In this installment, Steve McCaffrey reads “Signs of Winter” by John Clare. Experimental Canadian poet Steve McCaffrey is the author of over a dozen volumes of poetry and has twice received the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry.  He was one of the co-founders of the Toronto Research Group and is also the author or editor of several important books of criticism, including Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book Machine, North of Intention, and Prior to Meaning.

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John Clare, “Signs of Winter”

Tis winter plain the images around
Protentious tell us of the closing year
Short grows the stupid day  the moping fowl
Go roost at noon—upon the mossy barn
The thatcher hangs and lays the frequent yaum
Nudged close to stop the rain that drizzling falls
With scarce one interval of sunny sky
For weeks still leeking on that sulky gloom
Muggy and close a doubt twixt night and day
The sparrow rarely chirps the thresher pale
Twanks with sharp measured raps the weary frail
Thump after thump right tiresome to the ear
The hedger lonesome brustles at his toil
And shepherds trudge the fields without a song
The cat runs races with her tail—the dog
Leaps oer the orchard hedge and knarls the grass
The swine run round and grunt and play with straw
Snatching out hasty mouthfuls from the snack
Sudden upon the elm tree tops the crows
Uncerimonious visit pays and croaks
Then swops away—from mossy barn the owl
Bobs hasty out—wheels round and scared as soon
As hastily retires—the ducks grow wild
And from the muddy pond fly up and wheel
A circle round the village and soon tired
Plunge in the pond again—the maids in haste
Snatch from the orchard hedge the mizled cloaths
And laughing hurry in to keep them dry

DougGuerra Uncategorized john clare, signs of winter, steve mccaffrey

In this installment, Alexander Long reads “To John Clare” by John Clare. Long’s first two books are Vigil (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2006) and Light Here, Light There (C & R Press, 2009). With Christopher Buckley, he is co-editor of A Condition of the Spirit: The Life & Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington University Press, 2004). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, The American Poetry Review, American Writers, Blackbird, Callaloo, and The Southern Review, among others. An assistant professor of English at John Jay College, Long also plays bass and writes songs with the band Redhead Betty Takeout.

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John Clare, “To John Clare”

Well, honest John, how fare you now at home?
The spring is come, and birds are building nests;
The old cock-robin to the sty is come,
With olive feathers and its ruddy breast;
And the old cock, with wattles and red comb,
Struts with the hens, and seems to like some best,
Then crows, and looks about for little crumbs,
Swept out by little folks an hour ago;
The pigs sleep in the sty; the bookman comes-
The little boys lets home-closing nesting go,
And pockets tops and taws, where daisies bloom,
To look at the new number just laid down,
With lots of pictures, and good stories too,
And Jack the Giant-killer’s high renown.

DougGuerra Uncategorized alexander long, john clare, to john clare

In this installment, Joshua Kryah reads “Where She Told Her Love” by John Clare. Kryah was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was a Schaeffer Fellow in poetry. His first collection of poems, Glean (2007), won the 2005 Nightboat Books Poetry Prize judged by Donald Revell. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, FIELD, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, and Shenandoah, among other journals. He lives in Las Vegas with his wife and daughter and is a Visiting Assistant Professor in UNLV’s University College. He is also poetry editor for Witness.

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John Clare, “Where She Told Her Love”

I saw her crop a rose
Right early in the day,
And I went to kiss the place
Where she broke the rose away
And I saw the patten rings
Where she oer the stile had gone,
And I love all other things
Her bright eyes look upon.
If she looks upon the hedge or up the leafing tree,
The whitethorn or the brown oak are made dearer things to me.

I have a pleasant hill
Which I sit upon for hours,
Where she cropt some sprigs of thyme
And other little flowers;
And she muttered as she did it
As does beauty in a dream,
And I loved her when she hid it
On her breast, so like to cream,
Near the brown mole on her neck that to me a diamond shone
Then my eye was like to fire, and my heart was like to stone.

