The narrative arc of the two books I published by Thomas A. Clark was strange. I wrote a review of Thomas A. Clark's Madder Lake in 1981 or 1982. It was published in 1983 after circulating in ms for at least a year. Click here to check a revised, on-line version of it. Madder Lake had been published by Coach House Press, with bpNichol, an ardent Clark fan, seeing it through the press. I had liked some of Clark's work I had seen before, but beep's enthusiasm was, as usual, infectious, and I was more impressed by this book than any I'd seen before, save for those that Tom and his wife Laurie produced on their tiny hand press. At the time I wrote the review, I was running the Woodland Pattern reading series with Karl Gartung. Karl was particularly taken with the review, and keeps holding it up as a model of critical writing and one which had particular impact on him. As much as I appreciate the appreciation, I think his interest in the review comes more from the time and his state of mind when he first read it. Nonetheless, this seems to be the point where we decided to invite Clark to read at W.P. It took some fineggeling to arrange this at a time when Clark could come from Scotland to do the reading, but we finally managed it. By the time we did, I was completely caught up in other things, and I only got to meet Clark briefly and in a state of mind that rendered the visit nearly unreal, during his visit to Milwaukee - my problems of the time even preventing me from going to the reading.

But a number of things had been accomplished before then. Karl wanted to put out a small book by Clark, similar to one which the Clarks had published themselves. This wasn't expensive, since I was still working with my own press. bp and i made arrangements to swap copies of his edition of Clark's A Glade Dictionary, so that we could offer them for sale, or, more often than not, simply pass them around to friends and slip them in with regular orders as a freebie. The book consists of rhymed quatrains, each purporting to define a one word title, though slyly moving away from it at the same time as framing it. Clark had been strongly influenced by Ian Hamilton Finlay, with whom he had worked for a time. Although completely his own, the poems in the carried one of Finlay's types of magic unification: as quatrains they simultaneously drew on the severity and rectitude of classic Latin epigrams and the lilting romanticism of Celtic ballads and other traditional lyrics. Part of their dynamism came from the interaction of these two different and in some ways antagonistic models. In the strange web of affinities, Lorine Niedecker had thought Finlay had plagiarized her own work when she read poems like these. Bringing a circle around, Clark felt a strong affinity to Niedecker. During his first visit to Milwaukee, he visited her house and environs on the Fox river, and some 20 years later returned as one of the participants in her 100th birthday Memorial Conference sponsored by W.P. and the Fort Atkinson and Milwaukee Public Libraries. As with niedecker, Clark's rhymes basic metric and rhymes were immediately apparent. The elaborate sonic patterns that echoed, inverted, undercut, syncopated, and simultaneously reinforced and mocked them created a density and complexity of pattern that could (as could Niedecker's short poems) create symphonic effects in small places, suggesting some of the poverty of much verse that runs under a belligerent neo-formalist banner and questions conventions while upholding them. As much as Clark's poems fixed themselves in their own timeless virtues, and as much as Clark had done more experimental work, bp and I found some amusement in watching people who saw us as apostles of the avant-garde so taken with some of Clark's profoundly traditional poems. Despite our amusement, the fact that we both had a profound respect for tradition when it manifested itself without sentimentality, hidden or blatant political or cultural agendas, squeamish nostalgia, and other nonsense, should say something about what it means to be profoundly committed to experiment.

In my edition, I did get to use two of Laurie Clark's drawings and tried to capture some of the proportions of the Clarks' own books, but I did allow some of this to be sacrificed to economy and expediency - and to my own sense of how an American reader might respond to an offset edition.

Tom and I had discussed doing another book before his first visit to Milwaukee, and we managed to mention this while he was here. We resumed the discussion some time after he returned to Britain. What I wanted to do was to combine two of the Clarks' books, Proverbs of the Meadow and b>Proverbs of the Mountain in one edition which could be more widely distributed than the originals. The two books of proverbs featured work by both Clarks on an essentially equal footing. Neither text or graphics came across as much by themselves. Together, though they retained their succinctness, they became complex and even commanding. Tom's proverbs work through pairs, usually presented as couplets, though occasionally lineated in such a way as to accentuate auxiliary pairs within the main the primary duality. Although they drew on and carried the tone of folk aphorisms and gnomic utterances, they seemed to amplify characteristics of the dualism in Vagrant Definitions, this time combining gentle and temperate wisdom with couplets that could be read as slogans, oracles, perhaps even commandments. Laurie's drawings continued their graceful delicacy, but also asserted themselves with a boldness which could be missed easily enough by an inattentive viewer. In our correspondence about the book, Tom mentioned so much of the European tradition in philosophy as to confirm that I was not simply projecting my own preoccupations onto work that would not bear them up. I made jokes about the sonics of the book suggesting how Mahler might compose settings for haiku.

The book I saw shaping up before me on the simplest level came across as a combination of "illustrations" and poems in as close a harmony as such a conjunction could achieve. On closer examination, the reader should see that the combination of text and graphic pushed past the usual limits of both, presenting a kind of visual poetry coming from traditional sources that bypassed concrete entirely. The book could make a nice gift for a birthday or for Christmas for just about any audience, but more attentive readers could find a relative of the illuminated books of William Blake.

In setting up the body of the book, one of the main graphic concerns involved the positioning of the text in relation to the drawings - usually paying particular attention to the decision to place the lines together as a unit or to insert the image between them. I extended the negative space in the Clarks' own productions to give it added emphasis. In Vagrant Definitions, I left the back cover blank as an allusion to the Clarks' custom of printing only one side of each leaf of their books. I did the same with the cover of Proverbs, but also left the reverse side of each page unprinted, and, as usual with visual poetry, made the front cover as plain and as close to neutral as possible.

I finished the book during a return to Milwaukee during the period when I was living primarily in Richmond. The Clarks never responded to the book, though they have occasionally sent greetings via other people without mentioning it. I don't have any idea what this means. It could be that they are not happy with it. It could mean that their quiet and modest manners kept them from doing something close to talking about themselves. there may be other possibilities, including some I haven't thought of. The books remain strange to me. They're tangible enough. Their authors, however, have become almost unreal to me. Perhaps there's a Celtic tradition behind that.