Robert Hamberger interview with Sam Hickford (17th December, 2021)

SH: My supervisor, Oliver Hazzard, writes about Clare and he lives in Glasgow, whereas Iain Sinclair is very much a London writer. We have lots of urban poets who are interested in Clare, even though they don’t quite know how to identify every bird and flower he refers to. Do you consider yourself an urban poet? You lived in the countryside – how do you feel as an urban poet coming to Clare? Do you think it’s more of a challenge to understand Clare from that perspective?

RH: Because I didn’t have his naturalist knowledge, that defeated me initially because I did feel like the city boy who couldn’t understand some of his references and et cetera. A lot of my own subject matter isn’t nature poetry, I wouldn’t say that was my usual way of writing. With Clare, I think I was mainly interested in his ability to focus undivided attention on nature or whatever he was looking at, the idea of being able to examine something and take himself out of the equation, as well as his direct use of language. I really like his direct use of language and the attempt to draw the reader in rather than keep the reader out. That was quite influential for me – I don’t use dialect in my poems but the fact that he uses it is an interesting political act of putting speech on to the printed page. Using the rhythms of speech, as well, I certainly try to do that. I wasn’t influenced by the subject matter, the rural or urban, I was influenced more by his use of language and what he was doing with that as well as the idea of the eye being important to observe whatever was in front of him and to give that status, whether it was a wetland flower or some grass or the landscape that he was familiar with. I think his example of valuing whatever was in front of him was really important to me, particularly from being from working-class origins. That is a political act, to think whatever is in front of me has value and can be written about. That’s a really complicated way of saying that rural/urban thing was initially a barrier for me, but in the end that wasn’t helpful to me because I couldn’t have a different background from the background I had. It was less the subject matter and more what he did with his language that was helpful to me.

SH: Despite his background, you could still relate to him.

RH: Absolutely. Once I got over the fact that I’m never going to write in this way, because I don’t have the knowledge, I’m not a horticulturalist and a naturalist in the way he was, with his botanical knowledge, that was an initial barrier. It didn’t last that long. The thing that was a pulse for me was the way he actually used that language to take himself out of the equation. I thought that very helpful to learn from. Even if my subjects were family issues or biographical issues, I could still try. I do place the I in my poems, autobiographically, but I could still learn from that language.

SH: You don’t find yourself talking from someone else’s perspective?

RH: Usually not. Occasionally I would do a dramatic monologue if something has affected me, I will write in someone else’s voice. Clare did that and was very skilled that.

SH: I noticed in A Length of Road you write what seem to be dramatic monologues, imagining yourself as Clare but aware that there’s a distance there.

RH: It took me a while to get the voice I wanted as Clare and ventriloquising Clare. It was when I was at Hawthornden that I did the early drafts of those poems. It took me a while to get the voice I wanted, which was fragmented, Clare but not Clare. The same with the monologues and the people I met on this walk. I didn’t want to go inside them because part of the beauty of Journey out of Essex is that he gives these glimpses of other people’s lives: homeless people, gypsies, lacemakers, I found that such a powerful document that I wanted to go under the skin of some of those people.

SH: Was A Length of Road your first adventure in doing that?

RH: Yes. The walk was in 1995 and my first collection came out in 1997. My first collection does include some dramatic monologues: a guy in India and a Serbian prisoner of war. I spoke as Adam in the Bible. I have used characters as ways of extending the boundaries of my poetry and getting in someone’s skin. The poems in A Length of Road were parallel to that. It took me a few months to finish that. None of those poems were in any collections until A Length of Road, so I hung on to those for a long time. I published them as a pamphlet in 2007 but they’d been together for a long time. I published them in magazines but not as a group. (10.33) I had used dramatic monologue before, but with Clare I very much wanted all of them to have an epigraph from Clare’s journal, so I did want them mediated through his voice and for that to be my own imagination as to his voice in my voice, if you see what I mean. Dramatic monologues are quite interesting – they are this other person but they’re also you.

