Charlie Clark : part one

Charlie Clark studied poetry at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in New England Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and other journals. A 2019 NEA fellow, he is the author of The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2020). He lives in Austin, TX.

Photo credit: Matthew Wester.

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I have the benefit of being married to an amazing poet, Sasha West. She’s usually my first reader. I also have a few friends with whom I exchange poems. But usually I’ll write something and then allow a big lag between the writing and showing to other people. Then there is another lag between showing Sasha or a friend and submitting to journals. This passage of time serves two functions. First, I want to see if the poem hangs around, if I keep caring about it. Many of the poems I write feel valuable in the moment, but three months later I can see that they were more like practice, more placeholders rather than the work I want to have out in the world. So if a poem seems important or valuable after several months, I trust it more as something to show others. Second, I want the poems to feel cooled off—for them to be estranged from my imagination—before I send them out, especially to journals. It helps me to see what’s important in the poem as opposed to what felt important at the time of composition. That said, it invariably happens that I will sit on a poem for six or seven months, decide it’s finished, send it somewhere, and then immediately get an idea on how to revise some part of it. What I mean is that my creative concerns are usually elsewhere by then. I think it was Ocean Vuong who said in an interview that he likes publication because it means he can turn his back on that work. That seems healthy. Which isn’t to say continuing to revise after publication is a bad idea. In particular, I recall seeing poems by Rick Barot (“The Wooden Overcoat”) and Reginald Dwayne Betts (“For the City that Nearly Broke Me”) in Poetry Magazine some years ago. Each poem then appeared in revised forms in their books (Chord and Bastards of the Reagan Era, respectively). I really appreciate that the poems can be public in different forms. And I enjoy the weirdness of not being totally sure which version to consider final. Probably the book versions, but the journal versions are still out there, insisting upon themselves.