Tom Clark

Hardcover, 212 pages ISBN:  1-57423-124-3 2000, $27.95 Softcover, 212 pages ISBN: 1-57423-123-5 2000, $18.95   The Spell: A Romance by Tom Clark “Reading The Spell is like eavesdropping on the brain of Homer Simpson reading Dante’s Inferno while driving a speedboat. The strength of Clark’s book is found in the mixing of discourses and genres . . . from the Western novels of Zane Gray to the movie Blade Runner, from the Canterbury Tales and the Roman de la Rose to Bakhtin’s essay on the incontrovertible power of medieval laughter.” ––American Poetry Review With The Spell, Tom Clark gives us a Romance for the new millennium––a wildly funny poetic novel about the survival of medieval chivalric codes in a toxic-shocked postmodern world. Our Hero is Big Jesus Toomer, a messianic Great Plains prophet and former high-school football star. His Fair Maid is Nivene, an edgy, spooky honkytonk chanteuse, “a fluttering butterfly / flung flimsy-winged from a funnel cloud / to beguile that blundering knight /into comical questing hexhood.” When Nivene mysteriously disappears, Our Hero embarks upon a Great Rescue -- a magical, timeless journey into the Dark Wood, not on the back of a Noble Steed but behind the wheel of a banged-up black pickup truck. The Wood is full of Dangers: poisoned lakes, mechanical animals, reeking factories, fundamentalist Elders, and screeching, sexy witches who broadcast a mad and maddening music from their Secret Shacks. If you squint, it all looks uncomfortably like today’s America. “Clark certainly casts a spell,” writes Barbara Hoffert in the San Francisco Chronicle. “His work can be seen as a social fable targeting the mind-numbing incantations of contemporary society; as a heroic quest for love and purification; as a cautionary tale about political control; as a treatise on ecological disaster; as an ironic science-fiction send-up; and as a meditation on free will––all told in the language of a skilled poet.” The final effect is “haunting . . . expansive . . . startling.” Softcover,  232 pages ISBN: 1-57423-049-2 1997, $14.95   Empire of Skin an epic poem by Tom Clark “Tom Clark has published many intensely felt books of lyric luminescence . . . but his new book, Empire of Skin, is on a different scale: it tells the epic story of the Northwest fur trade [from the days of Captain Cook] through the early years of the nineteenth century, a human drama set against the background of a dangerous and expansive landscape.” ––Dale Smith, St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter In his preface to Tom Clark’s epic poem, Ed Dorn writes: “In the American westward expansion . . . the search for peltry [skins, furs, ‘soft gold’] led the way before all other exploitation––mining, ranching, land hunger. The Pacific Northwest was the last of the late-eighteenth- and early-twentieth-century frontiers, and it is still ‘the last frontier.’ “Empire of Skin is the recapitulation of the greatest hunting enterprise of the millennium, which brought the grounding and mapping of what is now demarked by the geopolitical term ‘Pacific Rim.’ The story encompasses the somber pursuit of prolific creatures [beaver, otter, buffalo, bear] irresistible to a race born without the hats and coats necessary for surviving extreme latitudes. This was the last great raid on nature before nineteenth-century advances in chemistry [yielded synthetic winter fabrics], allowing the masses a measure of warmth and affording the comfortable, morally opportunistic condemnation of the wearing of animal fur . . . “[Empire of Skin] is a beautifully founded document. It is created with a poetry that carries the authority of the full modern tradition. Its exactitudes of diction generate and inform the imagination. It is only such poetry that is capable of saving such extensive cultural memory from the decaying vortex of history.” Softcover,  240 pages ISBN: 0-87685-984-8 1995, $15.95   Like Real People poems and confessions by Tom Clark “Beautiful . . . Clark sets forth the conundrum of (auto)biography . . . and the mysterious way in which ‘lost time’ can be both gone and present, the inhabitants of that time (including the poet himself) both real and ‘like’ real people.” ––Alva Svoboda Tom Clark’s Like Real People is a voyage into autobiography, one poet’s attempt to “tell his own life,” first in poetry, then in straightforward, unadorned prose. The book opens with a series of unrhymed sonnets, each a lyrical snapshot from Clark’s not-unhappy Catholic boyhood on the west side of 1940s Chicago: schooldays, the Field Museum, pulp magazines, winter storms, ball games, the deli pastry counter. As the poet grows older, snapshots give way to narratives in verse: episodes of family history “torn from an old album”; memories high school and college years; a portrait of the poet and painter Joe Brainard, Clark’s contemporary and an exemplar of selfless artistic devotion; and scenes from the life of the husband, father, and “superannuated boy” the poet has become at age fifty. The book concludes with a sixty-page prose memoir called, after Rousseau, “Confessions”: it is like a prose tracery that sets all the glittering verse that has come before into a new pattern. It is also, in its closing pages, a remarkably candid and un-self-pitying portrait of a modern free-lance writer, one whose scrapping-Irish family character (cussedness, energy, reckless habits of living, cultural defiance, inability to “play well with others”) has led him into economic marginality and unremitting toil (“Grub Street has never had a retirement plan”).   