Clark is not McClure. Did he play guitar for the Doors?
In any event he blushes in his somnambulant state.
He looks like the ragged October leaf he'll write
About in twenty odd years. Such is the sleepwalker's fate.
More “impressions” from “The Young American Poets”:
Bell stands punctuated by parenthetical light.
He's not the shadow behind him. His buttons live
In Torrington, or Middletown, New York. Oh, sure,
Everyone's heard of the Iowa ring. But gasoline?
Benedikt lives in wood; he eats and lives in wood.
He moves between cities in archetypes and adverbs.
. . .
Berkson sits half-inflated by the shadow's corner.
. . .
The book
Doesn't tell upon whose knee he's silently propped.
Berrigan is potential electricity, yet a still life
With pitcher and paper cups. It's all in the Mormon
Beard, or else it's all in the lines his pants drop
To the floor. He's off the top of his head.
Good god, could I have done anything less with that?
Gluck works in a diner downtown, but she dances when
No one is watching. She's the independent rebel of
Saint Petersburg, Florida with an elbow grease attitude.
She reminds the fish bones of madame Sosostris.
Hass has been standing on the shore for years
And still no letter from D.H. Lawerence.
Sometimes he believes in the land he stands on,
But mostly it is the ocean he feels under his feet.
Yeah, that might be as good as any of this gets.
Marshall is the uncle the whole family avoids.
His folksongs twang in the suburbs of Paris.
He comes out of his shell like midnight
A disfigured moon fingering the eye through the larynx.
If you think that last line is bad, imagine how awful the stuff I'm cutting out is.
Padgett is mad as heaven help us, which he holds
In his hands. Death radios from his metallic rims.
He's father A holding baby B in world XYZ,
Against the pivotal question, "Which leg first?"
IIRC, what Padgett is holding is one, maybe two, of his children. And, hey, that last line might actually be worth something.
Geraud is obvious: a dreamer who dreams in italics.
He was born in the back of a Ford pickup and
Immediately tried to kiss the sun. He eats books
Pensively, absently. His face is still burning.
Geraud is this Saint Geraud, a pseudonym at the time used by Bill Knott. Don't ask me how you eat a book if your face is burning. Or if the book-eating thing wouldn't have been better saved for Mark Strand, who instead gets this treatment:
Strand looks older than he ever will in his continuous life.
Wisps of unpenned dramas hang limp over his dexterous eye;
His sinister one casts lines of intrigue into his hair.
His tie is made of canvas; at night he shapes it into colors.
Just a few more...
Torregian is a still life with empty bottle.
The emptied milk has blossomed into a flower
Upon his lap. He sings the blues in Nova Scotia.
The pale cut of remembrance falling into place.
Towle has just stepped out from The Dead
Poets Society. The girl of his dreams listens
To "April in Paris." His eyes rolled into black air,
He leans into adjectives. In light by a nose.
Alright, let's just skip to the big finish:
Charles Wright is probably thirty-three.
He hasn't yet regarded the nails
spitting in the eastern night.
He doesn't appear with The Young American Poets here;
In this version of 1968
he doesn't exist.
Yeah, guess who I was just discovering and thought was the bomb?
