It’s flattering to think that we are actually contributing to the pool of knowledge in our chosen fields, but are we actually learning adulthood? Finally, the opportunity to trawl unstalked through an obscure field of knowledge with little scrutiny, apart from the obscure demand to perform or to complete. It’s a responsibility we grow in, and maybe growing in the realms of unfettered and unprogrammed expertise a few neurons in the prefontal contex finally trigger.

I say that as someone who did meaningfully think he was becoming an expert in John Clare’s influence on contemporary poetry, and not just becoming a prelate in a generalised something. But it’s the imaginative exercise of it all – the desire to think it all matters, and matters uniquely – and the endless explaining to others why it might matter. This is a formation for the pointless career in adulthood – the needless retreat to the sideline, after years and years of maintaining a will towards generalisation, a keen interest in more than just John Clare.

—

So, do we trade? Do we hang up all our existing knowledge on the morbid coat-rack, in exchange for this expertise? I don’t know. I wish I could still reliably pretend to be a historian, a classicist, a nuclear physicist. But we instead sprint to localised ignorances in our own field.

In our field. The word is too human. Why cannot we not have untoucbed wildernesses? But to notice them is to cultivate them, to enact our stain of expertise on the living, organic realm.

We are gardeners. We are mowing our wonderfully untapped old-growth forests of knowledge.

—

But say we are growing up. We are. We are learning to distinguish, to finally ensure that what we say is mediated by authority and expertise. To not vaunt on subjects we know nothing about. To garden.

And this is by necessity a taciturnity. But must it be a retreat from activism? Can the intellectual gardener be a political visionary?

I still want to “speak up”. I don’t know what this means any more. In my saturation with expertise on one nature poet, and my awareness how little my knowledge of this one nature poet is, and the vast totality of what he wrote, from his earlier perceived days to his driftier asylum days, how can I continue to think “radically” about the plight of asylum seekers, of the growing injustices of the country I was born and have lived most of my life?

But I will. I will acknowledge that expertise must be channeled, exclusive. Equally. I will acknowledge that expertise gives us an obligation – a personal need – to develop a more integrated political voice. To speak up as this country is, in so many ways, razed to the ground. That our universities are squeezed. That our NHS is privatised.

Maybe my own PhD topic can help us understand why the expertises we funnel and inject ourselves with might be stretched to a broader vision of a society build on truth, a society rejecting the false gods of oppression:

By Langley Bush I roam but the bush hath left its hill;
On Cowper Green I stray – ’tis a desert strange and chill –
And spreading Lea Close Oak ere decay had penned its will
To the axe of the spoiler and self interest fell a prey;
And Crossberry Way and old Round Oak’s narrow lane
With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again.
Enclosure like a Bonaparte let not a thing remain,
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors – though the brook is running still,
It runs a naked brook, cold and chill

Of particular interest is how it all contracts, how the swirl of localised Northamptonshire pronouns become a more general vision of an imperalising force, a ‘Bonaparte’.

Let’s identify the way this hangs beyond our screen-heavy dissertations: the broader context of how our research defines us.

(1)

(2)

Elizabeth Jane-Burnett’s poetry aims to take us into a medium of perception beyond ourselves, into the natural world, into an object-perception unlittered by human consciousness. At times this becomes pure song, at times this becomes a sort of balladic documentation, as if a voice rising to a lilt and to an un-lilt:

herring gull

black-headed gull

arctic tern

oystercatcher

turnstone

sanderling

carrion crow

jackdaw

white wagtail

rock pipit

peregrine

kestrel

buzzard

brent goose

cormorant

kingfisher

farther out

gannet

One has only the preposition here, sandwiched in a pure stream of species, as if a child counting or becoming conscious, as if the ‘human’ ornaments of symbols and associations and adjectives are no good here.

It does waterfall to a great question: what is eco-poetry, and what makes it especially eco? Despite Jane-Burnett’s profoundly different poetry, and the way it emerges and becomes organic, is ensouled, in performance, there’s still an insufficiency in its presence in the ‘poetry market’ (if so can be termed): like other poems, it is printed on zombified and processed trees.

I’ve become conscious after the publication of Poems Sketched Upon the M60 that the same is true, here. No matter how much the poems in the collections implicitly warn against the encroachment of air travel upon the territory of stray cows, or aim to poetically and pretentiously and remotely reconstruct the spoken word of extinct animals, or whatever other eco-poetical contrivance, the ‘raw materials’ of the collection are the mass-production unconsciously carved dead letters of woodland sprites.