Softcover,  188 pages ISBN: 0-87685-917-1 1994, $14.95   Junkets on a Sad Planet Scenes from the Life of John Keats by Tom Clark “This superb book raises the possibility, unsettling for academic critics, that poems may make the best criticism.” ––Studies in Romanticism The brief life of John Keats––the suffering of the immortal artist who dies young, whose glory is written in the stars and yet whose entry in the Book of Life is “writ in water”––is the stuff of Romantic myth. “Junkets on a Sad Planet,” writes Tom Clark in his notes on this remarkably original book, “is an extended reflection on the fable of the modern poet’s life as Keats lived it.” Written in a series of blank-verse poems interspersed with fictional “letters” by Keats and by members of his circle, the book may be read by turns as a poetic novel, a biography in verse, an allegorical masque, and a historical oratorio for several voices. Anyone who loves Keats’s poetry and letters will be stunned: “Clark captures the essence of the poet’s style and spirit in a minimum of elegant and haunting words” (Los Angeles Times). “While the collection is an impressive display of Clark's ability to master many poetic voices, it is in the final section, a twelve-part deathbed (or after-death) reverie titled 'Echo and Variation,' that the book truly moves beyond loving tribute and technical display to a lovely and sad look back by Keats at his life, lifting the book to a high level.” ––Publishers Weekly   Softcover,  212 pages ISBN: 0-87685-869-8 1992, $13.95 Sleepwalker's Fate New & Selected Poems 1965-1991 by Tom Clark “Sleepwalker’s Fate is complex, alive in every line, tender, unbearable, and necessary. Every reader of contemporary poetry needs a copy of this book.” ––Small Press Review Published to mark the poet’s fiftieth birthday, this is a landmark book in Tom Clark’s oeuvre: a selection from his first quarter century of writing, from songs of innocence published when he was twenty-five (“Lake Life, I want to take a bath/ In you and forget death”) to lines reflecting the disappointments and compromises of middle age (“While everything external/ dies away in the far off/ echo of the soul/ still there’s a mill wheel turning/ . . . / by some distant stream/ a note of peace/ in a life which/ will never be peaceful”). The book is divided into two parts: the generous “New Poems, 1986–1991,” which collects recent lyrics mourning the passing of time, the trials of insomnia, the sad politics of poetry, and the sadder poetry of politics; and “Dark Continent, 1965–1986,” Clark’s judicious winnowing of his earlier work (on love, baseball, classicism, jazz, physics, trout kills, popular culture, and Catholic-Zen-antinomian mysticism). Between the two comes a ferocious prose poem, “Diary of Desert War, 1990–1991,” an account of the first Bush’s Middle East war written in the terse, telegraphic style of the Times Square news zipper––that is, of a news zipper in the hands of a surrealist op-ed poet. “These nonlinear poems, which delight in wordplay, don't easily disclose their subjects, but careful readers can discern a focus on appearances (light, shadow, and form) as well as a tenderness verging on eroticism. Initially inchoate references to nationalism and violence eventually coalesce in ‘Diary of Desert War,’ a series of imagistic prose entries that evoke a vague sense of human and machine joined together in vast space amid stars, sunsets, and sand. Highly recommended.” ––Library Journal Softcover,  168 pages ISBN: 0-87685-791-8 1990, $12.95   Fractured Karma poems by Tom Clark “Clark gives us what a poet is supposed to give us: one man’s independently arrived-at spiritual and material vision of the world. He is one of our original modern troubadours, and he deserves to be heard.” ––Tony Hoagland, Poetry Flash “Karma,” writes Tom Clark, “simply means that you don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Existence––a.k.a. “getting through to tomorrow”––simply means “that your left hand wouldn’t want to know anyway.” Cracked consciousness vs. the crazy subconscious, fractured karma vs. our chipped, sad, shopworn existence––these are the dynamics underlying this rich and varied collection of lyrics. Here are light-hearted nature poems chronicling a Pacific Coast cold snap, affectionate satires of the California brand of Zen Buddhism, and, in a pronounced shift of tone, a series of moving elegies for Robert Duncan, Delmore Schwartz, Hart Crane, and Jean Genet. Best of all, here is one of Clark’s matchless biographies in verse: a short double life of English music-hall great George Formby (1904–1961), master of the ukulele and the double-entendre, and the onetime professional clog-dancer Beryl Ingham, Formby’s wife, agent, manager, muse, and tight-fisted Colonel Parker. “There is beauty and humor here,” said Library Journal, “and an exquisite eye for detail.”   