Clare, et al

 And yet there is another Clare—no, several other Clares—to be found in his more than three thousand completed poems. Given how often Michael Dickman’s own poetry has portrayed unstable mental states, you might expect him to gravitate toward Clare’s madness. In fact, the Clare of “John Clare,” appearing in Dickman’s Green Migraine (2015), is an altogether friendlier figure: an avatar of childhood closeness to nature, a man who saw nature as something we live among (not something we travel to visit), a paragon of enlightened simplicity, and a devotee of local or dialect words. As such—this being Dickman’s poem—Clare resembles the kids in “7-Eleven parking lots / skateboarding through / black fields.” Adulthood itself is for Dickman a kind of enclosure: “Children play in the past / in pastures . . . Cows move through the fields to the fence and won’t move again.”

Dickman’s raw short lines, incapable of hypotaxis, speak to Clare’s sometimes-obsessive attention to the immediate, visible world. There are holes in the fences, holes in the logic of poetry, holes in the planks of reason: it is as if Clare saw through the adult world and its barriers, and the sight drove him mad. “Now I remember,” Dickman muses. “There are holes all around // Holes in children / Holes in trees.” Yet Clare’s kind of play, and his stubborn resistance, survives “between the yellowhammers and the leaf blowers // Between a worm getting pulled out of the dirt into the sky and a worm proging the dark.” (Prog—pierce, poke, prod—comes from Clare’s often-anthologized sonnet “Mouse’s Nest.”) Clare with his innocence, Clare with his honesty, Clare who was close to the ground and close to animals, becomes an unexpectedly cheerful inspiration in what must be Dickman’s happiest poem, the one that concludes Green Migraine by narrating the first days in the life of his son. Clare’s coinages—or his misspellings, or his odd English—fit a person for whom the whole language is new: “You sawn and shool . . . now your mouth is here mizled in the totter grass.” (For shool—which seems to mean “carry”—see Clare’s “Summer Evening”; for mizled, meaning “drizzled-upon” or “dampened,” see his “Signs of Winter.”) Young August will learn, awake or “asleep in a car seat,” what the world can bring, what else his poet father can say:

Animals are here

and night and day and noises

are here and wolves

and birds
 

Trees are here and John Clare is here

Hello John


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