“Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born at 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd, in the West Riding of Yorkshire on the 17th August 1930. Ted was a pupil at the Burnley Road School until he was seven, when his family moved to Mexborough, in South Yorkshire. As a child he spent many hours exploring the countryside around Mytholmroyd, often in the company of his older brother, Gerald, and these experiences and the influences of the landscape were to inform much of his later poetry.
In ‘The Rock’, an autobiographical piece about his early childhood, Hughes writes about Scout Rock, whose cliff face provided ‘both the curtain and back-drop to existence‘. The area continued to be a powerful source of inspiration in his poetry long after he had left Yorkshire. Hughes described the experience of looking out of the skylight window of his bedroom on 1 Aspinall Street onto the Zion Chapel. The Chapel is long gone, but Zion Terrace remains, its name a reminder of more God-fearing times.
In his classic and richly personal collection Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence (1979), with photographs by Fay Godwin, Hughes suggests that the Calder Valley was originally the kingdom of Elmet, the last Celtic land to fall to the Anglo-Saxons. A second, revised edition was published as Elmet in 1994.
Many of Hughes’s other poems also relate to the Calder Valley. ‘Six Young Men’, for example, was written at Hughes’s parents’ house at Heptonstall Slack in 1956. The poem describes a photograph belonging to Hughes’s father of six of his friends on an outing to Lumb Falls, taken just before the First World War.”
Poems – by Currer, Ellis & Acton Bell is a collection of poetry written by the literary sisters Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë. Published in 1846 under the pseudonyms Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell, it only sold three copies when first published. After the success of their later works, the poems have since garnered more attention and acclaim. The Brontë sisters consisted of Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848), and Anne (1820-1849), who belonged to a nineteenth-century literary family associated with the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters are most famous for their novels, namely Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre”, Emily’s “Wuthering Heights”, and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”, each an irrefutable classic of English literature. Contents include: “Mementos”, “The Wife’s Will”, “Gilbert”, “Life”, “The Letter”, “Regret”, ” Presentiment”, “The Teacher’s Monologue”, “Passion”, “Preference”, “Evening Solace”, “Stanzas”, “Parting”, “Faith And Despondency”, “Stars”, “The Philosopher”, “Remembrance”, “A Death-Scene”, “Song”, “Anticipation”, “The Prisoner”, etc. Complete with biographical notes of Emily and Anne Brontë by their sister Charlotte Brontë, along with an Essay by Virginia Woolf on the Brontë Family Home, Haworth.
[A] “When I thought about what I could show you, what I could write you, I thought of this letter.”
[D] “We will take detours along the way tracing spaces in traces, spaces in places, traces in spaces, places in traces. We will have to trust we will find our way home because from there we go out to all other places. Let us linger here together at the threshold…”
[A] “In a letter, in a sentence there are 3 things I determine. The definite things, the names, the things yet to be resolved: the questions and the things that just don’t mean anything at all. I find myself paying attention to these pauses, silences and endpoints. I wonder if I can show you what I mean, I wonder about what we’re all doing and if our thoughts overwrite each other, whether you would hear what I am saying.
How often do we say: “I see what you mean”… well do you? I cannot see what you mean I can only imagine.”
[D] “In truth there is nothing I want to make you see, there is nothing I really mean and this nothing can never be exhausted. You made a distinction between hearing and listening just as I do between seeing and looking. Perception is an act of consumption in which we hazard nothing.”
You said: “When something is conclusive it means it never started; labour does not make a work and perhaps, you wrote, the first and last form is an empty bowl…”This made me entertain a fantasy of pointlessly making bowls which means labour could make a work but only as a device to understand the failure of creating an audience.
Ad Reinhardt
You wrote: Perhaps the only painting is black but there are endless possibilities in black. Old black, fresh black, lustrous black, dull black, emerald black, oil black, sunlight black, shadow black and the black of the lime tree in winter.
Courbet, Woman with a Parrot, 1866
You wrote: Maybe the only score is silent. What does it mean to experience silence as the essence of language?. Being silent is not the same as being mute. Silence is the only form of articulation. This is the gift of language.