What ‘resources’ are then available to the radical eco poet, if such a species can be said to exist? For ecopoetry requires some liberation from the constancy of the cycle. Ecopoetry requires a sacramental movement away from a mass production that is destroying our planet in an unprecedented way.

I think it’s for this reason that (1) and (2) might be some of the most thorough ‘eco-poems’ I have, in the sense that they are grounded perceptually in their environment, in the sense they are not poems but involve an ‘ecological’ insistence upon every facet of space and time and breath. For eco-poetic reasons every collection churned out by the faceless Gods of the printing matrix must be imbued with its entirely personal tattoo. Equally, the performance of the poetry, outside of the stuffy citadels whereby poetry is performed, must endure the acoustic imprint that is the summation of modern life and the modern environment. If this is a poetry grounded in its environment, let it be grounded in the harsh reality of the Anthropocene, in the real tug of war of the world, the Nature we have made our prisoner.

~

Is it thus that ‘eco-poetry’ is only that poetry that is meaningfully situated, that seems to derive its allegory not from the (perhaps semi-ironic) Nature-spurning of Matthew Arnold but the notion of a real place, and the environment that entangles and overlaps and encases it? But thus we struggle to attain any wilderness, anywhere unshaped by human beings. Charles Tomlinson, who just encountered organically, and situatedly, in an Oxfam bookshop, whose hand was addressed to Paula, 1981, whoever or whatever that was, a resource I have to hand, part of the current literary echosystem that is before me, has this poem, ‘The Hand at Callow Hill Farm’:

Silence. The man defined

The quality, ate at his separate table

Silent, not because silence was enjoined

But was his nature. It shut him round

Even at outdoor tasks, his speech

Following upon a pause, as though

A hesitance to comply had checked it –

Yet comply he did, and willingly:

Pause and silence: both

Were essential graces, a reticence

Of the blood, whose calm concealed

The tutelary of that upland field

Ivan Illych has silence as a ‘commons’; I think this poem is, by a certain criteria, an ‘eco-poem’, in the sense that it is depicting a subject so perfectly of his or her environment that such an environment does not deserve to be told or spoken of. The environment itself does not emerge until the final line, as if we swerve back towards it: the subject is merely a ‘hand’ and the notion of Callow Hill Farm is more powerful by knots, the subject as other subject. Even if we have no idea what goes on at Callow Hill Farm; these details are immaterial; the biodiversity is merely taken for granted, a perfect synecdoche. Poems that situate us, however, can also be elegies, and this is the case with Clare’s later work, taking us apparently to the specific ‘round oak’ that used to form a memory centre in Helpston, the village of his childhood – in ‘The Round Oak’ (mirroring the similarly titled ‘Lamentations of Round Oak Waters’:

The apple top’t oak in the old narrow lane,

And the hedgerow of bramble and thorn

Will n’er throw their green on my visions again,

As they did on that sweet dewy morn:

When I went for spring pooteys’ and birds’ nests to look,

Down the border of bushes ayont the fair spring;

I gathered the palm grass close to the brook,

And heard the sweet birds in thorn-bushes sing.

I gathered flat gravel stones up in the shallows

To make ducks and drakes when I got to a pond.

The reedsparrow’s nest it was close to the sallows,

And the wren’s in a thorn bush a little beyond;

And there did the stickleback shoot through the pebbles,

As the bow shoots the arrow quick darting unseen,

Till it came to the shallows where the water scarce drebbles,

Then back dart again to the spring-head of green.

The nest of the magpie in the low bush of whitethorn,

And the carrion crow’s nest on the tree o’er the spring,

I saw it in march on many a cold morning,

When the arum it bloomed like a beautiful thing;

And the apple top’t oak aye as round as a table

That grew just above on the bank by the spring,

Where ever saturday noon I was able

To spend half a day and hear the birds sing.

But now there’s no holidays left to my choice

That can bring time to sit in thy pleasures again;

Thy limpid brook flows and thy waters rejoice,

And I long for that tree but my wishes are vain.

All that’s left to me now I find in my dreams:

For fate in my fortune’s left nothing the same;

Sweet apple top’d oak that grew by the stream

I loved thy shade once, now I love but thy name.

