Introduction: My Own Glinton Spire

Let's suppose that poetry can occupy a speculative zone, not in the sense of science fiction or fantasy, but somewhere between the poles of 'hard' empirical evidence-including historical fact-and dream. The poem, then, can perform the work of a distorting lens or a new way of seeing or, if it really soars, some best combination of both. Let's suppose, too, that some poetry longs to tell a story, even a series of small narrative bonfire eruptions. Finally, let's say the poet has taken negative capability a bit too far. But her subject has her firmly by the throat; she can't shake the addiction called John Clare. They wanted her to go to rehab and she said 'no, no, no'.Since 2007, when I began composing the Clare-inspired poems that would eventually comprise Bedlam Cowslip, I can't count the number of times I advised myself to abandon the project. Among the questions I posed: 'what business do I, a twenty-first century female poet from Canada, have, writing poems about a nineteenthcentury male English poet from a part of England where I've never even been?' I scolded myself for the presumption of such a project, that I'd even consider immersing in a faraway terrain and its own historically contingent idiom, both of which I was largely ignorant. 'There will be so many things you will get wrong. This Clare project is really untenable'.But often the most worthwhile projects are untenable.A large part of writing is giving oneself permission, temporarily setting aside the self-sabotaging impulse. I allowed myself to experience writing the Clare poems as a genre of dream. This sounds flakey, but I can't take it back. Also, the distortion referred to, above, isn't necessarily a good thing. Some distortion is better than other distortion. The subject must be honoured. The bedrock of facts, respected. I wrote from a place of humility. I read as much of the superb scholarship on Clare as time afforded. The Clare poems in Bedlam Cowslip continued to pull towards the warped, non-linear illogic of dreams with their colliding contexts. My own idiosyncratic peripheral 'take' on my subject seemed to be the inevitable direction. Striving to imagine what certain experiences might have felt like, for Clare, was a humanizing and humbling exercise destined, inevitably, to remain speculative.Clare and his poetry took up residence under my skin. His life's story, portrayed so vividly in fine biographies such as Jonathan Bate's, broke my heart. The intimate spaces of Clare's poems provided comfort as I first read them through a cold Scottish June at Hawthorden International Writers' Retreat right after my mother's death. I was thinking about our family farm a lot, and the relentless, backbreaking manual labour my mother carried out there during an era when corporate agri-business swallowed up small farmers like us.Eventually I realized that the poems in Bedlam Cowslip are about being lost, that they wrangle, through their curious contortions, with the paradox of being lost yet close to home, sometimes even being lost at home. The unsettling experience, for Clare, of moving only a few miles away from his familiar ground I found very poignant along with the search some of his poems enact for a reference point, an objective correlative. Glinton Spire. The disorientation caused by fame. Then being taken far from his home to the asylum. Notions of loss and disorientation are of course only one aspect of Clare's poetry; scholars have eloquently documented his granular poetics of locale, his eco-poetics, his activist turns, among other elements.Every poet searches for her own Glinton Spire. Clare's poetry offered me a stellar writing workshop: an education in poetic attention, the granularity of poetry, the adept use of frames, sonics, idiom, and the poem's activist agency, its immersion in a local culture.By 2012, however, the Clare project had stalled. My inner critic had won, temporarily, until a door opened: the opportunity to attend the 'John Clare in Space' Conference at Oxford Brookes University. …

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