Disordered Ideas - Softcover

Clark, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0876856954 ISBN 13: 9780876856956

Publisher: Black Sparrow Press,U.S., 2010

Synopsis

Tom Clark describes himself as an artist “living along the inter-dimensional rift zone of a society caught between its future in the realm of electronic magic and its past in the spell-casting of the caves.” In Disordered Ideas, his poetry is like an exquisitely sensitive seismograph: the needle jumps across the page, making a manic record of every quake, slip, and near-disaster along the postmodern-communications fault line.
He derides the new media, the isolating, enervating “brave new work” we do in front of computer screens, and the death of the personal in the digital age. Indeed, the only digits he has any use for are the five that make up the human hand: he revels in man-made artifacts, especially paintings and stories and poems. His topical verse is satiric and humorous, but when he writes about what he admires—the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich, the renunciations of Rimbaud, the political aphorisms of Brecht, his poems can seize the heart.

About this title

About the Author

Tom Clark was the poetry editor of The Paris Review from 1963 to 1973, one of the prestigious journal's most important decades. He published his own collections of poetry exclusively with Black Sparrow Press. His numerous literary essays and reviews have appeared in publications including The New York Times, London Review of Books, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. He has also published six biographies of twentieth-century literary figures. Clark died in Berkeley, California, in 2018.

Edition details

• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press,U.S.
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0876856954
• ISBN 13: 9780876856956
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 202