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Welcome to the latest Ted Hughes Society podcast.  This episode is released just before the Society’s Conference, entitled The Legacy of Ted Hughes, to be held at Hughes’s former college, Pembroke College, Cambridge, and our guest, for this most recent episode in our short season of talks by prominent members of the society, is Dr. Mike Sweeting. Mike is a member of the society’s council, with a particular responsibility for constitutional matters. Like many prominent members of the society, Mike has undertaken post-graduate study on the work of Ted Hughes, in Mike’s case, focusing on Hughes’s deep interest in and knowledge of anthropology.  Ted Hughes went up to Cambridge to study English Literature, but in his final year changed to Archaeology and Anthropology - reportedly, following a visionary dream of burnt fox, which he claimed warned him that his continued formal study of English Literature was destroying the poems that were existing in some potential form in either his subconscious or some otherworld. Like Hughes, Mike was born and raised in the rural North of England, where Mike’s father was a farmer. However, Mike decided against the farming life, entering Durham University where he progressed from his first degree to eventual doctoral studies. Since completing his PhD Mike has been involved in three areas of work, often simultaneously. He has been a scholar of the poetry of both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, but also a church leader and Christian Pastor, and a businessman and business consultant. He has advised owners of businesses on Mergers & Acquisitions and has also established corporate finance firms in 15 countries and has been chairman of a charity working in India, the USA, Canada, Romania and Argentina.  Mike has been a keen rock climber and target shooter since the age of 15. 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.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Ted Hughes Society podcast, and the latest in our series Meet Our Folks, in which prominent society members talk about themselves and their particular interest in the life and work of Ted Hughes. Our guest for this episode,Terry Gifford, is a poet, climber, former chair of the Ted Hughes Society. Terry is undoubtedly one of the foremost Ted Hughes scholars, a leading critic of the work of D.H.Lawrence and a pioneer in the field of eco-criticism. His many publications include Ted Hughes, a critical study co-authored with Neil Roberts and published by Faber & Faber in 1981; Teaching Advanced Level English Literature: a student-centred approach (with John Brown, Routledge 1989); Reconnecting with John Muir (University of Georgia Press, 2006); Ted Hughes in the Routledge Guides to Literature series (2009); The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011); Ted Hughes in Context, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018; Pastoral in the Routledge New Critical Idiom series (2019); and Reading and D.H.Lawrence in the Anthropocene (Edinburgh University Press 2025). A selection of Terry’s varied, skilful and engaging poetry A Feast of Fools, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2018.  Until his retirement in 2004, Terry was Reader in Literature and Environment at the University of Leeds. He was the Director of Research in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries and introduced practice-based Ph.D. programmes at Leeds in theatre, dance and creative writing. And for 21 years, until 2008, he was the founding director of the annual International Festival of Mountaineering Literature. Terry is at present a visiting scholar at the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, and is currently Profesor Honorifico at the Universidad de Alicante, Spain, where he co-supervises Ph.D. students in ecocriticism.  In this episode, Terry reflects on his working life in education - starting as a school teacher and then acquiring the knowledge, qualification and experience to teach in universities; as a scholar, particularly of Ted Hughes and D.H. Lawrence; but running through Terry’s talk, like a strong thread linking his various projects and interests is collaboration and partnership. 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.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our guest for this episode is Mark Wormald, current chair of the Ted Hughes Society, and a leading scholar, editor and irrepressible enthusiast for the work of Ted Hughes.  In this latest podcast in the short series ‘Meet Our Folks’, Mark traces his growing scholarly and personal interest in Ted Hughes’s poetry and life and Hughes passionate concern for the preservation and cleanliness of Britain’s rivers - a concern they both have in common.  Mark hosted the conference Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected, which was held at Pembroke college where Hughes had been an undergraduate and Mark was then Senior Tutor and Director of Studies for part 2 English. The conference led to a critical essay collection with the same title, edited by Mark and Neil Roberts and published in 2013, and also Mark’s election as Chair of the Ted Hughes Society and to his widely read and much praised book, The Catch: in search of Ted Hughes published in 2022. Hughes studied English Literature and then Archaeology and Anthropology at Pembroke College from 1951 to 1954, and as we’ll hear, thanks to Mark’s astute curation and tenacious fund-raising, Pembroke College now holds an extensive and growing archive of Hughes's original manuscripts, printed books, letters, and artwork for Hughes’s books. As Mark relates, the college has also acquired Hughes’s writing desk and chair, as well as a correspondence and previously unseen work shared with close friends like Seamus Heaney and the artist Barrie Cooke whose work and close friendships with not only Hughes but also Seamus Heaney, John Montague and Hughes’s son Nicholas, is the focal point of the exhibition Living Water: Poetry, Art and the Fight for Clean Rivers is presently on two sites: Pembroke College and the University Library of the University of Cambridge (https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1KeJHtJDUa/).  Also, due to Mark’s remarkable detective skills, the mystery of where in Pembroke College Ted Hughes claimed to have his dream of The Scorched Fox, and also where he barbecued steaks over a gas fire and painted pictures of leopards on the ceiling, may at last have been solved! 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.