Self-Portrait with Expletives by Kevin Clark

Self-Portrait with Expletives Reviews

• 
  Jeff

  I have not yet read Clark's first book, In the Evening of No Warning . This second book, recommended by a friend, surprised and pleased me in its valuing the mode of narrative-meditation as it slides over into the local-descriptive. The surprise is why I give it five stars; I'm very keen in what pleases me. Were the first book as pleasing as the second, perhaps I'd give the first the five, and the second four: it's not every book, after all, that, as Berryman would say, adds to the stock of available reality. Here's an example of what pleases me:
  
  

  In "Flashback at Castlefranco" Clark opens in a present tense counterfactual of tripping on a Florida canopied highway at dawn. The speaker is keyed into radio and coming off the trip, "so every tree and fence blazes | With end-of-bandwidth jitters, my breath | A shallow tinnitus audible in the orbit of my limbs . . . " Aware of his body coming off the trip the speaker cuts the car engine, turns off the lights and drifts in moonlight filtering through the trees, then has to turn them on again "to stay true to the road beneath the canopy," which is "strobing" with various bursting lights the speaker is ill-equipped to finally decide to live in. A stanza break then reveals this to be a memory ("Thirty years later . . ."). The speaker now overlooks a Tuscan hillside. The modality, with its descriptive bias, seems troped by the shifting from a countercultural revery to something more Virgilian -- out of James Wright. Except that the speaker stands with his young daughter, using her binoculars, "Aglow, entranced by sunset, she asks how far | To the mountains, there on the other side." Surely it is filtering light of this sunset that puts the speaker in mind of the Florida acid trip, but her question prompts in him nonetheless "a host of paternal lies" it is only in the writing of which he recognizes as such. This neatly tropes the paternality that connects counterculture to generation, modality to masters, like Wright, who are themselves, for Clark, literary fathers. So Clark, in his poem's reply to the daughter, earns for me his late manner: "There is darkness and there is the lit-up world, | And behind both | An immeasureable quiet."

  
  
• 
  D'Argo Agathon

  Clark is wordy. That, I think, is the most concise that I can be. Sure many of his poems are long, but I don’t really mind that. He’s wordy. Nouns everywhere. That I mind.
  
  Poems like his “Stephen Hawking” one on page 33 are remarkably interesting, but so drowned out by nouns and things and objects with a few adjectives thrown in before them that it becomes hard to read, hard to parse through, and hard to appreciate. Sure, throwing in a bunch of words may seem like good diction, but a good vocabulary is not a substitute for knowing when to use those words to the best effect, and when too much becomes way too much. That’s not to say I think his diction is bad… just “off.” For example, “Scrim” on 52 lists book, chest, rogue, threads, hair, and labyrinth all in the first line, and continues from there… I’m lost as to the purpose or meaning behind this noun vomit and it confuses the point of the poem – what/where is the focus? What should I care about?
  
  There are only a few occasions where I think this works, though. “Sixties Noir” is my favorite of the bunch and I think it’s because I understand the story that is being told, and it isn’t so vague as a lot of the pieces here. A lot of Clark’s content is really cool, if you can understand.
  
  And of course, I have to mention the play with form, as in “This Morning,” “James Dickey at Florida,” and “This, Then.” And I’ll have to say that yet again, I don’t really “get it.” I mean, I understand that “This, Then” has a kind of “falling off” feel, and I guess the “Engine” subpoem is to create the idling engine… but it just seems like so much work for very little pay.
  
  2 stars might be a bit much for my taste... As a side note, his "how to write poetry" book called *The Mind's Eye* is pretty good, if you are into that kind of thing.
• 
  Julene

  This book won the Pleiades Press 2010 prize.
  
  He has a rich history with many of the poetic greats, such as James Dickey, who appear in an intimate voice. Most of the book is a wild & wooly ride through his early years coming to manhood with some of his teaching experiences. From the opening poem "Eight Hours in the Nixon Era" we are started off through his world in a place and time with lots of characters from his history. Lots of self-definition and hippie days gone by. It is a free spirited book that works though life in poetic statements. He has moving poems addressed to his wife, and one where comes to near death when his lung collapsed.
  
  "Lucky poems marry themselves to the brief/pulse of the world as it goes by." this line captures his book and I am glad to have dipped in.