The Peasant Poet - John Clare - a shapeshifter
rooted in his own soil, inflections guttural & natural,
his concerns personal (not those of a community)
taken to High Society London as a curio, cadaver
of Dick Whittington in the belljar of class difference.
Was to be exhibited like this to be exploited
when he took the print runs, advances, hopes
of a lifelong readership before the fad ran dry?
Did he have a choice with nine mouths to feed?
Did he own this marketing, printing leaves on madness?
The alternative was to be left as he was, in the fields,
punctuating wild as the gadfly & never to be head of.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the new concrete: an online course in attentive poetics

Image
‎ The editors of The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century , Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe, will be leading an online course for The Poetry School , beginning on 15th September 2015. The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayward Publishing, 2015) One of the narratives of visual poetry since the 1950s is that the form has become one that can be taken up by any poet at some stage of their writing life. The concrete movement had such a strong impact that it's impossible not to write poetry and to consider, at some point, how these techniques might be put into practice in a particular poem or sequence. Edwin Morgan is significant here. His work is remarkable for its variety, dexterity and energy. I have always felt that his concrete poetry allowed him to get right down into the syllables, particles and phonemes of poetic language which he could later put to such effective use in his non-concrete work. Like an arachnophile coming back from year
Read more

talk to that & other poems

Image
  This is my first poetry publication for two years, a series of poems exploring cities: Liverpool, New York, Munich and  Brasília.   The central poem imagines Federico García Lorca, Walt Whitman and Hart Crane meeting in New York. This limited edition chapbook is restricted to 53 copies and is published in Tangerine Press's latest 'Walking Wounded' series, alongside new publications by David Keenan and Wendy Erskine.  Order Talk to That & Other Poems from Tangerine Press for £12, inclusive of p&p. 
Read more

poetry objects

Image
Over the past few years I have been working on a series of 'poem objects', using a wide range of materials. I later discovered the work of Joan Brossa, who also worked at this intersection between the visual arts and poetry. Each of my 'poem objects' is numbered. poem object #7 'sound poem' poem object #4 'the monarchy' poem object #1 'the solar system'
Read more