TC: Fireside Chat

.

You really think free advice is worth money?
An old ghost rising up clammier than ever,
You can hear his teeth rattling. Let’s call
Him Fear Itself, and nestle up closer
To the warm and fatherly radio
Whence issue deep and reassuring words.
At the other end of the transmission
A world of static and black-edged clouds away
You can hear the fire crackling in the hearth
And if you strain your ears you might make out
A distant barking, perhaps the voice of Falla,
Woolly anachronism from a lost epoch.
Dogs speak in unintelligible words. Arf!
I take that back: unintelligible
To us. And we’re not reassured. Crisis
Of confidence time, then: credit default
Occurs when you can’t buy what they’re saying.
But wait, did you ever? Bought situation
City all these years and now someone’s
Surprised? Do crocodiles cry rivers
In order to have someplace to swim? Time for
Regulation arrives at one minute
Before the sun yo-yos up into the sky
And that tinny barking starts up again. Woof!
High time to begin drawing limits to thought.
This may be a fight for life. We may find
Both sides of the limit unthinkable. We may
Have to be able to think what can’t be thought,
Credit crunch or no. Credo means I believe
In crop circles. Or did I mean church
May be the last sanctuary of deceived
Believers in the free market dream?
You’ll find a crescent-shaped scar on my wrist
To prove to you this was no mere nightmare.
I’m in a weakened condition so go easy.
What can I do but hand over the payroll?

Fireside Chat: TC, from The New World (Libellum)

Crowd at New York's Union Bank during a bank run early in the Great Depression: photographer unknown, 1931 (U.S. Social Security Administration)

Banking crisis protest, Reykjavik: photo by Jon Eckman, 2008

TC: An American Abroad: England in the Mid-Sixties

.

Tom Clark interviewed by Jeffrey Side, September 2009


JS: When did you first become interested in poetry?

TC: It must have been about 1957 or 1958. The first poems I remember liking a lot--as opposed to merely enduring as school assignments--were by (and I must admit this memory is pretty vague) e.e. cummings and Federico Garcia Lorca (Verde, te quiero verde...).

JS: When did you first start writing poems?

TC: I began then tinkering with some of my own self-serious small verse emissions, strictly in private mind you, in my environment such an activity would have been indefensible, and I've never much enjoyed playing defense.

Then at university it all opened up. The compulsory late Fifties Lowell period was followed shortly by several other more lasting interests, Stevens, Williams... and then there came the shock of encountering Ezra Pound, like walking out one morning and stumbling into in a deep canyon where a broad river gave issue to streams and rillets that led off and back and around and fanned out alluvially to flow toward everything in creation... and one's previous narrow path had been forgotten. Then read world literature as well as all world poetries intensely, acquiring at least at neophyte level such languages as were necessary for the journeying. Did an honors thesis on The Cantos that was published in the East/West Review, Kyoto.

By 1962-63 was writing quite a lot of poetry, won a university prize, had begun to publish. Went over to Cambridge in '63 and during my first year there found myself publishing poems in Poetry (Chicago), New Statesman, Spectator, Listener, TLS, Encounter, etc. That year also, Fall of '63, I took up poetry editorship of The Paris Review.

JS: You were poetry editor for The Paris Review at a young age (22). Did being so young affect your editorial decisions to any marked degree?

TC: No, I don't think so. The boldness or foolishness or whatever it was that caused me to summarily jettison the entire backlog of poems accepted by my editorial predecessor--several issues' worth in fact--probably resulted less from youth than from some permanent quality or defect of character.

At any rate I solicited and published in that venue poems from poets I'd been reading, Olson, Dorn, Creeley, Ashbery, O'Hara, Schuyler, Ginsberg, Duncan, Whalen, Blaser, Wieners, Eigner, Zukofsky, Niedecker, Oppen, Bunting, others; as well as from a number of younger American poets of my own generation and even the next, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Joanne Kyger, Aram Saroyan; and eventually also, once I'd gone back to the US, Clark Coolidge, Joe Ceravolo, Alice Notley, Jim Carroll, et al.

JS: You studied at Cambridge University in Britain during the 1960s. What was your impression of British poetry as compared to American poetry at that time?

TC: While at Cambridge I met others who were interested in some of those earlier poetries I've just mentioned: Andrew Crozier (who was at Christ's), Jeremy Prynne, John Temple (both of them resident at the college where I was a grad student, Gonville and Caius, the former as a tutor, the latter an undergrad and happily for me my good friend and house mate). The poet Tom Lowenstein was at Kings then, and we became friends; we've stayed in touch all these years. I also met Robert Creeley, whom I'd published and corresponded with (he was at New Mexico then), when he came over to do some readings, including one at the Kings Cross pub in Cambridge, not far from my then digs on the Newmarket Road, across from the Star Brewery and Midsummer Commons. RC and I would remain friends for over forty years.

