John Clare, Wisdom Smith and Me

David Morley

To mark the 221st anniversary of John Clare's birth tomorrow, poet David Morley reflects on Clare's relationship with the Romani community.

I finished a trilogy of books for Carcanet and I had no idea what I was going to write next. What poet really does? I was invited by New Networks for Nature, an alliance of creators whose work draws strongly on the natural environment, to perform at their annual gathering. My reading took place in Helpston Church. Afterwards, I sat down by John Clare’s grave and had a little chat with him.

Back home, I re-read Jonathan Bate’s biography then I read Clare’s notebooks. A real, living voice surges through the notebooks because Clare thinks nobody will ever read them. He sows the earth for unwritten poems and even for an unpublished prose book about the natural history of Northamptonshire called Biographies of Birds and Flowers.

John Clare By Himself
includes all Clare's important
autobiographical writing

The notebooks also show the presence of Gypsies in Clare’s life. I am partly Romani, I write in Romani dialect, and am alert to anything Gypsy. Clare liked Gypsies. He liked them at a time when it was acceptable for a clergyman to write in the local paper, ‘This atrosious tribe of wandering vagabonds ought to be made outlaws and exterminated from the earth’. Gypsies liked the poet back: ‘As soon as I got here the Smiths gang of gipseys came and encampd near the town and as I began to be a desent scraper we had a desent round of merriment for a fortnight’. A fortnight of merriment is not gained unless the Gypsies trusted this local poet - with his fiddle and pen – completely.

Clare also sought out the Gypsies for stories, songs and tunes. And one character keeps cropping up in the notebooks, a Gypsy called Wisdom Smith: ‘Finished planting my ariculas—went a botanising after ferns and orchises and caught a cold in the wet grass which has made me as bad as ever—got the tune of "highland Mary" from Wisdom Smith a gipsey and pricked another sweet tune without name as he fiddled it’. Wisdom was the catalyst.

The Gypsy and the Poet is available now

Next day, I went into my writing shed and found Wisdom Smith sitting in the chair, waiting for me, and I seemed to step into him, or he stepped into me. On some days I found John Clare waiting with his Gypsy friend. This triple team could write a lot better than I could alone: they could turn sonnets and make them an outdoor form, an unenclosed space for singing the world into being. Clare’s skill, with Wisdom Smith’s energy and – yes – his wisdom, forced me to make a step-change and write poems about the life of love.

The philosopher Emmanual Levinas wrote, ‘I am most like myself when I am most like you’. That implies a surrendering of the ego, a vital part of any creative process. It is true that once upon a time the action of writing used to take me over so completely it obliterated me. But, newly, sometimes painfully in the act of writing the sonnets of Wisdom Smith and John Clare, I felt myself become - and be - more myself than ever. Yet here I was, taken over by a gypsy and a poet! It was as if I had lived three lifetimes, transcending the self and entering a near-constant state of negative capability that allowed me to escape the literary - and write from a wild love of the world and life:


Worlds

It is pleasant as I have done today to stand
... and notice the objects around us

‘There is nothing in books on this’, cries Clare.
‘I do not read, brother’, states Wisdom smiling,
‘for I will not bother with Mystery.
Worlds move underfoot. Where lives Poetry?
Look’, hums Wisdom Smith, ‘in the inner domes
of ghost orchids - how the buzzing rhymers
read light with their tongues; or in this anthill -
nameless draughtsmen crafting low rooms, drawing
no fame - except the ravening yaffle,
or fledgy starlings bathing in their crawl.
I see these worlds - lit worlds. I live by them’.
The wood-ants sting. John Clare shifts foot to foot:
‘I did not know you gave me any thought’.
‘This? All this - is nothing, John’, laughs Wisdom.

from The Gypsy and the Poet, by David Morley

---

The Carcanet Blog Sale
Every week on the blog, we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors. The book(s) on offer will change each week, so watch this space!

This week, it's The Gypsy and the Poet by David Morley and John Clare by Himself. Just go to www.carcanet.co.uk and use the offer code BLOG (case-sensitive).