I’ve lived in St. Andrews for a year and a half and had to care for a child while unemployed, then worked a combination of jobs while supporting myself as a delivery cyclist, PhD tutor, online tutor, and tour guide. I have never had a reliable, stable income nor any kind of PhD stipend. I had a tuition fee waiver, and that’s it. Nevertheless, survivalism in a town full of reality-divorced posh golfers can be a fun challenge. In case you’re about to be a similar position, here is every tip I can think of right now, though I know some more:

• University of St. Andrews meal deal, available in the Main Library, Walter Bower House, and other University-run (not Union-run) cafés (somewhere in the North Haugh?). £1.75 for a reasonably priced sandwich, snack, and hot drink (filter coffee/tea). This has saved my life when I haven’t got the time to bring some food in a Tupperware (brandonym redacted?).
• Tesco on Market Street have a reduced to clear section in the middle that often includes a diversity of food. They throw everything away at about 9 pm so get there before that.

• Budget shops: There is an ALDI. That’s pretty much it, unless you count Greggs. But, In Dundee, there is a B&M and a Home Bargains. Make these your friends.

• Similarly, if you’re too old for an Old Scot Card, bear in mind the University’s Stagecoach discount. You can get 75% off weekly tickets, which is a huge help. A weekly East Scotland ticket will cost about £7, which can get you to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, and possibly Aberdeen (staying out too late in Glasgow or Edinburgh may result in you getting stranded without the Elemy service, which is reasonably priced.). You need the St. Andrews logo to come up on your app. For help, go to the Main Library help desk.
• Also, as a student, you are entitled to a 16-25 railcard even if you are over 25. This is important and will help a lot in getting to conferences, going home, etc. You need to go to the ASC and get them to stamp a physical railcard application, proving you’re a student, and then you’re off. It’s about £20 and well worth the money for a third discount on all standard tickets.
• Bear in mind random soup kitchens, in St. Andrews churches, which happen a lot. St. Mark’s Parish Church, a Church of Scotland church near the bus station, has a free soup kitchen on Friday starting at 11 am. Don’t think that you are ‘taking food from people who truly need them by doing this. Considering how messed up the university sector is, you deserve free food, unless you have some sort of expensive trust fund, in which case maybe you should consider setting up something like this. There are more, too, and many in Dundee.
• Similarly, St. David’s Community Centre, North East Fife Community Hub, near East Sands, on Albany Park, has an affordable lunch every weekday in which you can get a big lunch replete with much genuine nutrition for about £3. Food banks and a post office are run from here.

