Transmission lines and railroad near Salton Sea, California. District of Los Angeles smog obscures the sun: photo by Charles O'Rear, May 1972 for the Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA Project
Train whistle in cold January night
down by the water
lonesome sound
from a long way off
amid memory forest
Harlem Avenue 1947
amid memory forest
Harlem Avenue 1947
or 1948
late
upstairs
in the exile bedroom
at grandparents' house
across from the house
of the mysterious famous gangster
in the dark
under the attic rafters
hour after hour
imagining a meaning
to fit
the brilliant silvery word
Zephyr
Evening train (Albany, California): photo by efo, 6 November 2012
In Evening Train we witness people on a bus, a window in the night, greenery, a bird on its perch—and then at the center of this world, something nameless seems to open. It’s hard to say just what happens, other than the words of each poem itself. But that isn’t quite right. It’s as if the words are a way for the poet to inscribe silence. You turn the page, wondering, and it arrives again—something quite beyond what is told. Tom Clark is a master.
—Aram Saroyan
A long time fan of Tom Clark’s poetry, I have turned to his books and blog for years to find inspiration, entertainment, and truth. His is a poetry that I can trust—at once spare and direct, witty and uncompromising, personal and universal, intelligent and deeply felt. I rely on Clark to reveal the nation I live in but often fail to see, complete with its environmental degradation, commercial excess, and kitschy spiritualism. His poems live at the intersection of truth and beauty, weaving the threads of the humdrum and the unbearable with the mystical—or at least with a longing for the mystical. Tom Clark is undoubtedly one of the great living American poets.
— Nin Andrews
Tom Clark is a master of surprise. He is a poet twenty-four hours a day and in possession of a very entertaining mind. He gets the familiar and the strange to dance together, and the dance steps are never the ones you expect. There is pathos in the humor of the situation: "First it's stuffed bunnies they're giving you. Next it's ice cream and then the nice surprise -- you're at the hospital, having an operation." Clark has the ability to guide words as they "turn a nowhere into a putative somewhere" -- to take the complications of mental or physical experience and redeem them in lyric poems of notable brevity. Evening Train is smart and companionable and joyously imaginative.
— David Lehman
These poems are radically, almost luridly, American, mapping out landscapes imagined, described, and entered into with stunning visual acuity and incisive intelligence. Yet the language has a spareness, a near egoless authority, giving this book wondrous aesthetic tension. Evening Train confirms what readers of this major American poet have long known: Tom Clark is a contemporary master.
—Terence Winch
—Aram Saroyan
A long time fan of Tom Clark’s poetry, I have turned to his books and blog for years to find inspiration, entertainment, and truth. His is a poetry that I can trust—at once spare and direct, witty and uncompromising, personal and universal, intelligent and deeply felt. I rely on Clark to reveal the nation I live in but often fail to see, complete with its environmental degradation, commercial excess, and kitschy spiritualism. His poems live at the intersection of truth and beauty, weaving the threads of the humdrum and the unbearable with the mystical—or at least with a longing for the mystical. Tom Clark is undoubtedly one of the great living American poets.
— Nin Andrews
Tom Clark is a master of surprise. He is a poet twenty-four hours a day and in possession of a very entertaining mind. He gets the familiar and the strange to dance together, and the dance steps are never the ones you expect. There is pathos in the humor of the situation: "First it's stuffed bunnies they're giving you. Next it's ice cream and then the nice surprise -- you're at the hospital, having an operation." Clark has the ability to guide words as they "turn a nowhere into a putative somewhere" -- to take the complications of mental or physical experience and redeem them in lyric poems of notable brevity. Evening Train is smart and companionable and joyously imaginative.
— David Lehman
These poems are radically, almost luridly, American, mapping out landscapes imagined, described, and entered into with stunning visual acuity and incisive intelligence. Yet the language has a spareness, a near egoless authority, giving this book wondrous aesthetic tension. Evening Train confirms what readers of this major American poet have long known: Tom Clark is a contemporary master.
—Terence Winch
Evening Train by Tom Clark: A Review by Billy Mills
Evening Train by Tom Clark, BlazeVOX Books, 2014, ISBN: 978-1-60964-187-0, $16.00
The first thing to say about Tom Clark is that he is an American poet; this may seem too obvious to need stating, but it is fundamental to his art. The language, social norms and history of the United States are woven into the very fabric of his verse. This is made explicit in the first poem in Evening Train, ‘Moving House’, where the process of house removal is folded into the myth of Manifest Destiny, a people
…always moving out
ahead of the next wave yet not
riding the last wave to the crest
Clark writes poems that encompass memory (a central preoccupation), the natural world and our role in it, ageing and death, the interface between technology and social control: but all these matters are examined in a landscape that is specifically American and generally urban. Many of the poems set in the now reflect the geography of the city of Berkeley, where Clark has lived for many years. For instance, the almost surreal, apocalyptic poem ‘skyfalling’ is firmly anchored to a specific street junction in a precise social milieu:
Ninth and Bancroft, West Berkeleyinsecure householder half dressedemerges from behind barred gatelooks up into dark skyone arm bent overhead as if to shield, crouching --
Railway Station, Bielskobiala, Poland, night: photo by czako_o, 16 December 2008
Equally, the poems of memory tend to be firmly located in space and time. For Clark, there is no escape from what was:
There is no such thing
as a clean break
with the past
Chase it off, it comes sneaking
straight back
And so he makes no attempt to chase it off, but holds his memories up to the light, to examine how his past has made him what he is.
