QOTW: Ted Hughes on Sylvia Plath

Sylvia and I met because she was curious about my group of friends at university and I was curious about her. I was working in London but I used to go back up to Cambridge at weekends. Half a dozen or so of us made a poetic gang. Our main cooperative activity was drinking in the Anchor and our main common interest, apart from fellow feeling and mutual attraction, was Irish, Scottish and Welsh traditional songs - folk songs and broadsheet ballads. We sang a lot. Recorded folk song was rare in those days. 

Our poetic interests were more mutually understood than talked about. But we did print a broadsheet of literary comment. In one issue, one of our group, our Welshman, Dan Huws, demolished a poem that Sylvia had published, "Caryatids." He later became a close friend of hers, wrote a beautiful elegy when she died. That attack attracted her attention. Also, she had met one of our group, Lucas Myers, an American, who was an especially close friend of mine. Luke was very dark and skinny. He could be incredibly wild. Just what you hoped for from Tennessee. His poems were startling to us - Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens vocabulary, zany. He interested Sylvia. In her journals she records the occasional dream in which Luke appears unmistakably. When we published a magazine full of our own poems, the only issue of St. Botolph's, and launched it at a big dance party, Sylvia came to see what the rest of us looked like. Up to that point I'd never set eyes on her. I'd heard plenty about her from an English girlfriend who shared supervisions with her. There she suddenly was, raving Luke's verses at Luke and my verses at me.

Once I got to know her and read her poems, I saw straight off that she was a genius of some kind. Quite suddenly we were completely committed to each other and to each other's writing.

Ted Hughes

Hughes is known for his children's novel, The Iron Man
 (also known as The Iron Giant).  Image: reeway 2007

Source: extract from a 1995 interview with Ted Hughes with The Paris Review

Hughes was an English poet and children's writer.  He was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998. Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer, best known for The Colossus and Other Poems and The Bell Jar.  The pair were married between 1956 and 1965, when Plath died by committing suicide.

Short story writer and novelist Ali Smith

Extract from an interview with Ali Smith by Northings, an arts journal based in the Highlands of Scotland:

N: Your fiction seems very preoccupied with narrative voices?

AS: Yes, that is the whole point of fiction for me, and I don’t know that you can have a story that doesn’t have a voice. Once you have found the voice you have the story to a large extent, and for me it is usually more than one voice.

N: What about structure – how do you deal with that in the quite complex narratives of your novels?

AS: For me it comes before the novel, like an overarching framework – you have no idea where the novel will go within that, but at least you have the structure. Once you are into that process it is a blind – and a blinding! – process to some extent, and you really have to give into that and see where it takes you.

N: So that structural framework is malleable rather than a rigid one?

AS: It’s not rigid, no, and sometimes I wish it was more so! At the same time, you know that whatever it was that sent you on that overarching arc in the first place will probably take you through.

N: Is there a continuous editing process at work as you build up the narrative?

AS: There is for me. That is really how I do it. You write something blindly and then you look at it and see what it is you have, and work on it and try to work out where it might want to go, and the next thing is a continuation of that, and you build it up that way. Or I do, at any rate.

(Source - read full interview here).

Ali Smith was born in Inverness and is now based in Cambridge.  Her novels include Hotel World, winner of the Encore Award, and The Accidental, shortlisted for the Man Booker award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her collections of short stories include The Whole Story and Other Stories and The First Person and Other Stories (see review).

Jo Shapcott on why science matters to poetry

"Anyone who is curious, and I hope most poets are, will have that hungry attitude - the one that says there is nothing that is not interesting, and almost nothing not worth celebrating. I don't think poets have to understand science but I'd be amazed if their curiosity didn't lead them into wanting to know. I'm actually against writing about science - for the poet it's more that anything urgent within the consciousness will emerge in poems. Because of what the contemporary human knows about herself, inside and out, and knows about the Earth - and because of what humans do it - it would be amazing if some of these urgent nudgings didn't relate to science."

Jo Shapcott

Image by Science Museum London

Jo Shapcott is an English poet.  Her most recent book, Of Mutability (2010), won the Costa Book Award.
Source: Centre for Poetry and Science, University of Liverpool

2 quotes from writer V.S.Naipaul

On stopping writing:

'I think it will happen and I think it will be extremely painful. Without writing, everything will become insipid. Reading would have no point, because a writer reads with a purpose.'

On meeting other writers:

'I would not know what to talk to another writer about. He would be thinking about his book. And I would be thinking about mine. And what would we think of to say to each other?'

V.S. Naipaul

From a 2004 interview in The Guardian