Disordered Ideas

Tom Clark describes himself as an artist “living along the inter-dimensional rift zone of a society caught between its future in the realm of electronic magic and its past in the spell-casting of the caves.” In Disordered Ideas , his poetry is like an exquisitely sensitive the needle jumps across the page, making a manic record of every quake, slip, and near-disaster along the postmodern-communications fault line.
He derides the new media, the isolating, enervating “brave new work” we do in front of computer screens, and the death of the personal in the digital age. Indeed, the only digits he has any use for are the five that make up the human he revels in man-made artifacts, especially paintings and stories and poems. His topical verse is satiric and humorous, but when he writes about what he admires―the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich, the renunciations of Rimbaud, the political aphorisms of Brecht, his poems can seize the heart.

Kelly and Clark have each published over 50 collections of prose and poetry, having eschewed large commercial presses for small, independent literary ones. In their own right, both writers can claim successful literary careers as poets, novelists, teachers, theorists, and editors. Kelly continues to focus on the image, around which the rest of the poem eddies. Often erudite and philosophical, his poems seem to be arguments for, or illustrations of, some poetic. Organic in form, they always reflect honesty and sincerity: "I don't want to sit and type,/ but float garmented in light/ in the middle of the sky"; "I never believed I had something to say/ but believed what I said." And we believe and appreciate his tireless efforts over the years. Clark's poems, on the other hand, seem casual, conversational, like little afterthoughts, often stinging with social satire, as in this poem about the state of the job market in his profession: "unless I could quickly develop/ a strong background in the/ instruction of remedial English composition to lefthanded/ Icelandic women with green eyes/ I might as well forget about it." Many poems are addressed to his literary mentors: Celine, Kerouac, Olson, Pound, Rilke, Rimbaud. Missing from the work, however, is music, melody of lines, attention to soundoften a flaw of free verse. Both Kelly and Clark are important and prolific writers of their generation, and libraries wanting to reflect the full range of contemporary verse should own at least one volume by each. These newest collections would be good choices. Thom Tammaro, Multidisciplinary Studies, Moorhead Univ., Minn.
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