Acie Clark is interested in small talk. Most of the time, he says, people refer to it dismissively. But he finds meaning in life’s mundane moments. “So much of our lives is small talk,” says Clark. It’s the moments we all share — grocery shopping, driving, petting dogs, and taking walks — that he says are “just as worthy of poetry as the big stuff.”
At Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, where he is a writing fellow, Clark makes himself sit down somewhere and write once a day. “It doesn’t have to be important,” he says. “In fact, it’s usually more interesting when it’s not.” In one of his unpublished poems, “I Kept Myself in the Field One Day,” a line acts as a reminder of that idea: “What about purposelessness?”
In another unpublished piece, a prose poem called “The Liminal Point,” Clark writes, “Words become poems somehow, sometimes, eventually. I once thought being a poet meant I had to know how to name this difference. At some point I became someone who thought differently.”
Clark has just finished a first draft of his first poetry collection, titled Small Talk. It’s structured like a conversation, he says. The poems repeat themselves and gradually build, as small talk will when two people get to know each other better.
“At first, small talk is ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘What’s the weather?’ ” says Clark. But it can be other things, he adds. “What is small talk between a mother and son?”
The standard small-talk question — “Where are you from?” — has always been a difficult one for Clark. He says the geography of his upbringing always feels like a list: Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Michigan. He’s “a little bit Midwestern and a little bit Southern and a little bit somewhere else.” If he has to name the place he was raised, he says Jacksonville, Fla. But if he’s asked where he’s from, he’s more likely to say Rome, Ga.: a town near the Alabama border where his grandmother and father live, and a place he’s returned to all his life.
Geologically, Clark grew up on a brackish river: half salt water and half fresh water. “There’s a lot of in-between-ness,” he says. He feels this as a writer, too: “I was never interested in poetry or fiction,” he says. “I was just interested in stories.”
In the South, says Clark, “We love a hyperbole.” The people around him were storytellers, also interested in the freedom of the in-between. “I watched them tell the same story over and over again, and as they told it the facts would change,” he says. “It got less real and more true, or maybe less true and more real.”
These days, Clark says, he’s been considering the idea of truth. He’s teaching a Winter Wednesdays class called “Telling Your Story Your Way: Creative Nonfiction.” He says students have asked him, “If I don’t remember exactly what someone said, am I lying?” Clark’s response has been a question: “Are you being honest?” Truth is hard to define, he says, “But I think we know when we’re not being honest. Truth is abstract. Honesty is intention.”
His philosophy is still developing, he admits. For now, Clark says, “I don’t think poems are loyal to truth, but I think they’re loyal to a kind of honesty.”
After Clark drafts a poem by hand, he types it and prints it out. He attaches it to the wall and views it from a distance. “Let them keep you company,” he says. Given careful attention and enough time, he says, what’s dishonest will usually reveal itself.
Clark’s writing, though often purposely opaque, is startlingly tangible. It is seen and felt: when he writes of dusk, dusk seems to settle around the reader in its hushed hues; when he writes of wind and winter, the reader shivers from the chill.
Much of Clark’s poetry has to do with the body: hands, eyes, skin. As a transgender man, he says his work is undoubtedly for trans and queer people. But it’s also for everyone else — especially “people who are trying to understand what it means to question the language they were given to think about themselves.” Almost all of his work begins as a sonnet, says Clark — a form he loves for its principle of change. “By the end,” he says, “something will shift.”
With the first draft of Small Talk complete, Clark has begun work on a new collection set in northern Alabama, about tenant farmers. “I dream about the South all the time,” he says. Growing up, he didn’t know another queer person until he was 17. But home is home. Here in Provincetown, far removed from the warmth of home, Clark says people often ask him, “Aren’t you glad to be out of the South?” His answer: “No, I miss it terribly. Sometimes, we can love a place more from afar.”
Clark grew up Christian. “Some of my earliest understanding of poetry came from reading Scripture,” he says. As a kid at church in Jacksonville, he would listen to the rhythm of many voices reciting words in unison. He fell in love, he says, with the sharedness of it all: the space, the breath, the sound. He didn’t start writing poetry until he was halfway through high school at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville. By that time, he says, “I felt like it was something I already knew how to do.”
Clark received his M.F.A. from the University of Alabama, where he was an editor of Black Warrior Review, a literary magazine. Now he’s an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas. He lives in Conway, Ark., which he calls “the South of the Midwest; the Midwest of the South.”
In Provincetown, Clark drafts by hand in a notebook he carries around. He lets his eyes wander to the sand or the window or the weather. Often, he gazes at his dog, Russell, an “Alabama red dog,” a mutt, Clark says is “my roommate, my son, my second heartbeat.”
“I’m interested in what we give our attention to,” says Clark. During long walks on the beach, he notices the dead birds lying on the sand — probably victims of the avian flu.
“It’s a sad thing,” he says. “But there’s a part of it that’s like, ‘Well, this might be the only time I’ll ever see this animal so close.’ ” He examines the feathers and the beak.
“Beauty is funny,” he says. “I think it can be anything.”
