No one who knew Tom Clark would ever deny that he was irascible, brilliant, generous, difficult, funny, erudite. He was also immensely prolific—even in old age, he published his blog, Beyond the Pale, on a daily basis. BTP was a relentless illustrated catalogue—with scores of photos spanning the globe—usually revealing world’s woes and conflicts, often complemented with various texts he admired. He also wrote and published dozens of books of poetry and prose. His illustrious literary career is outlined here.
I felt really shaken by the news of his death yesterday: he was hit by a car near his house in Berkeley and died several hours later in the hospital.
We had met in person only once, back in April of 1978, when he came to DC to read in Doug Lang’s Folio Bookstore reading series. I have a distinct memory of taking him somewhere on the DC Metro.
We got to know each much better in recent years, mostly through emails. He liked my work and posted poems of mine from time to time in Beyond the Pale. We had many exchanges about poetry, music, our shared Irish heritage, etc. I am haunted today by his occasional references to the perilous streets of his neighborhood, where pedestrians had to risk their lives to take a walk. Indeed, he had been injured in an earlier accident some years ago.
Here is what he wrote me in June on this very subject:
“Admire your getaroundability. Could never ride on any airplanes nevermore no!! Cannot lift right leg off ground. Get on bus impossible. Cross street a prayer every time, plus plenty straight out hate speech outa me, unheard by robo drivers on software cruise control. They never talk back. I set up in shooter stance w metal cane pointed like assault weapon, they smile and laugh and roar past w/o stopping @alleged pedestrian crosswalk!
Little known fact you probably won't believe or care why should you, but the stop lights here are "smart" - that is, have sensors to detect approaching vehicle, stay green for same, but green goes to yellow in 2 seconds (literally), if you're a ped, and if there is a more unliveable country on earth, defining living as having a soul, I want to go there, just to comparison shop - but I've never owned a credit card or a cell phone, have no i.d. and indeed no idea how to shop, so there might be a problem there, but no worries.” email from Tom Clark, June 2018
Tom will be missed and mourned by his many friends and colleagues. My deepest condolences to Angelica Clark, his wife of 50 years.
Here are two recent poems of Tom’s that I especially like:
Nocturnal Resolutions
Be opaque
Have no memory
Make no attempt to be understood
Stop suffering fools
Be kind to animals no matter what
Listen to the angel
Try to look upon death as a friend
Accept pain as the condition
Be more patient
Don’t turn on the light
The Edge of the Forest
Poems ought to have memories.
They should remember other poems.
At this moment the noisy city
has fallen quiet, and the edge
of the forest is abuzz with voices,
the voices of poems beneath the old trees
talking quietly about the poems that were
once here but are not here any longer,
remembering each other.
both poems from Truth Game (BlazeVOX, 2013)
Late December Sunday. Low south sun
shines deep into the house, stooping
to give a little light, a little warmth.
Late life lover, quiet, bending
to look into my eyes and read remaining dreams,
to quicken what you can, and rock the rest to sleep.
Thank you for warmth and light, for loving me
this late December Sunday.
-- Lise Menn
painting: Claude Monet, Winter on the Seine, Lavacourt (1880)
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You – I
for Pat Silliman
Hard dreams. The moment at which you recognize that your own death lies in wait somewhere
within your body. A lone ship defines the horizon. The rain is not safe to drink.
In Grozny, in Bihac, the idea of history shudders with each new explosion. The rose lies
unattended, wild thorns at the edge of a mass grave. Between classes, over strong coffee,
young men argue the value of a pronoun.
When this you see, remember. Note in a bottle bobs in a cartoon sea. The radio operator’s
name is Sparks.
Hand outlined in paint on a brick wall. Storm turns playground into a swamp. Finally we spot
the wood duck on the middle lake.
The dashboard of my car like the keyboard of a piano. Toy animals anywhere.
Sun swells in the morning sky.
Man with three pens clipped to the neck of his sweatshirt shuffles from one table to the next,
seeking distance from the cold January air out the coffee house door, tall Styrofoam cup in one
hand, Of Grammatology in the other. Outside, a dog is tied to an empty bench, bike chained to
the No Parking sign.
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Ron Silliman has published 40 books and had his poetry and criticism translated into 19 languages. Among his awards are the 2010 Levinson Award from the Poetry Foundation, a Pew Fellowship, a Kelly Writers House Fellowship plus fellowships from the Pennsylvania and California Arts Councils and the National Endowments for the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. [See also this link.]
