Broadcasting
Exclusive interview with Sue Hubbard, Nova News
(No Limits Festival)
Broadcasting
Rainsongs, RTE Radio 1, Ireland
Broadcasting
Swimming to Albania, Salmon Poetry podcast
Broadcasting
Meet the poet
Broadcasting
Swimming To Albania, Clear Spot, Resonance FM
Broadcasting
The Poetry Place, West Wilts Radio
Broadcasting
Authors’ Club reading
Broadcasting
Reading of Uncut Leaves at Authors’ Club by Sue Hubbard
Walls and Borders in Art
Broadcasting
Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville in conversation
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard on
Easter Island statues
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard on Banksy
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard on Tacita Dean
Broadcasting
Louise Drewett Eurydice
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard’s Eurydice
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard on Sky News
Are Selfies Art?
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard
in conversation with
Shirazeh Houshiary
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard on Sky News
Banksy
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard on Sky News
Street entertainers
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard on Sky News
Caravaggio reproduction
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard on
Channel 5 News
Refugees
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard on Sky News
Auction prices
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard on Sky News
Banksy prices
Broadcasting
Hubbard’s Half-Hour
Resonance FM
Broadcasting
Sue Hubbard and
Lola Perrin
at The Rosemary Branch
Broadcasting
Serpentine Gallery
Poetry Marathon 2009
Broadcasting
17-18 October 2009
The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon was an ambitious two-day poetry event taking place in London during Frieze Art Fair week and featuring unique performances from leading poets, writers, artists, philosophers, scholars and musicians.
The Poetry Marathon is the fourth in the series of Marathons staged in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion each year. The Marathon series was conceived by Serpentine Gallery Co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2006. The first in the series, the Interview Marathon in 2006, involved interviews with leading figures in contemporary culture over 24 hours, conducted by Obrist and architect Rem Koolhaas. This was followed by the Experiment Marathon, conceived by Obrist and artist Olafur Eliasson in 2007, which included 50 experiments by speakers across both arts and science, and the Manifesto Marathon in 2008.
An international group of major figures will be brought together to perform in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the acclaimed Japanese practice SANAA. The event will include performances of new work, collaborations, discussions and experiments.
The Sunday Feature
Radio 3
Broadcasting
Among the Ranks of Angels
Rainer Maria Rilke
Poetry read by Tom Durham
Contributions from Philip Pulman,
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams
Poets Jo Shapcott, Don Paterson, and Sue Hubbard
and the Professor of German Karen Leeder
Produced by Julian May
Since Stephen Spender in the 1930s our finest poets have made versions of Rilke’s poems. Martyn Crucefix, who has translated the ‘Duino Elegies,’ explores their attraction.
Rilke never visited Britain and disliked the English language. He thought far more of Dante than Shakespeare. But his best known work, the ‘Duino Elegies’, completed in the same year as The Wasteland, has had the greatest impact on English readers and writers of any modern European poem. Martyn Crucefix’s translation was published in 2006, as was Don Paterson’s ‘Orpheus: A Version of Rilke‘, hailed as Paterson’s best book of poetry. Seamus Heaney has translated his sonnets and Jo Shapcott the poems he wrote in French towards the end of his life. She says “Rilke’s poems fascinate because they demand you pour yourself into them. The act of reading them is more like writing…or prayer.”
Rilke fascinates readers, too. You might be hard-pressed to find Thomas Mann in a bookshop these days, but if there is a poetry section Rilke will be there.
Crucefix unpacks Rilke, revealing what makes him so engaging: his idea that a poem is an object in itself, that the poet’s role is to sing, to praise. But Rilke is a poet without God. Existence is the wonder, not death the disaster. The poets explore Rilke’s ideas of the role of the imagination and inspiration, and how he renders the subtlest of experiences in language of great beauty.
Content and Texts © Sue Hubbard 2011
Images maybe subject to copyright
Between The Ears
Radio 3
Broadcasting
Wallace Stevens
The Man with the Blue Guitar
Performed by Kerry Shale
Music for the Blue Guitar
Composed and played by Martin Simpson
Contributions from David Hockney, Dana Gioia and Sue Hubbard
Poetry Please
Radio 3
Broadcasting
Producer: Sarah Langan
Roger McGough presents a mixture of poetry requests, including verse by Simon Armitage, Denise Levertov and John Keats. The readers are Kenneth Cranham, Annette Badland and Jonjo O’Neill. Elegies for lost lovers and dead trees ring out, with a quirky poem by the American Louis Untermeyer ‘To a Telegraph Pole‘ and a poem about Orpheus, whose music made the trees dance. Sue Hubbard reads her poem about his long suffering subterranean wife, ‘Eurydice‘. The seams of poetry and music are interlaced in Patrick Kavanagh’s famous ‘On Raglan Road‘, and we find out what ails the ‘knight at arms, alone and palely loitering’ in John Keats’s ‘La Belle Dames Sans Merci.’ A half hour bound to hath thee in thrall.
Hubbard’s Half-Hour
Cill Rialaig
Broadcasting
Cill Rialaig
Cill Rialaig
Published 10 January 2008
A model of restoration
Sue Hubbard finds magic in the ruins of an Irish village abandoned during the potato famine
I’ve lost my heart to Cill Rialaig. It’s about as far west as you can go in Europe without falling off. It is a magical place set in a wild landscape full of ghosts and memories, a pre-famine village that clings to a steep slope 300 feet above the sea on the old road that leads to Bolus Head in Kerry, on the west coast of Ireland.

