The Little Door Slides Back, by Jeff Clark
(Sun & Moon Press, 1997)
When I was 27, I was obsessed with a woman. Her name was Erica Neal. Though her name is actually irrelevant. Just like the true love I thought she represented was irrelevant. At 27, my life felt like a tennis game, and I definitely had no idea how to play tennis. I would anticipate seeing Erica on the way to my English Lit Survey course, and I couldn't breathe. Sometimes I would hope not to see her, because the disappointment was easier to handle than my speculation about what her look or non-look or laughter might mean. Which made desire like a toxic chemical in my system. And yet I was always convincing myself that desire is valid, which means I was obsessed with desire, or with Erica, or with the prospect of true love. Most likely, I was incapable of true love in my 20's. There was Erica. Three years before that my true love was my best friend's wife. That ended badly.
Maybe this is what desire is in your 20s. Chaos. Confusion. In Jeff Clark's The Little Door Slides Back, it feels as though desire is a sickened state, like you'd been drawn into the margin design of a William Morris book, and you're spending your time trying to see out, but all the ivy is in the way. Or maybe, like in a group of Clark's poems, you see a face in a dormer window, watching you on the sidewalk. Read Clark's poems. You get lost like this. Desire is confusing. For Clark, it's an "arabesque," as he describes in "My Interior." Desire is denial and ridicule for having any desires, as he tells it in "On the Iron Cot." Yes, desire is inescapable. And that's what the scenes in Clark's poems are, like you're in one of the dream scenes from "Twin Peaks," then add some steampunk, then some thick charcoal lines on edges. Who are those people in there? How do they suffer so impassively?
More pointedly, what should a reader do with the dynamic among Clark's narrative poems, his likely autobiographical "Some Information About Twenty-Three Years of Existence," and then his imagistic poems that crowd in during the last half of the book? The narratives are evocative, unjust and off-putting. I find them to be at the center of how I am reading the book. I also find I am looking in "Some Information About Twenty-Three Years of Existence" for similar narratives, but instead the poem willfully keeps me detached from a narrative. All it gives are sporadic images or observations. In "1988," the poem observes: "August, far away, cannot move anyone with my body. // Yellow paw." In "1994": "Quixotism. // Novantiquities." Should I be reading an absence of deep-rooted desire in this series of poems? Should I see these sporadic images to have a greater affinity with the imagistic poems, and the toxic atmosphere they create? Does life only gain meaning after someone turns 23?
What I do gain from this seeming lack of autobiography is the fact that whatever desire means to this speaker, it is as inexplicable as it is inescapable. Desire is not some Freudian clockwork whose mechanisms develop during childhood or adolescence. Desire exists. Desire is only human. With The Little Door Slides Back I feel like desire is a purely adult compulsion.
Meaning the book evokes the feelings of an unhealthy relationships. It dwells on the speaker's misunderstood motives when he (or she, as there are many times when I feel that the speaker in these poems is meant to be some other) reflects on what he or she wants. Which is a little sad. And it is in detailing images or narrative that the reader comes to understand some mixture of frustration, anticipation and inevitable denial.
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John Yau reviews The Little Door..., plus Clover, plus Moxley, in Boston Review!
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