Every few years one of the “major” trade presses identifies a young poet who might be thought of as post-avant in some manner or other & starts to print them long before they are “always already” famous. Often these poets stick out awkwardly amid the list of writers the press generally prints – the way Kenneth Koch did for years at Knopf, the way August Kleinzahler does at Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG). If the writer is a social animal, well situated within a literary community, as Koch was, this may have relatively little impact over the long term. But if the writer is already something of an isolato, being published by one of the major trade presses might actually increase one’s disconnectedness. Kleinzahler, for example, may have terrific distribution for his books, but I would wager that he is read – seriously thoughtfully read – less often, and with far less sympathy, than he would be if his books were, say, published by Flood Editions instead of FSG. That is because the people who would like Kleinzahler best would never think to pick up an trade book of poetry unless it’s by an older post-avant poet who has been incorporated into the list just to help legitimize all the bad School of Quietude poetry it prints – the role Ginsberg plays for HarperCollins, or Gary Snyder at Knopf. It’s a Faustian trade-off at best & in the long run I’m not at all sure that John Koethe or Campbell McGrath have done themselves any favors by going with publishers who will get them more readers with less insight than they could garner from a decent small press.

 

That is the context in which I see Jeff Clark’s Music and Suicide, newly out from FSG, which has also reissued Clark’s previous Sun & Moon volume, The Little Door Slides Back. Clark instantly stands out as one of the most interesting of all FSG poets. But at the same time, this would be a relatively weak & flawed book if it were released by subpress, Flood Editions or Coffee House Press. And while there are good poems in Music and Suicide, there’s nothing here that approaches the work, say, by Alan Gilbert or Del Ray Cross in Free Radicals. Clark is still very much a young writer, working out his aesthetic. Which, frankly, is fine. We’ve all been there – William Carlos Williams was a far worse poet than any of these folks until he was very nearly 40 years old. Charles Olson wasn’t so fast out of the gate either. But what is the likely impact on the work if Clark begins to believe the FSG hype machine & imagines himself truly to be “an unclassifiable classic in underground American writing?” 

 

Consider the first stanza of the very first poem in Clark’s book, from “A Chocolate and a antis”:

 

The phosphorous cheeks of an ailing jester fallen that day

from an alien haze over jade lanes

to blades arrayed in ribboned mazes

created to flay a dilated spirit hole

He was a chaotic boy with phosphorous cheeks

and a glistening sphinctral sanctity

a violet fallen alloy of a Medium

and a gigolo to sleep

He was white waste of nebula-scented hours

fallen that day an alien length

to a place of stale rain and that day

to craw crying to the side

was to harvest no more eggs of fantasy strewn out horizontally

and found by following a hare that could be a guide or a lie in fur

He was ugly when he ate the eggs, and in a trance

a chocolate and a mantis sat on his thigh

and said that Even broken or swollen

hysterical inside long boxes or on wires

or swallowing gray fay lures

to take and decompose both your lapel rose and the hose that fed it

you must offer a mantis your hand, a chocolate your tongue

then never again ill use or even dream to curate

fake faces or oases or their words

 

What is unfortunate about this stanza, which reads as if penned by somebody who discovered Bob Dylan’s songs during the previous 48 hours, is that there really are things going on here worth noting, particularly in the deployment of long ā sounds in the first several lines, then echoing periodically later, even up to oases. Or in the way the stanza builds up to that long last sentence. But if “phosphorous cheeks on an ailing jester” is meant to be deliberately badly written – sort of a Jeff Koons effect – there is no “set up” in the work to contextualize it or distinguish it from the gazillion of other phosphorous cheeks of ailing jesters that get submitted to every vaguely hip publication in the universe almost on a daily basis. Rather than an effective display of clichés, this is simply writing unable to demonstrate enough control to make itself interesting, even if there are “elements of interest” throughout.

 

There are, as I noted, some good poems here, but they’re generally short & quite fragile, such as “White Tower”:

 

We can burn it

It’s infected

fields, records, our fruit

water, mosques, it casts inordinate shadow

I have a lighter, you have fuel

Hatefully designed, well-defended, it kills, sells

We won’t try to climb, we douse

the perimeter, flood the subfloors with fuel

We drench the lobby

White tower that sodomizes horizons

 

As with the reiteration of phosphorous in that first stanza from “A Chocolate and a Mantis,” the redundancy of fuel in the third-to-last line rings out like a cracked bell in the tintinnabulum. The effect is like watching a dancer stumble in classical ballet. It’s the only wrong note here, but it’s embarrassing. It deflates the poem right at the point when it should be launching into what is potentially a rousing ending. This shouldn’t be the strongest poem in the book, but it is.

 

So what is going on here? Almost certainly if Clark was working with any press whose editors read his poetry at all sympathetically, they would have made suggestions, even demands, that would have resulted in a far stronger representation of his skills. His first collection, The Little Door Slides Back, is a genuinely good book: this could have been as well. As it is, Music and Suicide reads like a conscious attempt to discredit Clark as a poet. What I suspect must have happened is that whoever worked with Clark was completely unable to read post-avant writing & simply said “Whatever” when confronting the problematics of this work. The result is the literary equivalent of a train wreck, in which one of the most talented younger poets around allows market forces to mangle his promise. How pathetic is that?