Review of the Elmet Festival...

Went yesterday to Mytholmroyd (that's the actual name of a village in Upper Calder valley!) AND the village where one of my all time heroes (and favourite poet) Ted Hughes was born and raised for the first 6/7 years of his life.

We went for lunch at Hebden Bridge (which is a surprisingly artsy little town) and then on to Mythomroyd for a talk by the brilliant Simon Armitage (described, probably rather emabarrassingly for him, as the Poet Laureate in waiting) Simon grew up in a village not far from Ted's birthplace and became enamoured with Poetry through reading Ted Hughes. He spent the first half of the talk describing how important the Upper Calder Valley was throughout Ted's life; despite the fact that Ted left the area as a boy. Rather than read poems by Ted, he played poems read by Ted himself on a CD player; having first described where in the valley they were set and why. You really need to hear Ted Hughes read his own poetry to get the true rhythm and sense and feeling and darkness of his work. * ideally you need to hear every poet read their own work!

The second half of the talk was Simon reading his own poems but reading those which showed the link between him and Ted.

Simon was extremely funny, his poems evocative and his thoughts inspiring. He decsribed the following poem much as he descibes it at Poetry Archive, I include a link to it here...
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=87#

This one reminded me of Stevie Smith's "Not Waving Drowning" It is funny to start but ultimately very moving. Like when you start laughing and then hear the tragedy and it takes a moment for the emotional gears to shift and that awful sort of gap as all the air sucks out and leaves a vacuum, for just a long second before the wave of deep sadness breaks over you. It more often happens the other way around where you deal with the tragedy first and then find some relief when inexplicably it all turns to laughter. Sometimes I have experienced the first scenario immediately after the second- so it comes full circle.
Anyway- I loved this poem.

After the talk we had the great priviledge to be taken on a tour by Mr David Crossley; a gentlemen who knew Ted as a boy and has enjoyed an on going friendship with the Hughes family, even after Ted's death 9 years ago.

Unfortunately the tour was considerably shortened by the need for some of the kids to get back for a detention! (ugh!) This old gent took us to Ted's birth place and then to the canal where they fished for loach and Ted's life long love of fishing began. Mr Crossly read Ted's poems - the ones that related directly to their shared memories of growing up in this gushing ancient bleak living valley, surrounded by "dark satanic mills" and glowering moors.

He showed photographs of the views from where we stood, just as those views looked in 1930s. His enthusiasm, born out of nostalgia and empathy for Ted's words was palpable. He was a living oral history, standing on a greasy green moss spot on the old quarry slabbed walk way under a bridge over a dark muddy canal reading "The Canal's Drowning Black" and pointing at a newish old folks' sheltered housing block when he read the line "Mount Zion's Cowled, Satantic majesty behind me..." This having shown us a black and white blurred photo of Mount Zion - a huge methodist chapel stained black with industrial smog (circa 1938)

Having been into Ted's home and seen where this chapel stood you understand how this austere place of puritanical worship blocked out all light from the Hughes home and was an immence ominous black wall.

I feel kind of saddened and delighted by meeting Mr Crossley. A simple and honest man who again and again pointed out that he "whar nor scholerrr!" He was living the poetry purely and honestly and emotionally and not pretentiously - he was inspirational. I was saddened because the old chap must be mid seventies and whilst fit as fiddle - will not be around forever to share this absolutely vibrant and living history for all. Of course if "he whar a scholerrr" he'd have written a thesis and made countless documentaries etc.. as it happens he is just an enthusiastic old chap, who not olnly knew and loved Ted as a boy and grew to respect and understamd his work on a very personal level in age, but also has an immense understanding of social history in a part and time of England now long long gone. I wish we could capture old Donald Crossley's stories forever on film or recorded sound.

Oral history me lovelies... go out and tape you granddad and nana now---today! Keep a journal and blog even. Take pictures, write poems and then take pictures again because all too soon we'll be history too.

By Ted Hughes...

The Canal's Drowning Black

Bred wild leopards - among the pale depth fungus.
Loach. Torpid, ginger-bearded, secret
Prehistory of the canal's masonry,
With little cupid mouths.

Five inches huge!
On the slime-brink,over bridge reflections,
I teetered. Then a ringing, skull-jolt stamp
And their beards flowered sudden anemones

All down the sunken cliff. A mad-house thrill-
The stonework's tiny eyes, two feet, three feet,
Four feet down through my reflection
Watched for my next move.

Their schooldays were over.
Peeping man was no part of their knowledge.
So when a monkey god, a Martian
Tickled their underchins with his net rim

They snaked out and over the net rim easy
Back into the oligocene -
Only restrained by a mesh of kitchen curtain.
Then flopped out of their ocean-shifting aeons

Into a two-pound jam-jar
On a windowsill
Blackened with acid rain fall-out
From Manchester's rotten lung.

Next morning, Mount Zion's
Cowled, Satanic majecty behind me
I lobbed-one by one-high through the air
The stiff, pouting, failed, plaed moons

Back into their Paradise and mine.

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