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Welcome to the first episode of the fourth season of the Ted Hughes Society podcast and the first of two recordings of poems by the poet and leading Ted Hughes scholar Steve Ely. The two readings together will cover the seven books of poetry and three pamphlets which Steve has published since 2013. In this first reading, Steve will be reading poems from Oswald’s Books of Hours (Smokestack Books 2013), Englaland (Smokestack Books 2015), Incendium Amoris (Smokestack Books 2017), Jubilate Messi (Shearsman Books 2018) and Lectio Violant (Shearsman Books 2021).
Steve’s poems are frequently concerned with themes of loss, damage and degradation - the degradations of habitats and the loss species of animals and plants. Steve’s concern is also with the loss and degradation of the deep and foundational cultural roots of England and Englishness, but Steve’s focus on England Englishness does not come from any conventional conservatism - as he has made abundantly clear: ‘I’m a utopian in the tradition of William Morris’, he has written, ‘seeking to bring to light neglected aspects of Englishness – the Anglo-Danish heritage, the pre-Reformation English Catholic Church, the traditions of resistance running through the silvaticii rebels against the Norman occupation, the Peasant’s Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the radicalism of the English revolution, the nineteenth and twentieth century working class movements and the particular experience of ‘the North’.
Steve is Reader in Creative Writing and Director of the Ted Hughes Network and a founding member of the Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire) a community-based organisation which seeks to develop the legacy of Ted Hughes in and around Hughes’s childhood home of Mexborough. Steve is Director of the Ted Hughes Network, and led the consortium that developed and launched the Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire literary trails which includes guided trail walks, engaging local, poetry readings, creative writing workshops. Further information cane be found on https://discoveringtedhughesyorkshire.co.uk/ Steve also played a leading role in establishing the Ted Hughes-focused archive at the University of Huddersfield’s Heritage Quay and led the team which acquired the Mark Hinchliffe Ted Hughes collection.
Steve is currently writing a novel -The Quoz - described as ‘a folk-horrific bildungsroman set in a West Riding pit village in the Sex Pistols summer of 1977’ and completing a collaboration with the artist Alan Parker entitled White Pony.
The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.)
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