Jeff Clark

JEFF CLARK DESIGNER

From Poetry Society of America. New American Poets

Are you interested in the relationship between poetry and politics? Do you believe that your own poetry has political implications?

As far as the first question is concerned, I'm interested in politics. My own poetry has no political implications. I like to think that how I lead my life does, though.

Do you think that your poetry or poetry in general speaks to spiritual or religious yearnings and struggles? If so, how?

For certain people it must. For me, writing poetry is release, discipline, erotic, a shunt. I would say, in fact, "exorcism," but that word's connotations aren't precisely fitting.

Jeff Clark

 Napoleonette

I had a bit part in Napoleonette. I wrapped some meat in newsprint and handed 
it to a woman. The scene was shot in a moment. Since I am no B-movie 
aficionado, I went home, and in the late afternoon the phone rang me from my 
sleep. Putain was angry, he said, "All it was was the lady reaching over the 
counter-for nothing!-you wasn't even there."

Sometimes a ghost entered my heart and I could feel, and sometimes a phrase 
entered my mind and I could speak, with reason. But never was I able to stay a 
man long enough to remain him.

Jeff Clark

 If I Don't Return

If I don't return it's because on the way I was drawn from my sidewalk into a 
pawn shop, or else becuase a morose young man pulled me by the lapels of my
coat into a doorway and demanded, "What is meant by this word?" But before I 
could reply, someone stepped between us and said, "Say, for example, I gave 
you a little lamp, and you rubbed a Genie out of it, who offered you a wish. We
would expect you to wish for something, but you would instead try to confuse 
him, you might insist he change himself into a plastic bird, or you might say to 
him, 'In my canoe I am pelted by leshies,' or, 'Il y a de temps en temps un con 
qui me visite dans ma nuit et qui s'appele Monsieur D. Able-'"

That is when I shoved her aside and made a loud noise with my lips and cried, 
"Listen, you ought to wish for nothing but fame and then throw the bottle 
away!" I went on thus . . .

Jeff Clark

  

My Interior

One bordello, one hookshop in the buttock. 
One two-bit nightery with Wurlitzer in the back. 
A theremin, a pump, the rubble-heap of a palace. 
Siamese traps, and little pink cocktail umbrellas 
for the little blowsy ones who tramp the boulevards 
and sepia byways of my interior, tapping the asphalt 

with their parasol-tips, unfurling their wings 
to daunt paramours, tipping their fedoras to show their horns. 
All day they pull cottons from the inhalers that come down my conveyor. 
But in my night, they bolt home and lock it tight, and move inward, 
and begin to sniff by their armoires, and whimper 
We feel his first libation now, his hands on the hookah.

We hear Opal, we feel the bloodpump slow, 
we feel him slouch, and know his miserable vespers begin now. 
We prick him with our horns, we piss in his marrow. 
We fill his belly with a pall of hoary feathers. 
Before dawn, debauched, 
they try to stroke me to sleep in the bath . . . 

High noontide in my interior: the red deer 
wends out of my ravine when I wave, the little goat. 
The shadows of my Frenchmen annihilate my little night-womps. 
In my back-of-the-eyelid cinema: arabesques. 
My best records are all hiss and moan and tremolo. 
Your shadow annihilates my little day-womps.

Languor keeps my body from the desk. 
Languor keeps the stocking on the leg. 
Glare keeps the little ones at the conveyor 
and out of the head. But then, from way off, with cranking 
comes my night, and when it arrives 
I go to it like a callboy to a c-note.

Martin Corless-Smith

 

(Late of the Moscow Poems)

Her revolutionary boyfriend says:

Silence!
The crow reckons
In its comic attire
You walk like an asshole!
Old man.
I'm so tired before
I'm even born.
The Sun can't make it
This winter
We'll have to make do with this bucket
And a bottle of vodka
You say you are unjappy
Well what would happiness be
You seem to enjoy it whatever it is.
And your pants are tight
And you get fucked
The cloud wilst past
My door—and again
The light returns—opens
Like a fridge I'm in.

