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Jeff Clark. Music and Suicide. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. $11.00.

Review by Tom Pynn

love, live lost.

--“Entrance”

Poetry is a risky business. A poet will risk his mind-body in thought and communication to the point where even the ancient triangulation of divinity-creativity-madness—“Art is permissible sickness”—reaches its limits. Maybe Julian Jaynes is right and poetry is just one of several ways humans have devised in order to re-establish intimacy with the gods now that our brain has gone off in two different directions.

Even the line, the Urstoff of poems, Clark shows us, cannot bear the weight of temporality: “What I was lacking you brought back/ I was building a clear, strong structure/ and it cracked.” Not a new idea. As early as Plato’s Republic, we have Socrates putting his interlocutors straight with a sly, ironic wink: “Of course, we all know we are just playing.” Poetry has always confronted the onto-theological dream of man and his handmaiden the metaphysics of presence.

So, where does this leave the poet? Tossed out of civil society for exposing the noble lie: the myth of the state and the ideal citizen? Reduced to a purveyor of voyeuristic goods? Another commodity traded and exchanged for other commodities? If anything, the poet is one who shows us that words cannot be handled, poked and prodded, formed like clay vessels into WHAT I MEAN allowing the reader to grasp THE MEANING. A poem is no well-wrought urn.

The poet takes another route, indirect and into “an opening to what can never be fully present.” Juxtaposition, layering, inversion, images sound not just sight, bringing the body into play wherein the line becomes a breath; in short, all the tricks of the magical trade. The Romantics thought they had it—forgo the finite for an imagination cum divinity. The Symbolists eschewed the Romantic preoccupation with light and sought the dark recesses of human consciousness only to find themselves not on the other side, but a hapless passenger on a drunken boat. Modernity’s turn toward the interesting was forever left unresolved as Kierkegaard observed. So, it was left to Dadaists and Surrealists to offer ambiguity and not definitive texts. In the ambiguous free play of language opening us out and beyond what is merely possible or actual (Oh, banality!) into the impossible possible we meet Jeff Clark.

How much can the poet and poetic use of language be counted on to effect some kind of reorientation in our always already disparate, anomalous, contrary, and flagrantly contradictory experiences? “The world cannot contain itself,” he writes, indicating the task of the poet: push the limits of (full)meaning(full)—rational?—discourse beyond representation and all pretense of getting it right or appearing to give answers. Instead, “learn to contain ‘the not’, the ‘opening’.” The poet’s voice exposes, de(con)structs the grand narrative imposed by the reader’s narcissistic demands weaving a play of differance-opening into excess of meaning. This is not simply a derangement of the senses. The poet sacrifices the self’s swift sure race to the same in poem so “that Brahmins and butchers should hang together.”

The poem “Cama” (Skt: kama) steers the reader into the tension at the heart of human experience. Kama, pleasure in general and sexuality in particular, is both a legitimate goal in a social context and in the context of liberation (moksa, kaivalya) not worthy of our pursuit. For the religious this is taken for a paradox, for the logician a contradiction. On either account, kama is a promise of transcendence that is never fulfilled. This is because both the religionist and the logician take themselves too seriously and fail to grasp the play at the heart of tension that alone would open consciousness in creative ways. The tension is not an opportunity for coherence, correspondence, or resolution, which can never be anything more than totalitarian reduction to the same. Thus, the poem ends, “No correspondence between/ this writing and your face.”

Of note in this volume is Clark’s appropriation of a New Testament verse transliterated into poem-style/form. “Matthew 23:15” echoes the post-structuralist line in the book: Jesus takes to task scribes and Pharisees, the high priests of the WORD, calling them hypocrites for universalizing and proselytizing logocentricity. Was Jesus a post-structuralist? By appropriating the text as a found object, Clark succeeds in de-centering the narcissism in scripturalism—fundamentalist (mis)readings of texts especially religious, philosophical, and poetic.

In Clark’s volume, as well as in many little magazines, the prose poem is an increasingly visible form. If turning from measured line and stanza to verse libre and from “free verse” to the triadic line of Williams or the yogic/shamanic breath of Ginsberg has not sufficed for the post-structuralist project, then does the prose poem have anything to offer? In Clark’s volume, “Shiva Hive,” “Sun on 6,” “Teheran,” and “Succomb” are prose poems that comprise 27 out of 67 of the book’s number of pages. Does the prose poem do anything more than blur the dogmatic and monolithic claims to uniqueness of POEM and PROSE? Certainly a prose poem confirms Derrida’s claim that all texts are literature. “Shiva Hive,” an interesting post-structuralist dialogue that deconstructs not only reasonable discourse, but also the privilege at the heart of lovers’ shared language—“You are still idealizing. You attribute to me the possession of a secret, a position of mastery that I have to reject”—may fail as a prose-poem (what is this after all?), but it is an excellent meditation in post-structuralist thought. “Sun on 6,” as does “Teheran,” show the prose poem’s strength by erasing the hierarchical arrangement in conventional line forms and showcasing Dadaist and surrealist uses of word-images that subvert expectation, reason, and ordinary consciousness exposing the darkness of the sub-conscious where most of us fear to tread. Where “Succomb” is less successful is in erasing the privileged seeing of the I.

Or in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is the joke on us?

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