The Little Door Slides Back
Jeff Clark
publisher: Sun & Moon, 1997
isbn: 1-557133-14-X
price: tk
Clark, along with such poets like Garrett Caples and Will Alexander, signals a return to the interests of Surrealism, but he is somewhat different in that he is interested in a wider swath of French poetry extending back to Symbolist aestheticism -- the hallucinatory quality of Odilon Redon's charcoals comes to mind, or the restrained, tormented eroticism of painters like Popp -- up through writers of the Tel Quel period, though Clark stops short of any sort of fetishization of ecriture, not to mention any of the concerns of Language poetry.
Clark tends to recreate some of the ambience of the mystically-inflected culture from which avant-garde French poetry sprang, and even goes so far as to invoke a "Lord" (it's unclear whether Clark is a believer, but one tends to assume that he is not) against which to contrast his more Dadaistic tendencies:
This morning from his bed Lord
I led him to Flesh Ornaments
This morning from his bed Lord
I led him to a Pink Gamepiece Manufacture
This morning in his bed Lord
I hummed him old Hopi numbers
This morning from his bed Lord
I gave him an orange plastic crab that honks.
[75]
That plastic crab may well be Nerval's lobster, and the suggestion of immanent madness is another example of what appears to be Clark's channeling of the crepuscular mental landscape of the 19th century Parisian.
He appears to be writing from the thores of "ecstasy," but, as if thwarted by his own time and place as a mid-twenties Californian, one could say he is painfully aware of the irony of "ecstasy" being the über-drug of the synthesized generations, one not quite as toxic as absinthe but still inducing fretful reveries, not to mention the illusion of "correspondences."
The "bad boy" aesthetic of lingering Beat poetics undercuts any sort of pieties, formal or philosophical, in his writing; the screens of "beauty" and "faith" are constantly being erected, and they are not so much torn down by the dada-ist drop as being rendered more real by a dialogism with a chaotic, mad and often black humor:
Who follows one to the park
Who's behind one all the way
Whose scent is cat's ass and fed breath
blown down past one's head
by breeze that in one's mind is Wind
Whose refrain behind one on the walls
is drowned by wild parrots.
[tk]
One might think that Clark is merely rewiring some of the tactics of Ashbery in its total trust of the color qualities of words, but he has little interest in collage or "found language," and rarely approaches the urbane ironies of the New York School poet (Clark would not start a poem "We find these truths to be self-evident," for example).
In fact, Clark seems to be making a conscious decision to forego many of the techniques investigated during the hey-day of American postmodernism from the 50s to the 70s and to strike a simpler, more approachable posture; despite his often grandiose gestures, he always remains somewhat intimate with his imagined reader.
A distinguishing quality of this book is Clark's fugal use of single words like "dormer," "cock," "Lord," etc., all of which reappear in different poems or in separate sections of the same sequence, to take on interior, symbolic qualities that move them from their use in normal "social" language.
By repetition, these words enter a more purely imaginative (and not entirely rhetorical, but nominalist) realm, one that makes one forget how these words may have been used otherwise. The representation of nature and society in this book -- the trees, streets, bordellos, moons, etc. -- do not have a documentary quality to them, nor are they in any way related to "thingness" (think the chickens of Williams).
The long prose poem "Invaginations" takes this particular attention to the word to a different level, using a single word to suggest entirely conflicting identities for its protagonist.
Clark writes: "Tonight he calls himself a 'nympholept'," then "This evening he was 'blind', so that I was able to approach and watch him," then, "This evening he was 'small,' so that I was able to approach him and hold him in my arms." Finally, with a bathetic dive: "This morning he was 'foam balls,' so that I was able to approach and gather him up and stuff him into my Polaroid case and take him to the ocean..." [tk]
As in much of Clark's work, the piety of the lover and the "foam balls" of the dissaffected interchange, neither entirely stripping the other of its charms but creating, mutually, the language of Clark's world.
Clark's poems -- which run through several genres, including the fable, the love letter, the chant, the "tercet" (a series of three lines poems at the end of the book), and a Michaux-inspired form of autobiography, "Some Information About Twenty-Three Years of Existence" -- are devoted to the idea of possibility in the poet who operates as free agent, looking to the weather not for the springs of dailiness but for some message from the aether.
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