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 45:2 Spring 1999
JEFF CLARK
A Gigolo's Ghee Gilded William
The Summer 1999 issue featured a special
section on Robert Duncan, and included a rich constellation of poems by
Arthur Sze, John Matthias, Edward Dorn, Jeff Clark, Elizabeth Willis,
Robert Adamson, and Allen Grossman. We present Clark’s “A Gigolo’s Ghee
Gilded William” here.
Jeff Clark, the author of two books of poetry, lives in
Michigan, where he makes his living as a book designer. He has designed
CR’s covers since 2004. A revised version of this poem
(new title: “Disclosure”) appeared in Clark’s Music and Suicide
(FSG, 2004). That book received scathing reviews in Poetry magazine
and on Ron Silliman’s widely read poetry blog—a telling intersection of
two very different aesthetic programs: Clark’s work simply did not
comply with the ready-to-hand maps and agendas either outfit works
with. In CR's Spring 2005 issue,
however, Clark found a more sympathetic ear in a review by John Beer
(co-editor, more recently, of CR's
speciall issue on Kenneth
Rexroth):
[Music and Suicide] abounds with haunted, obscure
sexual encounters, mysterious transformations, fat black spiders, and a
poetic protagonist tortured by the very possibility of referring to
himself, by the lie that such an attempt, mediated by consciousness,
language, or the distortions of publicity entails.
Beer cites a handful of lines from different poems to
demonstrate Clark’s “sonic density”—a feature “A Gigolo’s Ghee Gilded
William” shares—and avers:
While such features of Clark's work are, I think, generally
recognized—they form the background of "undeniable gifts" that often
sets the stage for critical condescension—the intellectual reach of his
work has remained less visible. In part, the work invites this
oversight because its ambition is more erotic than programmatic, which
makes it hard to place in a critical landscape dominated by twin towers
of linguistic materialism and idle taste-mongering. But if this erotic
ambition is one more aspect of dark's untimeliness, that untimeliness
may allow him to escape mere datedness to disclose a new poetic future
for us all.
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