Literature X Ecology Series: John Wedgwood Clarke

The Literature X Ecology series presents conversations with leading contemporary poets whose work intersects with ecological thinking. The programme is part of a collaboration between RENEW and the Biodiversity and People Network and is funded by the B&PN as part of the network's annual cross-disciplinary programme of events.

In this online reading and conversation, John Wedgwood Clarke will talk about his collection Red River in relation to ecology and ecological poetics.

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Red River continues Clarke’s work on the dense networks of meaning that can be traced through the shadow sites upon which late capital depends for its timeless regeneration of commodities. Landfill (2017) explored the landfill site as a form of contemporary burial mound and portrait of a culture, a place where everyone winds up and are compacted together: images break down into the materials from which they are fabricated; mortality and rot are made visible again, the conjuring trick of waste disposal exposed as a highly regulated delusional practice.

Landfill implies we need to see our waste and make our decisions in sight of the damage we’re doing. Clarke’s work on the Red River explores a similar ugly/ rubbish site of complex cultural meaning and weird ecology hidden, in this instance, within a commodified tourist landscape authorised by myths of Cornwall and its representation in the visual arts. Red River hones in on the zones of pollution and damage upon which the industrial, and now the information, revolutions have depended. The collection listens to, and gaze into, the strange ecological reactions of flora and fauna to human damage that embody the indivisibility of the human/ nature relationship. The Red River is written into the Clarke’s new collection as a metonym for the global extractive mining techniques developed in Cornwall, and as a place of deep-time thinking about the possible extinction of the human species. It explores the troubled relationship between the human body and the river in a culture that has seen both the working classes and the river as a site of extraction, alienation and contamination.

Haunting damage exists alongside versions of the lives of Celtic Saints, exploring the complicated relationship between a landscape of sacred martyrdom, eco-sadism and the destruction of the river. He seeks to dramatize the longing for becoming other, for reaching into the mystery of a river, alongside a knowledge of the way religious teachings have played their part as a form of ideological technology that has run parallel to industrial creation of capital. Personal stories of the river as post-industrial playground flow into ecological stories which flow into stories of power and control of a river seen as a machine for processing tin. Throughout the collection, the Red River is offered as a site of meditation on landscape aesthetics, and how sites of apparent ‘ugliness’ can in fact offer the most ecologically complex and meaningful places through with to contemplate the human species impact on the world.

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John Wedgwood Clarke was born and raised in Cornwall. He trained as an actor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama on a county scholarship, before going on to study literature and complete a British Academy-funded PhD on ‘Objectivist’ poetry at the University of York. He is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter.

Clarke’s first collection Ghost Pot (2013) was described by Bernard O'Donoghue as a 'masterpiece that rewards continual rereading', and a ‘universe of minute perspectives’ by Carol Rumens. Of his latest collection Boy Thing (2023), Fiona Benson writes, ‘Boy Thing is a thing of wonder. The magic of these poems lies in their consummate alchemy of sound and imagery, and in their strange but somehow perfect metaphoric couplings’. Clarke's poetry is often created through collaboration with scientists and other artists, and displayed in art galleries, museums and in the landscape. Among other awards, he has been a Leverhulme artist-in-residence and undertaken British Library residency at Shandy Hall. His work as television presenter for BBC Four includes Through the Lens of Larkin (2017) and Cornwall's Red River (2021), which is based on a long-running research project about a post-industrial river in West Cornwall. He has directed major research projects and commissions, including most recently Red River: Listening to a Polluted River, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is currently a Co-I on the RENEW project.

His poems have been published widely in Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland, PN Review, The Guardian, New Statesman, London Magazine, Poetry Oxford and others