Jeanne E. Clark's Ohio Blue Tips

Very rarely do I get surprised by a literary experience. I am jaded. If I do get surprised, it is usually because I am unpleasantly surprised. That is why it is so nice to report on Jeanne E. Clark’s Ohio Blue Tips. Not only was I pleasantly surprised once, I was pleasantly surprised twice.

My first surprise was during her reading at California State University, Sacramento. I had no expectations. I went because Josh McKinney invited her and also because I had a common point of interest, namely, we were both primarily raised in Ohio. Her reading exhibited some beautifully crafted poems and some highly eroticized imagery. She read many poems from Ohio Blue Tips and some new poems. She also read a poem by poet Tim Seibles (on Cleveland Sate University Press) entitled "First Kiss" that was a tour de force. On the strength of what she read that night, I bought the book.

The second pleasant surprise was reading the book. It was a winner of the 1997 University of Akron poetry prize. I am always a little dubious of lauded "prize" books. So many turn out to be duds. I started the book and immediately realized that most of the poems were even better on the page than read aloud. The dense imagery was able to soak in even more. I didn’t experience "style fatigue" as is the case with many first collections. There were catalog poems, narratives, character sketches, short impressionistic pieces, etc. All of these were wrapped up in one of the most intoxicatingly arranged manuscripts I’ve ever read. Come for the poems; stay for how they are laid out in this book.

In Ohio Blue Tips Jeanne E. Clark wends her way through a collection of poems that transform Ohio into a rich wonderland full of dangerous erotic pleasure the likes of which I never saw as I was growing up there. The book is formally constructed in three parts, but these three parts do not belie a simple structural strategy. The book vaguely traces the course of the sexual adventures and yearnings of a woman. Probably this is Jeanne E., but only one reference to a "Jeanne E." (as "NeeGee" spelled backward) appears in the book. Later on the reader infers that this character is probably the same as the Quinn Margaret character who presides over the second section. In the third section Quinn Margaret is married and enduring the doldrums of married life as she is haunted by a domineering mother that she can’t quite shake off. [Perhaps my desire to equate Jeanne E. with Quinn Margaret derives from the knowledge gained during the reading that she really did teach in the prisons in Ohio and that she really was prevented from teaching one day because she was thought to be too high value of a target for kidnapping.]

Two main fictional characters (Joe Silver—it was Joe Spinner in an earlier incarnation during publication in Weber Studies—and Quinn Margaret) are interwoven throughout the poems in the book. Joe Silver is a character about which all information is inferred. He could be described as a mentally-deficient prisoner, and someone who is doggedly pursuing a female speaker in the book (mostly in the first section of the book) to the point of near self-destruction. The female he is pursuing is submitting to the pursuit, but Joe Silver eventually ends up compromised on a Marlowe bed, a device used to restrain prisoners, his “bread-dough belly breathing hard.”

The female character he doggedly pursues is seemingly Quinn Margaret and sometimes the first person "I," whom the reader surmises is probably Quinn Margaret because the same events overlap in the poems that use Quinn Margaret as the central figure and ones that use the first person I as the central figure. Bits of Quinn Margaret's poems interlock with poems that employ the "I" so that the image that begins to appear upon these interlocking puzzle pieces is the image of a single character. The overall effect is the accretion of narrative bits that link together—some pieces moving forward, other pieces looking back. Often times the narrative sweep is punctuated by short, meditative impressions.

So one puts together the following formula: Quinn Margaret is probably based on Jeanne E; Quinn Margaret is synonomous with the first person "I." Jeanne E., the author, is written on top of, a palimpsest of the first person "I." The end result is that the author is speaking to the reader through the guise of an invoked character that is seemingly her self. This ingenious bit of narrative witchcraft is disorienting at times, but as all of this comes together through many scenes of unspoken passion, it spells out the life of a child of Eros in Ohio.

For sure, Ohio becomes the third main character in the book. The culminating poem provides some sense of this.

That Summer, Joe and Prison

1

Ohio, with its steel-toed boots,
Heels worn away on the outside.
Those boots are shackled
Like a chain of Coniber traps;
Ankles, the twice-sprung necks of muskrat.
Gray day workclothes hang
From window bars by a rope.
Ohio, an inmate’s sucker-punched face,
Peony face, swollen
And latticed with ants,
Its broken nose bleeding from one side.
Ohio’s wrists are leashed
By leather, its puppet hands
Playing to a full house. Wooden heads
Jerking off on a day-hall rug.

Ohio then, with its petticoat sail
Skirting the lake. Bare-breasted,
Bikini top whipping a mast,
Its tin bucket full
Of bluegills dropped back.
Ohio on holiday,
Tongue licking colored ice,
A thin-wristed lover,
Sunburned and sleeping,
Its fingers, a ribboned ponytail
Twisting down the back,
Fingers that loose a rope from the pier.
Ohio, a four-pointed star
Spread out under moonlight,
Its pretty ankles
Dipping the green water.

