The writer’s jump start

 Lydia Davis discusses John Ashbery’s notion of the poetic jump start in an article in Harper’s.

Davis’s article is about why writers write, and she says some intriguing things about why she writes. But her remarks on Ashbery’s notion of needing an occasional jump start stole the show for me.

Ashbery had poets he turned to when his batteries were low. These poets were not necessarily major influences on his work. They were helpful because Ashbery could see what each was trying to do. He could see how each had tried to achieve his or her aims. When Ashbery looked at what each of these poets had done, he found it easier to get back to his own work.

That’s the poetic jump start. Is there something similar for those of us who don’t write poetry?

Here are a few examples of stories and books that interest me:

• Guy Davenport and Bernard Malamud wrote some stories about historical characters. The stories are so deeply researched it’s hard to tell where fact ends and fiction begins. Davenport’s story “John Charles Tapner” is an astonishing example.

• Montaigne’s Essays are an attempt by one writer to figure out what he really thought about things. It was an investigation into what was on his mind.

• Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer is an example of what can happen if a writer doggedly investigates a question that interests him. Hoffer started with the question of how mass movements begin. He kept researching as new questions arose. Hoffer would have been fascinated by the mass movements that are undermining this country today.

• The Rev. Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne is an example of a book about a place. Many other writers — including Nan Shepherd, Aldo Leopold, David George Haskell, Ronald Blythe, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin — have written books about places that I admire.

I could go on. But the point is that when I have an idea that interests me, it sometimes helps to have a model.

I’ve heard musicians say that they listen to music, not looking for something to imitate, but looking for something they might want to sample or riff on. It’s a similar idea.

The moral of the story: When you find kindred spirits, keep up with their work.

• Source: Lydia Davis, “Demanding Pleasures: On the art of observation”; Harper’s, July 2025. It’s here:

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/07/demanding-pleasures-lydia-davis-observation/

‘The technique by which the god is sought’

 The phrase is Nan Shepherd’s. Since it makes sense to me, I suppose I’m a theist in some way I don’t understand.

My problem is this: I make it a practice to walk in natural places. I walked through the pine forests of East Texas, along the marshes of Galveston Island and beside the creeks of the Hill Country. When we moved to Georgia, I got settled by getting into the woods, rather than joining the Newcomer’s Club.

Recently, I found myself recommending walks through the woods to a friend. As I was talking, it struck me that I really do believe this: Walking in the woods or in a marsh or in a desert is healing, although I don’t understand how that could be.

I know exercise is good for you. I know that seeing beautiful plants and wildlife can lift your mood. But that’s not what I was talking about when I recommended a walk through the forest to my friend. It wasn’t what Nan Shepherd was after in her countless treks through the Cairngorms. Here’s what she said:

 

I believe that I now understand in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on pilgrimages to a mountain. The journey is itself part of the technique by which the god is sought. It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own.

 

• Source: Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain; New York: Scribner, 2025, p. 108.

Thinking ahead to the 250th

 It appears we are going ahead with plans for the 250^th anniversary of the country, despite the campaign to undermine the country itself.

Perhaps in planning next year’s celebrations we could use a quotation from H.L. Mencken as our motto:

 

Liberty, if it means anything at all, means that body of rights which the citizen reserves to himself, even as against the government. … Thus a conflict is set up between the rights of the citizen and the power and security of the government. In so far as the citizen prevails the government is weak, and in so far as the government prevails the citizen is not a citizen at all, but a subject.

 

The powers claimed by the current occupant of the White House reduce citizens to something less.

• Source: The quotation is from an article H.L. Mencken wrote for The Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1926. I found it mentioned in notes in Library of America’s “Story of the Week.”

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/09/nature-of-liberty.html

Failure to grieve

 Elise Boulding, a sociologist and Quaker activist, got her finger on the country’s central problem: a “failure to grieve over its shortcomings.”

It’s a country that exterminated the indigenous people and stole the land; kidnapped and enslaved Africans because it wanted an exploitable source of labor; asked people of Japanese descent to fight in World War II while imprisoning their families in camps. The list of shortcomings is long — if you pay attention. Boulding is right that most Americans simply don’t.

It’s the Fourth of July, and instead of a celebratory day, I’m thinking of a somber day, a day to grieve over failures. I think, given the circumstances, that’s the place to start.

A few things about Thomas A. Clark

 Gavin Goodwin, who teaches at Aberystwyth University in Wales, says the poetry of Thomas A. Clark is similar to the work of Objectivist poets such as Charles Reznikoff and Lorine Niedecker.

I’ve mentioned Reznikoff and Niedecker many times. Goodwin’s observations helped me think about the things I like about Clark and his poetry. Here’s the short list:

• Clark’s poems have sharp images drawn from the natural world and often appear as fragments. Each fragment is the recording of an image — something like a snapshot. Clark’s longer poems are collections of these short items.

• Clark goes his own way. He left school at 15 and supported himself by working at unskilled jobs in factories and warehouses. He’s self-educated.

• Clark came to literature through music. From popular music he discovered jazz and jazz lovers. He read Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and started writing.

• Clark is interested in getting poetry outside of its traditional channels. In 1973, Clark and his wife, Laurie, a visual artist, founded Moschatel Press. They publish short poems with illustrations on cards and in booklets. They’ve printed some poems on kites and bags.

• Clark’s poems sometimes are reflections, rather than an image. The reflections work with the images. For example, Clark often walks through the landscape, and his poetry is full of images of stone, water, snow, lichens. Occasionally, you get a line that suggests why he keeps walking:

 

Attention to detail revives the sense of scale.

 

That short poem, untitled, was written in 2016.

• Source: Gavin Goodwin, “Beyond the Page: The formal possibilities of Thomas A. Clark”; Writing in Practice, 5 (2019). The article is on the site of the National Association of Writers in Education:

https://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/wip-editions/articles/beyond-the-page-the-formal-possibilities-of-thomas-a.-clark.html

‘In Praise of Walking’

 I do not know the poet Thomas A. Clark of Pittenweem, Scotland. But if I met him, I think I’d like him. People with shared sensibilities find it easy to get along.

He’s a walker and thinks walkers’ thoughts. His poem “In Praise of Walking” is a series of 40 items: propositions, aphorisms, adages, and a rhetorical question.

The answer to the question that ends the poem is: No, there’s nothing better than to be outside. 

I like Clark and his poems because I can respond to his interests in a way that I can’t to those of other poets. I love to walk in natural places. I get the sense he does too.

I once was chastised by a fan of Samuel Johnson’s who thought I failed to appreciate the great man’s gifts as an observer of nature. That might be true, but even when Johnson was enjoying the wilds of Scotland, he seemed to be a man who wanted to get back to London. Or so it seemed to me.

Clark does not seem that way. Here are items No. 3 and 4 of his poem:

 

That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.

 

Walking is the human way of getting about.

 

And this congregation of one replies: Amen.

• Source: Thomas A. Clark’s site is here:

https://thomasaclarkblog.blogspot.com

Clark: ‘Poor Poetry’

 Thomas A. Clark imagines a common or poor poetry: 

a poetry without glory, using plain diction, withdrawn

from ambition, lacking in rhetorical skill, a spare poetry,

not given by the culture but passed from hand to hand.

 

The Scottish Poetry Library says Clark’s poetry pays attention “to the experience of walking in landscape,” which is why I tracked him down.

I’d like to think this kind of poetry is possible: the kind that’s passed down hand to hand, with the noise that dominates the culture not having much to do with it.

• Thomas A. Clark’s “Poor Poetry” is available at the Scottish Poetry Library:

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/poor-poetry/