Jane Clarke: I think the first draft, in a way, is often just full
of emotional energy, and then to make it something that's meaningful
to others, it's the pulling back, it's the looking, and it's finding
the form that will express it so that it isn't just a diary entry.
You know?
Seán Hewitt: Welcome to The Glimpse. I'm your host. Seán
Hewitt. Jane Clarke is the author of three poetry collections,
including A Change in the Air, which was shortlisted in 2023 for
the T.S Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
She also edited the illustrated anthology Windfall: Irish Nature
Poems to Inspire and Connect. Jane Clarke is our guest today on The
Glimpse.
Jane Clarke writes poems of lyrical beauty and real heart. Rich with
the tradition of Irish pastoral or nature poetry, a whole landscape
can live inside one of her carefully tuned lines. But from the
rich soil of tradition, Jane brings forward a poetry that is subtly
changed, alert to political and social issues and fraught as nature
writing so often is now with anxieties about the changing
climate. In Jane's poems, we can hear echoes of voices past and
present, the farmlands of Seamus Heaney, the lyricism of Kerry
Hardie. And there's also a melodic sense of nature in all its fine
detail, a chorus made by water, growth, diversity, precious and
under threat. And if that wasn't enough, there's always a strong
emotional core too, love, desire, hurt and comfort. All of these can
be found in her poems. Jane Clarke, welcome to The Glimpse. I'm so
happy you could come and speak to us.
Jane Clarke: Thanks very much, Seán, and it's actually wonderful
to hear what you have seen and read in my work. I really appreciate
that.
Seán Hewitt: I'm a big fan of your poems, as you probably know by now.
Where are you today?
Jane Clarke: Okay, I'm in Glenmalure— at home in Glenmalure—
and it's actually a beautiful day, stunningly beautiful.
Seán Hewitt: Okay, that's nice. Yeah, we have bright blue skies in
Dublin as well. It's quite cold, but we have a lovely day. When I
was reading your, your bio, reading a bit about you, I learned
something that I didn't know, which was that you used to work in
community development and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I
wanted to kind of begin by asking you about that, because I suppose,
you know, we're used to poets having different interests, but
often, you know, we talk to them about poetry. But I wondered if you
could tell us a little bit about that, and what prompted you to
start exploring poetry? Or is poetry something that you always
had in the background?
Jane Clarke: I didn't really have it in my background at all. I
studied in Trinity. I did four years English and philosophy. So
obviously I was really interested in literature, but I was also
always very interested in social justice and activism. So when I
left Trinity, myself and a friend, we traveled in South America for a
year and became really interested in community development. So I came
back and got a job in the north inner city in Sean McDermott
Street, working in a project there with women's groups, youth groups.
And during that time, there was a lot of conflict coming up in
groups, and I found it really difficult to facilitate the
conflict situations. So that's what led me to doing psychotherapy; it
was out of a need for my work. And then, I just became fascinated by
psychoanalysis, and it actually was psychoanalysis that led me back to
literature, in a way, led me particularly to poetry. Because
training in psychoanalysis and working in it, a lot is about
dealing with grief, and also a lot is about dealing with symbolism and
metaphor. And you know, the words people choose and why they choose
that word in particular at that time.
Seán Hewitt: It is, it is. You know, we often think of poetry as
being able to mediate or give a space for thinking. Is that
something that, you know, being led in by psychoanalysis, is that
something that you think informed the kind of route that your poetry
took, or the concerns of your poetry?
Jane Clarke: Definitely. I suppose, when you say a space for thinking,
I also say a space for feeling and thinking. And that's what I learned
in psychoanalysis, that you need both. And I think that's what
happens in poetry as well, and that it's that kind of combination of
tuning into your emotional life and bringing your thought life to that.
And they're not separate, Really you can’t separate them.
Seán Hewitt: I wonder if you could tell us a little bit, too, about
your work with ecologists and activists and farmers and the stuff
that you're doing now. That's, I'm sure, connected to activism that
you've done in the past, but it seems to have shifted, perhaps,
into a different arena.