This poem is of relevance to anyone thinking about eco-poetry because it is the failure of eco-poetry itself, the failed attempt to conjure a situatedness, a particular environment, that was particular so therefore transient – like Callow Hill Farm, it is merely a ‘name’, as so many roads and towns bear the imprimatur of past rusticity. There are mythological resonances here, is this an Arthurian reference?, as well as the ‘circular narrative’ of the Round Oak, as we are led round it, or the memory of it, or the attempted memory of its tangled neurons. Clare, who was so determined to write (anachronistically) eco-poetry of and for the moment that he took to the fields, using his hat as a writing desk, is now following a circle round aimlessly, the circular contours of a memory of a truly encapsulated spatio-temporal organ. Clare admits the failure of eco-poetry, provided we ever find ourselves confined, old, unable to experience the outdoors except as a memory.

Or we may say that Round Oak is clearly in Clare’s visions, he remembers even the ‘stickleback’. And therefore this is a triumph of eco-poetry, a showing that eco-poetry does not have to be authentically plucked from the woods but can merely be the regurgitation of a previous situatedness. In other words, perhaps we don’t have to be purely swimming, perhaps eco-poetry can be reflective or meditative as long as we remembered correctly. Remembering one farm, one spot, one locality, in its fullness, it is more ‘ecological’ to return to it.

Just as unoriginality may be the most authentic ‘eco-poetry’.

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.

The most awful barb used to bludgeon strikers of various hues – baggage carriers, signalmen, and criminal barristers – is a comment on how selfish they are in shutting down essential public services. This argument is so torturously illogical that it amounts to anyone who does something essential being your personal slave. The argument apparently goes that as long as someone does something apparently critical or essential, like ensure the railways are functioning properly, prosecute defendants in murder trials, or lug huge baggage largely so you can fester in some tourist trap, they should have no representation in terms of their working conditions, subject to whatever whim their employers impose on them.

When did our society begin to have such contempt for workers? I believe strongly this is also the reason that some of the most poorly-paid workers in this country do not support strike action. It’s because it’s not fair that other workers are stable and unionised, even if they are subject to worsening pay conditions, not properly adjusted against soaring inflation of 11%. It isn’t fair – the precariat, people who work for care unions, hospitality unions, are not properly represented, and therefore must live hand-to-mouth, often living in real terms on less than minimum wage. This is not fair and RMT signalmen do have a better deal than this. But the ruling class have convinced you that RMT signalmen are somehow to blame for this, when it is them, creating a society that relies increasingly on agency work, zero-hour contracts, and mass precarity.

No union can represent them because their lives are so unstable and zero-hours that they do not have enough structure or stability in their lives to be part of a union. This is a soaring number of workers. If they were able, somehow, to organise, then strike action could really be effective in signalling that this society is just not equal or fair enough.

One of the main oddities that strikes me about hotels is, more so than any workplace, or any other workplace I have experienced, practically all skills are represented here. There are gardeners, cooks, cleaners, administrators, empaths, laundry-doers. There is brawn and brain in harmony. This is to the extent that a large hotel, more so than any other workplace I have experienced, would easily transfer over to becoming a fully-functional self-sustaining community. A team of gardeners cultivates the food, a team of chefs prepares the food, a team of entertainers keeps everyone company, a team of people-people spices up the communards’ respective lives.

If a group of hotel employees successfully organised, they could readily start a completely self-sustaining community, even an alternative society. In the hotel I work in, there are 240 employees, all of a vastly different ilk. The raising of the new nation’s flag, and the humane dismissal of all managers, would give birth to this grand, different institution.

The problem are the guests. Each guest occupies a space in a hotel that could easily fit an entire family of refugees.

We are reminded of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Premier Inns around London and Manchester did become social institutions, “houses of hospitality”. Forced by their imminent lack of function, which depends on the reality of swift travel, hotels were forced to learn the works of mercy and the rigours of Franciscan love-thy-neighbourism. Sadly, the too-quick end to this alternative and Medieval use of hotels was quickly brought to an end.

Perhaps if this social function hadn’t been altered, one would never have noticed the mingling of polished guests with the most vulnerable members of society. And, accidentally, a new, dynamic social system would have been created. One in which the hotel lobby would have been at the vanguard of social change – welcomed by a concierge retrained as a monk retrained as a concierge.