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Papa takes me to figure-skating school.
The school has classes every day: running, choreography,
floor gymnastics, figure skating. With skates over my shoulder,
we come to the school half an hour before the classes begin.
Putting on skates is a ritual. Papa ties the laces
very tight. I am wearing a woolen dress,
tights, and a gray hat with a visor and a pompom.
“Well, how was it?” Papa asks after my first lesson.
I am covered in snow from head to toe.
“I don't know. We were taught how to fall.
For the entire hour. Fall – get up. Fall again. Fall, fall, fall!”
“To learn how to fall,” Papa says seriously,
taking off my skates, “is an art form in itself.
Who knows, maybe it was your most important life lesson.
If you learn how to fall – nothing can harm you.
If you learn how to fall – you can be fearless.”
What’s Happening
(“Write 19 lines under that heading and I’ll post it” – DL to DS)
in memory of KK
-- David Shapiro [March 31, 2009]
Previously unpublished.
Renowned Irish poet Thomas Kinsella died today, 22 December 2021, in Dublin at the age of 93 (see this link.)
Here is one of his best-known poems:
Mirror in February
The day dawns, with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed - my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy -
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.
It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.
Below my window the wakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities;
And how should the flesh not quail, that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young, and not renewable, but man.
_______________________________________________________
I Thought No One Would Ever Love Me
so I lay in my daybed at night
& fashioned myself a Future
Wife. Someone like the girl
up the street with the old tan
Volvo. The one with one foot
in volleyball & the other
in drama club. Maybe I hid
her bleach. Maybe I gave
her pearls & a satin-trim
robe. Maybe I cut her
diploma into fleur-de-lis
& dipped them in the dark
chocolate of my chintzy
desires. I installed My Wife
in a woody, masculine den
& made her whippet-willed
& full of brandy. I stole her
hairspray & gave her a letter desk
instead & an actual inkwell.
I gave her lockable, leather-
bound love. I imagined her parents
somewhere safe, warm & out
of the way. We summered in Monaco,
read nothing but Daphne du Maurier,
took our sun at the Top of the City.
She had a smile like a high-wire act
& a signature like a sigil. I never
stopped loving the way she slid
into day-old stockings like a snake
reassuming its shed. In truth?
Her name was Jill. She wore
athletic shorts & never spoke
to me. So I renamed her Miriam
de Havilland & had her
handle my correspondence.
We cohabitated fantastically.
I installed paintings throughout
our Morning Room: storm-
flecked seas, gold-framed
& foaming at the mouth!
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Karyna McGlynn is a writer, professor, and collagist. She is the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande Books: I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, Hothouse—a New York Times Editor's Choice—and, forthcoming, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, The New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. Recent honors include the 2020 Rumi Prize for Poetry, and the2020 Florida Review Editors' Award in Fiction. McGlynn is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. [Find her at www.karyna.io or on instagram/twitter @karynamcglynn]
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Terrarium with Flaming Muse, collage by Karyna McGlynn
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Brocade Dress
On the way back from the dance in the days of cars with bench seats, she slid over to you, put her hand on your thigh, said Shall we park? & she was dark & beautiful & now these many years later you see she was desperate for you & you for her & what did you say, Catholic boy? Oh, I’d better get home & fact was you could have said I’d love to, but I wouldn’t know what to do—and now you know that would have been OK, that she would have said I’ll teach you, then—she was kind that way—for she’d been taught & perhaps had taught others & for her this was not new, and what a lesson it would have been.
Twenty years later you’re alone on an elevator in a department store, you’re going down & the door opens at a floor before the one you want & you see in the distance a gold brocade dress draped across an ornate chair & from hard right she steps into the elevator & you look at each other & you hear her quick intake of breath as she must have heard yours & she turns to face the door & at the ground floor the door opens & each of you walks away.
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Gerald Fleming’s most recent book is The Bastard and the Bishop, a collection of prose poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2021). Other titles include One (also HL), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press), Night of Pure Breathing (HL), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers). Fleming taught for thirty-seven years in San Francisco’s public schools and has written various books for teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed (a title taken from the great Turner painting), which details an innovative process of intensive writing with adolescents—writing accompanied by outrageously loud, carefully curated instrumental music. He lives most of the year in the Far West and, when there’s no plague occurring, part of the year in Paris. Fleming’s poetry and prose poems have appeared widely in magazines over the past forty years.
