Remembering the genius of Clive James

‘Clive James Stirs.’ That was the standard subject line for the emails I used to get from the great Australian polymath. I liked it. It cast him, I thought, as a sort of barnacled kraken — still hanging in there, occasionally roused to action. He was usually submitting a new poem. For a while, after he first announced his illness and his poem ‘Japanese Maple’ had gone viral thanks to a tweet from Mia Farrow (Clive found this funny, and was pleased), there was a faintly ghoulish cachet in the thought that we might be the publishers of Clive’s last poem. But of course, he didn’t die — and the poems kept coming. ‘In the meantime I hope to have a couple more poems for you,’ he wrote in spring 2015, ‘if I am granted life. I’ve been granted it so far, and in delightful measure; but there is no knowing for certain.