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Postmodernist writer Joshua Clover comes to UA

Award-winning poet to read his works tomorrow night

Poet Joshua Clover says he likes to play around, and he is going to show an audience exactly why tomorrow at a poetry reading hosted by the UA Poetry Center.

"For me, playing around is the act of engagement of the mind with the world," said Clover, an assistant professor of English at Saint Mary's College of California and a senior contributing writer for Spin magazine.

Clover said he does not mean "playing around" in the child-like sense of the word - although that may help the admittedly nervous poet relax his nerves before his reading. He is referring to the role of pop culture references, media and literary images that vitalize his poetry.

"My poetry is filled with quotations, sometimes cited, sometimes not," Clover said.

Clover's poetry - collected in a 1997 volume titled "Madonna anno domini" - quotes diverse texts, ranging from Bob Dylan to Woody Guthrie to T.S. Eliot.

Poetry Center director Jim Paul commented on the eclecticism of Clover's work, saying that it was "full of juxtaposing and full of shifts in tone."

"(Clover's poetry) has a kind of pop quality that I like," Paul said.

Critics often decry the use of sampling former media texts as meaningless playtime, where true meaning is lost when a poet uses media images that may hold no innate connection to the world.

Clover said he disagrees with the claim that artists are only working on the surface of things and not connecting to any real truth.

"Meaning is an oppressive scheme thought up by extremely conservative people," he said.

He dismissed the idea that meaning is something fixed, something that people may know with certainty.

He also quoted Bob Dylan, who said, "To live outside the law, you must be honest."

Clover said he believed Dylan was referring to people's innate sense of themselves outside media, political and religious constructs - using the example of the Ten Commandments and saying people would still have an innate sense of morality without them.

"My poetry is a call for people to be actively engaged in the world," Clover said. He said he believes it is important that no one "take the self and the world for granted," that "you have to reason through it at every moment."

Clover's poetry is generally classified as experimental, which comes from being a postmodernist poet - a generally vague grouping.

He addresses typical postmodern themes of the often contradictory nature of the self and of the world. He also notes the excess of information and media images.

Postmodern poets acknowledge that reality is as much of a construct as television, and that humanity has lost a firm sense of itself in deluge of media images.

"That's my sense of life," Clover said. "There is stuff you can know and stuff you can't know, stuff that you are trying to organize as it runs away from you."

Although Clover's poetry is considered experimental - both for its aesthetics and content - his first book won the 1996 Walt Whitman Award, which is generally given to more established writing.

Clover's reaction to winning the award was mixed.

"Obviously, (the Walt Whitman Award) increases your exposure, but there is the related problem in that the Academy is mainstream," he said. "You get identified in the mainstream. I have more in common with the experimental poets."

Clover said his poetry creates "an atmosphere that is filled with information and date, a huge amount of signs" and why he is "not that committed to people getting the references."

Tomorrow, Clover will read poems from his first published volume as well as newer, unpublished works.

The reading is tomorrow at 8 p.m. in the Modern Languages auditorium. Attendance is open and free to the public.