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Ben Jonson indicated,
never quite stated,
God prefers to be praised
in various meters, prose or free verse,
not in rhyme. I was raised
on rhyme and worse,
taught by example
not to praise God at all.
I offer, Jonson was wrong,
what about the Psalms and Song of Songs?
I count and wash the feet
when I write a poem,
Pope John XXIII washed the feet
of prisoners in Rome.
I dreamt I had a telephone call
from God. I said “Hello.”
He said, “Wrong number.
I never quite got out of my slumber.
I dialed nine-one-one.
I was not rescued by a bawd or a nun.
I knew Lady Macbeth walked in her slumber.
I was saved by poetry,
resuscitated by English prosody.
(Its hero, Shakespeare, gave me breath.)
I will work till I perish.
I speak and write American English.
My other languages are often a wish
For rhyme, a sonnet will make lovers go
naked in deep snow,
instead of to bed, instead of to bed.
Music doesn’t rhyme,
there’s harmony at bedtime.
A shepherd wakes when a dog barks at his flock.
To me this morning, rhyme is an alarm clock.
Rhyme for readers like us
is promiscuous.
I’ve monkeyed around
with words, the meanings of sound.
The sound of the words “blood” and “bread”
comforted the Christian dead.
I know ocean speaks
to rain, my roof only leaks.
In New Zealand, a river’s a person.
In the States, a corporation’s a person.
It’s late, I do not speculate:
anyone who rhymes can sing,
Joseph Brodsky would sing
Christmas poems often
while Lenin slept in an open coffin.
“Rhyme wrestles words from their true calling.”
Auden rhymed about love and falling
in love. He loved God,
might he say, “I fell in love with God”?
He fell in love with Chester and languages.
His Caliban rages, language ages, meaning changes
for reasons like wars, defeats and immigration,
the future’s an asshole beyond imagination.
Rhyme’s a vision, a point of view,
it helps some poets chew and chew
in Hell and further beneath,
even when Sailing to Byzantium.
Rhyme always has a mouthful of teeth,
a bridge, some cavities, some false, some wisdom.
Sometimes I wish to press the knife against my skin and let out blood
because the world is growing within me, overflowing; it overwhelms me –
for how is it possible that the world is within me while I’m within the world?
Where are the boundaries between us?
Where do I end, and the world begins?
I step barefoot on the ground and feel the rotation of the Earth.
I’m falling through the universe at breathtaking speed while not moving at all.
Eggtooth
Whose bread I eat, his note I sound.
And so at last John Donne’s ghost spoke. Leaned up
out of my book and nearly bit me.
“Seven,” he says, “sponsors creation but
also vice. Three (and four) holy, but three
marks the rooster’s count.” His face
was gold, pounded thin. “I say
use me like an eggtooth, break
the shell that shields you, let me be the germ,
hoarder-of-calcium, the bulb of sharp
caruncle, expression of beak (of horn)
fashioning a toothlet to snout-thrust, barb
to barb what’s cracking away
by the very thing maintained
and encased. Enamel glaze
grades the puncturer’s tool. Draw the breath
by drawing the hole. Use my imbalanced
device, half-medieval, to shuck frank death
as you surge with goodbye. As you fast
and breathe and pay,
supposing the face a blade
sustained to sing and to fly.”
Ed. note: Jesse Nathan is a lecturer in the English department at Berkeley. "Eggtooth" was published in Harvard Review Online, June 23, 2021.
"Yes, You Can Say About Me" (October 29, 2021)
Yes, you can say about me:
I loved grand opera, the blues, scat,
oratorios, gospel, hymns, standards.
I wrote American English.
One afternoon, when I could have gone
to a matinee, I went to the Bronx zoo
to hear a monkey sing a lullaby to a baby monkey.
Out of season and in season, I went to ponds
to hear frogs croak. I walked, hiked, ran
to listen to bees in hives and wild flowers.
Birds migrated in and out of my dreams.
Seagulls, albatrosses and swans felt safe,
ate from my hand in winter.
I cherished the sounds of fish breaking water.
I understood without translation
the gossip of house mice talking to sewer rats.
I eavesdropped on sugar maples
talking to bigleaf maples,
I heard granny smith apple trees soundless
winking at red delicious apple trees.
I understood what different brooks, streams, rivers
had to say to lakes and oceans, the silence and fears of
mussels and clams when they opened their mouths.
I saved a Monarch butterfly struggling
to get out of a spider’s web
so it could fly to Mexico.