Martin Corless-Smith

ouvrir ouvrir the nightingale
how has it come to this?
love is a severed foot
cattled in the guts
a trifle flipped
love is a tree of apricots
all rotted
I can see
it breathe I think
how has it come to this?
the fruit my bliss disdained
a trifle shattered in the breeze

Martin Corless-Smith

In a cypress grove

aroused and all appalled
in sudden agony the soul
as wintering—a perfume closed
(the mind prophetic of some future state)
I feel the mark upon
my absent trouser leg—
the shin placed by the cog
the foot falling just so,
grand as life, small as the next act
cognition—recognition—soiled cloth.
I am forwarded
to you in kind—affection like
a magnet that induces the invisible
yet palpable attraction of its opposite
thus living and thus dead.
I begin thus with myself.

Alice Notley

 

Poem (Why do I want to tell it)

it was the afternoon of November 
15th last fall and I was waiting 
for it whatever it would be like 
it was afternoon & raining but it 
was late afternoon so dark outside my 
apartment and I was special in that 
I saw everything through a heightened 
tear, things seemed dewy, shiny 
and so I knew there was a cave 
it was more or less nearby as in my 
apartment it was blue inside it 
dark blue like an azure twilight and the 
gods lived in the cave they who 
care for you take care of at death and 
they had cared for Ted and were there for me 
too and in life even now 

Alice Notley

The Descent Of Alette ['Presently']

'Presently' 'we neared a pale beach,' 'narrow' 'with trees behind it' 
'thick & blue-black,' '& lights' 'many lights' 'deep inside the' 
'wooded land' 'I touched bottom' '& walked ashore' 'Then I saw' 
'a final entity,' 'airy image, pass' 'out of my body—' 'from my 
forehead' 'A small shape,' 'perhaps brain-shaped,' 'that seemed to' 
'contain in miniature' 'the cave network' 'where I had been' 
'I saw the rooms—' 'the caverns—' 'streaked with color,' 'dotted with 
lights,' 'but all tiny' 'as in a honeycomb' 'The image' 'receded,' 
'gently floated' 'away' 'on the wind,' 'like a flower' 'a hibiscus—' 
'all reds & darks' '& yellow glow—' 'Or like a lantern,' 'paper 
lantern' 'Then was gone.' 'The others' 'other swimmers' 'had not 
walked ashore' 'with me' 'I turned to find them' 'I thought they 
must be' 'still floating' 'in the water' 'But they had vanished,' 
'I was alone' 'Myself &' 'alone' 'Yet emptied' 'of much, it seemed' 
'I felt unburdened' '& even buoyant'

Alice Notley

Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice

So I'm an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover

yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach

thing no song sing but in the word

which I'm starlessly unreachably faithful

you, pedant & you, politically righteous & you, alive

you think you can peal my sober word apart from my drunken word

my Buddhist word apart from my white sugar Thérèse word my

word to comrade from my word to my mother

but all my words are one word my lives one

my last to first wound round in finally fiberless crystalline skein

I began as a drunkard & ended as a child

I began as an ordinary cruel lover & ended as a boy who

                               read radiant newsprint

I began physically embarrassing—"bloated"—&

                               ended as a perfect black-haired laddy

I began unnaturally subservient to my mother &

                               ended in the crib of her goldenness

I began in a fatal hemorrhage & ended in a

                               tiny love's body perfect smallest one

But I began in a word & I ended in a word &                             

                               I know that word better

Than any knows me or knows that word,

                               probably, but I only asked to know it—

That word is the word when I say me bloated

                               & when I say me manly it's

The word that word I write perfectly lovingly

                               one & one after the other one

But you—you can only take it when it's that one & not

                               some other one

Or you say "he lost it" as if I (I so nothinged) could ever

                               lose the word

But when there's only one word—when

                               you know them, the words—

The words are all only one word the perfect

                               word—

My body my alcohol my pain my death are only

                               the perfect word as I

Tell it to you, poor sweet categorizers

                               Listen

Every me I was & wrote

                               were only & all (gently)

That one perfect word

 

Alice Notley

Sonnet

 Pink & white, chiffon & chenille, & cherubs

They frame oval mirror cracked across
No reflection of me it’s rented newly
My books on & under a vanity
Bamboo’s here too, Southamptonese, chair
A library’s dark desk, austere
I rearrange change them which change me
I’ll often forget to see
Pink & white to be lost after 90 days
Town’s as foreign-looking & mine
No town fits—not my image of one, but sense
That a town might make sense.
Clean cold-weather town, historical interest
Winter emptied, slickly plain downtown

 

Alice Notley

Peridots of Kings

There is no culture anywhere, in these countries I almost
live in; though there is history. And there was once — but
now only monolithic companies. I drove through
town — nothing left — a two-story ragged portion of the
Desert Theater; another building almost torn away, leaving
a structure with scant paint, couple of windows. Our
culture. I don’t want to live in one of those in the
past future perfect tense. It isn’t that I don’t want to live.

In the south of France, Rousseau, the contemporary poet,
will now read. He sits at a table, facing a black window
that reflects him. I stand behind and stare at his image
intently: he is so plain. A woman staples her poems together —
then he cries out in a note. What a musical genius. We are so
fortunate to have him, whom no one cares about. I don’t,

I’m my own poet. You don’t need a poet; you don’t need
anything but a big store. You don’t even need yourselves. And
that’s fine. I guess there wasn’t anyone to write to. I
did it for the universe of ghosts; half coyote, half motel.

Joseph Bradshaw

 

Our future

Our future 
I’ll try for anyone who is true. 
And if what you say is true, then there’s nothing that I wouldn’t do for you. 
For if it’s you that truly shows me how much you care. 
Then it’s gonna be me who will always be there. 
We have a chance for a life better then the one we had before. 
And the problem and the hurt are something we could have and feel no more. 
All you have to do is know that it is you the only one that I see. 
And do the same as me for our future life to be finally free.

Joseph Bradshaw

 

A better Me

I'm ah person who cares about people that's evident.
Every single thing that I say is ever ment.
What I don't care about is what you think about what I say
I say it because I feel that way,so I speak my thoughts without delay.
You don't like what I say then scroll on I'm not offended.
But for you I will not be altered or bend it.
I'll keep being me so I'll say whatever I feel.
I've never been one to copy others so I'll says what's real.
I've been getting better at being me again and I know this.
It's something I'm proud of and I don't care if you've noticed.
I've been doing all this for me so I may one day be better.
I'm pleased with my results so if you don't agree... Whatever.
I will keep spitting out poems and songs and not care if you're upset.
Everything I say comes with meaning and I say it with no regret. 
So much better now at being Joe is all I kn

Donald Revell

 

THE PIANO LESSON

                                                                       for Karla Kelsey

A few notes, like planets of the remaining
Color, hunger here, sated only by distance,
Only by distance sated. There are no cabs.

Our Spaniard, perhaps as near as the next room,
Would bellow pathos into the gash where child
Keeps his eye. Wise child. Tenderness is not
For such, not for lions. We stare across

The music, meeting you there, planets
Of laundry and an iron tree, green for Christmas.
I have invented a simple balcony for Christ

Behind the piano. Even in daylight,
There stands a ghost against the rail. Her toque
Is thrown into the traffic noise. A few notes,
Yellow as tender to the sun, hang there.

 

RAPTURE

Time might be anything, even the least
Portion of shadow in the blaze, that helpless
Hare of darkness in the hawk’s world.
I’d forgotten, in the haste of me, to reach
Backwards into time one hand. Come along.
I’ve seen a rainbow where no rain was.
The colors were slain children of the wind
Alive again because time might be anything,
And earth a broken astrolabe
Plunged into blackness by force of sunlight
These latter days. There is a flower
In the hawk’s mouth once was an animal.
It hurries towards the sun, and the hawk,
Helpless in the color of it, becomes rain.

Jordan Davis

 

Amuse-Bouche

I miss the moshpit pushed to the side of the bed.

The hard and fast rules, the business,

Walking across town the baby’s hand in mine

Gave me anxiety Rosado barely mellowed.

Who doesn’t love to hear about anxiety.

You wouldn’t be too wrong to wake from dreaming

Into an amusement park sluice of Rioja

Eau de post-Auden thanks a lot Timex hubbub.

Those feelings are in their way good luck.

I don’t even need a communion wafer

To feel the need to broadcast imprecations

Fade like a docent as the hedge fund falls.