Poems by Jack Clarke
Jack playing piano, c 1971 (photo by June Ava Poster)
Jack Clarke was what they call in his beloved Ohio a oner. He dedicated his life to achieving a poetry able to approach the complexity of the world, both visible and invisible, as he saw it. Grounded in an extensive scholarship into the history and life of myth, Clarke’s work, according to Albert Cook who recruited him for the new SUNY Buffalo English Department in 1963, moved as far beyond his friend and mentor, Charles Olson, as Olson had moved beyond Ezra Pound. For the uninitiated, this work is difficult to comprehend on first encounter because it is a site neither of breezy avant-garde parodies and facile ironies, nor of creative writing’s obsessive lyrical self-occupation. William Blake gave Clarke his love and passion for myth, and his commitment to — as Blake urged — “create a system” rather than “be enslaved by another man’s,” his dedication not to “reason and compare,” but to create. Clarke’s poetry is the site of deep thinking through myth toward an energetic cosmology. Moving off of his Blake studies, Clarke shared a path with scholars like Giorgio de Santillana (Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth), Carl Kerenyi (Essays on a Science of Mythology), Henri Corbin, Carl Jung, and others who approached myth as a serious form of thinking that opened up realms of primordial human knowledge. In an essay on myth, Jack proposed:
We must return to our origins, to the originary condition, the causal condition mythology/cosmology. In the 20th C. we can be as precise about Indo-European mythology as were the 19th C. philologists about I-E language.
Law:
-the First, the originary, is always the most advanced (whether in cosmology/mythology or language itself-- names, nouns, the nominative/substantive condition). We 'retake' through consequent process of (narrative) history, which is vertical not horizontal : God is dipolar, the carry is 'verbal'; and 'practical ':
muthos logos
(mouth's words)
originary consequent
nominal verbal
typos--topos--tropos
The things & stories of Person are nominal & verbal.
Mythology is both causal & practical, that is, both theoretical/speculative//systematic and analytic//literal/pragmatic/applied, as in the Olympic games.
“Mythology,” he wrote, “is a ‘science’ of the Real, in the sense that it is never etiological; it keeps the contextual intact, does not abstract, preserves nexus of event, leaves objects alone, includes everything that is necessary, and is experienceable.”
Jack Clarke and Charles Olson (Photo by Fred Wah)
This commitment to the originary was a crucial part of the bond between Clarke and Charles Olson, whom he took on as his teacher. Their relationship was intense, determining, and mutually nurturing. They shared this thinking about myth. And Jack’s knowledge of Blake became an important opening for Olson. They had a mutual commitment to a poetry grounded in scholarship, poetry as the site of thinking through. When Olson, devastated by the death of his wife, returned to Gloucester at the beginning of the term, he assigned Clarke to take over the interrupted myth course.
If scholarship is one root of Jack’s poetry, another is music. Music was formative. His mother, who taught music, had each member of her family take up a different instrument when they were young so that the family would make up a band. Jack’s instrument was trumpet, though he later mastered the piano and accordion, and, at the end of his life, the xylophone. At one point, he formed a band which toured the Midwest. Arguably, Jack’s ongoing commitment to see community manifested, to provide space and energy that precipitated a being-together of poets and artists, arose out of this early working together to make music. His knowledge of jazz was immense and detailed, and his understanding of its improvisatory dynamics deeply influenced his approach to prosody.
Jack’s poetry asks you, the reader, to abandon yourself, to engage with what you don’t know, and can’t understand, and enter a path of transformative gnosis. First of all, listen, sweetie, as Duke Ellington famously told trombonist Buster Cooper when he asked Ellington for chord changes. Jack’s poetry sings and much of what it has to say (as you can hear in the recordings of Skald Song that follow) is happening at the level of music. The music is part of an incantatory liturgy, an invocation, poetry’s old job before it got turned into “Creative Writing” and “Theory”. If you can’t get much else in the beginning, you can always get that. Listen. It’s a pleasure. And then, do what my mother taught me: look it up. You never encountered a Fravarti before? Well aren’t you lucky, because after you look it up you will know more than you did. Allow me to repeat: look it up. And then think about it. Then read some more. Live with it. Keep it on your bedside table and read it every night before you go to sleep for a month. Take some Time with it, a relation sadly gone in our current world of instantaneous emails and posts and the mass commodification of information. This is not poetry meant for instant consumption. It does not want you to consume it. It wants to consume you. Be warned. And know that there is nothing here that is not available to the Seeker.