The hotel auditorium would interchangeably be a hotel auditorium and a site of prayer. After the conference is finished, Evensong could begin. Travelling salespeople would be so impressed and beckoned by the allure of the incense and the immanence of prayer that they would join. Some would become novices.

Perhaps these reflections are driven by the fact that my Oxford PPH, St. Benet’s Hall, is closing. One has to take a wistful view of this: here, at a long table, businesspeople and Benedictine monks did mingle at formal dinners. The prayer of ages thundered through the college, infusing a surprising soulability. The Medieval met the modern, where increasingly secular (and often Brutalist) colleges dominate the city.

In many ways, John Clare seems to be the poet of the modern environmental movement. We have cause to elegise the Swordy Well that he himself lamented. It was turned into a landfill site, before being trimmed and preened into a nature reserve. A teeming of panpsychist urge must have moved Clare to imagine Swordy Well – an enclosed limestone quarry – with its own voice:

                Petitioners are full of prayers

                To fall in pitys way

                But if her hand the gift forbears

                Theyll sooner swear than pray

                They’re not the worst to want who lurch

                On plenty with complaints

                No more then those who go to church

                Are eer the better saints

                I hold no hat to beg a mite

                Nor pick it up when thrown

                Nor limping leg I hold in sight

                But pray to keep my own

                Where profit gets his clutches in

                Theres little he will leave

                Gain stooping for a single pin

                Will stick it on his sleeve

That Clare wrote outdoors, using his hat as a desk, makes the idea of the enclosed quarry bemoaning his (her, their?) hatlessness more impotent. Clare’s poetry is full of the speaking, divine voice of the natural world: “The voice of nature as the voice of God, / Appeals to me in every tree and flower.” This is a nature-connectedness that emerged before the coining of the term “ecology” and before the modern realisation of the quantitative metrics pertaining to our destruction of the natural world.

Celebrating the beauty of common land is intrinsic, in turn, to celebrating the biodiversity that it gives way to. Clare’s many poems in praise of living birds in their natural environment, divorced from the symbolic networks and cerebral ideas of transcendence that they were linked to by poets like Percy Shelley (in “To The Skylark”, for example) – like “The Nightingale’s Nest” (bidding us ‘hush’ as we enter into its private dwelling) and “To the Snipe” (celebrating the poem as a “lover of swamps”) – provides, so it might seem, an energetic imperative to preserve the biodiversity of our frail earth.

This is my own version of what is now a kind of stock argument, made from George Monbiot to Paul Farley. Invited recently, indeed, to an interdisciplinary talk series, run by St. Leonard’s College at St. Andrews, I chose to rehash this argument in pretty much exactly these terms. I was first, titling my talk “John Clare and the climate emergency.”

And then the sting. A man asked me, “What does John Clare have to do with the climate emergency”? I waffled something; how “a vision of biodiversity” gives us an overweening urge to protect the planet. Then followed the next two talks; a presentation on carbon capture in the ocean, and a talk on how to interpret whale-song, the serious business of studying the natural world.

I recall mentioning that Clare was interested in natural history, the forerunner to modern science, and was even working on “The Natural History of Helpstone” (Helpston being his local village, which he viewed as warranting natural study.) I also faintly remember muttering something about a “moral impulse” in science. But this is a paradox; as I was reminded, science is the objective and quantitative study of the laws that guide our universe.

I’ve been thinking a lot since this talk series, indeed, about the broader question of what exactly art in general has to do with anthropogenic climate change. I remember giving the answer that Clare encouraged us to “engage with the natural world”, to “listen to birdsong”. The tidal waves of talks discussing the imminent loss of species that we face, however, mean that perhaps engaging with the natural world is not enough. Perhaps all any poetry should be saying is “we are so screwed”, a sort of dispondaic anti-paean.

Regardless, we cannot get into bird’s nests as John Clare did. One of the best ways to find the snipes (the ungarish wading birds) that Clare addressed is a sewage farm, as Paul Farley tells us; unofficial locations birdwatchers travel to in order to catch glimpses of rare birds. (I had a moment like this in the hotel I work in; pied wagtails are nesting above the lobby, which I am the ambassador of. Birds knocked off course will not necessarily gravitate towards our official nature reserves.)

