Look, John Clare has his own blog! (via LNR Books Diary, who got it via ReadySteadyBlog)

If you’re not familiar with the poet John Clare, this old New Yorker piece is a good place to start:

The great curse of Clare’s life was poverty. He is the poorest major writer in the canon of English literature, so poor that he was often unable to afford paper. These struggles are reflected in some of his manuscripts: he made his own paper, if it can be called that, by scraping layers of birch bark, and his own ink by “a mix of bruised nut galls, green copper, and stone blue soaked in a pint and a half of rain-water”—and he was doing this after the supposed breakthrough success of his first book, “Poems, Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery,” in 1820. Some of his manuscripts are made from letter covers stitched together; one of his best nature poems is written on the back of a handbill for a local election in which Clare could not vote, because the poor were excluded from the franchise.