or merely – as Todd Swift said – “recent”? People scanned it for signs of “innovative” or non-”mainstream” work. I have to say I was very intrigued by Alice Oswald’s reading at the TS Eliot prize reading. I particularly remember a strange, weird-Victorian-child kind of poem about a daisy, and how completely spare it was. She has utter authority on the stage, and reads with as much conviction as if she were a Brontë.
Whether that makes her “new” or not I don’t know, but I think one has always been prepared to say she is different from everybody else. My copy of the book is, belatedly, in the post.
Here is a stanza from one of the poems in the book, and click here to read the rest of the poem.
Thrift
Born by the sea.
Used to its no-hope moan.
Forty or thereabouts.
Lived on her own.
More anon.
Hughes saga continues
Back to the melodrama: Frieda Hughes has scratched open the wound of her parents’ divorce, saying it was Sylvia Plath’s mother who “poisoned” Plath against her errant husband. It’s a sad, depressing story. But, just as Sylvia was already suicidal by the time she met Ted, with a very serious failed attempt* behind he, Ted really was having an affair and she really was upset about it. I mean, what are you going to do. Frieda is the last living member of that nuclear family, not a position I envy her.
In other news
I have finally managed to book a venue for two separate one-day poetry workshops! One on sonnets, one on something else. Maybe rhyme. More details to follow, but the venue is the Lamb pub in Bloomsbury, and the dates are May 22nd and June 26th.
Also, as well as transferring a painful quantity of money to pay my rent (“I can’t pay the rent!” “You must pay the rent!” etc) and going to Morrisons, where I bought bread, onions and some household sundries, I have been writing today. I can’t tell you more yet, but I think I may be quite pleased with my little bagatelle. I made some butternut squash soup. I’m satisfyingly full of puns and rhymes.
* She really did not intend to be found; it was a total fluke.
Weeds and Wild Flowers is a good book – I got it when it came out, though the marriage of etchings and poems is maybe slightly off-putting (there’s no real connection between them). But it looks lovely in it’s big blue and brown hardbackness.
And I don’t think there is anyone better suited to win this first TH award. To paraphrase John Peel (on The Fall) – they’re both different, both the same.
Least said about the shortlist for the Ted Hughes award the better – you had to be a poetry society member to vote I think, which may explain the slightly odd mix of the old, the new, and er…the very old – but Alice Oswald’s writing does seem uniquely her own; and, though one hopes it doesn’t become the Ted Hughes nature poet award, there does seem to be something entirely appropriate in a poet who is so connected with writing about nature being it’s inaugural winner.
Dear Katy
I think that Alice Oswald deserves her laurels and Ted Hughes his ivy. It’s very laudable of Frieda to stand up for her dad, but given that she was about three when her mother gassed herself, she wasn’t really in a position to know what was going on.
Best wishes from Simon
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