• Bikes: Transitions have bikes you can borrow and a bike workshop where interested volunteers will help you repair your bike and not charge you extortionate sums. There’s a really nice chap on Kinnesburn Road who runs a bike shop called Cyclepath. Do not go to Spokes on South Street. These guys are notorious overchargers who will do whatever they can to ensure you pay overpriced sums for a simple and uncomplicated bike repair.
• More on transitions. Transitions’ various community gardens have harvestable produce that is fit to bursting. Among the Transitions gardens that are easily accessible is a garden by the Observatory (nearby David Russell Apartments, where you may be.)
• Similarly, Transitions run drop-in sessions in their garage on Monday and Friday from 12.30-2.30 by the back of the Chemistry department. This is often extremely nice stuff that posh students have got rid of. You can get virtually anything here – clothes, electronics, etc. I have got a blender, a wardrobe, and several furniture items for free here.
• Use apps like Too Good to Go (which operates in St. Andrews) or Olio.
• Consult In The Loop, the staff and PG newsletter. If you say you need something and make a case for why you might need it someone will often get in touch with you. I have acquired a washing machine and two sofas this way.
• Housing: Landlords and landladies will often charge hefty prices, considering they know the housing game. Many of the student letting agents are notoriously immoral in terms of inflating prices. Look around for more ad hoc arrangements in Facebook pages like Get a Room. If you ask your department administrator to circulate a request for housing, something might come forward.
• Also, near Leuchars, there is some amazingly cheap student accommodation nearby some army barracks. If you talk to student accommodation and say you are at risk of homelessness, they will move you here very affordably.
• Castle Furniture Project in Cupar is supposed to be affordable and good. There’s also a similar shop like this in Anstruther.
• Booze: Luvians (on Market Street) have a little expired beer box if you’re looking for something a little fancy to impress at a dinner party or posh student party, or just want to treat yourself, but, like me, are practically destitute. Obviously the Union is the cheapest pub in town, but you might feel a bit awkward in there unless you are 18, so consider other cheap pubs in town: Aikman’s, the New Inn (I think that’s about it.) Aikman’s sell a selection of Belgian beers for about half the price they’d be anywhere else, especially some bougie craft beer pub in Islington.
• Books: try Transitions, Monday and Friday, an aforementioned drop-in session. Quite often if you are looking for course reading someone will be getting rid of them. I’ve taught EN1004 and have seen the entire EN1004 reading list, together, huddled in the Transitions drop-in session. There’s a second hand book shop on the other side of Market Street, near Luvian’s, which I mention because I bear a mortal grudge against Toppings, who won’t let me have a poetry reading there (if you’re reading this, Toppings, once I become a celebrity poet at the same level of Byron, I am never letting you stock my books. If you do I will take legal action against you.)
• Swimming pools, blah blah blah: The Sports Centre is obviously your best bet, but maybe you want to consider working for the Fairmont? Lots of students work here and if you work for the notorious C&B department, often commandeered by UGs, you can simply sign up for particular shifts and not work any consistent or reliable shift pattern. And you then have access to the swimming pool! And also these ridiculous 30% discounts (or some figure to that effect) on stuff like massages, the restaurants (which are not that great), etc.
• Obviously charity shops are in the town. I would avoid Oxfam, which is notoriously overpriced, though it does occasionally have these massive inexplicable discounts on nice coffee and chocolate.
• Naturity has a bargain basket with stuff like soya cream for 75% off, as well as free vegetables.
• Finally, I would strongly recommend a trip to Kinnessburn Eco Hub. A little bit out of town, this is a very affordable refillable shop, in which you can buy rice, shampoo, pulses, etc. I have bought a massive quantity of chickpeas, rice, and shampoo and honestly spent something like about £7.

• More when inspiration strikes.

(If you’ve enjoyed this, please consider buying my poetry collection, Poems Sketched Upon the M60: https://www.waterstones.com/book/poems-sketched-upon-the-m60/sam-hickford/9781912412334. I’m so poor that I eat from bins.

I recently had a very well-meaning and wholly lovely visit from a friend who advised me that the key to becoming a successful poet is a more coordinated PR campaign. My friend from school has also advised me this for years. I am entirely convinced that this is true, being excessively cynical about the world.

Equally, I don’t want this to be true and wish it would not, be true. Some of my earliest Facebook activity after recovering from the anodyne of a silent monastery a couple of years ago was directly ridiculing this notion. A juveniler me would tag myself at locations I’d never been to and write poems as if I was there, in direct and pretentious-prickish satire of the idea of a dramatic monologue. (I was recently called a pretentious prick, jokingly and banterously, twice, while giving guided tours around St. Andrews, so the term is on my mind a little.)

Maybe I can pinpoint what finally made me cave. Picture this scene, reader; FlixBus from Glasgow to Manchester, get in to Manchester Central Coach Station at 2.30 am, there’s a guy walking round the coach station shouting at everyone in sight, you get a coffee in a 24/7 SPAR. Then a security man in a High Viz Jacket tells you that you look “70% homeless”. You tell him that you teach at St Andrews, have a book. He says you need to buy some clothes from NEXT and then – in his words – “your students will be able to come to you”.

