Interesting essay by Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes (mentioning also his theatre
work) -

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1655550,00.html

Best

A
 

Wild things 

Poet Alice Oswald celebrates the raw earthiness of Ted Hughes's poems in an
era when our relationship with Nature is ambiguous at best, dishonest at
worst 

Saturday  December  3, 2005
The Guardian 

The first Ted Hughes poem I ever read was "The Horses". I picked it up one
evening after work and I was instantly drawn in. I could feel the poem's
effect physically, as if my braincells had been shaken and woken. When I
finished reading (and ever since) the world felt different.

What struck me straightaway was the real, breathing presence of those
horses. They hadn't been described. They hadn't been defined or suggested or
analysed or in any way poeticised, but summoned up alive, brought back into
being in the medium of language, still "steaming and glistening".

The verbal presence of those horses has some straightforward magic in it -
the kind that can't be deconstructed. Nevertheless, I noticed something at
the time that I could learn from - the poem slowed down whenever it
mentioned them: "huge in the dense grey", "megalith-still", "making no move"
... It's like a three beat theme tune. By the end of the poem I could hear a
kind of sonic replica of three grounded hooves and one tilted.

It was a new idea to me - that instead of describing something (which always
involves a separation between you and the object) you could replay it alive
in the form of sound. You could use poetry to reveal what it sounds like
being outdoors: the overlapping of thousands of different noises: the rain's
rhythm, the wind's rhythm in the leaves, the tunes of engines, the beat of
footsteps. The technical term for this is counterpoint. If there's one thing
Hughes is brilliant at, it's counterpoint. That's why his poems sound deeper
and wider and richer than human language. They seem to include the whole
sacred and speechless background of nature.

When I read "The Horses", I was working as a gardener for the Royal
Horticultural Society. Brought up in the lyrical, romantic, pastoral
tradition of "Nature poetry", I felt a sharp division between my eight-hour
working world and my reading. I kept noticing that gardeners talked about
Nature as something present and that its presence for them had a certain
thickness and function. But in all the poems I knew (perhaps I didn't know
that many), there was a flavour of absence or at least distance - as if the
poet was sitting on a rock on a hill looking at the world through a
telescope. 

The word that best describes that kind of poem, that contagious feeling of
aloofness, is nostalgia. It was originally a medical word, coined in the
18th-century to describe depression among soldiers billeted abroad. Just
like those soldiers, those of us who don't work outdoors are somehow removed
from its meaning, abroad in our own surroundings. We walk outside and a fog
of nostalgia comes over us. Our eyes are instantly out of focus.

So we get used to thinking about (and reading about) nature as the
just-vanished place, the place we can't quite reach. But for those who do
work outdoors, that way of speaking is hopeless. It's too soft, too lofty,
too nebulous. It deprives things of their clarity. At any rate, that's what
I was feeling 15 years ago, on the wet November evening when I first came
across "The Horses". I'd been up at dawn that morning, pruning apples all
day. I was fed up with people floating past me using the word "idyllic" and
I was fed up with reading about nature at one remove. I thought I'd rather
hear a gardener's or a farmer's account of the landscape than any poet's.
Then I opened The Hawk in the Rain (Hughes's first collection) and there was
my worked-in world alive in all its freshness. Not a trace of nostalgia in
the language. 

So then I read all the Hughes poems I could lay my hands on and what they
all had in common was that imaginative grasp of the present - that ability
to speak strictly within one moment and not through a misted screen of
remembered moments. I could hear it in the metre, but I could also hear it
in the pile-up of words ending in "-ing": blackening, brightening,
splitting, stumbling; and in the abundant use of compounds:
hour-before-dawn-dark, frost-making-stillness, megalith-still - as if the
language had only just been knocked up. Above all, I could hear it in those
constant time-splitting allusions to movement: "overtaking the instant",
"now and again now", and in a poem about a foxhunt, "as I write this down,
he runs still fresh with all his chances before him" as if the poem and the
fox were going at the same speed.

This non-nostalgic way of writing is, to my mind, the only way of getting
through to the animate part of nature, the soft growing tip. Hughes called
it "the vital somewhat terrible spirit of natural life which is new in every
second". DH Lawrence, whose poems Hughes admired, called it "quivering
momentaneity". He spoke of the need for an "unrestful, ungraspable poetry of
the sheer present", which is a pretty good prediction of what Hughes was to
write 50 or so years later.

