Tom Clark: Canyonesque at BlazeVOX

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Irish mannequin in a store window during Mardi Gras, New Orleans, Louisiana: photo by Carol M. Highsmith, 6 January 2008 (Carol M. Highsmith's America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

No one asked me where I wanted to be born
said the store window mannequin, but if they had,
I'd have preferred almost anywhere to this festival
of false delights, where the distance between wishes
and dreams is equal to the distance between
promises and lies. That is, it doesn't exist. The deer
do not come down to the water to utter
their spontaneous cries. There's nothing here but concrete.
The deer are legitimately terrified. I too
am terrified. Morning in the canyon, then again night
in the canyon. The gap grows ever more wide
the way the light falls
on a diagonal, the night in its radial aspect
defying meditation. A moon rose in the mind and each thing there
picked up its radial aspect in the night.
Sometime in another other
wise completely ordinary
random century.



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On Tom Clark's Poetry:

"Clark's exactitudes of diction generate and inform the imagination... finally it is only poetry that is capable of saving such extensive cultural memory from the vortex of history." -- Edward Dorn

"A writer known and loved for his enthusiasm, curiosity, purity of scope of imagination, and an amazing ability to blend humor and cosmic concerns." -- Amy Gerstler

"The place he writes from, of void/non-void overlap, is a pure arena for the imagination to play in; and Clark is likewise pure: austere, bleak, exalted too... shimmering as ever." -- Alice Notley

"[Clark] really flows and gambles and plays it loose. I like his guts... He's the raw gnawing end of the moon." -- Charles Bukowski

"Tom Clark has been one of American poetry's most consistent and constant chroniclers of our long sleepwalk to parts unknown." -- Joel Lewis

"He is one of our original modern troubadours, and he deserves to be read." -- Tony Hoagland

"Tom Clark's poems seize the heart. They make it stop, for a second or two. They make you think twice about reading anything carelessly, ever again." -- Anselm Hollo



Click here for information about Tom Clark's new BlazeVOX book Canyonesque