Maybe it is my incorrigible autism that just makes me not understand why going to NEXT is the next step towards “being taken seriously”. Are we seriously so blind towards the general import of what people are saying that we fixate on what brand they are wearing in order to decide whether or not to take them seriously? Fair enough that we think people with tattoos are cool, or that we think people with top hats are a little silly and antiquated. But having some sort of textile radar that can swoop into the whim of iron that a vestment has been branded with… surely this is a condition of late capitalism gone mad?

Maybe I’m still a bit angry at my very well-meaning boss’ boss, who flitted around the five star hotel I briefbriefbriefly worked in like an osprey, checking who hadn’t ironed their clothes and making a prey of them. Multiple times, despite doing my job very well and handling its multifaceted responsibilities well, and despite being good at schnozzing with rich people (a skill I never though I had, looking as 70% homeless as I do), it being precisely transferable to wiping arses in care homes, I was frequently given the slip by some complex chain of command that my presentation skills were not good enough. I missed a spot polishing my boots, I had urine all over my face, etc. etc.

But I have caved, reader, and so this blog post is now just some pictures of me taken by someone else and an accompanying set of narcissistic photos. Isn’t that what you want? But you shall be given poems, that you shall not read, which is the only twist.

In the morning, let me know your love,

O megalith, for you spun this circus where

howls of racist abuse shall be our matins,

conical clouds will sing us from above.

And when all of this is in rabid disuse

what manner of vehicle serves to infuse

the whole temple of its plate-glass life?

Artificial fertility of stone-hewn

moss. A priory or two

to beat the sediment to dross

of spirit. Three hundred years

to imagine and relove.

The habitat’s trance, arboured

legacies of beyond pine

symphonies, starboard

new solitudes.

Will you accept my narcissism, God?

I’ve been vegan for ten years now. When I started it was specialist health food shops selling overpriced vegan food that you had to explicitly hunt for. Now being vegan is so much more accessible and trendy, but the ‘vegan market’ is saturated with samey and gimmicky food. The often dreaded ‘vegan meat’ largely looks like something vaguely resembling meat, with the tactile and olfactory consistency of cardboard. Recently, standards have fallen as supermarkets aggressively compete to corner the vegan-curious, offering fake meat products that are tantalising at first but unhealthy and bland.

I visited this restaurant with some friends in London. London is the worst culprit of this type of behaviour; ‘health food shops’ selling dreary vegan comestibles proliferate. In Camden, vegan offerings are absolutely full of poseur cuisine: overpriced experiences that should be paying you for the privilege of entering them.

So I was utterly surprised to wholly enjoy my time at this restaurant. I was staggered by the food, which is truly novel, innovative, and variegated. I had a vegan goat curry, which was the best meal I’ve had out in ten years; succulent and ambitiously structured. The waiting staff were full of genuine, rather than forced, warmth; the prices were modest.

Meat the Vegans is new, and needs support not to become another start-up erasure, so I’d really recommend doing everything you can to keep it afloat.

The robot camera enters the Titanic

And we see her fish-cold nurseries on the news;

The toys of Pompeii trampled in the panic;

The death camp barrel of baby shoes;

–

The snow that covered up the lost girl’s tracks;

The scapular she wore about her neck;

The broken doll the photojournalist packs

To toss into the foreground of the wreck.

This poem by Michael Donaghy, ‘Reliquary’, is now more pertinent than Donaghy could have ever imagined. I think the poem is about how we unwittingly or wittingly insert ourselves into the past – how we excavate to incavate. In a volta’s fire, “The broken doll the photojournalist packs / To toss into the foreground of the wreck” is woven into the perfect alternate rhyme structure of the poem itself, as we unknowingly are the wreck we claim the vanity of having distance from. What is historical becomes actual.

The title is bathed in irony – the line ‘The death camp barrel of baby shoes’, with its invented and disturbing concept of baby saints, does not quite step into regular pentameter: we ourselves are on the same awkward, jittery journey, reading this poem, re-re-reading about the Titanic, hearing that a submersible has imploded, re-martyred.