Jane Clarke: Since I began to write in my early 40s, my awareness of
what's happening in the environment has increased
enormously, and also I realized I wanted to learn more. And so then I
sought out people with whom I could learn, and they were interested in
what I was doing. So I now have some wonderful naturalists and
ecologists amongst my friends. And then again, one thing led to
another, because I was interested in the climate crisis, and
particularly the biodiversity crisis, then I began to work with
Burrenbeo, who promote and support farmers who are farming in a
different way, in a way with nature— this whole thing of working
with nature, rather than exploiting it. Which is the change all
of us have to make, it's not just farmers, you know. So, so that's
how, you know, one thing led to another. And over the past year, I
visited six farmers. And, you know, I go, I visit, I meet with them, I
listen, I walk with them. It's only for a morning. And then that has
led to about ten poems, which I hope to be doing something with
over the next year.
Seán Hewitt: And how do you see that working in your poems? How is
it shifting the sort of poetry that you write—or are you noticing your
attention fall in different places?
Jane Clarke: Well, I have to say, when I go to visit the farmers, I'm
always sort of scared, and that's always my thing. When I'm required
to write a poem that, "Will I be able to do this justice? Will I be
able to find a way in?" But, actually, I have, and yeah, so how
has it helped? I suppose, in a way, a lot of my earlier work came from
the farm where I grew up, then it was coming from Wicklow. And in a
way, this has allowed me to spread my wings, if you like, and work,
you know, with all kinds of different settings and all kinds of
different aspects of biodiversity. And so that's been really enriching
for me.
Seán Hewitt: When did you move to Wicklow?
Jane Clarke: Thirty years ago we moved to Wicklow and—yeah?
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, I was gonna ask you about about "Spalls," the poem
you're gonna read for us. Is this a new house in Wicklow, or is this
kind of a historic look back at the first time you moved?
Jane Clarke: Yeah, we moved to one house in Wicklow, and that's the
same house where we are now. So this poem and this garden is the
garden out around us here now. So if I could just say about the
background to the poem, yeah. So how it came about is the summer
before, so that was 2022, myself, my wife, were with two friends who
were farmers in their kitchen, and I felt in something they said, I
felt their discomfort with us as a couple. Now I knew they really
liked us. It wasn't anything but with our "coupledom," if you like,
it wasn't about us as people, but about something about being
uncomfortable. And, of course, that reminded me of my parents. And I
came home from that visit, and I started to write this poem. And I
think maybe if I hadn't just picked up on that feeling—which, of
course, it was difficult for me to feel that, as it was over the years
with my parents, but I think the great thing about a poem is you can
include different feelings. It's not just one feeling, it's not just
discomfort there, there's love there, there's, you know, there's
an awful lot else, I hope conveyed.
Seán Hewitt: And isn't it amazing as well, how long a poem can wait.
You know you might have felt something 30 years ago or on
different occasions over 30 years, and it takes that long before it
catches and suddenly you know what it is. You know how to name it.
Jane Clarke: Yes, Absolutely.
Seán Hewitt: Would you do us the honor of reading "Spalls" for us?
Jane Clarke: I will, yes,
Seán Hewitt: Thank you.
Jane Clarke: And if I could just say that "spalls" comes from the
Irish word "spalli," which means the small stones you put into a
wall to hold it together. "Spalls" To help us grow a garden, my mother
and father travelled / across the Bog of Allen and over the Whiklow
Gap. // They'd have preferred to drive west to Galway or Mayo, /
they'd have preferred a husband and children // but their daughter
loved a woman. We'd have the table set for breakfast: rashers, black
pudding, fried bread and eggs. // When the soil had warmed, we
unloaded shovels / and rakes, buckets of compost and the rusted
iron bar // for prising out rocks. The back seat was thronged / with
pots of seedlings my mother had nurtured all winter. // We worked
to her bidding: loosen tangled roots before planting, / sow
marigolds next to beans, sprinkle Epsom salts around roses. // My
father took off on his own to spud ragwort or clip a hedge. / One day
he spent hours gathering stones of different shapes and sizes. // By
evening, he'd built us a wall under the holly, held together / by
gravity and friction, hearted with handfuls of spalls.