JS: After Cambridge you studied at Essex University (also in Britain) where you knew Andrew Crozier with whom you edited the magazine The Wivenhoe Park Review. What motivated you both to start a magazine?

TC: In '65-'67 I was at Essex, teaching a bit, working on a protracted and never to be completed Pound dissertation, and there continued to do the PR editing and also started a mimeograph magazine series, Once, that ran to ten issues plus four chapbooks. I featured many of the poets named above (encouraged them to send me all their work, used what I could in PR, the rest in the mimeo). Also published in that series some young English poets I'd gotten to know, like Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood, Tom Pickard.

And yes, while there I also founded and edited The Wivenhoe Park Review with Andrew Crozier, who like me had come over from Cambridge to Essex. As to motivation... It was operated under a sort of official departmental subsidy in that we were afforded the equipment and services of the university print shop. (Whereas my own truly underground mimeo magazine was cranked out in the middle of the night in a broom closet, strictly sub rosa, and then snuck into the outgoing university mail under the disapproving noses of the night porters.) Donald Davie, who'd been my Ph.D. supervisor at Caius, had come over to start the new Department of Literature at Essex; in my second year there he brought in Ed Dorn (from Idaho), so there was that particularly interesting poet, soon a good friend, as company. The Dorns were living on the old Roman Road in Colchester; while at Essex I lived off at the coast in a cottage in Brightlingsea owned by John Barrell (whom I'd known at Cambridge when he'd been an undergrad at Trinity) and his wife Audrey.

Perhaps this comes back to your earlier question, "What was your impression of British poetry as compared to American poetry at that time?"

Well, it was my immediate poetic environment. I would go down to London at the weekend and see poets there, like Tom Raworth in Barnet and Lee Harwood in the East End. Other welcoming ports of call in London were the abodes of the poet Anselm Hollo and the publisher Barry Hall. All of the above became good friends. I also got around the landscape quite a bit to wherever there were readings, it was very much an impromptu read-if-you-show-up scene, so I hitchhiked all round and did readings from Newcastle (with Andrew Crozier, in Tom Pickard's Morden Tower, where too I was able to meet other interesting poets in Tom's orbit, both younger, as Barry McSweeney, and older, as Basil Bunting) to Nottingham (I remember Jonathan Williams, Brian Patten and Adrian Henry showing up at a jamboree reading there) to Oxford (where I read several times, to microscopic audiences of course), all the way down to Bristol (where in the thickets of Somerset I heard but did not see my first nightingale). There were a number of poets I'd routinely bump into on these volunteer junkets. Gael Turnbull, Michael Shayer, Roy Fisher, Jeff Nuttall, Bob Cobbing, Dom Sylvester Houédard, John Furnival were about, Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown were regulars, and Spike Hawkins whose work I especially liked, and also two Canadians, Lionel Kearns and Gerry Gilbert. The American poet Harry Fainlight then living in London was a familiar from that same time. Of course there were many readings in London as well. The biggest was a grand show at the Albert Hall in spring of '65. Readers as I recall were Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Robert Graves, Adrian Mitchell, Christopher Logue, Simon Vinkenoog, Ernst Jandl and a few lesser lights such as myself. I wore an overlarge black leather coat I'd bought for five quid on the King's Road two weeks before and read my poem "Superballs". Someone deep in the dark reaches of an upper balcony (how many holes would it take to fill the Albert Hall), once I'd announced the title of the poem, hollered, in a Cockney accent, "Wot?" I repeated the title. "Wot? again. A third time I tried. Once more the echoic bellow, "Wot?"

JS: During your stay in Britain, you hitchhiked across the country with Allen Ginsberg while he was visiting there in 1965. You also interviewed him for The Paris Review. What were your impressions of him during this time?

TC: We met at an art gallery in Bristol where we were both taking part in one of those informal, round-robin readings. We'd been in touch by mail, I had solicited poetry, we had had a pleasant correspondence. After the reading there was a crazy motorcycle sidecar ride through the wilds of Somerset and a long crowded night with what seemed like a hundred but was probably closer to ten poets trying to sleep on John James's extremely overcrowded floor. (Beyond which there peacefully slumbered sheep.) Allen, just back from an evidently somewhat exhausting stay in Prague, where he'd been elected King of the May, had a persistent hacking cough, so that the brief periods of sleep for everybody were synchronized with his gulps of some codeine cough medicine he had brought back from Prague along with whatever bacteria.

