We started the first Poetry Room by rearranging the furniture in order to accommodate everybody! Twenty three people came to discuss Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters on a cold Wednesday night: thank you to all of you who turned out and provided a great discussion.
This session was introduced by Linda and Anna. We began by setting the context of Ted Hughes’s life, looking at the following extract from the poet’s letter to his son on why he published Birthday Letters, a collection exploring his relationship with the American poet Sylvia Plath:
It was when I realised that my only chance of getting past 1963 was to blow up that log-jam, and assemble whatever I had written about your mother and me, and simply make it public – like a confession – that I decided to publish those Birthday Letters as I’ve called them. I thought, let the feminists do what they like, let people think what they like about me, let critics demolish and tear to bits these simple, unguarded, quite private for the most part, unsophisticated bits of writing, let the heavens fall, let your mother’s Academic armies of support demolish me, let Carol go bananas, let Frieda and Nick bolt for their bomb-shelters – I can’t care any more, I can’t lock myself in behind this glass door one more week.
Linda discussed how to read a poem- the particular challenges and delights the form presents to a reader. We selected eight poems from Birthday Letters to look at:
Fulbright Scholars
Visit
You Hated Spain
Fever
The Earthenware Head
Epiphany
The Inscription
Red
Eight was perhaps a little ambitious and there was so much to say (a good sign!) that we didn’t get past the first three. Themes that came up were the difficulty of reading the poems as poems and not journalism/biography. Some people also felt affiliated with either Hughes or Plath.
One of the things we hope to do in The Poetry Room is to assert the primacy of the poem. This is a particular challenge with Birthday Letters but we picked the book because we knew we wouldn’t be short of things to say about it and we weren’t. Some people went on to the bar to carry on the conversation, which we hope people will continue to do over the course of the sessions – and to use this blog for discussion too.
Next Thursday 3 April at 6.30pm, Sharon Olds’s Selected Poems is up for discussion. If you haven’t got the book, you can get a copy from Blackwell in Newcastle with a discount if you mention the Poetry Room. Everyone is extremely welcome: whether you’re new to reading poetry or an old hand, please come and join us and spread the poetry word.