Jodie Hollander Finds Unlikely Inspiration Writing on Location
During my tempestuous teenage years, I was attracted to the work of Sylvia Plath. I voraciously read her poems, as well as The Bell Jar and Paul Alexander’s 2003 biography, Rough Magic. Her work resonated with me unlike any poet I had read before. Ted Hughes, of course, was mentioned, but only as the villain in the story of her tragic life. At one point, I felt I had to stop reading Plath’s work, as my own poems were sounding too similar to hers. After reading of the various abuse allegations against Ted Hughes, I found myself avoiding his work as well.
In 2017, I visited the Calder Valley in England. I stood at Plath’s grave, and also visited Lumb Bank, the large mill house Hughes purchased in 1969, which now serves as a residential writers’ retreat. I felt a strong connection to the land and an urgent sense that I must write here. When, in 2024, an opportunity arose to be poet in residence for the Elmet Trust, which included staying in Ted’s earliest childhood home in Mytholmroyd, where he lived till the age of eight, I jumped at the chance.
Arriving at #1 Aspinall Street, I felt the presence of a strong poetic energy. The home is a small, unassuming terrace house with a steep staircase, tastefully updated and decorated with pictures of Hughes and his family. However, strange things happened while I was there. A violent storm began the moment I picked up Birthday Letters. I heard clanging in the fireplace where Ted nearly died at age five. I heard what sounded like footsteps up the narrow staircase to where Ted’s older brother Gerald had slept. After returning home to the United States, what followed was the unexpected arrival of two Hughesian poems. After that, I began to deliberately watch, as Ted Hughes’ ideas and poems came forward and offered themselves to me. Somewhere around this point, an informal project took shape: to compose poems derived from or generated by my reading of Ted Hughes’ poems and, later, my reading of secondary material.
A key issue in this project is the degree of interpretative license my poems allow themselves, both in using material derived from his lines and in introducing new matter of my own as well as employing devices of form and narrative absent from Hughes. To illustrate, here’s my poem: “Your Horses,” which describes standing on the moors, where Ted was inspired to write his famous poem “The Horses.” My poem borrows several verbal and descriptive details from Ted Hughes: for example, the horses’ tilted hind-hooves, their seeming like megaliths, their stillness and silence. On the other hand, I do not attempt to imitate Hughes’ curlew whose “tear turned its edge on the silence,” or his breath leaving “tortuous statues in the iron light.” Hughes’ image of his breath forming statues is applied instead to the horses. Hughes’ poem ends with a wish that “In the din of crowded streets” he might “still meet his memory in so lonely a place.” By contrast, my poem draws on details from his biography and letters and leaves two questions hanging. The second of these questions depicts Ted Hughes as a ghost, a lost spirit looking back to his childhood, still seeking.
“The Horses” is written in the first person and narrates a past event: “I climbed through the woods,” and ends with a wish: “May I.” My poem is also written in the first person, but the second line changes in the third line to address Hughes directly. Who is the Ted Hughes addressed here? I have come to understand that this is a trickier question than it first appears. Clearly, I am addressing Ted Hughes beyond the grave, but he is a compound figure: the mature poet who has, in my words, known the “admiring faces, the scandals, / the accolades,” but also the boy playing on the moors with his older brother, Gerald. In my poem, I do not offer any direct answer, though I believe an answer is implied, based on what I view to be the tragic events of his later life and after the death of Sylvia Plath.
Somewhere around this point, an informal project took shape: to compose poems derived from or generated by my reading of Ted Hughes’ poems and, later, my reading of secondary material.
Where as a young poet, I was interested in the emotional intensity of Sylvia Plath’s content, now I find myself interested in Hughes’ diction, which strikes me as raw, visceral, and violent in nature. His long, often unruly lines, while not always ear-pleasing to me, are attractive in their chaotic nature. There is a darkness, a harshness in Hughes that echoes some of the poems I wrote about my childhood growing up in a dysfunctional family. Birthday Letters, in particular, strikes me as a collection that, not unlike my own first two collections, serves partially as an unburdening of a painful story long kept under wraps.
