Poetry
FROM THE ASHES by Steve Clark
(Huerga y Fierro, 2010)
In ten parts, FROM THE ASHES is an apocalyptic love poem in the form of an interior monologue which unleashes different voices amidst its peregrinations throughout the entrails of Manhattan. Part lyric, part confessional, part manic rant, FROM THE ASHES depicts a confused and chaotic world at the point of extinction. It is a love poem to everyone and no one at all. Striking chords (mostly minor), between the quotidian, surrealist and romantic, FROM THE ASHES, draws on the hermetic maxims of the mystics while recalling in one moment such raw American authors as Anne Sexton and Charles Bukowski, and in another the Spanish-language writers Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda. As in Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Duende, the notes are always dark. From this seemingly chaotic melange and divergent influences emerges an original and singular voice which begs the question (and its response): When the world has ended, when there is nothing but ashes, what music will we hear?
From IX FROM THE ASHES
I went to the fancy new restaurant yesterday in Tribeca.
They brought me parts of you,
your wrist holding an African Daisy,
your belly button in a dollop of caviar,
your tongue smooth as a lemon slice,
and your lovely blood in a snifter.
I fell back off my chair laughing full with you
and whispered hatred for God.
Now I am taking you out of me,
carving myself out and pulling
you bone by bone
so you may live
even among this heaped wanting
that is never cured,
even among the billions of hearts pumping
and the terror of all that movement.
I’ve packed you a blue sweater
with a hummingbird on it.
I’ve packed you a pair of gloves,
I wouldn’t want those hands to get cold.
REVIEW of FROM THE ASHES
From Spain’s ABC CULTURAL, June 26, 2010 by Jaime Siles
Steve Clark is a poet and filmmaker as seen in the feature length film, The Last International Playboy (2009) which he directed and co-wrote. This fact explains some of the traits of his work like the crystallization of particular instances, a narrative in sequence, and an idea of poetic development, which is not by any means the expected.
Clark proceeds by frames conceived as movements within movements which form part of a discourse whose full articulation we discover at the end. The reader finds himself before a universe of phrases that are only fragments, appearing in the text like the beads in a necklace with different colors, sizes and materials. What dilutes or distorts its unity (which it has, though difficult to decipher) is that the parts overwhelm the whole, which is almost annihilated by the impact of these certain fragments, which rise above the totality of the poem.
Hidden Lover
Before us we have what one might call “a text in fugue,” whose elements detain themselves while it’s centrifugal force becomes more intense from moment to moment. And this dynamism of meaning, which characterizes this force, comes synthesized by certain points, in which the poetic development gives the impression of forging into an apparent malaise. This contrast is one of the pistons that drives the book, if it not it’s principal raison d’etres.
Already in the book’s first movements we find the architectural procedure which will be the principal formula: an amply developed allocution – consisting of fourteen verses – which follows a fixed scene in the Comoros islands and could be defined as “ecological.” Here a disappearing fan of expressions (I kiss you, I kiss me, I kiss I) gives birth to more images, not necessarily more explicit. However, they are stamped with an invocation that will later clarify and decipher all that was obscure before . . . The universe of the person invoked—"the hidden lover."
The second movement — with its accumulation of images and chaotic enumerations, some bordering on surrealism – is much better. They contribute to the book’s diction, its visionary stamp, and a rhythmic intensity which each time becomes more captivating. The third movement, in spite of it’s novelties, is somewhat irregular and takes us back to the poetic dualities in the first movement, just as the fourth coincides with the second. However, the fifth follows its own mechanism, singling out — from the preceding alternating currents — a single physiognomy, like that of the curtain transformed into a song and the distinct images of streets and muscles.
A Beautiful Body
Love—protagonist of the whole book—is even more present in the sixth movement, which is much less urban than the previous one because it occurs in a natural landscape. Perhaps this is why death appears on the horizon, and irrationality gives way to a certain degree of classicism. As seen in the gnomic phrase which announces: “A beautiful body erases intelligence.” But since Clark is a poet more interested in variety, and the continual change of register and style rather than the traditional forms, in the seventh movement he opts for a kind of realism, and in the eighth for another poetic form, which in my opinion, is much more efficient and interesting. The ninth movement combines characteristics and procedures from the two previous ones, and the tenth consists of a narrative re-telling, which saves the final lyricism for the song that serves as a coda and we should interpret as the final development of all that came before.
From the Ashes is a unitary book written with a rare poetic method . . .
—Jaime Siles
(From ABC Cultural, June 26, 2010)