“Every once in a while, it’s true: I get sick of dying.”
The first line of Kevin Clark’s poem, “This, Then,” is haunting and direct, yet purposeful enough to drag the reader into a long pause to clarify the sentiment in their own mind.
Reading the San Luis Obispo poet’s work is reminiscent of speaking with him. Clark is careful with his words, steadfast in his speech, and delightfully blunt in his answers. Clark and San Diego beat poet Chris Vannoy will present a reading of their work at CORE Winery in Orcutt on Feb. 10.
Vannoy is the founder of San Diego’s Poet’s Tree reading series, as well as editor of the Poet’s Tree Press. His work has been published in Ghosts of the Beatnik Poets, City Works, The Writing Center, Visions, and Step Jazz magazines. He was also featured at the Lollapalooza Spoken Word Tent. In 2005, Vannoy, whose most recent book is The Rest of It, was on the first San Diego slam team to go to the poetry Slam Nationals in Seattle.
Clark has an enviable list of accolades and publishing credits that would make any writer tussle with the green-eyed monster. In the Evening of No Warning, his first book of poems, earned a grant from the Academy of American Poets. His Self-Portrait with Expletives won the Pleiades Press contest. He’s been published in some of the most distinguished literary journals in the country, including The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, and Crazyhorse. He has also won The Literary Review’s Angoff Award and was the inaugural selectee for the ArtSmith Award.
His first flirtation with poetic success came when he was a reluctant student at the University of Florida, where he had come to join the track team. Quickly realizing that life wasn’t for him, Clark said he became drawn to the political culture of the 1960s and to poetry.
“I was very involved in poetry,” he said. “I published a poem in a magazine that I don’t think even exists anymore called the Florida Quarterly … I published here and there after that. But it was around 1979 or so one of the best magazines in the country took a poem of mine.”
That magazine was The Georgia Review, a prestigious literary journal based out of the University of Georgia. He said the acknowledgement from the venerated establishment led him to see that he could have a future in poetry.
Clark, who joked that many of the early works of his youth were “just terrible,” said his style now is mostly free verse. Free verse poetry doesn’t follow a fixed meter or use rhyming lines and is often intended to mimic the natural flow of speech rather than the rigid beat of metered stanzas.
“I don’t write much with pencil and paper,” he explained. “I write on the computer. I come to the blank monitor more with a feeling than anything else. There may be an image or a topic area. … When I’m writing, I don’t know where the poem is going to go. I have a feeling.”
Clark said one of the things that may surprise readers is how much he cuts from his early drafts. He writes and revises several times, sometimes for months, with five or more poems in process at the same time.
Gauging whether or not those poems are successful can be a tricky task, though.
“How do you trust your own writing to be measured by some of the aesthetics you apply to other writing?” he said. “I am never one hundred percent sure. … For me, I know that I’ve got a couple of good lines or a good idea. Through the process of revision, I keep honing the poem, but that’s hardly the finish.”
Clark said workshopping poems in writing groups that he regularly attends is also a valuable part of the process as well. For young or new poets eager to try their hand at the medium, Clark has simple advice: Read more poetry.
“What you need to do is see how poets do it,” he explained. “Then write as wild and as fresh and image-based as you can. … You’ve got to experience it and try it, and you’ve got to keep trying it.”
Arts and Lifestyle Writer Rebecca Rose keeps trying. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 1-8, 2018.