What's happening is the language. Not only in the usual sense of being interesting (which it is), but in the new sense that words are events, as real and important in themselves as wars and lovers... It is to the word, then, that the mind moves, and the word responds by taking on a physicality, even a sensuality, we have all been trained to ignore. Words have weight, and the distance between two can be a chasm filled with forces of association... What Clark is doing is genuinely new.
The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such.
Here, for a moment, we are joined.
BEFORE THERE WAS BILLY COLLINS & TED KOOSER, THERE WAS EDGAR GUEST
