There’s something gratifying about literature in which you find yourself reflected—even more so if it’s both beautiful and a cracking good story. In A Finitude of Skin, the debut book of poetry from St. Louisan Clayton Adam Clark, St. Louis readers will feel grounded, enjoying an extra level of connection with the engaging and evocative work that puts divorce and brain surgery next to karst, bull sharks, and nucleic acid.
The book, which won the Moon City Poetry Award in 2017, is an examination of humanity through the lens of Missouri geography—or is it geography via anatomy, or the humanity of anatomy, or some other permutation? Clark deftly weaves autobiography, research, and place together to tell stories that feel immediate and urgent—to St. Louisans or anyone else.
Raised in Fenton, the south city resident works in public health while volunteering for River Styx magazine. He earned an MFA in poetry from Ohio State, and has had poems published in The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, and Cimarron Review.
Can you tell us a bit about the genesis of this book?
I started writing the book before I got married. I was writing while I was married. My marriage stopped being a marriage—I wrote through that. So I’m writing what’s interesting to me about being married—we’re this ecosystem. What does it mean to stop being an ecosystem? How do you stop these two bodies who’ve been around each other for 10 years? What happens when that ends? How do you stop being a system? What makes systems change? In the instance of that marriage, there’s a third person coming in. It’s a disturbance in the system. That’s why I’m so interested in invasive species. Armadillos in Missouri weren’t here 10 years ago, or not at the prevalence they are now.
Courtesy of Clayton Adam Clark
You use an intriguing device throughout the book, talking about deeply personal life stuff in the context of science and geography. What’s that about?
The best of the best is also the stuff that takes this personal part and lays it against the Missouri geology, the anatomy, all the physical things that interest me a lot. It’s hard not to write sentimentally. You have to have the personal piece or people don’t care. Trying to figure out that blend happened in the course of this. This is what I stumbled upon in grad school—I was analyzing poets who were doing stuff I like. It’s like a braiding. To avoid sentimentality, to avoid the bland, strictly landscape poems—when you mix them together you can find complexity. The intellectual part [is] figuring out "How are these things connected—the armadillo to the end of my marriage, how do they fit together?" Through the writing, what are the connection points, where do they touch, how do they touch?
I’m in public health research and public health communication. I’m in grad school full time for clinical mental health counseling. Conceptually in my head, a lot of my writing is informed by medical language, anatomy language. Research is a huge part of my creative process. I’m taking a family systems class right now, functioning in a systemic view. [It informs] how I think about ecosystems, human systems, couples.
The Missouri Department of Conservation website is a huge resource for me. I go there to learn about what kind of brown bat species are in Missouri, or what kinds of fish are in the Meremac. I’m from here, I’ve lived here most of my life. I was in grad school in Ohio with all these different people—some are from the beach, the desert, the mountains. I’m "just’" from the Midwest. I got over that and started looking more closely at what the landscape is, how to look at it more closely. This was all underwater at one point.
The book sent me to the dictionary a few times, which, as a reader, I love. Other than the Missouri Department of Conservation website, where do you find your vocabulary?
Some of it just comes through the research, learning about what was going on at Elephant Rocks, how that all came about. In reading that, you catch words that catch your interest. This is something my writing teachers taught me, to keep a journal of things you want to write about someday. Words, phrases, ideas, things in the world that I want to write about. They go into a little file on my computer or a little note on my phone. I could be at a concert or a reading, hearing other people reading. I’ll hear things that catch my interests. It’s like a collection, when I set down to write I can go into that and see what are the pieces that seem to fit together. That’s that braiding piece.
You can buy A Finitude of Skin directly from Moon City Press via University of Arkansas Press, or from Amazon.
