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Gillian Clarke : Organic
Poetry
When I spoke to Gillian
Clarke on the 28th February 2001, the spectre of foot and mouth
disease was hanging over her home in a West Wales farming community.
As well as being an acclaimed poet, Gillian Clarke has a small flock
of sheep, which she raises according to organic prinicples.
It was also the day
of the fatal rail crash in Selby and as well as nursing bronchitis,
she was contemplating the full horror of such violent loss of life.
A Level students who
study her 'Letter from a far country' as a set text will be familiar
with her as a writer who evokes 'childhood, womanhood, Wales, the
private country where the warriors, kings and presidents don't live,
the private place where we all grow up.'
But they may not realise
that her writing is born of a very real dismay at the events which
happen in the world. Far from being cut off from the world in her
cowshed study in Llandyssul, she engages with everyday tragedies
in a way which causes her palpable distress.
"It's a personal
rather than a financial nightmare for us, we've bred those dear
ewes as friends, like cats or dogs. But for our neighbours, however,
it doesn't bear thinking about. It's an absolute horror." She
places the blame for the disease firmly at the door of those farmers
who adhere to commercial rather than organic principles.
Her belief in organic
principles stretches from farming, to the reception of her poetry.
Her website is regularly updated with responses to emails from her
readers, many of them schoolchildren and students with specific
questions about her poems. She thanks a boy studying for his GCSEs
for his interpretation of her poem 'Catrin'.
"I had not realised
the full extent of what I had written instincitvely.... Believe
me, the poem is not mine anymore. It is yours."
Full
interview with Gillian Clarke: In her own words
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