The plane is a fallow tear,

auto-drought to its carcass

in a graveyard of silhouettes;

mink whales wait for the burden

of a transplanted heaven.

This is an airport poem,

unmoored to the archaeology

of its destination:

Yeadon, or the native whitewash

of Misi-zaagiing,

It is not enough to acknowledge,

we pour faces into the commedia;

nature’s whiplash…

The physical process of carbon offsetting, the paying for some questionable subcontractor to plant ecosystemically inappropriate trees, is not enough, by any stretch; we have to also invent spiritual and aesthetic means of carbon offsetting. To truly, when we are on board a plane, picture the microdot in the landscape we breeze past, even while we are diverted by onboard entertainment facilities, and raze, or help to raze, with our trip; fully Ignatian-visualise the forest we have unearthed with our selfish aviation activities.

I make these pretentious statements because I myself am guilty. I have fasted from flying for ten years, despite really wanting to travel; wanting to do ecotourism in Costa Rica, wanting to travel to the wider Francophone world like Haiti and Martinique to encounter (always selfishly, always westernly) reality, wanting to visit friends in Romania. Wanting desperately to go to the US to discover the ‘heart’ of the Catholic Worker movement I am involved in (past tense? Involved?) Wanting to see biodiversity, to have a vision of why saving the world on a micro-scale in the UK in our woefully agro-businessified and bird-of-paradise-lacking island might matter. Maybe just wanting a holiday!

But I flew this month for the first time in ten years. Given my son lives in Canada, far away from the UK, it was my only way as not a rich man and not an experienced sailor or swimmer to visit him. The extent to which this was a big deal has been met by apathy, consternation, and patience by whoever I’ve happened to tell…

…Tethered to old Britannia

a single air traffic controller

waylays into mystery…

But I remember the odd liturgies of flying from family holidays, which I was fortunate enough to go on, the sacramental strip tease, the unnuding, the odd clangorous clawing sociability of a mystery, the nudging and jabbering as we machine-learn Icarus. But perhaps that’s what the myth means; human flight is always costed. We may have seamless, even quotidian flying, but it costs the earth, weighs down upon it.

Everyone I’ve spoken to assures me I’m relentlessly justified in getting a long-haul flight to see my son. Even so, even after having paid the ‘carbon offsetting’, I feel guilty. The airplane itself, marauding with the Southern English and English-speaking Canadians, becomes confessional.

One moment of odd mystical synthesis was reading that France have moved to ban short-haul flights for journeys that are under two and a half hours. This was accompanied by the realisation that Canada, unlike the UK, lacks a really substantial railway network. From what it seems, rail transport from one big Canadian city to another is modern and high-speed, but many big towns of 10,000 people lack a railway station. This is true in the UK (Heywood – St. Andrews – two examples that have touched me -) but these are minorities, and are always supported by an extensive bus network.

Another moment of mystical synthesis was the fact that German environmentalist protest groups, unlike XR and Just Stop Oil, are making really concrete demands. Asking, for example, for speed limit reductions.

I am a supporter of XR and Just Stop Oil. But this plane journey and this reading material made me reflect a lot on my trip on environmentalist action. Maybe the apocalyptic imagery won’t wash, and in line with disruption, activists need to be more precise.

I don’t know. But one thing I imagined would be that specifically disrupting flights from Manchester to London, for example, would be a precise and effective strategy. These are planes that categorically shouldn’t run – who in their right mind is flying a trip that such a high-speed rail link exists for? But people constantly are – there are two flights a day. This seems less of an economic necessity and more the need for a seamless journey. Disrupting short-haul flights would encourage a precise debate like this.

Equally, should we ban private jets? Or restrict their use for the rich and powerful? These are all measures that, one supposes, would make sense, would begin to trigger a wider movement towards climate equity.

Or is it in nuance that we fall? Should we be doggedly emotional, and insist on the sentimental and spiritual dimension of what we’re losing? Or should we both?

…A million screens

discourse

the procession

of an earing

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.