arts encore
‘Necessary Clearings’
Writer transforms life changes into poetry by
Margaret DeRitter
J
ennifer Clark can’t remember a time when she wasn’t interested in writing. When she was 11, she wrote a joke book and tried to get it published. When she was in high school at Hackett Catholic Central, she was certain she’d be a published author by 18. She didn’t reach her goal by that age, but now 49, she certainly has been published, prolific and versatile. Her poems, short stories and memoir pieces have appeared in journals, anthologies and newspapers, many in the past five years. One story — “Tendencies,” about a woman who becomes magnetized — won an Editor’s Choice Award from Fiction Fix last year, and she had a poem nominated this year for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award. Clark also had a play presented at the U.S. National Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect in 1993. And this summer she had her first book published, the poetry collection Necessary Clearings (Shabda Press). She’s excited, but it also “feels a little scary,” she says, “to see the poems all together in one collection and know that people I know will read it.” While Clark’s fiction tends toward magical realism, her poetry speaks more to her own experiences. Clark wrote the poems in Necessary Clearings over the course of six years, starting in 2005. She sees loss as a key theme and says the collection provides “an opportunity to pause and reflect on loss and to unshelter from the myth that everything stays the same, because nothing does.” While loss is a necessary part of life, it’s not without an upside, she adds. “It’s a clearing, this opportunity for something else to be there” — hence the title of her book and the cover art, a spoon turning into a swan.
32 | Encore SEPTEMBER 2014
Jennifer Clark’s poetry collection Necessary Clearings was released in August by Shabda Press and is her first published book.
A key inspiration was becoming a mother, says Clark, who dedicated the collection to her 9-year-old son, Tom. “Parenthood gave me a deeper sense of loss and what loss means. You think you figure things out with your kids, and then they change.” Her poem “Even Heaven Will Not Be Like This” captures a snowy Sunday morning with her son’s small body snuggled into hers. “Will you come to me / when you are grown / and rest upon my lap?” she asks her son. “Yes mamma,” he replies. The poem ends with this: “Upstairs, a bed creaks, your father rises, / soon you will run to him. Coldness will / rush in to claim your spot. / Even this moment / is ending.”
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