Seán Hewitt: Thank you very much. I love that poem. I'm really glad
that you told us; I hadn't realized that the word "spalls" had an Irish
root.
Jane Clarke: Yes,
Seán Hewitt: It was a word that I'll admit I didn't know before I
read this poem. Where did you come across it? Or is it a word that's
common to you?
Jane Clarke: Well, it's funny because it's actually in, in a poem
in my first collection. I wrote a poem "Dry Stone Wall" in my first
collection, and "spalls" was in it. So it was when I was researching
the first poem, and I researched it by talking to my mother and father
around the kitchen table at home, and asked, I was asking dad all
about, "How do you build a dry stone wall?" Because that was one
of the things he always loved doing. And so he gave me
vocabulary, basically, and mom did as well. And then—so I wrote that
poem. And this poem was first called "Under the Holly." The
"spalls" weren't in it at all, and I hadn't got a good ending; the
ending wasn't right. And you know yourself, you just walk around
thinking, "How could I get this better?"And so one day, I was just
thinking about the making of a wall and remembering that they use the
word "hearted." That actually is an expression used by wall-makers. And
that's when I got the final couplet right, and "spalls" then became the
last word.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, "hearted" is such a, an incredible choice there;
even if the word is given to you, you know, it carries such strength.
There's a line in the poem there that the wall being "held together
/ by gravity and friction." And it seemed it could almost be a sort of
manifesto for poetry, the way a poem could be made. You know, there
are certain elements that spark off each other or seem to pull in
opposite directions, and then there has to be this kind of gravity
that, that centers the whole poem and perhaps "spalls" is just—there
could be no other thing in this poem. You know, the poem covers
roughly a day. You know, we begin with breakfast, and then we move
towards the evening, but you fold so much life inside it, whether
it's just the geography of Ireland, where your parents are coming from,
a movement across time. As you said, you know, there's a poem
looking back over 30 years; I wonder where that folded into the
poem. You know, did the poem begin small and expand, or did it begin
big and, and center down into the dry stone wall? What's the
relationship between the the image and the, and the scope of the poem?
Jane Clarke: Yeah, it, it began with that journey across country,
and my awareness that my parents, they didn't even like crossing the
Shannon, so to come to Wicklow was such a long way for them. But from
the beginning, it was one day. I mean, it's very much evoked by a
typical day with them. But there were more details in it, so I did
cut it back to what seemed most important. And then, I put in
those little things that my mother used to say, because I kept a note
of, you know, advices mom used to give me for the garden. So I had
kept that, and I found that on my desk one day, and I thought, "Oh,
yeah, they all, they're so wonderful. They what they all mean
in other levels." So I put those in, you know, a little bit further
on in the process.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, it was only this year I learned about marigolds and
companion planting and sacrificial planting and all these sorts of
things. But there's so much secret knowledge in a garden, I think.
Yeah, in some ways, that makes the poem—folklore is the wrong word,
but you know, as in the knowledge of people, that is passed down
through the poem. And there's so much, like you say, that people
never write down and becomes lost over time. This poem, you know, I'm
glad you explained that, that it began and in this kitchen and with
a feeling of discomfort, because when I was reading it back, I
thought that line, "but their daughter loved a woman," is kind of
the detonation point of the poem, or the the point at which
everything around it begins to change in significance. And often,
poems have these, these small, little places where you think, "Ah,
that is the heart of the poem. That is where everything is hinging on."
It seems to me to be a poem not only about discomfort, but also the
love of overcoming, or even trying to overcome, a discomfort, and all
the other things that we give to each other, But it seems that your
instinct is to extend grace and to see the poem as a sort of
empathetic place for thinking and feeling.