2

Ohio, wrist under the hand of Michigan,
Riot gear stacked in the hallways,
The Man figures my worth
As a hostage: young, white teacher—
Single female with child. I’m worth too much.
He sends me home for the weekend.
Johnny Crusoe sends each pitch
Home, over the wall. Crash Redell
Glides his facethrough plate glass.
The Man cancels passes, fishing.
And you, slamming a ball down the alley,
Break the pinsetter’s leg at the knee.

Bluegills in a tin bucket,
And the man I’ve invited from New York
Dangles his chicken-bone wrist
Over the side of the boat. I float on my back,
Casting into night: boathouse dinner,
Then the moon, shiver of glass,
Spreads out on the deck.

The Man called you Fat-Boy-in-Trouble, Joe,
Strapped you four ways down to a Marlowe bed,
Bread-dough belly breathing hard,
Rising naked and fast in 102 degrees,
Six-by-eight room. You called for water.
And sometime before morning,
The man from New York pissed
From the side of the boat. It was summer,
And laughing and no good. The trouble, Joe,
Falling back and away from me.

Here we have the perspective of the first person "I" looking back on the events that are presented in the first part of the book. The emphasis on Ohio in the first section suggests that the distant perspective attained by Quinn Margaret/I is seen through an Ohio prism. It was the place where odd magic happened. The way Ohio is repeated it seems almost like an incantation designed to ward off evil spirits.

Quinn Margaret is the focus of the book. She is somewhat of an oddball female character that doesn’t seem to fit into the family portrait. Her interests and passions are diverse and unconventional. The composite female character of Quinn/I encounters a mother that is self-righteous and a sister who is naive but endowed with a physical presence that tends to be noticed. In the third "marriage" section she is a woman who has moved beyond her family's judgments only to have them resurface in her overly-defining-of-the-self marriage. Quinn Maragaret clearly struggles with notions of propriety. A bit of danger always seems to be lurking, usually near water like where one might find the Sirens. The Quinn/I character moves through her erotic passions, some conventional, some not for the timid (as a male I kept hoping that someone would grant me permission to write about similar topics, such as my lusts and transgressive erections). There are scenes with prisoners and women [Aside: what has she saved for the next book? animals and furniture?]. If blood doesn’t start flowing to uncharted regions of your body while you read this book, you just might be dead.

The following is another vivid example of the visceral nature of so many pieces in this book.

Almanac

Back then, I knew what I liked:
Tomatoes huddled in hothouses,
The fat, splitting red
Faces of German gardeners.
The Loeschers
Sold the hothouses to the bank.
Bill Loescher, the grandson, the heir,
The first boy in our school
To drink coffee and eat shrimp in a restaurant.
The first boy. Back then,
Hawthorns and marigolds
Grew on Sugar Street.
Blisters bubbled the bottoms of my feet.
The pool swam against them,
Sandpaper on soft wood.
I liked the bleeding,
Rubbing my raw toes against
The also-raw toes of my favorite boy—
Cousin Brian—
Not the one everyone thought.
I liked that my desire was secret:
A criminal’s herb
Fundamental and growing,
The bone twitch in a girl’s hip,
Summer squash that in one day
Outgrows the garden
But not summer—
Big, but not the whole season.
Back then, I liked calves,
Young cows and the legs
On a left-handed girl.
They stood upright and strong.
I liked sweat,
Its coral vine
Trails along my baked skin.
I liked that Wednesday was the hungriest
Day in the middle
Of abandon and houseflies.
I liked a thunderstorm’s electric dirt,
the way it started the dog.
Back then, I liked
That sometimes penniless sky.

This piece is from section two. It is one of the poems that looks back on childhood from the vantage point of a young woman, not quite the mature woman the reader encounters in section three. What strikes me is the rapacious hunger present in the quality of seeing in this poem. Heat and a kind of throbbing rawness make their way to the surface. These two qualities, especially the heat (as intimated by the title of the book), are consistent metaphors throughout.

The heat of desire is always lurking in the shallows. In the following poem, Clark conflates this heat with the common practice of luring snails to their death. The erotic merges with the grotesque in a manner that thrills.

The Eccentric Beauty (excerpt)

I collect snails
At night,
Set out grapefruits,
Half-moon traps
Hollowed out.
The snails
Are gray lips
Over these breasts.
They push small circles
Of brown earth.
By morning,
the fruit is full
With their bodies.

Somehow, reading this kind of passage makes it easier to imagine what freak show artists do to each other when they are aroused in their circus trailers.

After all, firing the imagination of the reader is the heaviest lifting that poetry can do. All else is but good stewardship on the part of the poet. I suspect Jeanne E. Clark is an excellent steward of her senses. When she recognizes what stimulates her senses, this provides a grade for the path she takes to the reader’s imagination. There could be other kinds of beauty besides the rough and sumptuous kind presented here in Ohio Blue Tips, but those other kinds of beauty don’t get touched as often. And she is a poet who is very generous to her memories, memories that might make others flinch at their slightest recall.