 Besides, Clare laments the practice of taking birds’ eggs, but he is known to have had a pioneering collection therein, and to have collected birds’ eggs for local natural historians. Clare also couldn’t afford meat, as a member of the agricultural peasantry, but never declined it when it was offered to him. XR veganism, for example, would have made no sense to him.

There are many ways that I do believe, however, that Clare allows us to be more conscious and responsible members of the ecosystem we inhabit. I think some of these are just purely accidental, due to Clare’s consistent extreme poverty. Clare was perpetually low on paper, to the extent that he sometimes wrote on tree bark. Some very fine versets are scrawled upon other manuscripts, untitled little gems that fit unconventionally in the modern poetry scene, which demands titles, anthologies:

[on Peterborough Manuscript B8, R114]

                & the world is all too made for thee such much ado deare

                & the world be a rude world

                was there a nook in which the world had never been to sere

                That nook would prove a paradise when thou & love would near

                & there to pluck the blackberry & there to reach the sloe

                How joyously & quietly would love thy partner go

                Then rest she weary on a bank where not a grassy blade

                Had neer been bent by brambles feet & love thy pillow made

I know that as a poet finding these pearls, and how pointedly they are written on existing manuscripts, in a desperate, palimpsestic mode, has influenced my own practice. I now write poetry habitually on the back of receipts, Megabus tickets, envelopes, fish-and-chip packets, and on PhD notes (the most extreme of all, perhaps.) I suppose this is a clear example of aesthetics turning into practice: that John Clare is making me notice the potential (to delve into corporate parlance) of the littered scraps of paper that are reproduced automatically in our universe.

The fact that John Clare saw no distinction between poetry and natural history (indeed, felt  more comfortable in the latter) is also crucial to climate change. It’s not enough to be still and ruminate, or to loiter, but nor is it enough to study; we need a holistic (accused corporate parlance) attitude, as the poet-scientist might offer us. Clare has influenced poet-scientists, such as David Morley (see, for example, his Gypsy and the Poet, which uses Clare as a springboard to appreciate the natural world.) And then there is the land politics, and the resistance to enclosure, which allows us to imagine a different way of perceiving our world, beyond as a mere resource. One of the best poems on this theme is simply titled ‘Enclosure’, celebrating that which is uncultivated, structured almost as a fairy-tale:

                Far spread the moory ground, a level scene,

                Bespread with rush and one eternal green,

                That never felt the rage of blundering plough,

                Though centuries wreathed spring blossoms on its brow.

                Autumn met plains that stretched them far away

                In unchecked shadows of green, brown, and grey,

                Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene;

                No fence of ownership crept in between

                To hide the prospect from the gazing eye;

                Its only bondage was the circling sky.

                A mighty flat, undwarfed by bush and tree,

                Spread its faint shadow of immensity,

                And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds,

                In the blue mist the horizon’s edge surrounds.

This “faint shadow of immensity” becomes impossible to convey within the orthodoxies of syntax and grammar, from time to time. This leads one to insist most on what Clare supplies the modern climate change movement – a determination to, at least in moments of glittering insight, write ourselves out. Many have commented on Clare’s descriptive impulse – where his role as a speaker in his poems is minimised – but the more-than-human nature of Clare’s work can be seen most readily in ‘The Progress of Rhyme’, in which he descends (ascends?) into onomatopoeia, foreshadowing Hopkins, in order to approximate the song of nightingales (rather than dismissing it as the lorn cries of Philomel):

                And nightingales – oh, I have stood

                Beside the pingle and the wood,

                And o’er the old oak railing hung

                To listen every note they sung,

                And left boys making taws of clay

                To muse and listen half the day.

                The more I listened and the more

                Each note seemed sweeter than before,

                And aye so different was the strain

                She’d scarce repeat the note again:

                ‘Chew-chew chew-chew,’ and higher still:

                ‘Cheer-cheer cheer-cheer,’ more loud and shrill:

                ‘Cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up,’ and dropt

                Low: ‘tweet tweet jug jug jug’ and stopt

                One moment just to drink the sound

                Her music made, and then a round

                Of stranger witching notes was heard,

                As if it was a stranger bird:

                ‘Wew-wew wew-wew, chur-chur chur-chur,

                Woo-it woo-it’: could this be her?

                ‘Tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew,

                Chew-rit chew-rit,’ and ever new:

                ‘Will-will will-will, grig-grig grig-grig’

                The boy stopt sudden on the brig

                To hear the ‘tweet tweet tweet’ so shrill,

                Then ‘jug jug jug,’ and all was still

(a pingle is a small piece of enclosed ground in Northamptonshire dialect.)