I wept when we anchored at Plymouth harbor,
the first time I heard English English.
-- Stanley Moss
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Sex with a Famous Poet
I had sex with a famous poet last night
and when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered
because I was married to someone else,
because I wasn’t supposed to have been drinking,
because I was in a fancy hotel room
I didn’t recognize. I would have told you
right off this was a dream, but recently
a friend told me, write about a dream,
lose a reader and I didn’t want to lose you
right away. I wanted you to hear
that I didn’t even like the poet in the dream, that he has
four kids, the youngest one my age, and I find him
rather unattractive, that I only met him once,
that is, in real life, and that was in a large group
in which I barely spoke up. He disgusted me
with his disparaging remarks about women.
He even used the word “Jap”
which I took as a direct insult to my husband who's Asian.
When we were first dating, I told him
“You were talking in your sleep last night
and I listened, just to make sure you didn’t
call out anyone else’s name.” My future-husband said
that he couldn’t be held responsible for his subconscious,
which worried me, which made me think his dreams
were full of blonde vixens in rabbit-fur bikinis,
but he said no, he dreamt mostly about boulders
and the ocean and volcanoes, dangerous weather
he witnessed but could do nothing to stop.
And I said, “I dream only of you,”
which was romantic and silly and untrue.
But I never thought I’d dream of another man--
my husband and I hadn’t even had a fight,
my head tucked sweetly in his armpit, my arm
around his belly, which lifted up and down
all night, gently like water in a lake.
If I passed that famous poet on the street,
he would walk by, famous in his sunglasses
and blazer with the suede patches at the elbows,
without so much as a glance in my direction.
I know you’re probably curious about who the poet is,
so I should tell you the clues I’ve left aren’t
accurate, that I’ve disguised his identity,
that you shouldn’t guess I bet it’s him...
because you’ll never guess correctly
and even if you do, I won’t tell you that you have.
I wouldn’t want to embarrass a stranger
who is, after all, probably a nice person,
who was probably just having a bad day when I met him,
who is probably growing a little tired of his fame--
which my husband and I perceive as enormous,
but how much fame can an American poet
really have, let’s say, compared to a rock star
or film director of equal talent? Not that much,
and the famous poet knows it, knows that he’s not
truly given his due. Knows that many
of these young poets tugging on his sleeve
are only pretending to have read all his books.
But he smiles anyway, tries to be helpful.
I mean, this poet has to have some redeeming qualities, right?
For instance, he writes a mean iambic.
Otherwise, what was I doing in his arms.
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Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Duhamel teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
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Tamara de Lempicka, Sleeping Woman,1935.
______________________________________________
November Poem
It’s the first cold November evening.
I am out driving
And there is a hitchhiker
Bearing a sign
At a quiet intersection.
I ignore the Cecil Taylor on the radio
To read it.
Perhaps they are bound for some
Exciting destination,
Or a place that I have been.
As I drive closer, the words become legible.
DESTINATION, REUBEN JACKSON’S ARMS.
OH, HOW I MISS THEM SO.
I am jubilant, flustered.
I squeal to a stop. It’s Donna!
I thought she was married and happy in Philadelphia.
We do not speak, but embrace.
I produce tears, she produces a butcher’s knife
And quickly accomplishes her deed.
She is careful to wipe the blood
From the seat covers,
And places each finger in sanitary gauze.
I still love you, she cries.
A final kiss and that still potent smile.
She still loves me, I moan before dying.
She is still neat and considerate as ever.
My pupils lock on her lovely thumb pointing northward
Across the avenue.
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Reuben Jackson is the Archivist with the University of the District of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, Fingering the Keys (Gut Punch Press, 1991) and Scattered Clouds (Alan Squire Publishing, 2019). His poems have been included in more than 40 anthologies. From 2012 to 2018, he was host of “Friday Night Jazz” on Vermont Public Radio, and currently co-hosts “The Sound of Surprise” on WPFW in Washington, DC.
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Each shock and shudder pummels the ship
as it cleaves through the waves. The updraught
billows the sail, and combers flood
the storm-struck deck. Our crew, flayed by spray,
squint ahead through the onslaught,
making way to that island of isolation.
The ocean begins to batter again:
a pulsation reverberates throughout the ship,
causing the wood to creak and bend.
Lightning strikes the water like a damnation.
Not a single place of solace for our crew to crawl into.
Yet again, the ship ripples and pulses, and the wind
rips the spindrift from the crest of each wave.
