BIRD: A Solo Poet Shares the Path from Her First Word to the Moon and Stars

By Melanie P. Moore

Marisa P. Clark’s poetry collection, BIRD, published by Unicorn Press, is a walk through the world with an astute observer and fascinating thinker who is unafraid to feel every single thing that comes her way.

Of the collection, writer Lori Ostlund said, “BIRD…is … a book about the queer body, loneliness and desire, nature as solace, nature as violence. … Clark writes poignantly of birds she has buried that become poems taking flight.”

“A great deal of what I write is going to come from me walking in the world,” Clark said recently. “A lot of the world I walk in is within my home and outside my home, things I encounter. I don’t need to go ‘into nature’ because [nature’s] everywhere. It finds me. That’s one of the book’s driving themes.”

Clark, a poet and writer, has taught creative writing at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque for 25 years.

“A former graduate student told me last fall that I write about dead birds all the time,” she said. “They had heard me read a lot of dead bird poems. Almost every dead bird I’ve found has gotten at least a draft. There’s something inside me that wants to give that creature its story and articulate its intersection with my life.”

The cover art is an image of a piece that hangs in Clark’s living room, The Protector, a giclée (number 13 of 250), by Carol LaRoche. Clark purchased it from LaRoche’s studio on Canyon Road in Santa Fe.

“I didn’t think of it as the cover until I got the acceptance from Unicorn Press,” Clark said. “I feel like it’s the perfect cover. LaRoche is famous for her wolves. The Protector is a wolf holding a bird. I share a house with three parrots and two dogs, who seem to be equivalent or at least adjacent animals.”

Each of the books is hand sewn, which Clark says, “feels good in my hand. Different from other paperbacks. It moves and feels alive in my hands but not coming apart in the way that non-hand-sewn paperbacks do. The publisher took the time to piece this together very carefully.”

Piecing the physical book together carefully, full of care, seems fitting for a poet who has pieced together poems that feel alive in the reader’s hands. Clark wanted the publisher to write more about the book-making process, but the publisher insisted the spotlight should be on her work.

“Working with Unicorn Press has been a lovely process,” Clark said. “It’s a really small press, but I’ve had a good experience.”

The Table of Contents reads almost like a poem with titles that sound like memorable lines, such as “The Bed Where I Lost My Virginity Was a Queen,” “Over Coffee on a Late December Morning, My Mother Reminisces Again,” and “The Wildness of Peaceful Things.” With an apparent nod to a sestina or villanelle, one title is repeated in each section, but, unlike a sestina or villanelle, there is no pattern to where the repeated title appears. Some of the titles, and their poems, are entertainingly impish, like “Pants: An Autobiography.” The collection closes with two of the most compelling poems, which, read aloud, are transformative.

Of the collection’s structure, Clark said, “I felt like the four parts had to work together but they had to do different work. I see the ‘First Word’ section introducing major themes that the book later develops. I liked the idea of starting with a poem called ‘Middle Age,’ when I’m starting to look back on formative memories.

“The second section, ‘The Fate of the Dove,’ I see as often being about the speaker as a witness to difficult things or as someone who sometimes has difficult things enacted upon her.

“In the third section, ‘Hawk / Shadow,’ the speaker starts taking ownership and agency over things, and not always doing it in a kind way. There’s sometimes some harshness within the self there. 

“The last section, ‘Moonlight / Starlight,’ is trying to resolve some of the themes that have come up. Not to put a bow on anything, but to show some movement away from this kind of—… I think depression’s a fair word, but deep sadness for sure. The speaker is coming out of it, coming into some acceptance.”

Asked if the end is about hope, she gave a qualified answer.

“Realistic hope, yes,” Clark said. “Meaning, not everything is hopeful. The last line, about the star coming into the sky and starting to flicker faintly, that is hope but it’s faint.

“There are also a few poems [in the collection] about how children are treated. Certainly the speaker experienced some harshness growing up and then bears witness to abusiveness, as in the poem ‘Chew on This,’ with a little boy. The poem ‘Moonlight Is Starlight’ is a prayer for children to be recognized as the little worlds that they are.”

Raised Catholic on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Clark spoke about spiritual threads in this collection.

“Spirituality, within the book, doesn’t appear in terms of organized religion, though some of the poems touch on that. And in some of the writing I’m doing now, I’m starting to take on my early experiences with Catholicism. In BIRD, it seems like explicit references to religion have to do with my mother attending mass.” Of the poem “Ash Wednesday,” Clark shared that each year on Ash Wednesday, when ministers and preachers appear on UNM’s campus, she always stops for a blessing.

“Just in case,” she said. “Because it can’t hurt, right? That day [of the ‘Ash Wednesday’ poem] happened very much that way. I was going through raw heartbreak at the time. It’s a raw poem. Maybe the blessing I needed was not to be reminded of dying but of having a path to walk on earth. I don’t know. That might have been what I was looking for that day.

“Some of the poems touch on spirituality as religion,” she said. “But I think spirituality appears more where there is connection. Often there’s connection with nature. For whatever reason these past few years, I have had a lot of dead animals, specifically birds, put in my path, and I feel I can’t just leave them there. There is some call in me to not leave the bird there to be run over or trampled, but to be moved and be put where it can rest and nurture the earth. At some level that is a spiritual calling, so that is what’s happening in these poems.

“A couple of poems take on institutions, like marriage—especially marriage for queer people, or what family is supposed to look like institutionally. The poems turn those ideas on their heads. And for me, there’s a suggestion of spirituality in that too. Rather than giving in to what’s being force-fed from outside, some of us find love and familial bonds in other ways—within our solitary selves, within friendship, within our relationships with pets.

“The speaker [in the poems] who so often feels solitary, on this solitary jaunt through the world, also has had a lot of connection,” she said. “Poems like ‘Christmas, with Fruits’ and ‘Last Call at Trackside Tavern’ are about friendship. Other poems look at communion with pets, for example. I hope that others find connection similarly.

“I see spirituality in making community of things,” Clark said. “When the book got picked up, I thought, ‘Wow there are a lot of poems in here about being alone.’ Sometimes that’s good, being a solo person in the world, and sometimes it’s a burden. Then, as I was putting the thank-you’s together in the back, I saw that this person who wrote [these poems] is not alone in this world at all. I have so much to be grateful for.”

You can purchase the book from Unicorn Press here. Clark has done readings in Albuquerque, among other locations. Future dates and locations for her readings will be shared here as they become available.