C L A Y T O N E S H L E M A N
____________________________________________________A NOTE ON JEFF CLARK
Jeff Clark was born in southern California in 1971. Of his two trade books to date, the first, The Little Door Slides Back (1997), was chosen by Ray DiPalma for The National Poetry Series and published by Sun & Moon Press. It was reprinted in 2004 by Farrar Straus Giroux at the same time this press published Clark's second collection, Music & Suicide, which received the Jay Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Since late 2003, Clark has lived in Ann Arbor, where his book design studio, Quemadura, is also based.
Very few poets display the charged turbulence that fills Clark's apprentice volume. Its soul-searching, stimulating negations bode for great potential development as a poet in somewhat the same spirit that a rich neurosis at the beginning of psychotherapy is of tremendous value for a patient and can lead to a powerful resolution. The title, The Little Door Slides Back, refers on one hand to the terror of womb exit, and, on the other hand, to his subsequent realization, at twenty-three, that without “personal logorhythms” he had slid the door back a second time, enclosing himself in what he calls the “terror in the Hangar.” Here, with the coined word “logorthythm,” (based on the mathematical term, “logarithm,” and suggesting the rhythm of the Logos, or wordrhythm), it is appropriate to comment on Clark's language: peppered with neologisms, arcane words, and syntactic break-offs, it veers in an exhilarating way between speech and sound-tuned alignments. One prose poem, “Marie-Pristine,” an imagined letter by a young French woman to the man who has abandoned her, written in English-as-a-second language mode, plays with the fascinating blur between the awkward and the inventive.
The action in The Little Door Slides Back is controlled by a doppelganger, or double, identified only as “he.” Percolating through what Clark refers to as “the blue byways of my interior,” this figure, often erotically entangled with the speaker, goes through chameleon-like changes. He is variously identified as a jeweler, a palmist, an assassin, a nympholept, a horse, the wicked technician, Larousse, a nighttime turd in Desert diaper, and Lord. The early David Lynch-like, tenebrous atmosphere, dominated by sado-masochistic vignettes, evokes the alchemical nigredo, in which patterns of self-recognition are formed by means of horror and obscenity. Three-quarters of the way through this collection, the speaker states that he wants to “waylay and molest the beast that has imagined and pent me here.” At this point, the doppelganger turns into a spectral companion who helps the poet “dismantle the nest.”
The opening poem of Clark's second book, Music and Suicide, places the speaker as “an ailing fallen jester” in the grass of a “ribboned maze.” Mazes, unlike labyrinths, have no center, but, unlike the grinning cul-de-sacs that characterize the first book, they do allow interior circulation, a kind of errancy that enables Clark to create some terrific narratives stitched with jump-cuts and switchbacks, the finest of which is “Teheran,” a 7 page prose-poem phantasia, replete with immersions, re-emergences, creature contacts, and cunnilingus. Again, in contrast to the fragmentary, muffled violence in the first book, in “Farewell Antithesis” we find an exacting vision of a goat torn apart by a pack of dogs. The book's final poem, “Entrance,” places the poet with “an ally in a maze / that will stay exitless each lane / more alive than the last.” Clark now also writes: “We are not looking for a crystalline being, but for something in the process of melting. Allowing each of us to move within the otherness of the other.”
Having cracked his subconscious strong room and kissed what crawled and flitted from it, Clark has capably laid the groundwork for a reversal of his Little Door complaint: “Never was I able to stay a man long enough to remain him.”
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