John Tripp
greetings, john clare
In this bit of Northants
they locked you up for years
in a looney bin run by butchers,
cold as a latrine.
You I ived, if that's the word,
long enough to be an old man,
then they trundled you in a cart
back up the lanes to this
mossed grey stone among oaks
on a flat landscape of barley
with almshouses, Ebenezer chapel
and a couple of pubs.
I think you are the only ploughman
in English Literature. They say you shuffled
with one foot dragging in the furrow.
You were awkward and shy, with beauty
running in rhyme through your head.
At the museum your writing looks huge
and crazy, you were scared of everything
except woods and fields
and what you saw there.
For a while you were amusing to dukes;
in London you met Lamb and Hazlitt
whose carpentered prose showed up
your shocking grammar and spelling
which still made poetry like sapphires.
On the heath
ragged patches of burned-over grass
are littered with coke cans, chip bags
and spent sheaths.
The church clock fires off three in the afternoon.
We go mad, too,
but cunningly in quiet bursts
that explode under wrappings of sanity.
Greetings, John Clare....
Page(s) 19
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The