In winter the sea boils and rages against the cliffs as storms sweep in from the Atlantic. Hugging the hillside, it looks south-west towards the Béara Peninsula and the tiny uninhabited islands of Scariff and Deenish, and eastward beyond Waterville to MacGillycuddy’s Reeks. At the right time of year you might see seals or, if you are very lucky, a leatherback turtle. Abandoned by the inhabitants, who were driven out by near starvation, the collapsed cottages stare out to sea like a collection of grieving widows. The one-time fields and tillage-plots that lie on either side of the road are half hidden by rocks and boulders. Criss-crossed now by drystone walls, they are full of spongy tussocks of boggy grass, gorse and bracken. Grazing sheep, marked with the Day-Glo blue and pink dyes of their owners, shimmy up the hill, wiggling their backsides like muddy go-go dancers.
As the mist comes in, settling over the headland like a white duvet, and the rain beats against the windows on this, the last day of the old year, it is not difficult to imagine how hard life must have been up here. Unlike in other parts of Europe the plough was unknown, and cultivation of the staple, potatoes, was dependent on the spade. There was a little fishing and cattle breeding, and rye and oats were grown, the rye primarily for thatch. Houses consisted of one room, with a large fireplace fitted with a croch (hanger) and a drol (hook) for supporting pots. Animals lived under the same roof. Two doors facing each other allowed the cows to be driven in, milked, and then ushered out through the opposite door. Those living here must have been permanently damp, their skin kippered from turf smoke, their lungs full of bronchitis. Young women became prematurely old, worn down by incessant childbirth and hard work.

It is here that, ringed by sacred sites and standing stones, the pre-Augustinian monks built their beehive huts on the cliffs and prepared spiritually for the more demanding retreat on Skellig Michael. Some eight miles from the mainland, it can only be reached for a few months in the summer, even today, by a lenient sea. No boatman worth his salt, however beautiful the day may seem, will waste time making the crossing when he knows landing is impossible in the heaving Atlantic swell. Both Skellig Michael and its jagged companion Small Skellig, a gannet sanctuary stained white with guano that can be smelled on the wind as you approach, and which rises from the sea like something out of a Wagnerian opera, can be seen on a clear day from the mainland. Nothing prepares for the mystical atmosphere of Skellig Michael, home to monks for hundreds of years, with its 670 hand-hewn steps leading up above the sea to the clutch of monastic domes that, even now, seems only a hair’s breadth away from heaven. It was here that members of the Celtic church retreated to the edge of the known world to seek the face of God.
And what of Cill Rialaig now? Well, it’s risen like a phoenix from the ashes of its past. Through the tireless efforts of Noelle Campbell Sharpe, who raised the money to buy the village in the Nineties, the place has been turned into an artists’ and writers’ retreat. Peat smoke rises from the chimneys as photographers, printers, painters and the occasional writer engage in a flurry of creative activity. More than 1,500 painters and sculptors have taken up residencies in the seven rebuilt cottages that have been converted into simple live/work studios. Cash cannot buy a place, only talent can. The remains of the four other cottages stand in ruins, monuments to the inhabitants of the old village. Most recently restored as a meeting house is the home of Séan Ó Conaill, the farmer-fisherman and storyteller who lived here between 1923 and 1931.

Cill Rialaig is a model of restoration, not only of old buildings, but of a community. When each resident artist leaves, he or she donates a work that is then sold in Siopa Cill Rialaig, a purpose-built arts centre in nearby Dungeagan, to help fund the project. But the place is more than simply an artists’ retreat; there is also a scheme whereby one-off craft pieces are produced by young apprentices, local youngsters given a taste of training by professional artists.
It is the untamed authenticity of this place, however, that Campbell Sharpe has helped preserve from developers. If ever you should come this way, walk from the village out along the empty headland to the end of the lonely track until you reach a low, whitewashed cottage with a corrugated roof, which sits in isolation on the edge of the cliff with an uninterrupted view of the whole bay. The path of its immaculate, windblown garden is lined with pebbles from the beach, and the peat stack has been built with the precision of a Zen sculpture.
The cottage belongs to one of Kerry’s farming bachelors. They are a dying breed, but if you should be lucky enough to meet him, you will know him by his shock of white hair and twinkling blue eyes. When once I stopped and said he must live in the most beautiful spot in the whole world, he simply nodded, smiled and carried on working, as though such a statement about this inspiring place was obvious.
Content and Poetry © Sue Hubbard 2012
Image 1: © Donald Teskey
Ditto Campfire
Broadcasting
Campfire
20th October 2011
We feel very privileged to welcome to Campfire, Sue Hubbard, twice winner of the London Writers Competition and the poet who created London’s biggest public art poem(the- cut) Eurydice, commissioned by the Arts Council and the BFI during her residency as The Poetry Society’s Public Art Poet, which runs in the underpass from Waterloo Station to the IMAX.
As It Happens
CBC Radio
Broadcasting
Topical program from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Includes interview with Sue Hubbard after the demise of the Much Loved Waterloo Poem