I read a story about a child and a house built out of small red bricks. When construction was complete the child squatted next to it, placed a pig inside it and carefully replaced the top. Occasionally she walked away from the enclosure but always returned, opening it carefully, looking inside, emptying or filling it. This was her universe. Then you wrote me a story about a red house, a model that came to be built for real in red brick, found like a little time machine although you couldn’t determine if it goes to the past or the future. There is something tragic about the kind of architectural model created on the kitchen table. A house of meetings but also departures, its walls urge you to remember your compulsion to forget.
What does it mean to inhabit something, to capture its music? You thought about a nautilus shell for a long time and I wondered how you could blend with the darkness of the sea…
Dear Black Spot…
Gazing into your liquid emerald darkness suffused with silver halide crystals of light, sinking into your inky depths, enveloped in your perfect form, in a slumber dead to the world, an eternal caress wrapt in your tender abyss.
As I write to you I can sincerely say I have lived in this house although I cannot determine whether it is the past or the future. The ghostly sublime of a chair hovers in the background then I realised it never went away because it was never there in the first place. In the distance doors exploded from their origin, nothing is being asked or explained. A serene velocity at the mirrors edge hovers in the silver of the ground.
Symptoms manifested in the smashing of windows, the rehearsal of a ventriloquist act in empty rooms constructing an emotional temperature. I have stood under the darkening sky at the strike of madness where dead fingers dance, the dark matter of corporeal poetry: a shadow soundtrack of whispering grass kicking the air.
[A] “When we believe in a concept so deeply we might make a container for it over and over again…until the object might measure half the thought or the form smothers its nucleus. Just like a faucet that leaks [D: and there is comfort in this sound] concepts survive between half full and drowning.”
Piet Mondrian
[D] “Let us go, you and I beyond the perimeter where the Lime Tree is the tallest tree in sight, taller than the pines, the birches and willows, let us forget the names we give to the things we see.
There on the mossy bank of the lake I shall add my half empty to your half full and we shall wade out into its depths. We will forget that in spring and summer the Lime Tree was green all over and now in winter its branches are black, we will forget we are sad about that. We will forget because here in the lake we will be testing the concepts of surviving and drowning.”
You wrote: Perhaps an artist cannot live, but only die in what he or she creates. In reality this appears to be a trifle like a paper cut and ‘when this cut is made nothing is destroyed’, but beneath the work are the cuts, sharp, clean, deep. How do you obtain relief? Breathe and keep cutting.
[A] “I wonder are you bored because time is being consumed. Boredom is when what you want is elsewhere and you are obliged to wait for it, or wait without it.” [D] This absent content is a fragment that shines like gold. There is no sound we can run to in this prototype theatre; we can only act out to the sides.
Roland Barthes writes: ‘There is a scenography of waiting: I organize it, manipulate it, cut out a portion in time in which I shall mime the loss of the loved object”… the object yet to come, the object that should have come and didn’t, the object that might never come, “provoking the effects of a minor mourning.” A Lover’s Discourse, Waiting, P.37
I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign. I have no sense of proportions. The being I am waiting for is not real. I create and re-create it over and over, starting from my capacity to love.
[A] “In a letter, in a sentence there are 3 things I determine. The definite things, the names, the things yet to be resolved: the questions and the things that just don’t mean anything at all. I find myself paying attention to these pauses, silences and endpoints.”
Fernando Pessoa writes “I think with my feelings and feel with my thoughts”.
[D] Do you see what I mean?… I imagine in this instance that you do.
“In historiography the prosaic element [lies] especially in the fact that…its actual form ha[s] to appear accompanied in many ways by relative circumstances, clustered with accidents, and sullied by arbitrariness, although the historian ha[s] no right to transform this form of reality which [is] precisely in conformity with what immediately and actually happened. The task of this transformation is one in which poetry is chiefly called if in its material it treads on the ground of historical description. In this case it has to search out the inmost kernel and meaning of an event, an action, a national character, a prominent historical individual, but it has to strip away the accidents that play their part around them, and the indifferent accessories of what happened, the purely relative circumstances and traits of character, and put in their place things through which the inner substance of the thing at issue can clearly shine.” – Hegel, Aesthetics.
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