Allen was the first "international poet" I'd known. He had an acute sense of his international audience and thus, doing an interview in The Paris Review appealed to him immensely. We then hitchhiked together to Wells Cathedral and Glastonbury, where he plucked a flower from King Arthur's grave. There followed intense rainstorms and various further those-were-the-days adventures. Eventually by way of Bath and Reading (this begins to sound like a tale from Fielding or Defoe) we reached London. By then there was perforce a nice empathy. We went on up to Cambridge. Allen camped at my digs, while we taped the interview, on an old, borrowed and beat-up reel-to-reel machine, in several sessions. We went on several expeditions to the Fitzwilliam, where Allen wanted to clamp his glims on the Blake manuscript exhibitions. And he wanted to be taken to meet Morgan Forster at King's, which was nearly a disaster. The great novelist was not at home or at any rate not answering the door to unexpected visitors. I'd been to see him before, but that had been at Forster's invitation, in company with his former student George Plimpton. Allen left his calling card, a handwritten note covered with fields of daisies and skulls and crossbones. Have a nice day!

Interior East Side of Gonville Court, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge: photo by Jdforrester, 2003

Senate House passage in the snow (with Gonville and Caius Gate of Honour to left): photo by Monsarc, 2009

TC: Joseph Ceravolo: Ho Ho Ho Caribou

.

for Rosemary

I

Leaped at the caribou.

My son looked at the caribou.

The kangaroo leaped on the

fruit tree. I am a white


man and my children

are hungry

which is like paradise.

The doll is sleeping.


It lay down to creep into

the plate.


It was clean and flying.

II

Where you...the axes


are. Why is this home so

hard. So much


like the sent over the

courses below the home


having a porch.




Felt it on my gate in the place

where the caribous jumped

over. Where geese sons


and pouches of daughters look at

me and say "I'm hungry


daddy."

III

Not alone in the

gastrous desert. We are looking

at the caribous out in the water

swimming around. We


want to go in the ocean

along the dunes.

Where do we like?

Like little lice in the sand


we look into a fruit expanse.

Oh the sky is so cold.


We run into the water.

Lice in heaven.

IV

My heel. Ten o'clock the class.


Underwater fish

brush by us. Oh leg


not reaching!

The show is stopping

at the sky to drive in the

truck. Tell us where to


stop and eat. And

drink which comes to us out


in the sand is

at a star.


My pants are damp.

Is tonight treating us



but not reaching through the window.

V

Where is that bug going?


Why are your hips

rounded as the sand?


What is jewelry?

Baby sleeps. Sleeping on

the cliff is dangerous.

The television of all voice is


way far behind.

Do we flow nothing?


Where did you follow that bug

to?


See quick......is flying

VI

Caribou, what have I

done? see how her

heart moves like a little


bug......under my thumb.

Throw me deeply.


I am the floes.

Ho ho ho caribou,


light brown and wetness

caribou. I stink and


I know it.

"Screw you!...you're right."

VII

Everyone has seen us out

with the caribou but


no one has seen us out in

the car. You passed


beyond us.

We saw your knees


but the other night we

couldn't call you.


You were more far than a

widow feeling you.


Nothing has been terrible.

We are the people who have


been running with

animals.


More than when we run?

VIII

Tell us where o eat to stop and eat

The diner is never gonna come.



The forest things are passing.

I did drink my milk



like a mother of wolves.

Wolves on the desert



of ice cold love, of

fireproof breasts and the breast

I took like snow.

Following me



I love you

and I fall beyond



and I eat you like a

bow and arrow withering in the



desert.

IX

No one should be mean.

Making affection and all the green



winters wide awake.

Blubber is desert. Out on



the firm lake, o firm

and aboriginal kiss.



To dance, to hunt, to sing,

no one should be mean.



Not needing these things.

X

Like a flower, little light, you open

and we make believe



we die. We die all around

you like a snake in a



well and we come up out

of the warm well and



are born again out of dry

mammas, nourishing mammas, always



holding you as I

love you and am



revived inside you, but

die in you and am



never born again in

the same place; never



stop!

Ho Ho Ho Caribou: Joseph Ceravolo, from The Paris Review #44, 1968


Strolling reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) in the Kebnekaise valley, Lapland, Sweden: photo by Alexandre Buisse, 2007
Waterfall, Norde Isortoq, West Greenland: photo by Rene Moerkhoej, 2007
Peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus), Asturias, Spain: photo by Francisco M. Marzoa Alonso, 2005
Rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss): photo by Ken Hammond/USDA (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture)
Herd of caribou (Rangifer tarandus), Arctic national Wildlife Refuge: photo by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, 2008
Lemming (Lemmus lemmus), Norway: photo by Frode Inge Helland, 1987
Caribou (Rangifer tarandus), Suomi, near Ihari, Finland: photo by Lukas Riebling, 2005
Arctic fox (Alopex lagopus): photo by Marcel Burkhard, 2005
Cowberries (Vaccinium vitis-idaea): photo by Jonas Bergsten, 2006
Albino caribou (Rangifer tarandus) leading a train, Jämtland, Sweden: photo by oskarlin, 2005
Common cottongrass (Eriophorum scheuchzeri): photo by Franz Xaver, 1991

TC: Final Farewell

.