There is a small green place
Where cowslips early curled,
Which on Sabbath day I trace,
The dearest in the world.
A little oak spreads oer it,
And throws a shadow round,
A green sward close before it,
The greenest ever found:
There is not a woodland nigh nor is there a green grove,
Yet stood the fair maid nigh me and told me all her love.

admin Uncategorized john clare, joshua kryah, where she told her love

In this installment, Steve Orlen reads “The Instinct of Hope” by John Clare. Orlen is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Permission to Speak (1978), A Place at the Table (1981), The Bridge of Sighs (1992), Kisses (1997), and This Particular Eternity (2001). His work had been honored with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He teaches at the University of Arizona and in the low-residency MFA at Warren Wilson College.

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John Clare, “The Instinct of Hope”

Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Something about me daily speaks there must,
And why should instinct nourish hopes in vain?
‘Tis nature’s prophesy that such will be,
And everything seems struggling to explain
The close sealed volume of its mystery.
Time wandering onward keeps its usual pace
As seeming anxious of eternity,
To meet that calm and find a resting place.
E’en the small violet feels a future power
And waits each year renewing blooms to bring,
And surely man is no inferior flower
To die unworthy of a second spring?

admin Uncategorized john clare, steve orlen, the instinct of hope

In this installment, Thorpe Moeckel reads “Winter Fields” by John Clare. Moeckel’s first book of poems, Odd Botany, was published in 2002 by Silverfish Review Press, and his chapbooks include Meltlines, The Guessing Land, and Making a Map of the River. New poems and essays are forthcoming in Verse, Virginia Quarterly Review, Rivendell, and North Carolina Literary Review. He earned an MFA in 2002 at University of Virginia, where he was a Jacob K. Javits and Henry Hoyns Fellow. A former Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill, he now teaches at Hollins University.

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John Clare, “Winter Fields”

Oh, for a pleasant book to cheat the sway
Of winter—where rich mirth with hearty laugh
Listens and rubs his legs on corner seat;
For fields are mire and sludge—and badly off
Are those who on their pudgy paths delay;
There striding shepherd, seeking driest way,
Fearing night’s wetshod feet and hacking cough
That keeps him waken till the peep of day,
Goes shouldering onward and with ready hook
Progs oft to ford the sloughs that nearly meet
Across the lands; croodling and thin to view,
His loath dog follows—stops and quakes and looks
For better roads, till whistled to pursue;
Then on with frequent jump he hurkles through.

admin Uncategorized john clare, thorpe moeckel, winter fields

In this installment, Michael Haslam reads four stanzas from “Child Harold” by John Clare. Haslman (b. Bolton, Lancashire, U.K., 1947) has lived at Foster Clough, on the Pennine moor-edge above Hebden Bridge, in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, since 1970, writing, loving and labouring in the immediate vicinity. Publications include Continual Song (Open Township 1986), A Whole Bauble: Collected Poems 1977-94 (Carcanet 1995), The Music Laid her Songs in Language (Arc 2001), and A Sinner Saved by Grace (Arc 2005).

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John Clare, Four Stanzas from “Child Harold”

My life hath been one love — no blot it out
My life hath been one chain of contradictions —
Madhouses Prisons wh-re shops — never doubt
But that my life hath had some strong convictions
That such was wrong — religion makes restrictions
I would have followed — but life turned a bubble
& clumb the giant stile of maledictions
They took me from my wife & to save trouble
I wed again & made the error double

Yet abscence claims them both & keeps them too
& locks me in a shop in spite of law
Among a low lived set & crew
Here let the Muse oblivions curtain draw
& let man think — for God hath often saw
Things here too dirty for the light of day
For in a madhouse there exists no law —
Now stagnant grows my too refined clay
I envy birds their wings to flye away

How servile is the task to please alone
Through beauty woo & love inspire the song
Mere painted beauty with her heart of stone
Thinks the world worships while she flaunts along
The flower of sunshine butterflye of song
Give me the truth of heart in womans life
The love to cherish one — & do no wrong
To none — O peace of every care & strife
Is true love in an estimable wife

