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The poems threaded through the interview below are taken from David Motley's The Gypsy and the Poet (Carcanet, 2013).
Simon Kövesi: Could you tell me about the context for your conceiving of this new collection of poems, The Gypsy and the Poet?
David Morley: I'd finished a trilogy of books for Carcanet, and I had no idea what I was going to do after that trilogy. I'd worked on three books over ten years. And I started writing sporadic notes, the usual sporadic way, and was doing fine. And then two of my PhD students were dying to go to this get-together of environmentalists and writers and film-makers, that was taking place at Helpston. Well, I had already been invited. They knew that! I had been invited by New Networks for Nature, a broad alliance of creators whose work draws strongly on the natural environment, to perform at their annual gathering. The performance took place in Helpston Church. Afterwards, I went to see John Clare, sat down by his grave and had a little chat with him. Then I went to Clare Cottage with my students,· I bounced a few ideas around with them in the car. At home, I reread Jonathan Bate's biography, and found myself thinking about the presence of Gypsies in Clare's life - particularly of Wisdom Smith. I am partly Romani. I have written poems using various Romani dialects. I was drawn to Clare through his use of his own voice and dialect in poems and notebooks, but also through the company he chose to keep: his friend, the Gypsy Wisdom Smith leapt out at me from the notebooks. I went to my university library and got out every John Clare book, and took in as much as possible. The notebooks and the poems in their original publication were my epicentres of obsession. I wasn't necessarily trying to do anything with this. I had found an appetite for something and following it through in tha usual, voracious way that you do when you're not writing, in order to write. Then, one morning, I went into my writing shed and found Wisdom Smith sitting in the chair, waiting for me, and I seemed to step into him, or he stepped into me,...