Jane Clarke: Yes, it's funny, I sometimes wonder, because I started
writing in my early 40s, I wonder, would it have been very different?
Of course, it would have been different if I'd started writing my
early 20s. By that time in my life, I had learned a lot about how how
to process difficult emotions and how to make sense and how to take
responsibility myself. Like I always say, it's something about
how do you stay really close to emotion and distance from it? I
think we need to do that as poets. Look at it—and again, that's what I
learned to do in psychoanalysis, to look at what is happening to
one—and I think that's what we do in poetry.
Seán Hewitt: Do you think that poetic form helps you to do that?
Because it you know, you can start moving things around you. You've
got a framework in which the emotion has to be somewhat
distanced from you, and you bring in a thinking brain as well as a
feeling brain. Yeah, do you think that's something about what form is
for?"
Jane Clarke: Yes, I think form does it, and the editing to find a form
does it. The editing process really helps that. I mean, I think the
first draft, in a way, is often just full of emotional energy, and
then to make it something that's meaningful to others, it's the
pulling back, it's the looking, and it's finding the form that will
express it so that it isn't just a diary entry. I mean isn't that the
big thing to move the poem from something that's just a personal
expression to something that will be meaningful to the other?
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, I mean, it's such a difficult trick to learn. It
takes a lot of time to be able to distinguish the point at which
something becomes meaningful to other people, and sometimes it's
trial and error. You're always the first reader of your poem. And of
course, the poem means a lot to you because you, you made it. And
sometimes I think, you know, those early drafts that are full of anger
and expression really resonate with you as a writer, because you
finally got it out, you've got the feeling out, but that feeling has
to be given a form and a shape in order to be felt by other people as
well. Yeah, how do you know when a poem is done for you?
Jane Clarke: Well, first of all to say that I have a wonderful
workshop group. Okay, so I have, you know, four colleagues who I
meet once a month. I can't stress how fortunate I am to have them.
Usually we, I bring two poems a month there, and I work as much as
I can on them before I go there, and in between times, my wife will
probably have heard them and given a kind of a "mmm" or whatever
reaction. And so I bring them there, and they give me feedback.
And then I go back again to myself. And usually it's in the next
iteration where I get a sense of whether it's ready. But for
example, there's a whole life of a poem, isn't there?
Seán Hewitt: Yeah. I mean, sometimes poems are left in a
drawer for for months or years and you have the experience of picking
them up. And even if there's a line or an idea, it's still there and
suddenly, you know, like a meeting in a kitchen, it suddenly locks
into place, or something comes of it.
Jane Clarke: Yeah, that's it.
Seán Hewitt: It's really important never to throw anything, because
you never know when your mind or your life becomes ready to, to make
that poem. So it's a waiting game. You said originally that this poem
was called "Under the Holly" and now "Spalls," but what to you is
the, the difference in resonance between those two titles? I'm
always amazed by the way that people choose titles and, and what
a title can do to a poem.
Jane Clarke: Yes, I know that's good question. Somehow I just. I
know sometimes it's there isn't an intellectual answer to that. It
just felt like you're "hearted with handfuls of spalls" That's what's
at the heart of the poem, I guess. It had to be that. You know?
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, there's something almost Heaney-esque about
the word, or the use of the word in this poem. And obviously Ireland
has such a strong tradition of pastoral poetry, and I wonder what
your relationship to that tradition is. Is it something you're aware of
as you're writing? Is it something you're kind of constantly working
with or pushing against or, you know, how do you think about that?
Jane Clarke: I think...I think working with, I would say, I mean,
for example, Patrick Kavanagh. I am just so lucky that there was a
Patrick Kavanagh, that's how I feel. I feel so fortunate. His way
of writing, you know, what he does with the ordinary—he makes it
extraordinary, how he brings, you know, the small ordinariness and
makes it universal. All of that. I learned an awful lot from Patrick
Kavanagh. And you know, I just adore his work as, as with Heaney,
you know, we have such a good, strong tradition. And also, I have
found that in, in poets in the States, in poets, you know, English
poets, UK poets, so I wouldn't like to say that it's just the Irish
poet, but I suppose maybe a few of them are very special to me, but
I've also found it elsewhere.