Railway Station, Bielskobiala, Poland, night: photo by czako_o, 16 December 2008
And part of this is a political animal, concerned with questions of the environment and our relationship with it; his inadvertent killing of a ladybug leads him to the perception that
Beautiful things ought to be left alone
In a natural state
Frequently, he observes the intersection between this ‘natural state’ and his own urban environment; deer in the city crossing through a ‘lethal stream’ of traffic, for instance. Like memory, nature cannot be confined, and if you try to it will pop up again where least expected.
Railway Station, Bielskobiala, Poland, night: photo by czako_o, 16 December 2008
Clark is an active blogger, but his adoption of new technology hasn’t blinded him to the dangers of ‘A generation/mesmerized by/small screens’. These are the opening lines of ‘Blank (Don’t Be Late)’, the first of a run of poems in the second half of the book that are concerned with the digital world. In these poems, Clark imagines a kind of virtual world, with forests of ‘cell phone tower trees’, a world controlled by computers where people feel constrained not to speak out for fear of ‘administrative penalties’ and where even those dependent on medical care are doomed to wait
not for any imaginable compassion
but for the computer
malfunction
to end
Railway Station, Bielskobiala, Poland, night: photo by czako_o, 16 December 2008
Questions of health and mortality are also important to his work. His poems about death are reminiscent of the work of Cid Corman, the same matter-of-fact idiom is evident in the writings of both men. In these poems, a sliver of light through a curtain prefigures the closing of a coffin lid. In ‘Negative Development’, the perception that ‘Old is a kind of plague’ follows from the lines:
Death avoidance.A game of tag.An everyday thing.
The untypical heavy end-stopping of the lines enacting the subject in a carefully crafted stanza.
Railway Station, Bielskobiala, Poland, night: photo by czako_o, 16 December 2008
There is an almost Buddhist calm at the back of Clark’s view of death which, again, reminds the reader of Corman, an attitude that informs the final poem in the book, ‘Blown Away’.
unmoored yet not unmovedtossed cloudward, flippedsans volitioninto the flow
Railway station, Poland: photo by czako_o, 13 February 2007
*
Clark’s language is, as already noted, pure American. This is explicit in the poem ‘So Now You Know’, which is a litany of idiomatic phrases beginning ‘you can blow’, but is really the given condition of his writing. These poems give the impression of being casually constructed, conversational, almost easy, but this is just a superficial impression. If he is engaged in conversation, he takes it to some very odd places, to silence, as a rule. When you reach the end of one of his poems, you may not be entirely clear on what exactly has been said, but you do have a clear sense that there is nothing more to say.
Not that the poems are unclear, the language is as limpid as you could ask for, the ‘content’ is in no ordinary sense obscure. Whatever confusion that might arise stems from the fact that the act of reading does not exhaust the best of Clark’s poems; they linger in the mind like unresolved questions, inviting contemplation. As the poem ‘Words’ has it
Even in the middle of nowhere
there are words
words turn nowhere into a putative somewhere.
I can think of no more accurate description of these poems.
-- Billy Mills, from Elliptical Movements, 12 January 2015
Drawbridge No. 8 (Richmond, California): photo by efo, 27 July 2010
Amtrak train 734 (Pinole, California): photo by efo, 30 April 2006
California Zephyr, Oakland: photo by efo, 27 November 2005
The Burlington Zephyr, East Dubuque, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, April 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
![Chicago, Illinois. Chicago Burlington and Quincy streamliner pulling out of the Union Station]()
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Zephyr streamliner pulling out of Union Station, Chicago: photo by Jack Delano, February 1943 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Zephyr streamliner pulling out of Union Station, Chicago: photo by Jack Delano, February 1943 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad Denver Zephyr diesel locomotive and older Pennsylvania Railroad steam locomotive side-by-side at Union Station, Chicago: photo by Jack Delano, January 1943 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Silver Pilot. E Unit Zephyr, at Illinois Railway Museum, Union, Illinois: photo by cradek23, 12 July 2008
Zephyr, Snowy Glenwood Canyon. The eastbound California Zephyr passes through Glenwood Canyon and along the Colorado River on a snowy February afternoon. In the background, the Bair Ranch has been a working cattle spread since 1919 and now also is a popular small resort. The Glenwood Canyon passage, just east of the town of Glenwood Springs, is one of the most fabled scenic stretches on the Zephyr route: photo by George Hendrix, 6 February 2010
The California Zephyr pauses at Osceola, Iowa on an unseasonably warm February night: photo by lzcdome, 2002, posted 25 October 2009
A slice of history. Nebraska Zephyr with 1959 Edsel, Le Claire, Iowa: photo by Tristan Garrett, 25 July 2011
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad Twin Cities Zephyr preparing to stop at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin: photo by Loyd Wollstadt, 1956; image by Roger Wollstedt, n.d.
Burlington Northern Metra 112 at Naperville, Illlinois: photo by Laurence's Pictures, 26 December 2010
Amtrak's Illinois Zephyr heads east amidst very large snow flakes at Naperville, Illlinois: photo by Laurence's Pictures, 24 December 2008
Nebraska Zephyr at Rock Island, Illinois railway museum: photo by Laurence's Pictures, 21 July 2011
Nebraska Zephyr at Rock Island, Illinois railway museum: photo by Laurence's Pictures, 21 July 2011
View in a departure yard at Chicago and Northwestern Railroad's Proviso yard at twilight, Chicago, Illinois. Brakeman is signaling with a red flare and the train is going by during exposure: photo by Jack Delano, December 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
View in a departure yard at Chicago and Northwestern Railroad's Proviso yard at twilight, Chicago, Illinois: photo by Jack Delano, December 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)