Jokers Hill

Monday, April 1, 2013

I Found the Poems in the Fields ...


The title to this post is a line from poet John Clare (1793-1864). The line continues  “and only wrote them down.” I’ve been thinking about Clare a lot lately, as the precursor to contemporary ecological poetry, but also as a figure important to field studies and research. After all, that line could easily be transposed … “I found the data in the fields and only wrote them down…”

Clare had a difficult and in some ways a tragic life. Born into a family of farm labourers in the village of Helpston, Northamptonshire, he was schooled enough to become literate—a mixed blessing since it set him apart from his family and fellow villagers. As a child he wandered throughout the countryside around the village, enthralled by the life he found there—birds, animals, plants, springs—and when he discovered poetry he began to write in exquisite and exact detail about the countryside he knew. His poems are in fact field notes.

A local bookseller arranged for Clare’s poetry to be published and he enjoyed a brief celebrity—made much of as “the peasant poet,” invited to London to meet with the movers and shakers in the literary world. Though writers like Coleridge took his work seriously, to most people he was merely a curiosity, a rural versifier, and his fame didn’t last. Nor did it aid his attempts to support a growing family.

In 1809 the Act for the Enclosure of Helpston had been passed, marking the end of the world Clare knew and loved. The landscape was radically changed, the commons made inaccessible, and Clare’s poems took on a political cast. The hard physical labour of his working life, coupled with his sense of dislocation within the changing countryside he loved, led eventually to a breakdown. He spent the last 20 years of his life in the Northhampton Lunatic Asylum.

All of this has been going around in my mind as I read about our government’s short-sighted and narrow-minded closure of the Experimental Lakes Area Field Station … done in an unforthcoming manner as the following article from The Globe tells: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/as-dismantling-begins-shuttering-of-research-station-called-a-travesty/article9846568/

(If you want to know more about the Experimental Lakes Area check out their website here: http://www.experimentallakesarea.ca/)

As we become more and more a species that lives virtually, it becomes more and more important to maintain the few possibilities that exist for experience and exploration of the material world around us, the planet that supports the virtual dreams and fantasies that seem to beguile those in power. Too many of those fantasies deny what current research is telling us about the effects we are having on the world we live in.Clare knew the importance of field studies and research—if he were alive now I reckon he’d write poems about this closure—and others. 

The Experimental Lakes Area is not the only Canadian field station to face closure. The University of Saskatchewan has decided to close it’s Kenderdine campus at Emma Lake. Emma Lake is very well known as a centre for the arts. What is not as well known is that since 1965 the Biology Department of the U. of S. has used the campus for field study and research. It’s closure means that students in biology will no longer have field studies and research as part of their program. A petition has been circulating against the closure and an organization dedicated to preserving the area has been formed. You can find out more, if you want to, at: www.keepkenderdine.com

Here’s what George Monbiot had to say about Clare in a piece* he wrote for The Guardian on Clare’s birthday (July 13) last year. It’s worth paying attention to.

“What Clare suffered was the fate of indigenous peoples torn from their land and belonging, everywhere. His identity crisis, descent into mental agony and alcohol abuse, are familiar blights in reservation and outback shanties the world over. His loss was surely enough to drive almost anyone mad; our loss surely enough to drive us all a little mad.”

The closing of these field stations seems to indicate that we are already a little mad.

*You can read the full article here:

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