Seán Hewitt: One of the things that is interesting, I don't know if I
kind of invented this as a, as my own anxiety when I started writing,
but I remember being aware in my own mind that queer poetry, or
whatever you'd like to call it, was an urban thing, and that the
pastoral tradition or, or the nature poem was often not part of
the same tradition. And I wonder if that is something that you were
aware of, or if it's something that you are trying. You know, even just
by dint of being who you are, where you are, do you feel that you are
writing into a tradition, that you're changing in a respectful and
positive way, but just by by the presence of your poems?
Jane Clarke: Well, yeah, no, it's a really good question. I'm really
glad to have been part of broadening the tradition and making
it more inclusive. And that is really important to me. And it's
funny, because it also comes from having grown up a farm in
Roscommon, and I went to Dublin when I was 19 to study. And it was
Dublin where I found the freedom to come out, and, you know, to explore
lots of different things, socialism and feminism, and you know. So I
don't glorify rural Ireland, and I am very aware of the limitations,
particularly then. Now it has changed enormously, but still, if I
was going into a mart in some town in Ireland, I would presume
homophobia, which—I don't think that's right anymore, but that's my
instinct. My instinct would be to censor myself. In the last 20
years, as you know, it, has opened up remarkably. Civil partnership
made a difference to my writing, Seán. You know, marriage equality
made a difference to my writing. I really like to tell people that,
because people think, "What would legal, you know, change? What would
change in the referendum have to do with your creativity?" It has
everything to do with that.
Seán Hewitt: And how did it change it?
Jane Clarke: Well, it..and I suppose because I and and my wife,
we felt more able to be open. We felt more part of everything,
rather than that bit of being on the outside, and I really think
that made a difference to how able and open I felt to express one of
the most important things in my life, my love for my partner. You
know, the poem "Wife," the poem "June." All those poems, I wouldn't
have been able to write them because I was being cautious. I was
doing the censorship. I know, I know young queer people don't
necessarily censor the way we did, but we grew up in a time of, you
know, self-censorship for protection.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, and it's so good to hear that actually social and
political change can, can free writers because, you know, we often
think about writers as loving a bit of oppression and difficulty, and
that is where art comes from. But the idea that it might also be
spurred by freedom and a loss of constraints is, I think, a really
positive and quite hopeful way of looking at of looking at writing.
Jane Clarke: Yeah.
Seán Hewitt: I think it might be a good time to take a break, and then
we're going to come back and talk about an American poet who, who you
admire. And it's a really surreal and quite chilling poem. Looking
forward to talking to you about it. Thanks, Jane.
Jane Clarke: Thanks Sean.
Cathy & Peter Halstead: We hope you’re enjoying this second season
of The Glimpse. It’s just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff
Poetry Foundation. We’re the founders, Peter and Cathy Halstead.
Our goal is to make great poetry more accessible to everyone, and we
do that in a variety of ways: through partnerships, our film
series, this podcast, and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We
hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a
Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving
the page you’re on. Thank you so much for listening.
Seán Hewitt: Jane Clarke, welcome back to The Glimpse you've chosen
for us, a poem by Natasha Trethewey, would you tell us a
little bit about it?
Jane Clarke: Yes, it's it's a pantoum.
Seán Hewitt: And I was going to ask you that, so I'm glad you said. I
was here googling the rules of pantoums, just to check that it
definitely was. Okay.
Jane Clarke: So the you know, the second and fourth lines repeated as
the first and third lines of the following stanza. But it's such a
fabulous pantoum; it's a really chilling poem. And it is about a
cross-burning by the KKK on a lawn in Mississippi. Well, I presume in
Mississippi, because that's where Natasha Trethewey grew up. And I
think what's really striking about the poem is the understatement and
the reticence.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, it's a really chilling, quite strange poem. I
read it a couple of times before I got this picture coalescing of what
was what was happening. Would you read it for us?