Moortown Diary was written at a time when Hughes had recently returned to
Devon. It has a particular place in my heart because Hughes worked on it
during three or four years when he was spending almost every day outside,
either gardening or farming. This book, and Season Songs which was written
at the same period, are where you really smell Devon for the first time: the
softer rhythms, the moisture, the sheer delight. You could almost call them
clay-based poems, whereas previously they've been written on millstone grit.

Hughes had lived in Devon before, but it was his marriage to Carol Orchard
in 1970 that allowed him for the first time to understand the place. Orchard
was (and is) a gardener and the daughhter of a Devon farmer. Under her
influence, in the first few years of their marriage, Hughes produced two
books you could almost call site-specific.

Moortown Diary grew out of the journal notes Hughes was making between 1972
and 1976. In 1972 he had fulfilled a long cherished dream. He had bought a
patch of land with his father-in-law and was to spend the following four
years learning the basics of farming from him. Jack Orchard died in 1976.
His stubborn figure is the presiding spirit of the poems. He's there in the
background, keeping the language honest, absorbed and swift. The book is
dedicated to his memory.

Hughes was so aware of the difference and value of a mind still in the swing
of some practical task, that when he came to publish his notes as poems, he
barely edited them. The book is full of quite weird turns of phrase that a
more timid poet might have smoothed away: "wraith-rain pulsing across
purple-bare woods", "the wind presses outer-space into the grass", "at white
heat of numbness it stands in the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness"
(about a tractor!) "she choke-bellowed query-comfort to herself". He
preferred that kind of spontaneity to the more worked and counterpointed
sounds of his earlier poems.

Moortown Diary, in the words of its introduction, "more or less excludes the
poetic process" - or at any rate it changes that process from one of
recollection and reshaping to something more like documentary, more like the
rapid jottings of a journalist. It was quite a fashionable idea in the 70s
that by writing quickly and without corrections you could avoid the
falsifying input of the intellect. The same year Moortown Diary was first
published, Faber had published Impro, a book by Keith Johnstone about
spontaneity in the theatre. Johnstone wrote, in language very reminiscent of
Hughes, about "unfreezing the petrified imagination" by "accepting first
thoughts". It's interesting that, when Hughes came to write notes for
Moortown Diary (in 1989) he described the poems as "improvised verse" which
puts them directly into a theatrical, not a literary context.

Even more than Hughes's other collections, Moortown Diary draws on Hughes's
fascination with the theatre. He worked with theatres throughout his life,
translating Lorca, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides - not as academic texts
but as performable plays. And the particular, energetic, on the run feeling
of his poems grew directly out of his own sense of Shakespeare's plays. But
with Moortown Diary, those theatrical shadows become the whole body of the
verse. 

Maybe this was because he had spent the previous six months in Iran, working
with the theatre director Peter Brook. Orghast, the play he wrote with
Brook, uses an invented language. Its aim is to bypass the deceptiveness of
words and get through to the raw animal truth underneath, the truth of
gesture and intonation. Just like Orghast, Moortown Diary keeps its eye
firmly on the creatures behind the language. It's written in the style of
Hughes's play translations: very swift and bright and urgent and speakable.

Hughes always finds some procedure for stripping away the protective layers
- the soundproofed ears, the double-glazed eyes - that prevent us making
contact with anything outside ourselves. Right now, I can't think of
anything more important than that kind of poem. Because we're not just here
to think about literature. We're here to try to wake up. We have a problem
with our fields, with our weather, with our water, with the very air we
breathe; but we can't quite react, we can't quite get our minds in gear. One
reason perhaps is that our minds are conditioned by the wrong kind of nature
poem, the kind that leaves us comfortable, melancholy, inert. Nostalgic.
Dishonest. 

The disruption of that comfort, the chance to concentrate utterly on what's
out there, to see it in its own way and to say so without disturbing its
strangeness is what Hughes offers. If we accept that offer, who knows what
may follow? As Hughes said, back in 1970, when he was reviewing a book abut
the environmental revolution: "What alters the imagination alters
everything." 

·This is an edited extract from Alice Oswald's Ted Hughes Memorial lecture
for 2005 




Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead:  http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com