Kevin Clark Poetry
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“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”

—David Hare

“A work of art is never completed, merely abandoned.”

—Paul Valery

“Poetry is a dream dreamed in the presence of reason.”

—Tommaso Ceva

“The art of running the mile consists, in essence, of reaching the threshold of consciousness at the instant of breasting the tape.”

—Paul O’Neil

“For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I already knew.”

—Robert Frost

“I like restraint—if doesn’t go too far.”

—Mae West

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

—Mark Twain

“In the midst of our happiness we were very pleased.”

—Gertrude Stein

“Keep your eye clear and hit ’em where they ain’t.”

—Wee Willie Keeler

“Poetry begins where certitude ends.”

—Eavan Boland

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”

—Satchell Page

“There is only one plot: Things are not what they seem.”

—Jim Thompson

“Let’s play two.”

—Ernie Banks

Self-Portrait with Expletives

Self-Portrait with Expletives Book Cover

Winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Book Competition

Published by Pleiades Press
Distributed by LSU Press
Buy at Amazon Buy at Publisher

Praise for Self-Portrait with Expletives

I swear Kevin Clark’s Self-Portrait with Expletives is the book I’ve been waiting to read—the book in which the past and present are not strangers, but lovers. Clark’s ecstatic poems time-travel with alacrity on their quest for transformation and song. Intimate, hilarious, attentive, political, Self-Portrait with Expletives is a mature, commanding book by a poet confident in his craft. It’s also a book with a wide and wonderful boyish grin.

—Denise Duhamel

From these pages flows a warm and breathy voice that sings up the Tuscan countryside but also traffics in the quiddities of hardscrabble Americana: beers drunk, cars wrecked, guns fired, songs sung, lovers kissed and missed. It’s as though there’s nothing this voice can’t say; it’s personal, provocative.

—David Kirby

Kevin Clark’s astonishing coming of age stories—in his superb new collection, Self-Portrait with Expletives—seduce us by being consistently brilliant and hilarious, heart-breaking and invigorating. The Sixties and Seventies haven’t been this much fun or nearly so troubling since, well, way back then. These portraits of the self slowly emerging into the complex world of shifting historical times, and the impeccably staged narratives charting the speaker’s own passage into adulthood and mature love, become powerful testaments to what personal freedom can truly come to mean.

—David St. John

Moving seamlessly between the sixties-to-mid-seventies and the present, between a sensuously lived life and a deep sense of mortality, Kevin Clark’s poems perform the magic his passion dictates and his intelligence won’t quite allow: an “open / closure, the kind that improvs it own end- / lessness.” Lush with detail, rich with wisdom, filled with unforgettable people, and held together with masterful syntax, these poems raise narrative poetry to a breathtaking new level of pleasure.

—Martha Collins

Sample Poems

Flashback at Castelfranco
This, Then
Eight Hours in the Nixon Era

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