Jane Clarke: Yes. "Incident" We tell the story every year—/ how we
peered from the windows, shades drawn— / though nothing really
happened, / the charred grass, now green again. // We peered from the
windows, shades drawn, / at the cross trussed like a Christmas
tree, / the charred grass still green. Then / we darkened our
rooms, lit the hurricane lamps. // At the cross trussed like a
Christmas tree, / a few men gathered, white as angels in their
gowns. / We darkened our rooms and lit hurricane lamps, / the wicks
trembling in their fonts of oil. // It seemed the angels had gathered,
white men in their gowns. / When they were done, they left quietly.
No one came. / The wicks trembled all night in their fonts of oil; /
by morning, the flames had all dimmed. // When they were done, the
men left quietly. No one came. / Nothing really happened. / By
morning all the flames had dimmed. / We tell the story every year.
Seán Hewitt: It's such a brilliant poem. I wonder if part of the
reason that it's, it's so chilling is, is that actually, if you read
it in one way, and you take some of the cues of the language, you have
angels, Christmas trees, a sense of almost holiness with the candles
and the fonts, and it might read in the back of your mind like an
entirely different poem. And there's something about the way in
which that scene is being made to sit alongside religious and
Christmas-like settings that throws the mind in such a strange
and surreal direction that by the time it coalesces in your head
what's going on and what the story is actually about, you find
yourself very disturbed by, by the set of images that have been chosen
for it.
Jane Clarke: Yes, and like you say, I think. You do have to read it a
few times to get a really good sense of actually what's happening
here.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, yeah, it's really chilling. I think the
pantoum as well—it's not a form I've ever tried to write in,
because I always run scared of kind of received forms, particularly
repeating forms. But there's something about the way that these
images recur and are subtly changed. You know, we, we go over
the course of a night, but the same ideas keep on returning. It feels
like a dream. It feels like a distant memory. The way this the
set of images are just pushing at the back of of the consciousness of
the poem.
Jane Clarke: Yes, and obviously the first line "We tell the story every
year," so doesn't the repetition do that as well? So we keep telling
the story through the poem as well. And that's a bit like a family
story that, you know, the way it does get told again and again. And
there are some details that get repeated. And you sometimes wonder,
"Well, what, was it actually like that?" But we get attached to those
details yeah as a way of telling it.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah and, and even that line seems to be somewhat
undone by the poem. "We tell the story every year." So you're kind
of led to expect events and narrative and resolution. And it
doesn't, almost doesn't fit the word story at all. It feels like
there's a sort of doubt and strangeness in the way that it's
made. But it has this secret underneath it that is just slowly
boiling away in an unsettling way. And I wonder, if you know, do you
think that this is an example of how that restraint in poetry works
to good effect? Is that something that, you know, drew you to this
poem as well?
Jane Clarke: Yeah. I think the the holding back the restraint makes us
feel it all the more. That's what it does for me, because she doesn't
spill out all the different feelings, and that—for any family
to go through that, the horror of that! I mean, surely we go through
the trauma every single year. We relive the trauma every year. But
she steps back from that. She doesn't allow herself to do that.
She doesn't say, "Look at the terrible thing that happened to
us." She just puts it at a distance. And through that, then we
have our reaction, whereas otherwise we'd be just reading her
reaction. Do you see what I mean? But I think she, she allows, you
know, so much space for the reader to feel it themselves by that
distance.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, there's something about the poem, and I was
looking to see if there was actually a clue to this, or if I
just assumed it, and I think I've just assumed it. But it feels like
the way a child might experience a scene. Perhaps it's putting us in a
place where we don't quite know what's going on, but we see these,
these men arrive, and why should they be "like angels?" You know,
there's no reason that these men, once we know who they are, should
be described as being "like angels," but maybe that's an
association in a child's mind.
