Although Clark Ashton Smith enjoyed a major poetic career, and his versatility extended from cosmic fantasy to ambitious projects of translation, from multilingual poetry (Spanish, French) to miniatures of haiku and delightful evocations of American schoolboyhood, we are inevitably used to thinking of him as the boy prodigy he was, a Mozart in American poetry. Having begun a lifelong engagement with these books, I can only regret that Smith didn't find time to give us a beautifully polished version of all Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil.
But here is Smith as I think of him, in his prodigious adolescence:
Young Klarkash-Ton
(Clark Ashton Smith)
True visionary, penetrant
by sheer force of eyebeam, boy Baroque,
hashish-inspired, toke upon toke,
the voice of the rueful penitent
nowhere in your verse: odd rapture-gleams
may glint up from some graveyard niche
or open tomb, raise up a lich
to “squeak and gibber,” rupture themes
of better-mannered poetry.
What moon-made silver anoints the dead
kisses the rose a sinister red;
she winds her thorns’ she-deviltry
around the grave lip, the blissful tomb.
Seductive, ruthless, cool boy-rogue,
your saucy richness found no vogue.
Yet your numbingly narrow room
by the Auburn shambles couldn’t constrain
you inside a mere “California” talent.
Like Arapaho warriors skewered, chests taloned
aloft in prophecy, hung upon pain,
you flung your soul outward: brilliant scatters!
Retrieved it star-hot from the verge.
Heart split by the cosmic hammer-and-wedge,
you wrote yourself whole: we who read may shatter.
