Aug 292013
 

The above title was in a letter from Ted Hughes to Keith Sagar and is quoted in the current LRB (29 August 2013 Half-Fox by Seamus Perry. It would seem possible that we are suffering from the same disease. Or perhaps discomfort is a better word. Or condition?? Perry, in his review, expends some energy on reflections on Ted Hughes’ Crow. I loved that book! Back in 1970 or thereabouts I devoured it or it might be more accurate to say that it devoured me – took possession of me – formed my views of what writing should and could be. Somehow or other over the course of the last forty years I lost my copy of Crow and it seems I must buy a new copy. I want to find out how it touches me now. There’s a hope that it would reinvigorate my writing. Help me into that wildness that is at the heart of Hughes’ best writing.

And there is the fact that most people find the writing on our blog repellent or confusing or nonsensical or difficult or too wild as somebody said to me recently. As though we deliberately set out to alienate possible readers. Do we? These two old crows scratching about in the dust. Hopping, cackling, laughing and hurling insults.

Two punk crows too old to be dangerous.

It seems Hughes at times suffered self-doubts, as Perry quotes from another letter: ‘what I might have made of Crow’. Is that a despairing howl? But I loved Perry’s final sentence and quotation from Hughes: ‘In the end,’ Hughes told one of his interviewers, ‘one’s poems are ragged dirty undated letters from remote battles and weddings and one thing and another’.

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