This brings me to another question. Why am I, an outsider and an American woman living in Arizona, writing poems about the late British poet, Ted Hughes? My first two collections, My Dark Horses, and Nocturne, both explore my unusual upbringing in a family of professional classical musicians. My parents’ story was also one in which two artistic geniuses clashed in a fraught and difficult marriage. Though their story is, of course, very different from that of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, in many ways the dynamic is similar, and feels strangely familiar to me.
In May and early June of this year, I was fortunate to have a second opportunity to stay at #1 Aspinall Street and to serve once again as poet in residence for the Elmet Trust. As I was hiking up through Abel Cote, a rugged, windswept farm on the moors, I happened to walk right up to a newborn lamb dropping from its mother. At first, I was startled. I didn’t mean to intrude on such an intimate moment, nor did I want to anger the mother or the other sheep. From a distance, I watched a little package, still yellow in its amniotic sac, wriggling to life, as its mother licked it clean. Reflecting on the experience, I couldn’t help but think of Ted Hughes’ poem “February 17th,” which describes a lamb that “could not get born.” Hughes takes on the gruesome task of slicing the stillborn lamb’s throat strings and holding up the severed head to its mother. This heartbreaking poem has always struck me as not only being about the death of an unborn lamb, but also how violent and cruel the world can be. I couldn’t help but think of the two tragic suicides in Hughes’ life, and the unconscionable loss of his four-year-old daughter, Shura, who her mother, Assia, killed when she died by suicide. It seems impossible to imagine how anyone might go on after these losses, and many of my poems have imagined Hughes as a tortured presence still wandering the moors. However, that rare, enchanted moment of seeing a lamb being born on a warm, sunny day at Abel Cote, right beside the field where Ted saw his famous horses, felt like a departure from that darkness, and has recently redirected me, if only in a small way, to begin re-imagining Hughes in a different, perhaps more peaceful place in the afterlife.
Abel Cote
I picture this wind whipped ridge,
this farm enclosed by a bouldered wall,
cows lounging in the fresh-cut grass,
shire horses standing at a wooden gate,
and you, listening to Lapwings and Skylarks,
having alas passed through:
no one on earth can find you now.
In the subtle light, a new lamb drops from its mother,
glistening yellow in its amniotic sac.
The bright juices spilling into the bright grass,
as she licks and licks and licks it into life.
Another thing worth mentioning about #1 Aspinall Street is that there is handsome photograph of Ted placed in the upstairs bathroom, which was once the bedroom that Ted and Olwyn, Ted’s sister, shared. In a strange, Mona Lisa-like way, the eyes of Ted Hughes follow you no matter where you are in that bathroom. Whether you’re sitting on the toilet or soaking in the tub, Ted’s eyes gaze directly at you. I admit to, on a few occasions, using the other bathroom in the house, or foregoing an evening bath, simply to avoid Ted’s penetrating eyes, which admittedly are quite unsettling in the way they somehow always seem to be staring straight into your soul.
Before staying #1 Aspinall Street, I didn’t believe in ghosts. Now I’m not so sure. I certainly feel something, some kind of unusual poetic energy propelling this project forward, something that feels like the spirit of Ted Hughes. In a letter to WS Merwin dated June 9, 1988, Hughes says: “I’ve had a double sort of existence—one as typecast in the Plath drama, one trying to ghost along somewhere close to the life I might have had.” As I continue work on these poems and learn as much as I possibly can about Ted Hughes, I can’t help but wonder if he is still “ghosting along” beside me.
Jodie Hollander
Jodie Hollander’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, Poetry and elsewhere. She has published two full length collections: My Dark Horses (2017), and Nocturne (2023), both with Liverpool and Oxford University Press. Hollander is the originator of 'Poetry in the Parks,' in conjunction with several National Parks and Monuments in the US, and lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.