Acie Clark Finds Poetry in
Everything and Anything
Striving to make honest poems, even if they’re not true
FAWC fellow Acie Clark, standing with one foot on solid ground and the other on thin ice, says he’s always dealt with “in-between-ness.” Photo: Emily Schiffer
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 In one of his unpublished poems, “I Kept Myself in the Field One Day,” a line acts as a reminder of that idea: “What about purposelessness?”
– Dorothea Samaha
To read the full article in The Provincetown Independent, visit here.