Michael Boughn, Cass Clarke, Jack Clarke, Harvey Brown, Bob Creeley, at Clarke’s home in Buffalo, 1989.
Jack’s publications during his lifetime included Blake: A Masque, #7 of A Curriculum of the Soul (Institute of Further Studies, 1973); Gloucester Translations (1974); Lots of Doom (Cotinneh Books, 1975); Greenfield (Institute of Further Studies, 1976); The End of This Side (Black Book, 1979); In the Analogy Book 1, (Shuffaloff, 1991); Americanos Muthos de Blanc (Shuffaloff, 1992); and From Feathers to Iron: A Concourse of World Poetics (Tombouctou/Convivio, 1987). From Feathers to Iron is Clarke’s magisterial ta’wil on poetics. Posthumously, the complete In the Analogy appeared in 1997 (Shuffaloff) and a collection of prose and poetry including several important essays on Olson, Tramping the Bulrushes, was published by Dispatches Editions in 2017. With Albert Glover, he edited A Curriculum of the Soul (Glover Publishing for IFS, 2010; reprinted by Spuyten Duyvil, 2010).
Some of Jack Clarke’s bibliographies on myth and culture:
Special thanks to James Maynard, Curator of the Poetry/Rare Book Room at the University at Buffalo, for his assistance tracking down the manuscripts of Skald Song in Jack Clarke’s papers. And also to Al Glover for his generous critical intelligence and editorial help.
Copies of In The Analogy, Tramping the Bulrushes, and From Feathers to Iron: A Concourse of World Poetics are available. Please write to Michael Boughn at mboughn@gmail.com
Eight Sonnets from Skald Song
Skald Song was a performance that Jack created with master percussionist and Groovologist Charlie Keil. They performed the poems in several Buffalo venues in 1984–85. The complete recordings are available from Bruce Holsapple’s Vox Audio.
Dismantling the Nominative to Wear the Investment
We take down Babylon step by step before it falls
on us, each brick of the walls handled by hands
of healing, dismantled that we may wear
the investment America translated before it can
be used by other hands, our art, the all-important
second act, not go on but back, let every piece be
worn and no structure remain all returned to song,
the step to the other side Newton made, the world
frame and toolbox condition must be acted upon
before it freezes (closes as North to Spider Woman)
and we all fall back into wolf nest of Green Man
wear green only to aid and abet song of golden mouth
like Hopi, humpback a tune to number, not continual
transformation but changed ratio of the hundred arms.
The Church of the Phenomenal
The botching of Francis’s reform of Paul
created the Renaissance and the modern
scientific, industrial, democratic complex
so that ourselves, as well as all living
beings of the Earth freed of the burden
by Christ regressed back to the Roman
family (different from Neolithic as such)
instead of stepping further into the world
where there’s no protection from evil
which as Henry Adams shows was used as
security for inventing our own
what a waste of time and the unseen
not to picture why we’re even here
still alive in such a scary place.