(I remember, in the fantastic talk about whale-song, the idea that whales are not singing but rapping is addressed. There is a lovely arrythmia to Clare’s onomatopoeia here.)

(‘The Lament of Swordy Well’ is taken from Tom Paulin’s The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse. ‘Enclosure’ and ‘The Progress of Rhyme’ are taken from J.W and Anne Tibble’s Selected Poems.)

I’ve worked in the luxury hotel sector casually for about a week, in one of my many painful iterations of self, and have received a few tips as a concierge. When I’m sent on some errand to the less visible parts of the hotel, however, I’m struck by how unequal the procedure of tipping most probably is. There is the laundrette, where continuous hard work is taking place unseen by any of the clientele but is less “customer-facing”. There’s also the housekeeping, who surely don’t have the opportunity to mop up tips.

Tipping certainly has no place in a socialist economy, and even when workplaces share tips, they’re shared within the context of (from what I understand) one individual team. This means no tips for the various invisible people who make our world function, who we cosmeticise out of view. I’m obviously thinking symbolically of the hotel. Careworkers, however, must subsist largely on minimum wage, with no prospect of tips in sight. When I worked in care, for years, I did not receive one tip, and had to work long night shifts in order to elevate my income to something more in line with a “living wage”. There are also millions of underpaid workers with no prospect of being tipped – TAs, cleaners, etc. etc. They are barred from the dubious honour of being able to be tipped possibly because of not personally dealing with the wealthy, because of their inability to provide sustained banter (this could be because of a disability), or because they do not provide the temporary paroxysm of banter, but a more sustained and sensitive social service (dealing with the vulnerable, for example.)

In reality, though, the minimum wage will never be adjusted by particularly reckless governments in line with inflation, so that makes me appreciate the practice of tipping more. It’s one of the only examples of “trickle-down” economics, but a sort of presenteeist trickle-down. If tips were able to be shared equitably among everyone, then one imagines that society would be slightly more equal. Alternatively, the government could just intervene to make everything a little more equal.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/poems-sketched-upon-the-m60/sam-hickford//9781912412334

TBC

I can present only an experiential argument, but it’s a persuasive experiential argument nonetheless. When I started my BA at York, I loved how expansive and close-knit the community was. In addition to lectures, there was a functioning rural campus with a student-run co-op, a society that ran allotments, and a sort of squashed-together nest of brutalism that encouraged and practically demanded you to engage with the most reprehensible of arseholes. While still extremely immature, I grew up not in the sense that I attended lectures on fashionable critical theory, but that I learned how to cook, that I had enough time and space to volunteer in programmes scattered through the actual city of York. Between all of that, I met friends in pubs, read and wrote a lot, and learnt my alcohol threshold.

This was in such contrast to Oxford, where I did an MSt. I came, excited, and had so many interesting conversations, attended so many fascinating lectures and talks. Maybe it was because I had “done stuff” in the interim, but I felt deeply constrained by the collegiate system, where one’s college often has the stultifying arrogance to proclaim it can organise your whole social life for you, that it can arrange expensive package catering deals for you, that it can be your entire world and your whole extra-curricular life. In contrast to York – where I had enjoyed having an expansive life across a small campus, making stupid decisions like signing up to be a life-drawing model – I felt Oxford as a kind of prison, where I was kept docile and deradicalised by the odd feeling that I was still a boy in school about to be put in detention.

This setting can’t be very conducive to growing up. And then there’s the Bodleian, which technically has every book, but doesn’t let you take them out, and so you’re forced to hobble around different libraries to get what you need. And then there’s the fact that Oxford itself functions as a sort of gated community for the students, while the actual residents of the town are pushed into the suburbs, giving you an entirely constrained world.