Softcover,  208 pages ISBN: 0-87685-695-4 1987, $11.95 Disordered Ideas poems by Tom Clark “Clark is a poet in complete command of his talents. . . . He strums the language, eliciting some beautiful and startling imagery. His voice is pliant but his vision is unbending.” ––San Francisco Chronicle Tom Clark describes himself as an artist “living along the interdimensional rift zone of a society caught between its future in the realm of electronic magic and its past in the spell-casting of the caves.” In Disordered Ideas, his poetry is like an exquisitely sensitive seismograph: the needle jumps across the page, making a manic record of every quake, slip, and near-disaster along the postmodern-communications fault line. He derides the new media, the isolating, enervating “brave new work” we do in front of computer screens, and the death of the personal in the digital age. Indeed, the only digits he has any use for are the five that make up the human hand: he revels in manmade artifacts, especially paintings and stories and poems. His topical verse is satiric and humorous, but when he writes about what he admires—the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich, the renunciations of Rimbaud, the political aphorisms of Brecht--“his poems can seize the heart” (Anselm Hollo).   Softcover,  218 pages ISBN: 0-87685-611-3 1984, $13.95 Paradise Resisted: Selected Poems 1978-1984 by Tom Clark “[The West] is big terrain, and Paradise Resisted is equal to it: a tough, beautiful book . . . This is the real West in our time, as significant as John Ford’s cinematic legends.” ––San Francisco Chronicle In Paradise Resisted, Tom Clark has written what he calls “a personal field guide to the contemporary West.” The 160 lyrics collected here are like snapshots from a magical mystery tour, one that starts in the cool blue Rockies, barrels through the desert, and at last breaks down somewhere deep in L.A., “as far west as civilization as known can come and still have a pet tarantula.” The Wyoming firmament is wide open, like a window into oblivion (“such a threatening space/ what with its great expanse of unaffectionate sky”); Eldora, Colorado, is tremblingly beautiful (“a valley/ of aspens/ and wild flowers/ with the wind/ dithering in them”); Arizona is mainly the sun (“blinding & frontal”) and the highway (“a black unreeling truck lane to eternity”). The rural West is a resistible paradise: Clark feels only loneliness there, the little towns interchangeable, everything built as cheaply as possible. It is only in Los Angeles––the Capital City of Postmodernism, its man-made “canyons of concrete/ the perfect environment for a wild dog”––that he feels at home. It is here that he hopes to evolve, “bark by angry bark,” into an artist “truly representative/ of the American 21st century.” “Engaging and well-crafted. Clark’s perceptions are swift and keen, and his concise, accessible style combines journalism with symbolism in rhythms that shift from rock ‘n’ roll to be-bop. The main course is ‘Early Warning,’ a 33-page meditation/shout on life, death, writing, and passion that rings in the ear like a Handel oratorio.” ––Los Angeles Herald Examiner Softcover,  160 pages ISBN: 0-87685-456-0 1980, $14.95 The Last Gas Station and Other Stories by Tom Clark Tom Clark's collection of short fiction, The Last Gas Station, is in two contrasting parts. It opens with twenty-three very short prose pieces––amusingly surreal California vignettes, some no longer than a page, peopled by denim-clad cowgirls, itinerant lover boys, Martin Heidegger, Boris Pasternak, Muslim college students, Vietnam vets, Ty Cobb, Ted Berrigan, and a great dinosaur poet of the Jurassic period. These are followed by the novella "Incident at Basecamp," an oddly matter-of-fact account of a close encounter between a young married couple and a spindly, three-toed, mind-reading extraterrestrial somewhere deep in the Rocky Mountain wilderness. "Clark is versatile," wrote the Los Angeles Times; he's "a poet turned sportswriter turned novelist" whose range is brilliantly showcased by this substantial collection. The opening sketches are playful and delightful, but "in the tradition of 'biggest is best,' The Last Gas Station closes with a wallop: 'Incident at Basecamp' [is] a sturdy science-fiction novelette."