Thanks, Peter, for the consideration in your post re: Thomas A.
Clark. I hope you don`t mind that I`ve made a few escalopes of
it below...

Peter wrote:
> You obviously respond to the more literary end of Tom's
> work, but less to the visual, where matters of space, the object etc
> have to come in to fill the otherwise frustrated appetite for
> difference and resistance: where this doesn't happen, then the only
> consolation has to be that the work is coy or twee.

You dignify my position re: Clark by calling it a response, Peter.
It`s probably more like an attitude at the moment. Rather mindless
enthusiasm for sixteen sonnets, with a subsequently (probably)
exaggerated dislike of his later work. I`m worried, tho`, by the
tendency I detect in the terms you use to describe one
suitable orientation towards Clark`s work, their tendency to
assimilate themselves to the work, in the way that Clark`s work often
aims at its own assimilation with Nature (Clark: "let air play about
the poem" &c. and your own distinction between the "literary" Clark
and the Clark who is primarily visual, spatial, concrete, i.e. (I
take it) "natural"). There is a danger that, because the work
represents Nature, and represents itself as Natural, a conciliatory
critical approach will amount to the mere recapitulation of the
poetry`s own dominant themes. The simple style is no more or less
likely to dissemble than one which makes a virtue of resistance and
difficulty, but exponents and defenders of the simple style are
perhaps unique in advising other readers to approach it disarmed, in
the posture of a relatively passive submission. Interpretation, if
you can call what I have written so far on Clark "interpretation", is
implicitly and explicitly denigrated in Clark`s work (see twenty
poems, esp. "in those first days":

    the people knew nothing
    of deduction or inference
    &c.)

 and (therefore) in your own account of it, forcing
interpreters to conclude either that they have missed the point or
that this is a literature which represents itself as having a
supra-literary value by collating "pre-literate" motifs (connected
with John Berger-like peasant subsistence, hand-carved outside
toilets, an ethics of modesty and simplicity) - "the more literary
end of Tom`s work" is no less "literary" than any other "end", but it
has an interest in minimising its own literariness (hence the leeks
and the radishes), or at least writing itself as a stop-gap on the
road to some wholly unliterary "experience".

> Shouldn't the fact that he seems
> such an easy target make us hold-to-question our fire? To displace
> "walk" for "wank" isn't subversion but simply a walk back under blanket cliche,
> or over the sort of splattered surfaces he is more patiently trying
> to refresh. But such art walks close to its own limits, it attracts
> liability to itself and summons a reader into either a learnt refrain
> of parody or a difference of quiet patience.

I would be the last person in the world to claim a subversive intent
in my parody; it was a joke. It would be easy enough to argue that
it was a blast at the latent (figurative) auto-affection, a
self-satisfaction inside the first sentence of In Praise of Walking,
where a blithe spirit blithely informs us that he? we? can simply up
sticks and walk away from the property, triviality, violence &c. It
seems to me that what is being named here are these qualities as
represented by the speaker`s television, (not something he is likely
to encounter on his walk then). Compare Ric Caddel`s poem, Flock,
where the walk in the country is prompted by fury at property,
violence, &c., all of which worry the speaker`s heels as he pants
across the moor. But it wasn`t, it was a joke. Here`s another TAC
joke: Colourless green ideas wa*k furiously.

> Above all he challenges any naive cult of difficulty,
> or of a latter-day assumption that innocence is unrenewable.

Without making a fetish of the naive? You`ve read a draft of my
Prynne essay which challenges that critical tendency to dote upon
"difficult" poetry as the repository of magical (ethical) powers
rather than read it, so I know you`re not aiming this one at me, but
I worry that Clark is approaching a naive cult of the naive, that
next year we`ll have the reductio ad absurdum, his "Six
Tautologies" or something...handmade paper postcards with "as sure
as X is X" potato-printed on one side.

Whoops. Unable to resist swingeing my parodic urban scythe through
the fieldmouse again.

all best
robin

 


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