The Artist and The Poet

The 2010 Drecki Memorial Lecture featured a documentary film and presentation by the film-maker and photographer Noel Chanan.

In 1983 the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and American printmaker and sculptor Leonard Baskin, his collaborator for many years, took part in an audio recording in which they discussed their long-standing friendship and the nature of their collaborative work on illustrated books of Hughes' poems.

The outcome of the recording was a lively, entertaining, and revelatory dialogue. Previously unpublished, this unique insight was the basis of a forty-minute video by film maker Noel Chanan, friend of both Hughes and Baskin, and in it they explore in intimate detail the genesis of such key works as Crow and Cave Birds.

The video incorporates extracts from readings by Hughes of his own poems, and a mass of previously unseen photographs of the interlocutors, together with extensive ilustrations of Baskin's dramatic prints and sculptures.