When I was picking poems to read last night,
because a number of people here are
familiar with a number of my poems,
I was curious about the arrangement of the poems,
trying to figure out how I could best arrange them.
And I noticed, in deciding to read "The Milky Way" first,
that there's a kind of doubleness to the poem,
there's a desire to belong in the world to occasionally
recognize someone for instance.
But there's also a longing for something
that's more absolute and in a way less human.
And it's a thread that runs through my poetry
and I selected the poems on that basis.
John Clare is a man or was a man who did and did not
belong in the world.
He was an English poet, rural farmer,
was a contemporary of Wordsworth and quite a popular poet
for a short time in his time.
And the last half of his life, he spent in two asylums.
He was schizophrenic.
He belonged to the world in the sense
that he's probably the purest and most valuable nature poet,
for lack of a better word, that I've read.
His poems are what they appear to be about,
are about the world around him, the rural world around him.
And then many of them are very lovely, very simple.
And he belonged in and not in the world in a sense
also in his schizophrenia.
When you read the letters that he
wrote when he was in the asylum, what you most recognize
is that there was a kind of childlike innocence about him
that did not belong.
John Clare.
I know there is a worm in the human heart,
in its wake such emptiness as sleep should require.
Toward dawn, there was an undirected light the color
of steel, the aspens, thin, vaguely parallel strips
of slate, blew across each other in that light.
I went out having all night suffered by confusion
and was quieted by this.
But the Earth, vegetable, rock or water
that had been our salvation is mostly
passed now, into the keeping of John Clare, alive, whose
poetry simplified us--
we owe the world ourselves--
who, dead or sleeping, now reads the detailed leaf
in stone passing, until it will finally be memorized and done.
I know the heart can be hard, and from this misgiving
about itself, will make a man merciless.
I know that John Clare's madness nature could not straighten.
If there is a worm in the heart, and chamber it has bitten out,
I will protect that emptiness until it is large enough.
In it will be a light the color of steel and landscape,
into which the traveler might set out.