On a recent trip to Full Circle Books, located across Penn Square Mall in Oklahoma City, I noticed a bench whose wide back and armrests were stacked with books of poetry, all of which were written by regional poets. I picked up Blue Norther and Other Poems, by William Bedford Clark, an Oklahoma native who teaches English at Texas A&M. A quick scan of the pages displayed a host of familiar place-names and even a few familiar meters. I could not resist the rare pleasure of reading poems about my home state, written in forms that caught my ear.
There are a number of sonnets in the collection, my favorite being "After Thirty Years: An Anniversary Poem," written by Clark to his wife. After all the years of living together, their marriage is still full of mystery for him. But the poet admonishes the reader against any confusion of mystery with ignorance or resignation: for, he admonishes us, "to not know is not doubt. / It is rather to wonder."
The unknown and the mysterious pervade the poems in this collection. In "An Okie Parable," the poet remembers examining the doodle-bug—or ant-lion, as it is also called—preparing a death trap of sand for its prey. Wholly terrified by the lethal powers of this creation of nature, the poet recalls the words his father spoke to him at that time: "Deep down in life are lurking things / you hope to never see." Thus, in "After Thirty Years," the unknown is regarded with awe, reverence, and even love. But in "An Okie Parable" that awe is commingled with terror and some disgust. To my mind, this poetic capacity to treat the same subject with varied tone and from different perspectives allows the separate depictions of the subject to accrue into one satisfying, true image. Places like the Carney cemetery, Guthrie, and Okarche all assume a life of their own in Clark's hands, because he portrays those lives under the force of time and change.
Indeed, Clark shares with the most distinctively American writers a central concern for his environment—Oklahoma, specifically, as well as Texas and the Deep South. This sense of place is wholly integrated with his sense of history. In "Lawncare," he begins a sardonic complaint about the futility of mowing grass by evoking imagery of the Dust Bowl:
The duststorm’s black wall in mid-afternoon
Was a sign in our father’s time that soon
The thick wind would hurl back what was taken
By slow tractors and rutting plow.
He goes on to complain of crickets dispossessed by his lawnmower and "the bristling grass of late August," until he finally concludes: "It may be grass is best left to itself, / Like Depression glass on a what-not shelf." Through this ingenious simile, Clark has given expression to the incarnation of history in place, of place in history, and of both in his own experience.
Clark has no rigid ideology to advance on his subjects, nor even on his aesthetics. Though most of the poems are written in rhymed verse, many are in nonce forms, and some are in highly irregular or free verse. Some of this may be because this was Clark’s first book of poems, and he has chosen to cast a wide net in terms of style. In any case, the ears of all readers will enjoy Clark’s poetic expressions that enliven the senses and the places and events to which they have grown so accustomed. ~Travis Biddick