Click below to listen to So Here We Are 2 on Miporadio. Please give time for the link to download. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England I first encountered the poetry of William Barnes when I was sixteen. I had been in Barnes House at Sturminster Newton school and had no real idea of what he wrote until I bought some books at the Dorset Bookshop in Blandford Forum. It was a charming, overflowing bookshop run by two elderly ladies who had published a book about Barnes. What was striking about Barnes was that he wrote almost exclusively in the Dorset dialect. Here was the language that my parents, grandparents, the local farmers, farm workers and villagers, more or less used. When skies wer peåle wi’ twinklen stars, An’ whislen air a-risén keen; An’ birds did leave the icy bars To vind, in woods, their mossy screen; When vrozen grass, so white’s a sheet, Did scrunchy sharp below our veet, An’ water, that did sparkle red At zunzet, wer a-vrozen dead; The ringers then did spend an hour A-ringen changes up in tow’r; Vor Lydlinch bells be good vor sound An’ liked by all the nåighbours round. The habitual ‘v’ for ‘f’ and ‘z’ for ‘s’ was still in common use. I grew up, as did my daughters, saying, ‘Oh-arh’ and ‘Look at that girt bull’. I come from the same peasant stock as Barnes and at seventeen I was writing a strange poetry inspired by Wordsworth, Barnes and the puns of radio comedy. I want to talk about Barnes, his context and the English poetry canon. This general overview may cast some light on the narrowness of the canon and the relative instability of late twentieth century English poetry. William Barnes has three aspects that are noteworthy. He wrote for a specific and local audience, the rural poor and dispossessed and put that focus above anything else. By choosing not to conform to national English he reduced his potential audience considerably. However, his dialect poetry did sell in quantities and has never been out of print. It is still widely available in different editions. Indeed, in the past forty years his position in relation to the canon has improved. There has been a Selected Poems in the Penguin Classic series, edited by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. Secondly, his work as a linguist and as a theorist of English language is significant and similar to the seventeenth century Levellers who also wanted the removal of the Norman-French system of government. Thirdly, he was also a political economist seeking a way out of worst effects of industrialisation. In other words, there is more to Barnes than might be thought. The poet, John Ashbery, in a handy book entitled Other Traditions, based on his Norton lectures, delineates the value of six poets outside the canon. These include the Northamptonshire peasant poet, John Clare, who is listed in the Cambridge History of English Poets, among the Lesser Romantic Poets. He is there with some fascinating figures, such as Barnes, Thomas Love Beddoes and George Darley. Clare is the poet that famously wrote I am – yet what I am, no one knows or cares; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes – They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host Like shadow’s in love-frenzied stifled throes – And yet I am, and live – like vapours tossed Now I don’t wish to suggest that Barnes is better than Clare. Rather I think that both have been sorely neglected because they deal with the rural poor and dispossessed. Clare lost his mind as a result of his problems and has only recently thanks to Ashbery, Jonathan Bate and the Clare Society found his way closer to the canon. A similar resurgence is happening for Barnes. They are, both, though, still outside the canon. There is a view of the origins of English literary language that late fourteenth century and early fifteenth century poets took the wrong course within vernacular English as it slowly emerged as a distinct language. At that time the bulk of the population spoke Middle English dialects influenced