How beautiful this hill of fern swells on
So beautiful the chappel peeps between
The hornbeams — with its simple bell — Alone
I wander here hid in a palace green
Mary is abscent — but the forest queen
Nature is with me — morning noon & gloaming
I write my poems in these paths unseen
& when among these brakes & beeches roaming
I sigh for truth & home & love & woman

admin Uncategorized child harold, john clare, michael haslam

In this installment, Anne Marie Macari reads “I Am!” by John Clare. Macari‘s first book, Ivory Cradle, won the APR first book prize in 2000. Her second book, Gloryland, was published by Alice James Books in 2005. Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines and, in 2005, she won the James Dickey Award for poetry from Five Points magazine.

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John Clare, “I Am!”

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

admin Uncategorized anne marie macari, i am, john clare

In this installment, Gillian Kiley reads “I Am!” by John Clare. Kiley lives and teaches in Rhode Island. Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Swerve, and other journals.

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John Clare, “I Am!”

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

admin Uncategorized gillian kiley, i am, john clare

In this installment, Barry Silesky reads “Song” [“I peeled bits of straws”] by John Clare. Silesky’s third book of poems, This Disease, will be out from Tampa University Press, Fall 2006. He is author of biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and John Gardner, as well as editor of the literary journal ACM (Another Chicago Magazine). He teaches poetry at Loyola University-Chicago.

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John Clare, “Song” ["I peeled bits of straws"]

I peeled bits of straws and I got switches too
From the grey peeling willow as idlers do,
And I switched at the flies as I sat all alone
Till my flesh, blood, and marrow was turned to dry bone.
My illness was love, though I knew not the smart,
But the beauty of love was the blood of my heart.
Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude
And fled to the silence of sweet solitude.
Where the flower in green darkness buds, blossoms, and fades,
Unseen of all shepherds and flower-loving maids–
The hermit bees find them but once and away.
There I’ll bury alive and in silence decay.

I looked on the eyes of fair woman too long,
Till silence and shame stole the use of my tongue:
When I tried to speak to her I’d nothing to say,
So I turned myself round and she wandered away.
When she got too far off, why, I’d something to tell,
So I sent sighs behind her and walked to my cell.
Willow switches I broke and peeled bits of straws,
Ever lonely in crowds, in Nature’s own laws–
My ball room the pasture, my music the bees,
My drink was the fountain, my church the tall trees.
Who ever would love or be tied to a wife
When it makes a man mad all the days of his life?

admin Uncategorized barry silesky, john clare, song [i peeled bits of straws]

In this installment, William Fuller reads the prose fragment “Dewdrops” by John Clare. Fuller‘s most recent books are Sadly (Flood Editions, 2003) and Avoid Activity (Rubba Ducky, 2003); Watchword is forthcoming in 2006 from Flood Editions. He lives in Winnetka, Illinois.

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John Clare, “Dewdrops”

The dewdrops on every blade of grass are so much like silver drops that I am obliged to stoop down as I walk to see if they are pearls, and those sprinkled on the ivy-woven beds of primroses underneath the hazels, whitethorns and maples are so like gold beads that I stooped down to feel if they were hard, but they melted from my finger. And where the dew lies on the primrose, the violet and whitethorn leaves they are emerald and beryl, yet nothing more than the dews of the morning on the budding leaves; nay, the road grasses are covered with gold and silver beads, and the further we go the brighter they seem to shine, like solid gold and silver. It is nothing more than the sun’s light and shade upon them in the dewy morning; every thorn-point and every bramble-spear has its trembling ornament: till the wind gets a little brisker, and then all is shaken off, and all the shining jewelry passes away into a common spring morning full of budding leaves, primroses, violets, vernal speedwell, bluebell and orchis, and commonplace objects.

admin Uncategorized dewdrops, john clare, william fuller