SH: As you say, it’s never perfectly being in someone else’s skin, but how did you feel trying to be in Clare’s skin? Did you find that comfortable or uncomfortable?

RH: The other thing with my use of language in my (Length of Road) poems is being aware of Clare’s mental health difficulties and trying in some way to honour that, to respect that, make that have an effect on the language. As I said, it took me a while to get the voice. Once I got it, those Clare poems were enjoyable to write because I could use some sense of his voice and subject matter but filtered through my sensibilities and conscience. I do respect him as a writer: I’ve spent 25 years writing the book, reading the biographies and letters. A lot of the autobiographical pieces are autobiographical prose. He was a writer who I gained more respect for over time, looking in to his work, if that makes sense. There are some writers who you gain less respect for going into their work. I really felt that given the range of pressure on him, financial pressures and the pressures to adapt his voice and art. There’s also the fact that there were 3000 poems, only a quarter of which were published. This is just someone who I found very inspiring, about not giving up and just keep on writing. I know other publications were very important to him. He wrote 800 poems (in Northampton Asylum) with very little prospect of publication, as well as dealing with a mental health condition. He still tried to find a shape for his poems when pressures were telling him to shut up. It did seem to me that he never relinquished his identity as a poet, even if it was giving acquaintances love poems in exchange for beer. He still felt he needed to do this and still had some ability, and I sought to explore his voice in my own writing. Some of those later poems are visionary in a way that the earlier poems aren’t: he was still progressing.

SH: I feel like a lot of editors try to draw a trajectory in Clare’s life, distinguishing between his brief success as an earlier poet with the fact that he went insane. Do you find yourself segregating Clare like that?

RH: I don’t see his story in that way. I am interested in the early success and the critical neglect, as well as what that did to him and his sense of voice and vocation. If you look at the Northborough sonnets, you see that he had just made a major move from Helpston to Northborough. Clearly there were all these problems about whether he would ever be published. There was this confidence in his own voice in the Northborough sonnets, which was astonishing. His use of absence of punctuation was really interesting, merging different readings within a set of 14 lines. I do write sonnets and I have learnt a lot from Clare in sonnets. I don’t see that episodic way of looking at his writing and mental health difficulties and how he managed that. I don’t find that a helpful way of following his example. He was someone who, very early on, had loads of pressures, and yet, for me, he kept going, he kept writing. He explored prose writing. This is a very living, questioning, challenging voice. The last twenty years in the asylum could be seen as tragic but I still feel there was a heroism there, less so still for men. I think his example is inspiring in that way. A poem like Don Juan, which is quite radical and extreme in its misogyny, his own misogyny, is quite daring of him, and quite scandalous with some of those stanzas and lines. They’re disturbing to read as a twenty-first century reader. In a poem like Don Juan, there is a very bold, verbal energy, where Clare is playing with his craft and subjects you wouldn’t normally associate him with eighty-five miles from home. There’s Childe Harold with Don Juan, both written at the same time and quite radically different voices going on. I don’t view the life in that episodic way. He does represent a lot of things but, for me, one of the things he represents is his craft. They don’t stand still, for me, the poems, which is another thing I find impressive about him.

SH: When you read the poems that he wrote later in Northampton Asylum, do you find them yourself uncomfortable to read?

RH: If you look at Don Juan, they are definitely uncomfortable. It’s not a nice, cosy, green Clare, is it, the voice of Don Juan? That’s what a lot of people would associate with Clare. I think we can learn from him, from our own views of women in nineteenth century poetry. There are still lessons, I think, in the range of his work. I am with you in the sense that sometimes discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing if it’s challenging us about what can or can’t be said, written, or published. It’s better to confront us with our own assumptions about what a poem is and how a poet can experiment with their own voice. My own view is that he was doing that consciously rather than unconsciously. It’s still someone who had facility with words and who thought in images. The asylum is somewhere where he’s still a poet, the images about losing vowels and consonants and all of that, and how brave he was to keep experimenting. I suppose that’s my conclusion, that discomfort when reading a poem is not necessarily a bad thing, challenging you with your assumptions about what he could and couldn’t write about.