Jane Clarke: Yes!
Seán Hewitt: Did you read it as a child's perspective?
Jane Clarke: Yes, I, well, I probably did, actually, when you
say that, because it reminded me of a story my mother told and what
happened to my mother was when she was three, so obviously, you know,
she was telling the story through a child's eyes. So I think you're
right. I think that's part of what gives it a very particular tone.
Seán Hewitt: Yeah, and there's something about, you know, that
even the way you were speaking before, about how, you know, it
might take 30 years for an idea to click into place. And sometimes
that's what we do with childhood memories as well. You know, we, for
some reason, have remembered something someone said to us, or
that we saw a certain thing when we were three or four years old, and
then maybe 20 or 30 years later, we get the second piece of information
that clicks it, and we think, "Ah, that's what that was, or that's why
I remember it."
Jane Clarke: I think that's a really, really good way of looking
at it, the idea of the child and then the adult working with it,
because, like, you say, like, even fonts of oil, there's the religious
symbology coming in there. So, so I think it's that mixture of, you
know, the child's impression, the family's way of repeating it, and
then an adult, I think, realizing what this all is. And I think the
poet lets us be the adult, realizing, and almost looking at
the child behind the curtains, looking out. We can see this family
looking out at what's happening.
Seán Hewitt: Even the reluctance in the title to name what the incident
is. You know, that's another way of holding a secret inside the poem.
And you know, there's something deeply kind of unsettling about
these angels kind of appearing at a house. And "the charred grass now
green again." Or "the charred grass still green." That seems to put me
in two different time frames in this poem. You know, it's gone back
to being green, or it was green and then it was charred. You know, it's
kind of mixing time in a really interesting way.
Jane Clarke: And isn't it, sort of exploring history in the present,
because the charred grass is now green, but actually it was charred.
It'll always have been charred by—what happened shapes that lawn
today. You know, as as what happened shapes that family and
that community and that society and that country.
Seán Hewitt: Which is something perhaps, about the pantoum that
helps there as well, because it's a circular, kind of repeating form.
Even if it moves somewhere, you kind of get the sense of pantoums,
so I do, that they might just go on after you finished reading them,
they keep on moving around in circles, even if you're not there
to watch them. I often say to students, you know, you can write
it in a form and then dismantle the form around it, but sometimes the
form helps you get to where you need to go. It doesn't have to end
up as a pantoum, in can be unmade in a better way than you might have
made it just with your own devices. And what are you working on now?
Jane Clarke: Well, I'm working on my fourth collection, which is
exciting, and I have a date September 26th.
Seán Hewitt: Oh, you do? Oh, that’s exciting, that’s great.
Jane Clarke: I'm very excited. So no, I'm still, you know, getting it
there, you know, but yeah, that's, that's the plan at the moment. And
then I'm also working on a book of my poems, illustrations and some
reflections about making space for nature in Ireland. So they're my
two projects at the moment.
Seán Hewitt: That is plenty to be getting on with I can't wait for
the new collection. Jane Clarke, it has been such a pleasure to speak
to you and hear about all these poems and your thoughts about them.
Thank you very much for coming on to The Glimpse.
Jane Clarke: Thank you, Seán. I've really enjoyed it.
Seán Hewitt: Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt.
Jane’s poem “Spalls” is from her book A Change in the Air, published
in 2023 and aired with the permission of Bloodaxe Books.
Natasha Trethewey’s poem "Incident" is from her book Monument,
Copyright (c) 2006 and 2018 by Natasha Trethewey. It was aired
with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Massie
& McQuilkin as agents for the author.
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The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry
Foundation. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt. Our Senior Producer is
Jennifer Wolfe, Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing
engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and
production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation’s Executive
Director, and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead.
And that’s it for this second season of The Glimpse! It’s been a
pleasure to be in conversation with these writers and their words, and
to share those conversations with you. I hope you’ll keep it going,
keep reading poems, and join us for the next season of The Glimpse.
Thanks for listening.