Reginald John Clemo (Jack Clemo) was a British poet and writer who was strongly associated both with his native Cornwall and his strong Christian belief. His work was considered to be visionary and inspired by the rugged Cornish landscape.
Background
His father was a clay-kiln worker and he was killed at sea towards the end of the First World War, so Clemo was raised by his mother who exerted a dominant influence on him.
He became deaf around age 20, and blind in 1955, about 19 years later. The china clay mines and works around which he grew up were to feature strongly in his work.
There is a small museum located in a dedicated Memorial Room at Trethosa Chapel, where he was both christened and married, featuring his life and works and which is run by volunteers. His literary papers, including manuscripts of prose and poetry works, are held by the University of Exeter.
An annual Jack Clemo Poetry Competition was established in 1995 by Arts Centre Group (ACG) having received a legacy from Jack Clemo's estate. The first winner was Ulster English teacher and poet Ray Givans and the prize was £30 and a sculpture by ACG member Iain Cotton in Cornish stone with a Celtic design (the sculpture to be held for one year). The winning poem was called Work Ethic.
Education
He was educated at the village school but after age of 13 his formal schooling ceased with the onset on his blindness.
Career
Clemo's early work was published in the local press but his literary breakthrough came with the novel "Wilding Graft", which was published by Chatto and Windus in 1948 winning an Atlantic Award.
This was followed in 1949 by his autobiography," Confessions of a Rebel", which established Clemo as a remarkable and original writer.
Clemo developed further as a writer and in 1951 he published his first collection, "The Clay Verge". Set in a stark landscape, the poems explore the forces of nature and the workings of a hard-won grace. He received national recognition for the first time in the same year during the Festival of Britain where he was awarded a literary prize.
In 1970 he was appointed a Bard of the Gorseth Kernow and conferred with the title Poet of the Clay. In 1981, at the age of 65, he received an honorary literary doctorate from the University of Exeter.
By the age of 65 he had achieved sufficient recognition for a dramatised version of his biography, directed by Norman Stone, to be produced and screened by the BBC in 1981. No tapes of this programme have survived. A few years later a biography of Jack Clemo was written by Sally Magnusson. His portrait was also painted by Tricia Porter in 1975 and is displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The first major academic conference on Clemo, 'Kindling the Scarp', was held at Wheal Martyn, Cornwall, on 31 May and 1 June 2013, organised by scholars at the University of Warwick and the University of Exeter. This also coincided with the closure of the Trethosa Chapel on Sunday 2 June and the relocation of Clemo memorabilia previously displayed there to the Wheal Martyn Museum in St Austell.
An unexpected change to his writing subsequently occurred after two trips to Italy late in his life. In 1987 he first visited Venice and then, 6 years later, he also travelled to Florence. This seemed to prompt a blaze of much more colourful verse, integrating the personal drama of his own life with the sweep of Italian faith, culture, landscape and history. In "Heretic in Florence" he recounted the stench of the dry river Arno and its cure, portraying it as a metaphor for his own release from merely barren art.