29 June 1980
Neolithic Man without a Fravarti
Siriotropism of the bead of feminine sustenance
created from Zeus’s mountain top where perfective
action takes place as She-Hawk alighting upon
white promontory, returning to the world because
poetry has built a place for her, albeit invisible
to all but Hecate, none the less real as Mt. Qaf,
the Northern migration completed to shield sheath
of the Sirian Fravarti, the Jerusalem without whom
Albion is nothing to anyone, who opens his veins solely
to awaken the sleeping giant to local habitation Spenser
and Shakespeare saw as Elizabethan (not the British
Empire) Gloriana in her glowing flesh descending
upon a real pedestal, the continental shelf of our own
country in place of meeting, solid agoraphobia
26 June 1979
Cut Nominative Crap
If I don’t get that crazy Zen archery at the dark
of the moon to bisect rocking arrows parabola
covering the cold pan of Venus with tectonic cranial
helmet like meeting house hill politics of one nation
(Urizen’s horizon of open Virgilian Book of Changes),
how close the book of American history by finishing
sentence before it can reach its end in the Universe,
how in fact put the feeling back on the other side
to locate the ‘elsewhere’ or ‘non-where’ of right
hemispheric doxology contained in American sentence
making Dog-town rune of nine nights an anthill twin
to Orion’s Dog, the Jackal, (doting single of doubt)
waiting for true war to appear in the Nomo limit
of perception within this Sirian art called gothonic
Completing the Circuit of Circe
Sing to her of what has happened to her creation,
don’t let it go back to her broken up, don’t let
her hear her song broken up the words falling dead
in the divine analogy, that is our chance, her gift,
but we let it slip through without hearing it,
these living words are her synovial fluid, punk
fluid the Plasmatics sing of, to ignite the soma
haoma Homer used to write with, his words the lost
sinews of Zeus, our sin that we haven’t gotten them
back for her, the song of Circe lost in the analogy,
we let the words go back to her unchanged,
a blockage in the circulation of her bodily fluids,
the collagen of our world wasted on the future,
the first time this mixture has been made available.
28 August 1981
Aeonic Residue
Facing the shadow is the measure of belief
one’s line is no stronger than its persuasion
why the form of evil is so important to American
writing, the locus of perception (seeing the Dawn)
cannot be twisted back by law, the forgiven is
cosmological, the strength to draw the line
across the former deep, so the Shadow
is removed by location, projected as illusion
110,000 years ago when the magnetic polarity
shifted briefly, an event of “art” that created
the prior form of traum only to adjust earth’s
homeostatic equilibrium so we could all continue
breathing, now point would be to get off archetypal
entropy, an American will blame himself for anything
February 1981
Sirian Phallocentrism
The sound of solar plexic drum in the boule of the wood
standing erect branching out to fill all space & time is
the Tartarean cold hell & thicket of the husband harrowed
by perpetual helical alternation of contrary forces equilibrating
the proliferation of vibratory matter within the enveloping
sheath of condensation until the moment of pure emanation
of the Nommo disguised in Blacksmith’s clavicular breathing
out of feminine sustenance of the world as numerical twin
to God issuing in the seminal fluidity of the monitor of the arch
covenantal stones which incorporate all the previous good
for the new era of homophrenic accordance of man and woman
in spermatopyric exchange of Taurus for Minos opening
Ariadnean path out of labryc fusion of frozen North with
its premature wounding blocking Sirian flow in Sweet South
The Bridge
The soul spans geological time, discerning and detached
in relation to the self & the other, the life & purpose
of our world epoch, that the fire not go out, though the
dark powers would continually storm the Bridge
of the Blessed Way, wrought & stored within the soul,
invisible as a sand painting at the end of day,
letting the fire go out in one place, trusting it will be
rekindled in another, never doubting the migration
of the commonwealth of souls over the resilient
local of ‘interconnected incommensurability’, piloted
by choice, not natural selection of the vehicular
form, poetry only to intensify the realization of
the slowness of vast movement, & to resist ever
acculturation, from dawn to dusk, the rush to war
Seven Sonnets in their sequence written September 29, 1976
Law-Giving
We must see clearly the ruiner
of ancient Greece, Zeus-Jupiter,
how he became pulled away from
his original perfective action, one’s own
lord & Lot of Doom, the dawning
upon oneself of oneself, or Urizen
as Truth-Dream before Luvah stole
the Horses of the Sun, what befell
Our Don of Phoenician Minoa when
Indo-European Mycenaean emissaries of
conjugal love, having no sense of west
knocked out their Sixth Eye of God, the rest
is history until Jesus came to remove
this imposture of Patriarchal Pillars & Groves.
