WEBVTT

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When I was picking poems
to read last night,

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because a number
of people here are

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familiar with a
number of my poems,

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I was curious about the
arrangement of the poems,

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trying to figure out how
I could best arrange them.

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And I noticed, in deciding to
read "The Milky Way" first,

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that there's a kind of
doubleness to the poem,

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there's a desire to belong
in the world to occasionally

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recognize someone for instance.

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But there's also a
longing for something

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that's more absolute
and in a way less human.

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And it's a thread that
runs through my poetry

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and I selected the
poems on that basis.

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John Clare is a man or was
a man who did and did not

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belong in the world.

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He was an English
poet, rural farmer,

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was a contemporary of Wordsworth
and quite a popular poet

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for a short time in his time.

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And the last half of his
life, he spent in two asylums.

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He was schizophrenic.

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He belonged to the
world in the sense

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that he's probably the purest
and most valuable nature poet,

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for lack of a better
word, that I've read.

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His poems are what they
appear to be about,

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are about the world around him,
the rural world around him.

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And then many of them are
very lovely, very simple.

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And he belonged in and not
in the world in a sense

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also in his schizophrenia.

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When you read the
letters that he

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wrote when he was in the
asylum, what you most recognize

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is that there was a kind of
childlike innocence about him

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that did not belong.

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John Clare.

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I know there is a worm
in the human heart,

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in its wake such emptiness
as sleep should require.

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Toward dawn, there was an
undirected light the color

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of steel, the aspens, thin,
vaguely parallel strips

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of slate, blew across
each other in that light.

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I went out having all
night suffered by confusion

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and was quieted by this.

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But the Earth,
vegetable, rock or water

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that had been our
salvation is mostly

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passed now, into the keeping
of John Clare, alive, whose

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poetry simplified us--

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we owe the world ourselves--

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who, dead or sleeping, now
reads the detailed leaf

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in stone passing, until it will
finally be memorized and done.

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I know the heart can be
hard, and from this misgiving

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about itself, will
make a man merciless.

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I know that John Clare's madness
nature could not straighten.

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If there is a worm in the heart,
and chamber it has bitten out,

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I will protect that emptiness
until it is large enough.

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In it will be a light the
color of steel and landscape,

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into which the
traveler might set out.