I say this not because I have some kind of anti-Oxbridge fury. I feel completely at peace with Oxford’s existence, and do not have any preening desire to blockade it. I say it instead because at other universities there is a tired cliché of ‘Oxbridge rejects’, which needs to be dismantled. Since beginning a PhD at St. Andrews, I have felt so much more positive and expansive than I did at Oxford. Finally, there is one main library where I can actually take out books (because I have the neuroticism to still read physical books), there is a beautiful setting (Oxford’s obvious beauty is obscured by its confusion; a pot-pourri of architecture slobbered together.) Perhaps most importantly, St. Andrews is a ‘traditional’ university that is actually and functionally engaging with the climate crisis. While Oxford colleges lap up donations from climate change deniers and ne’er-do-wells, during matriculation, we are helpfully pointed out where to get a bag of organic produce, where to grow vegetables on campus, how to curb greenhouse emissions. [even if one does not believe in the climate emergency or whatever, this is doubtlessly helpful advice.]

St. Andrews is obviously not perfect, but it shows a ‘traditional’ university can adapt to obvious global concerns, have a bit of a moral compass, and still be as ‘traditional’. I believe, from a couple of seconds of being here, this is why St. Andrews has overtaken Oxford and Cambridge in the Times’ completely arbitrary student survey. And yet one meets countless people in institutions like St. Andrews that seem to be desperate for the traditional Oxbridge experience.

It’s indeed true that such a value is attached merely to the trochees ‘Oxford’ and ‘Cambridge’, and that the production of these syllables can lead various employers to be slightly more positively disposed to you. But this should not be the case, perhaps is somewhat only the case because various colonialists murmured the same syllables in antique dialects to justify their atrocities (I’m aware that lots of good people went to Oxbridge.) Again, I bear no ill will to these two higher education institutions, but I just think the time has come to stop associating them with some kind of mystical wisdom and intelligence. They are just higher education institutions, that’s all.

In World War II, children with the newly-conceived “autism” were identified by Hans Asperger. They were woefully insufficient in Nazi German spirit (geist) and systematically put to death in concentration camps. The whole category of “autism” was part of the general drive to purge undesirable people. While many boys were saved by Asperger, it is told that he had a particular dislike of the girls, who he considered unredeembably geistless, and warranting lethal injection.

Asperger’s work was revived in the 1990s, and divorced of its political content. “Autism” became what we know it today: an apparent tool for understanding people with unusual thought processes and obsessions. The previously-executed autists are now studiously overdefined as people with limited “social-emotional reciprocity”, as well as a “restricted and repetitive pattern of interests/activities”. Autists are an accepted part of disability discourse, whose social incapacities are meticulously accommodated for.

When I was 15, I was told I had “Asperger’s Syndrome”. It was put into my medical notes that I did not accept it, as if it was something entirely intrinsic, not devised in the context of a fascist regime. The admonition that it might be something to be questioned was not acceptable.

I ignored it. Eventually, trying to re-engage with the idea that I was “autistic”, or that I was on the “autistic spectrum”, I attended support groups, facilitated by the University of York’s disability team. I was frequently derided in these groups for believing God exists, or not conforming to a discernible pattern of “autistic interests”.

Is autism real? What about neurotypicalism, or neurotypical disorder – why not this way around? Are people with autism allowed to reshape what it is, rather than just be told by a clinical hierarchy? I have wondered all of this ever since learning that autism was a tool for genocide. As a category, perhaps resembling the movement for complicating sexuality, it should be taken out of the control of clinicians.

(Buy my collection, Poems Sketched Upon the M60): https://www.waterstones.com/book/poems-sketched-upon-the-m60/sam-hickford/9781912412334

(Order a personalised copy: e-mail me at sam.hickford@yandex.com)

Is there a middle-point between mass production and sending manuscripts to your mates? If the Elizabethans did indeed have a stigma of print, then we now have a complete astigmatism, as we blindly churn out endless new releases in our printing turrets. What if, even in this framework, we somehow managed to make each book meaningfully individual and personalistic? Can we? What if we sent the same set of poems and essays to everyone, collected in the same volume, yet there was always a twist, some additional Easter Egg, just a little quirk or chink to ensure that we can’t fully automate literary production!?

I did have an idea, in the course of trying to get people to purchase Poems Sketched Upon the M60. It’s essentially an idea that makes the whole process into a meditation. This is something akin to the lamentably named “found poetry”. Every single time someone actually does buy a copy of my collection, I force myself to write a completely and wholly individual poem for them somewhere in the collection. I oblige myself to do this even if I know very little about them, and some of the poems I’m most proud of are the people I know nothing about. At a recent dinner party, I had a conversation with some bloke about the Latin origins of the word “mellifluous”. He gave me a tenner to purchase the collection, and I knew little about the inner workings of his mind. Thus, I wrote a poem called “Mellifluous”, refashioning a lot of what was uttered into something resembling a metrical scheme, which I then lost forever when I actually gave it to him the next week (I was invited back, despite bringing nothing and drinking vast quantities of beer. I resolved to bring something next time, in what I now realise is a fairly constant social protocol.)

