James Wesley Clark

James Wesley Clark

James Wesley Clark left this world January 28, 2021, in Arnold, Maryland, where he was being treated for complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He was a poet, journalist, bookseller and collector, chef, and family historian. He was also long known and loved for...
Afloat

Afloat

One of our dear editors died in his sleep January 27. J. Wesley Clark published some 400 poems in a writing career that began in El Paso and Mexico City as a stringer for the wire services in the early 1960s. Prior to that, he served with the 82nd Airborne as a...

Wanted!

I’d cross any river if a poem or a story were on the other side, and that’s one reason I lobbied to become an editor for Free State Review in 2011, and eventually the book acquisitions editor for its publisher, Galileo Press. Being an editor lets me walk...

Where Have All the Demons Gone?

The trouble with poets is that we don’t have any urban myths. No story of the mad sonneteer with hooks for hands sneaking around Lovers Lane. No legend of the cannibal food poet who ate his extended metaphor garnished with his victim’s liver comfit. Try doing a survey...

Breaking Lines

a commentary on craft, by Barrett Warner  My buddy E. J. loves his iambic apartment in Catonsville. “Ten feet to the kitchen, ten feet to the bathroom, ten feet to the living room,” he says, grinning like a baseball in October. It’s the sort of home where everything...