Steve_Bamlett_blog

Reading Kate Clanchy.

The task is to retire with your mind still active. Fortunately Durham University English Department near where I live maintains a number of public lectures where you can hear artists and writers talk about their art. To do justice to these I book if I can and start reading a writer I hadn’t before encountered. This Thursday I’m seeing Kate Clanchy who is speaking about her own work but in relation to her continuing role as a teacher (disguised these days as a writer in residence it seems) of writing and specifically of poetry. Key to this is a book published this year, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me: Stories from 30 years in School.

The great thing about this book is the genuine intention to demonstrate (‘show not tell’ Kate will with a chorus of teachers enchant)  that teaching is not teaching when it isn’t learning from learners; in fact being taught by learners. The shaping process is a mutual one, where teaching itself becomes a relationship of transaction and transformation. I shall say more about the amazing innovative liminal (as understood by Victor Turner)* effects this brings about in her current prose works but have to note first that such processes were already prefigured, cognitively at least, in poems from the volume Samarkand (1999) and especially the wonderfully rich teacher-learner ‘love’ poem, The Spell (p. 35). It bears a slightly fuller reading before considering the more immediate but no less rich reflexive tendencies of her prose.

The Spell is an openly derivative form at least in subject. For instance, it is impossible to miss that the poem reflexively relives the conversational context (and iambic metrical line) of a Yeats’ lyric. Her poem begins:

If, at your desk, you push aside your work,

take down a book, turn to this verse

and read that …

This matches the rhythmic pace of Yeats, apart from the dramatic use of initial stress, as well as using nearly word-for-word a phrase of Yeats’ When You Are Old[1]

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, …

As Clanchy says in her new book: ‘Stories come from stories, poems from poems,…’.[2] But ‘coming from’ is not a form of identification as we see clearly here and in more than one way the child can be mother of the man. There is the same story – taking a book from a shelf and reading it – but the differences are important. Clancy emphasises the detail of the act of reading rather than turning it into a poignant dreamy reflection. The poet and reader in Clanchy are entangled in tactile dynamics that are those of the relationship of the reader’s sensing body with a physical book:

and read that I kneel there, pressing

my ear where on your chest the muscles

arch as great books part, …

…

and stroke my cheeks as if smoothing

back the tissue leaves from chilly,

plated pages, ….

Here is a poet who knows the mutual feel of bodies and the detailed feel of books – even to the tissue used in nineteenth century books to guard illustrated plates. But of course ‘tissue’ is also from the repertoire of the physical body, The poet’s ‘ear’ is that of a loving wife but also the poet’s ability to hear the cadences and counterpoints in metrical verse.

To me such effects are caused by conceiving reading as a point of bodily liminality, where bodily senses fail to distinguish the boundaries of ‘you’ and ‘me’, at least momentarily. Bodies sense at their ‘skinny’ boundaries a unity that still contains diversity just as arches in bodies bespeak tensions between different muscles. And while Yeats is a male writer who puts his definitively feminised imagined reader to sleep, no more active than in a dream, Clanchy’s reader is neither gendered, although other poems suggest it is one of a series of heterosexual marriage poems, nor subjected but made equal in body and relation to the poem itself:

Turning to this verse, and then, my love,

You shall not know which one of us is reading

Now, which writing, and which written.

If ‘turning to’ also implies metamorphosis, the poet and reader are both and neither the subject of the poem, its physical writer and reader. They are a kind of liminal agency – many things and all, with boundaries dissolved. This kind of poetry may be no longer fashionable – fuelled as it is by the vast importance until recently of the example of seventeenth-century Metaphysical verse, although you can except Zaffar Kunial. In particular, Clanchy excels in enjambement reinforced by initial strong stress in the run-on line like Donne and Herbert.

But my concern now is with her prose. In this the main liminal effect lies in the ways in which pedagogy transforms all of its elements in the teaching of poetry. This happened too in Antigona and Me (2009), whose subject is the story of the interaction between writer (me), protagonist (Antigona) and itself – since interaction is in itself an agency.  

Not Antigona’s story as it happened to her, but her story as it happen to me: as I heard it, as I researched it and imagined it; as it made me think; as it changed me. I would put myself in the book as I was and am: me with all my ignorances and prejudices and losses of temper, me with my large, British, liberal behind, and the reader would have to peer past me, would never be allowed to forget this was a particular, partial view of life, not a life itself. …[3]

This is reflexivity of the kind employed in qualitative social research but more subtle (shown not told, I’d say). There is a presumption that we do not see the subject focused upon by a writer except through the medium and distorting effects of the writer’s own personality, culture and nationhood. Clanchy likes to deal with this by rather sneaky little jokes: the titter involved for instance in describing her ‘large, British, liberal behind.’