I have been thinking a lot about “found poetry” because I recently audited a module on language poetry and the twentieth century American avant-garde. Third-year undergraduates, taking a break from canonical figureheads like Chaucer, were studying literary extremists like Kenneth Goldsmith, one of whose poems simply consists of a typed-out copy of the New York Times. He proceeded to teach this creative method at the University of Pennsylvania, where he penalised undergraduates for showing any iota of creativity.

While I can’t share in this, stumbling into poets who deal in “found poetry” did set me off into an alternative set of reflections. I am now acutely aware of how much blank space there is in the world. I think this is related to how intensely easy it is to manufacture a book these days: to press its gatherings together, to attach its spine, to give it some comatose existence. There are many silent pages found in business textbooks, government white papers, and Vatican codices. All of these are just yearning for someone to write some metrically-precise reflection on them. John Clare, for example, could get to work on a piece of paper pretty fast, writing a pretty acceptable ballad on a salvaged handbill extremely quickly. He was genuinely short of paper, and so relished the opportunity to have just anything at all that he could write upon. Imagine what the combined force of Romantic poets (even just) could do with all the blank paper that is currently strewn across the Crystal Palace in Glasgow (where I happen to be writing this.) One could squeeze at least one actually quite good sonnet horizontally from the bit of the menu that says ‘Breakfast’, and a pantoum on the leaflet bearing the title “Table Service”. This is not even to mention all of the totally pointlessly-used paper you could find if you went into the Staff only area. The same drab rotas, perhaps some silly letter to all staff from some draconian manager.

I don’t know, and can only imagine, but the point is that one local Wetherspoons can be turned comfortably into not just poetry, but good poetry. I don’t mean finding phrases and appropriating them, I mean reflecting on the entire spatio-temporal context of the documents we find, and writing poetry about them in the white space. The secret liaison that is occurring between two people on the rota, which has reached classical intensity. The fish and chip meal that contributed to someone’s death in The Counting House in Glasgow the last month; another soul’s passage to the after-life. It’s overwhelming to think about. We must remember that many of the poets of the past, apart from when they were trying to be neat and tidy, managed to cram multiple good poems into one tiny page. Just look at the manuscripts! Hopkins drafted ‘Binsey Poplars’ on the back of a handbill. Imagine if he had access to the vast stock of paper today – I’m sure the Society of Jesus use far more paper than they used to, in printing out MS Word documents for missions, cleaning rotas for religious houses. God knows what else.

Receipt-poems ought to become a genre. The receipt bears the imprint of a time, a place, and is pretty much always printed with the intervention of someone, even if it’s someone who ensures the machine is working successfully, or someone who writes the computer code. Given that so much poetry today is splintered from any details of time and space, and given how lavishly and excessively we are using paper (which comes from trees, which we are deforesting at a vast rate), we basically have a Kantian duty to write perfectly-crafted poems on the back of receipts. In doing so, we should be conscious of every single space. If there is indeed a bit of space, this should be the very image of a caesura: a Robert Browning dramatic monologue baddy pausing in half-reflection of the sins he has committed, and how God might just not actually forgive them just because he went to confession last week. The receipt becomes our vehicle not to appropriate random bits of text and figure, but to seriously interrogate the endlessly complex psychological circumstances in which a receipt is created. To restore, to convert to verse, to converse.

We are not going to destroy “capitalism” like this. If I had one poetic absolute, however, it would be to infuse the world with sensitivity, with the idea that words matter beyond just sound-bites, consumer talismen, and they can be arranged mythically. Rahul Gupta first introduced me to the idea that the Logos might be just about possible into today’s word-saturated World. I am painfully aware that we cannot avoid the way in which words issue necrotically from the body-politic. So let’s stare at the vomit, clean it up, and then, instead of just regurgitating the vomit, re-tile and polish the floor.

You can still buy Poems Sketched Upon the M60 here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/poems-sketched-upon-the-m60/sam-hickford/9781912412334 Or send me an e-mail, sam.hickford@yandex.com, if you’d like to order a personalised copy.