The Only Way
for Dorn
Cain forgives Able, Claggart forgives Billy Budd,
the K he slew in his dark self-righteous pride
must become his own dear twin brother,
even that hard-hearted tyrant Zeus himself,
if he is ever to get his speech flowing again,
can you stand to see this monster & not want
to kill it, yuk, or do you so love it you’re afraid
it will be killed, by someone else, who could
kill Ulikummi except Enki, & what does it mean
to be translated into a Blue Star, why is it such
a secret in the West still, Orphic wouldn’t you say,
or like Lohengrin, to keep from her his original,
exactly who do you think that other guy was in
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, wasn’t he a huge twin to Will.
At Long Last
Why was it Gilgamesh went on quest for
immortality, was it not because of the death
of Enkidu at the hands of Inanna, but that always
happens when patriarchal propaganda has made
you afraid of her, who can withstand her power
but this can’t go on, Siduri will find you at some
bar & open the gate for you, the Shadowy Eighth or
both the K & yourself transcended & ready for Origin
a magazine of the creative, where you are going to fall
asleep, & dream such an alcheringa it will seem
as plain as day. so much so that you will even break
the oldest taboo in the world, you will give the woman
at the well your words, John Golden Mouth restored
to human society which is a city yet a woman, Jerusalem.
Bad Bed, Hesiod
On first looking out through Athena’s eyes,
or the lamb emerging out through the gates
of her poor broken heart, the kourotrophos
the Society of Eternal Events, Herakles in drag,
or sperm-brain Basileus Albina, Lost Phoenician
Original in the West where phallic pomp & pride
ruined discourse, so we can only stammer
in the face of bitchy accusations, or get angry
& hit, at least Melville got it as far as the K
& not his wife, the next step in this working out
of projection would be to put him to work, to direct
his anger as Blake did his Spectre, against the real
enemy, those who would depress mental & prolong
if they could corporeal war forever, pure animosity.
Fuck You
If Archie Bunker promises Edith he won’t
throw his back anymore, & if Gore Vidal
rescues Mary Hartman from the mental hospital
these are beginnings, by analogy, of Brotherhood
that is of being projective in the Human Universe
sense, not saving women, protecting women, or
any previous program, but imply entering
that world, of Power, of Britomartis & Sophia
the living & the dead, to be able to speak
as a Don to Portia, the vocal event that
consumes all space-time, that dumps the two
Platonic Months, & restores the I-am-Rig-you-are-
Veda discourse of Heaven & Earth, Heavenly Ava
Earthy Oly the inversion of sun & moon story.
Patriarchy there, Matriarchy here
The dipolar, & the great biomorphic loss,
which is the Secret of the West, well-kept,
Eden, all perverted, reflected in the Veg
glass, mimetic fallacy of all looking
at the picture, what Gawain knew, you don’t
get to speak to the King without going through
the Queen, which Lance seems to have literalized
like all of us adulterous pricks, & ruined society
called Camelot one of the better Muslim shots
in the West, for the Sexes, yes, indeedy, but why
should the K be allowed to trick us this way
& for so long, never mind, more to the point, isn’t it
true that Trickster figure is just a vulgarization of
the Angelophany itself, of Hainuwele’s terrestrial animal
The Leopards of Catal Huyuk
Underestimated, wild, feral, beasts
wheeling variously according to size of
birth, no society except for milk
bearing tree, they are one, we are many,
if we try to be so, we get the ultimate
anguish, one law for lion & ox, if they try
to be many, astrologists all, society
collapses, didn’t mean to drone on about
this but She is coming, the Amazon Achilles
killed & it will happen again in Aquarius
if now everybody doesn’t change, get
Paul Bunyan to build Golgonooza with
an ox & pickaxe, not out of Hainuwele’s
limbs, like that Marduk, trying to replace Enki.