The captain beaches the hull.
Rain and wind weaken,
giving way to night’s mist.
The crew steps onto the island before them.
In the distance, they hear a song swimming
through the night, and into their view comes
a winged figure, its song unwinding from a rock.
(Ed. Note: The image above is "The Tempest" of Giorgione.)
To live, one must make an inventory:
Item 1: The sky. It is everywhere.
Item 2: People. There are many of them.
Item 3: It is hard to believe, but there are still birds. They occupy space between people and the sky. Sometimes they touch the heavens; sometimes they touch the earth.
Item 4: Conceptual thinking.
Item 5: Garbage cans. Discarded objects, personal treasures no longer loved such as broken limbs of dolls.
Item 6: Cars. Be aware of them.
Item 7: The rest of the world.
The dead are watching the shadows caused by light.
Inside of each shadow, a small invisible death is practicing the art of dying.
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Say Grace
In my country our shamans were women
and our gods multiple until white people brought
an ecstasy of rosaries and our cities today
glow with crosses like graveyards. As a child
in Sunday school I was told I’d go to hell
if I didn’t believe in God. Our teacher was a woman
whose daughters wanted to be nuns and I asked
What about babies and what about Buddha, and she said
They’re in hell too and so I memorized prayers
and recited them in front of women
I did not believe in. Deliver us from evil.
O sweet Virgin Mary, amen. O sweet. O sweet.
In this country, which calls itself Christian,
what is sweeter than hearing Have mercy
on us. From those who serve different gods. O
clement, O loving, O God, O God, amidst ruins,
amidst waters, fleeing, fleeing. Deliver us from evil.
O sweet, O sweet. In this country,
point at the moon, at the stars, point at the way the lake lies,
with a hand full of feathers,
and they will look at the feathers. And kill you for it.
If a word for religion they don’t believe in is magic
so be it, let us have magic. Let us have
our own mothers and scarves, our spirits,
our shamans and our sacred books. Let us keep
our stars to ourselves and we shall pray
to no one. Let us eat
what makes us holy.
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Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018), winner of the 2019 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize. She has also translated and edited a chapbook of poems, Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019). She is the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD candidate in Korean literature at the University of Chicago.
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Mansindo_(萬神圖), early 19th-c. Korean shamanic painting.
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“Gone”
“Irk” was one of my dad’s favorite words.
Mom liked to pick up on teen lingo.
She said “stuff” was “neat.”
She was a real people person.
She was chiffon and dad was concrete.
I walk in the valley where they met.
I walk in a “marijuana haze” (how
Dad put it) in New York City. He was
a quarter leprechaun. She was half elf.
I caused them both a lot of grief.
Had I shown more love, I’d be less bereft.
I walk in ghost shoes, my words
a threnody belonging to the throng.
My folks stay closer now they’re “gone.”
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Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is a publisher, critic, eco-activist, impresario, singer/songwriter, and artist, best known as a New Romantic, post-surrealist poet. He is author of 17 books of verse, including Blue Lyre from Dos Madres Press and Party Everywhere from Xanadu. Recent poetry is in New American Writing, Sensitive Skin, Stat-O-Rec, Posit, and Big City Lit. Wright formerly ran Cover Magazine for 15 years. He is a Contributing Editor to Local Knowledge Magazine and reading series. He has hosted numerous events in New York at La Mama, KGB Lit Bar, and Howl! Happening. Art and literary criticism appear most recently in ArtNexus and American Book Review. [See Jeffrey Wright's brilliant and silly Pandemic Puppet Jam!]
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R. Crumb. Stoned Agin. 1971
My memory: meeting a Montserrat cat –
she is sitting beneath Pablo Casals’ sculpture –
the true owner of his bronze cello
with whiskers sniffing mountain air.
It is Fall. It’s sunny, but the air is already
keeping a promise of the storms ahead.
I am now worried about this cat –
the cat that guards Casals and his cello.
Who will feed her during the winter?
Who will brush her tricolored coat?
Who will make her feel safe in the mountains?
I beckon the cat to follow, promising
to take good care of her if she lets me.
But the cat sniffs Casals’ dusty shoes,
raises her tail, and turns away.
I feel abandoned. I pray to the Black Virgin
to protect this proud feline. I ask Casals
to keep watch and play sometimes
for the cat’s hunting pleasures
El cant del ocells (The Song of the Birds.)
The air shimmers with hidden music.
The cat catches overtones – and the horizon shifts.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