In her current book this wry ability to show herself looking at her subject occurs for the same reason – to show that what a writer can be taught (by her Kosovan nanny, Antigona, or the LGBTQI+ teenagers, the first-generation migrants teens of different nationalities and the ‘excluded classes’ of the British class system in her ‘Inclusion Unit’. This book is about experienced liminality in the author in the context of professional paradigms that suggest that teachers are inevitably in them-and-us relationships with learners – often for laudable reasons of safeguarding young people.  Thus while Clanchy’s sincere ‘large liberal behind’ stresses the need for boundaries in her relationships with teenage learners. These disadvantaged teenagers’ autonomous ability to develop into maturity is respected and not end-stopped by over-engagement by the powerful but at the same time Clanchy hates the powerful who just refuse to see that their policing of boundaries refuses to see and acknowledge the difference in some teenagers’ or migrants’  experiences and thus treat them without questioning their own assumptions. Moreover those assumptions – a comfortable belief in one’s own entitlement to power leads to bad professional practice should as the use of  means that take away the rights of learners.

Hence, if not without discomfort, Clanchy writes of her own work outside professional boundaries such as, at the request of a migrant mother, adopting her private password for a state agency and writing ‘the ensuing correspondence for her and as her, phoning her as I go’.[4] What follows is a drama in which roles are exchanged, identities become inevitably liminal, but one in which learning occurs.

… she is supporting her son in the dispute with the school with the irrational, exclaiming, melodramatic energy that perhaps only a Kurdish widow who grew up in a village with more scimitars than telephones could possibly muster, while I am, instinctively, on the teachers’ side.[5]

Look at those adjectives describing the ‘Kurdish widow’ – they speak of the flawed values of the West and its assumed superiorities. They are dramatic and the product of a role scripted by thoroughly imperialist and orientalist values, which are only part of my instincts in that I have learned my instincts from my culture.

My point is that Clanchy purposively exposes herself to that critique of her ‘large, British, liberal behind’, a past that determines her values, perhaps even what she calls her instincts but which can and should change. Indeed the book is about how these values change. They change as she shows that she does not ‘like’ the way social workers and others understand and treat migrants who have become formally excluded in school. She is taught to see and tell terrible truths about herself instead of believing in comfortable assumptions of her entitlement. Thus in talking to the Kenyan boy, Aadil, she says:

‘People like me, that’s who’s in government. And what did I just show you? You look Somali to me. I’ve got no idea. Most of us – white people, English people – you look the same to us. We’ve got no idea.’[6]

Thus, we are shown (we see and aren’t exactly just told) Clanchy learning – being taught effectively if not explicitly, that what she is ‘like’ is the rest of a largely racist culture and that she cannot move on until she learns that about herself, she will not learn about the disempowered and marginalised. Hence we read this book through this reflexive self, with all its ‘ignorances and prejudices’ revealed to us as we go – able to see the process by which the ignorances and prejudices are implicitly o explicitly challenged by others and through this teaching, changed.

Of course my favourite part of this is Clanchy learning about LGBTQI+ teenagers. The most definite section in which Clanchy plays with the boundaries to acceptable teacher – teenager relationships occurs when she learns that Liam’s social exclusion relates to the fact that he cannot go to places in which other gay people meet. Asked to take him to a gay-club Clanchy reacts with all the force the ‘obvious’ inappropriateness of that action, and the implied relationship behind it, might suggest:

              ‘I’m your teacher,’ I said weakly. ‘It’s not right.’

              … That was our relationship. I couldn’t take him to a gay nightclub. Any nightclub.[7]

But, of course she does because otherwise she would be inhibiting his development as much as she would by not allowing her own children to ‘walk along ledges or cross a busy road’.[8] These processes of learning involve acceptance of failures and disappointment but always a means of learning and respecting that others – the otherness of diverse teenagers – are the arbiters of their own lives in the final analysis. The contradictions in this position for a teacher are fully explored in this great book. What Kate learns is that we often confuse teaching with bourgeois self-satisfaction and self-projection and our duty to the vulnerable with entitlement to regulate them by our own introjected cultural values. With this learning, Clanchy challenges the educational paradigms of the moment. Look for instance at this about educational principles: ‘The latest thinking is: merciless challenge, rigid boundaries, drastically raised expectations’.[9]

By this point in the book she tells us that this is the paradigm mainly because it is easy to imitate and involves in itself no teaching of the teacher by the taught. The paradigm misses that, easily dismissed as ‘Touchy feely understanding?’, and Clanchy locates this in the fact that all teaching and learning must involve love – agape not eros, she, of course, tells us. But even agape has to understand erotic love – else how else help others to find forms of that that match diverse biopsychosocial needs but that leave the lover still in control of their own choices. If anything it is that finely situated control in which emotion can be expressed in a way that does not disempower the one who must feel the emotion. We find this in poetry she says and in teaching it and being taught by it and its readers:

The writing of a poem does not open the writer to a desperate blurt, or the helplessness I felt in the workshop in Manchester; rather it orders the experience it recounts and gives the writer a grip of it.[10]

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* For a definition of liminality see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality

[1] For the poem, see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43283/when-you-are-old

[2] Clanch (2019: Loc.3014)

[3] Clanchy (2009:Loc.135)

[4] Clanchy (2019:Loc749)

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid (Loc.1063)

[7] Ibid:loc.401

[8] Ibid:loc. 422

[9] Ibid:loc.1853

[10] Ibid:loc 3079