Great moment in Blade Runner where Roy
Batty is expiring, and talks
about how everything
he’s seen will die with him --
ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,
sea-beams glittering before
the Tannhauser Gates.

Memory is like molten gold
burning its way through the skin.
It stops there. There is no transfer.
Nothing I have seen
will be remembered
beyond me.

That merciful cleaning
of the windows of creation
will be an excellent thing
my interests notwithstanding.

But then again I’ve never been
near Orion, or the Tannhauser Gates,
I’ve only been here.

Hong Kong Skyline: panoramic view: photo by Diliff, 2007
Ginza neon night rain: photo by Move Lachine, 2008

TC: Jim Dine: Old Me, Now

.

I was seventy-four in June...

Age talks about how long a person has existed. These self-portrait drawings are about how many times, I’ve regarded my face minutely and have corrected and erased to get the feeling I want to show most accurately. I now am able, after all this looking, to enlarge my head to become a field of form and chatter and for it to be compared to a vast forest or a limestone quarry, for instance.

Finally, lying is not an option nor is decoration. I am committed to setting the record straight. Don’t worry, I will.

-- from Jim Dine: Old Me, Now: Self-Portrait Drawings, 2008-2009

I am an old man. I avoid mirrors.

Pretty is pretty. But the truth is the truth. Often not pretty.

Instead of looking away from the unprettiness, Jim Dine has made the weight and pull of time into an instrument of vision.

The unrelenting honesty of self-perception is absolutely heroic. Take a hard look at On Ardmore Ave (2009). It will stare right through you.

Hard looking is the mode as well as the subject of this work.

The titles of the drawings tell the story.

Eyes Gone Over, Thin Red Lips, Old Rider, The Stain of Time, Staring in the Evening, Dark Song, Singing Hard Times, Faded Eyes in My Head.

There is a short film I once saw that presents Rembrandt's self-portraits in a swift slideshow, showing the features changing subtly with age as the artist, watching himself with unwavering truthfulness, grows old. Flesh and bone coalescing in an accelerated version of unforgiving meltdown, the unkind work of time upon the human face. It's very moving to see. And Old Me, Now made me think of it.

"Finally, lying is not an option, nor is decoration..."

This may well be no country for old men. Small wonder then that Jim Dine's book comes from a publisher in "The Old World". It speaks to us from Beyond the Limits of Positive Thinking.

Nothing is personal then
And everything is true
Including love's great circumambience
And the skull in the mirror

The mortal intimation
Of souls of beings long since lost
In a forgotten past
And the deep pink nescience

Of the thought evacuated tissue
Glaring back at you
Through the empty eyeholes
In the mask

The New Man: Jim Dine, 2009, from Old Me, Now: Steidl & Partners/Richard Gray Gallery, 2010 (photo by Arthur Aubry via Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago)
Paris After Aldo Died, 2009, from Old Me, Now: Steidl & Partners/Richard Gray Gallery, 2010 (photo by Arthur Aubry via Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago)

TC: Pam Brown: In the Blue Mountains

.

hoping for a place

deep in the shade

verandahs all around,

to contemplate

what brought us here

excerpt from "Worldly goods": True Thoughts, Pam Brown, Salt Publishing, 2008
Forest in the Blue Mountains: photos by Adam J.W.C., 2008

TC: Click

.

One may age ten years in ten minutes.
It's too quiet. I can hear the crickets,
It's like a music of the spheres in reverse,
A whack recursiveness of thinking,
Or is it just the night-clicking computer god
And what kind of iterative god is that?

Pascal had his pit, which went with him
Where'er he went, like a faithful dog,
Nor was he out of it. Infinity I can see
From here. It looks empty, unrelenting,
Cold. There is no respite from Being
And Number, a poet once told us that

When it was getting late for him
And night panic passed through his hair
Making it stand on end, the little he still
Had of it. I'll go to the wall, stand with it,
Let it be my friend, just to have something
That won't fall down. I feel giddy, said the clown.

I believe in a world. Is God or death more great?
This world is my world and will vanish with me
But while I click it goes on existing
In eternity -- to 2046 or
2666, or whene'er the chips melt down.
I've lost Memory writing this.

I've aged ridiculously in ten minutes,
Maybe ten years. Distance is closing in,
It's too quiet. I can hear the crickets
Singing God and death out of existence.
More power to them. Click.
The intricate circuits of a summer night.






Click: from The New World, Libellum Books, 2009
Under the Elms: Fairfield Porter, 1971-72 (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts)