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