Mentions / Tom Clark

Some fun reads, fun digging, the past few days over at John Latta's Isola di Rifiuti, if you're into Ted Berrigan and Tom Clark. He makes an interesting observation on Clark's tendency toward "new words," basically getting the artifacts of the day, into his poems. Interesting because when I think of Clark's work, my impression - quite possibly wrongheaded - is one of so-called "poetic language." Always liked that Clark wasn't afraid to use it when he had to. Maybe what I'm thinking of is along the lines of the "tenderness" Latta mentions. If nothing else it speaks to the fact that Clark isn't going out of his way to use the "new words" and force them into poetry for its own sake. It's funny how the writing programs always rush to chop off the poetic language (largely for good reason, but amputation is always a drastic measure), when in fact you look through just about any contemporary poetry review/journal/zine and that language is nowhere to be found (and hasn't been since, what, fifty years? my lit mag knowledge doesn't go back nearly far enough to really know). You would just think that "poetic" would bear closer relation to the actual "poetry" of the day published. I'm not being fair, though: it's tough when public perception is close to a hundred years behind. And I shouldn't generalize about writing programs - there have always been some good ones, and many probably have at least one good faculty dude. But I'm off track. What about Clark. He's got his hands on the reigns. Let me just put down a poem of his from earlier this decade. A poem with "pants suits" and the Nasdaq, but also a "whole cosmic choir" brought to "whispering knees."

Why Hillary Became a Goddess on the Night
of Her Acceptance Speech

Because her hair looked cool
Because some of the best alien minds are watching developments
        closely
Because she is the traditional Daisy poised fragile before the
        masculine mills
Of production, yet wearing out six black pants suits
To bring us to acculturation and consequence
Because the Nasdaq is plunging and there is a mandate for change
Sweeping through the gentle bacteria that make their home in her
        tireless campaign shoes
Because the worried market takes comfort in knowing what it
        must consume
Because choosing is not an issue except to the terrified cartoon
        eyeballs
In the take-out carton, wondering whose turn is first
Because some of the best alien minds consider "us" the shrill-voiced
        uncertainty factor
That threatens to bring the whole cosmic chorus to its
        whispering knees
Because Utopia is the island in time that forgot itself as it lifted
        its utensil
At the altar of its great consuming goddess No Memory, with her
        sadclown smile strained
Because her lofty position at the social fulcrum which is the
        mercy seat
Takes a terrific toll on black pants suit bottoms
Because some of the best alien minds are surveying developments in
        numb disbelief
Because 65% of the wood lice aren't losing any sleep at all
Because retreat in the face of even greater problems,
While not a bad idea, won't solve anything
Because acceptance and consumption are just what the market needs
To shake it out of its trance-like belief in what it thinks alien minds
        are saying
Because acceptance means acculturation to the masculine mills
Because happiness is merely their invention anyway, because Dame
        Pleasure is wearied
Of Earth, has taken to the air, faded, fluttered down in a still, snow-
Like inwardness to spill, scatter and be raked up with all the sibyl's
        other fallen leaves
In this enchanted-recount self-enclosure, like a small-town autumn
Where the commoners lie down nightly with what they have made
Happen, amid the bedded reeds of the vigilant event horizon
Because in this collapse its truths are received
By their souls, because of what this means to the odd weightlessness
        they feel
Because they have no way to grace their laurels
Beyond filling up the best alien minds, intent upon those peerless
        screens
With the black pants suits of our resident historian
Who's just keeping a chair among the blond clouds warm for them.