Thomas A. Clark

 

For over 30 years, the literary renaissance in Guilford, Vermont has been thanks entirely to the efforts of Bob & Susan Arnold, proprietors of a catalog book business called Longhouse, which is the name also of their own small press. In addition to Arnold’s own poetry, Longhouse has published the likes of Franco Beltrametti, Hayden Carruth, Michael Casey, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Bill Deemer, Theodore Enslin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Lyle Glazier, Marie Harris, Jonathan Greene, James Koller. Alan Chong Lau, Tim McNulty, Peter Money, Barbara Moraff, Lorine Niedecker, Mike O'Connor, Andrew Schelling, Janine Pommy Vega, Anne Waldman and others. In short, a very particular and thoughtful list. Deemer, one of the finer New American Poetry acolytes (west coast version) in the 1960s who seemed to disappear from view the instant the scene started to change & publications like Coyote’s Journal began to become increasingly scarce in the ‘70s, has been visible almost entirely in Longhouse editions for years now.

As you might imagine, a genuine micropress like Longhouse doesn’t get great distribution, falling below even SPD’s radar. Happily, tho, the Arnolds give away – that’s really the right word for it – one of their chapbooks online every month, a series they call Woodburners We Recommend. This month, they’ve chosen a work entitled Yellow by Thomas A. Clark, a series of exceptionally short & tight poems that initially take off from the color of gorse, a brilliant wildflower common to Clark’s native Scotland (albeit one that is increasingly treated as an invasive weed by other countries of the former British empire).

Clark – not to be confused with the American writer Tom Clark – is a quiet, exact poet, the closest thing Scotland has ever had to a true Objectivist. Here, he really is interested in the way a color can provide what he calls “a value, a standard of measurement, a moral tone.” Like all great nature poetry, the resulting pieces are fundamentally depictive:

the yellow of gorse
prepared by green
nourished on rock
in a salt wind

Or

a yellow wagtail
by a waterfall

Or

as if in response
to colour
warmth

To say that these poems are simple or slight, of course, would be to miss the point entirely. They are in fact all about precision – there is no room here at all for waste or inexact language. The result is pure pleasure – I could read Thomas A. Clark poems all day & never tire of the process.

I’ve been reading Clark, in fact, nearly as long as Longhouse has been publishing, having met the man on an early tour of the US back in 1972 or ’73. Because he’s not the flashy sort, and lives far from literary centers like NY or London, he’s a writer who doesn’t get read nearly as widely or as often as he deserves. In some ways, one can feel a kinship between his verse & that of the late Cid Corman (also a Longhouse favorite), as well as to younger poets, such as the Canadian Mark Truscott or Eureka’s Joseph Massey, all of whom seem to have seen into the Zen side of Objectivism in ways that Oppen, Reznikoff & Rakosi never were able to reach. It’s a tradition that, when done well, never gets old. And Clark is a master.

If I have any complaint, it’s only that Longhouse runs these wonderful works online for just a month, rather than doing what seems obvious & ultimately more useful – gradually building up an online archive of its o.p. books. Still, that’s a quibble. In the meantime, I make sure to visit Longhouse every month. If you want to get on the mailing list for notification of each new online book, drop a note to mailto:poetry@sover.net.