Edward Clarke on poetry, hilarious discrepancies and Small Potatoes

I’ve spent a lot of time recently writing reviews, articles, papers for conferences, references, reports, schemes of work, even this sentence, with my 14-month-old son on my lap.

I’ve worked out that the screen of my laptop is just wide enough for a Word document and an episode of Josh Selig’s wonderful Small Potatoes.

While thus multi-tasking I have been thinking more and more about discrepancy: the discrepancy, for example, between the childish songs from Small Potatoes and my thoughts about the exhilarating inadequacies of John Berryman’s poetic project in comparison with W. B. Yeats’s grand achievement.

‘Imagination, Imagination, give it a try, ah, ah give it a try, give it a try’, intone the small potatoes — ‘it’s all great fun, yes!’ Academic life is full of hilarious and depressing discrepancies, usually between earnest or naive expectations and what is actually delivered on campus.

The discrepancy, say, between the nervous zeal of applying for a place at Oxford and the mounting drunken fervour of freshers’ week, which some of us may have witnessed recently, or the discrepancy between the ‘learning outcomes’ I’m sometimes asked to describe on syllabi for my courses and just what the students actually take from my classes.

At the moment I feel especially the discordance between what I have been calling the vagabond spirit of poetry and academic discourse.

While he was studying at Oxford after the First World War, Robert Graves used to argue with Lawrence of Arabia about the role of the poet.

Graves thought that the poet’s secret is not so much “a technical mastery of words” but “a particular mode of living and thinking”.

Addressing those of us who would make a career of teaching literature, while trying also to write it, Graves asked later in life: “And do I suggest that you should resign your jobs and for want of sufficient capital set up as small-holders, turn romantic shepherds...in remote unmechanized farms? I do not even know that you are serious in your poetic profession.”

If the unkempt state of my small Oxford garden is anything to go by, then I’m pretty sure that I would make a hopeless small-holder.

But it’s perhaps inevitable at this time of year as massive gangs of students arrive back to rain-swept Oxford, and my diary starts filling up with tutorials, seminars and lectures, that I should start dreaming again of an unmechanised farm in Spain or South America.

Seamus Heaney did, in fact, give up urban academic life temporarily in the seventies, swapping it for cottage life in Wicklow, because: “When I was there, I always felt what Wordsworth might have called that ‘blessed mood, in which the affections gently lead us on’.”.

As the evenings draw in this Michaelmas, I vow to be mindful of the poetic necessity of keeping at a tangent.

As I describe more ‘learning outcomes’ to the accompaniment of Small Potatoes, I will try to remember Brendan Kennelly’s words about Yeats: “He had the courage to experiment. He permitted life to live him even as he struggled to master his life. He wanted to go ‘walking naked’.”