Ted Hughes

To focus on you for a second, who were the first poets that you fell in love with that made you enjoy reading poetry?

Yeah, I think, obviously I had the one when I was a kid that we speak about in another video, Alan Allberg's, heard it in the playground, but older, honestly, and I love saying this because we were hearing the crows crowing, is Ted Hughes's collection, Crow.

There was something in the darkness and the mythological folkish exploration of this death force and life force that was the crow that just like, And I didn't have this language for it then.

I can play with it now.

Was that difficult to, um...

I mean, you seem to have been very ce-celebratory [laughs] of her and, and hope she ha-ha- was, had a torrid affair with Ted Hughes and things, whether you'd wish she had.

So I don't think it bothered you, but does- was it sort of weird to sort of find out about your mother before you knew her?

Oh, no.

I read the novel too.

It makes such a fuss of Ted Hughes.

And I think, why is it in Australia we can't even have a biography of a poet? All right, you know, you may like Ted Hughes more than you like A.D.

Hope, but they're poets of similar stature, I think.

And I just like think we have to behave in Australia as if we are Americans or Brits, you know, and we care about our culture.

You know, most children have the experience at one time or another of listening to the adult world around them, listening to their parents in the living room, listening to the newscaster and saying to themselves, "These people are insane.

These people have forgotten the priorities of existence," you know? Their priorities are all, as they'd say in Ireland, trín acuile, upside down, you know? And when I discovered real adult poetry, I remember a, a volume of, of poetry by Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, I felt as if a passing hawk had flown down, put its claws into me, and carried me off into the wild blue yonder.

It was that physical exper- uh, uh, of an experience.

And I said to myself, "Here are adults who have kept the primary vision of childhood alive into adulthood." I may not have used that language at that time, but that was the experience that I had.

And that one was, and then there was a guy named Paul, what the fuck was his last name? He was at the Hull Truck Theater Company.

And we used to do authors, and he got Ted Hughes.

He took Ted Hughes.

We had to take our own authors, and we would do them.

This is something that no one would ever do on television anymore, is improvise authors in the style of an author.

Yes,

yes.

And he said, I would like to do Ted Hughes.

But we need to keep talking a lot about the importance, the centrality of bringing things into being, creating, developing.

Ted Hughes believed that you could train children to develop the imagination.

to imagine more deeply and more effectively, you could actually train children to do that.

I'm interested, Piers, about, because we've talked a lot about creativity and narrative, and I feel it feels like it goes really hand in hand with narrative writing.

Okay

Um, I like Phil- Ted Hughes, despite his horrendous reputation

Mm-hmm.

Would you teach Sylvia Plath?