The Clerk's Tale

by Spencer Reece, Louise Glück (Foreword by)

Overview

In a recent double fiction issue, The New Yorker devoted the entire back page to a single poem, "The Clerk's Tale," by Spencer Reece. The poet who drew such unusual attention has a surprising background: for many years he has worked for Brooks Brothers, a fact that lends particular nuance to the title of his collection. The Clerk's Tale pays homage not only to Chaucer but to the clerks' brotherhood of service in the mall, where "the light is bright and artificial, / yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral." The fifty poems in The Clerk's Tale are exquisitely restrained, shot through with a longing for permanence, from the quasi-monastic life of two salesmen at Brooks Brothers to the poignant lingering light of a Miami dusk to the weight of geography on an empty Minnesota farm. Gluck describes them as having "an effect I have never quite seen before, half cocktail party, half passion play . . . We do not expect virtuosity as the outward form of soul-making, nor do we associate generosity and humanity with such sophistication of means, such polished intelligence . . . Much life has gone into the making of this art, much patient craft."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544310247
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/04/2004
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

Spencer Reece is a poet and priest. His first collection, The Clerk’s Tale, won the Bakeless Prize in 2003, selected by Louise Gluck, and his second collection, The Road to Emmaus, was longlisted for the National Book Award. He has received an NEA grant, a Guggenheim grant, a Witter Bynner Prize from the Library Congress, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar, and The New Republic. He served at the Honduran orphanage Our Little Roses, and works for the Bishop of Spain for the Reformed Episcopal Church, Iglesia Española Reformada Episcopal.

Read an Excerpt

Portofino

Promise me you will not forget Portofino.
Promise me you will find the trompe l'oeil
on the bedroom walls at the Splendido.
The walls make a scene you cannot enter.
Perhaps then you will comprehend this longing
for permanence I often mentioned to you.
Across the harbor? A yellow church. A cliff.
Promise me you will witness the day diminish.
And when the roofs darken, when the stars drift
until they shatter on the sea's finish,
you will know what I told you is true
when I said abandonment is beautiful.



The Clerk's Tale

I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier,
selling suits to men I call 'Sir.'
These men are muscled, groomed and cropped—
with wives and families that grow exponentially.
Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties,
of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,
of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars,
of foulards, neats, and internationals,
of pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin.
I often wear a blue pin-striped suit.
My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples.
On my cheeks there are a few pimples.
For my terrible eyesight, horn-rimmed spectacles.
One of my fellow-workers is an old homosexual
who works hard and wears bracelets with jewels.
No one can rival his commission checks.
On his break he smokes a Benson & Hedges cigarette,
puffing expectantly as a Hollywood starlet.
He has carefully applied a layer of Clinique bronzer
to enhance the tan on his face and neck.
His hair is gone except for a few strands
which are combed across his scalp.
He examines his manicured lacquered nails.
Iadmire his studies attention to details:
his tie stuck to his shirt with masking tape,
his teeth capped, his breath mint in place.
The old homosexual and I laugh in the back
over a coarse joke involving an octopus.
Our banter is staccato, staged and close
like those 'Spanish Dances' by Granados.
I sometimes feel we are in a musical—
gossiping backstage between our numbers.
He drags deeply on his cigarette.
Most of his life is over.
Often he refers to himself as 'an old faggot.'
He does this bemusedly, yet timidly.
I know why he does this.
He does this because his acceptance is finally complete—
and complete acceptance is always
bittersweet. Our hours are long. Our backs bent.
We are more gracious than English royalty.
We dart amongst the aisles tall as hedgerows.
Watch us face into the merchandise.
How we set up and take apart mannequins
as if we were performing autopsies.
A naked body, without pretense, is of no use.
It grows late.
I hear the front metal gate close down.
We begin folding the ties correctly according to color.
The shirts—Oxfords, broadcloths, pinpoints—
must be sized, stacked, or rehashed.
The old homosexual removes his right shoe,
allowing his gigantic bunion to swell.
There is the sound of cash being counted—
coins clinking, bills swishing, numbers whispered—
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven ...
We are changed when the transactions are done—
older, dirtier, dwarfed.
A few late customers gawk in at us.
We say nothing. Our silence will not be breached.
The lights go off, one by one—
the dressing room lights, the mirror lights.
Then it is very late. How late? Eleven?
We move to the gate. It goes up.
The gat's grating checker our cheeks.
This is the Mall of America.
The light is bright and artificial,
yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral.
You must travel down the long hallways to the exits
before you encounter natural light.
One final formality: the manager checks out bags.
The old homosexual reaches into his over-the-shoulder leather bag—
the one he bought on his European travels
with his companion of many years.
He finds a stick of lip balm and applies it to his lips
liberally, as if shellacking them.
Then he inserts one last breath mint
and offers one to me. The gesture is fraternal
and occurs between us many times.
At last, we bid each other good night.
I watch him fade into the many-tiered parking lot,
where the thousands of cars have come
and are now gone. This is how our day ends.
This is how our day always ends.
Sometimes snow falls like rice.
See us take to our dimly lit exits,
disappearing into the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul;
Minneapolis is sleek and St. Paul,
named after the man who had to be shown,
is smaller, older, and somewhat withdrawn.
Behind us, the moon pauses over the vast egg-like dome of the mall.
See us loosening our ties among you.
We are alone.
There is no longer any need to express ourselves.

Copyright © 2004 by Spencer Reece. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.

Table of Contents

	Foreword	ix
	Portofino	1
	The Clerk's Tale	2
	Chiaroscuro	5
	A Bestiary	6
i.	The Snake
ii.	The Frog
iii.	The Bat
iv.	The Cat
v.	The Elephant
	Tonight	11
	Then	12
	Chrysanthemums	14
	Autumn Song	15
	Midnight	16
	Winter Scene	18
	Diminuendo	19
	Ghazals for Spring	20
	Cape Cod	27
	Ponies	30
	Triptych	31
i.	Politics
ii.	Homosexuality
iii.	Easter
	Etude	34
	Florida Ghazals	35
	Interior	42
	Addresses	43
i.	To You
ii.	Divinity Avenue
iii.	To My Brother
iv.	Pentimento
v.	Coda
vi.	United Hospital
vii.	Blue
viii.	To Those Grown Mute
ix.	Fugue
x.	To Martha My Nurse
xi.	Minneapolis
xii.	Beverly Road
xiii.	Afton
xiv.	Two Bright Rooms
xv.	Boca Raton
xvi.	Loxahatchee
xvii.	Summerland Key
xviii.	Worth Avenue
xix.	I Have Dreamed of You So Much
xx.	Vizcaya
	Interlude	64
	Morbidezza	65

Editorial Reviews

Inside everything was Episcopalian— / the wicker chaise lounges, the small spotted mirrors, / the rattan dining room set, the tears.” Reece’s evocation of a family house on Cape Cod, eventually sold, exemplifies the twin currents of detached humor and sorrow that run through his début collection. The most effective poems here are autobiographical, recording early family life; a period spent recovering from a nervous breakdown in hospitals and borrowed houses (“My legacy is to leave the room empty”); and a new life in retail—hence the title. Reece’s poems are saved from solipsism by a keen alertness to the characters around him and to the consolations of the natural world. Animals please him, because they are happier than people—“The ponies said: This day astounds us. The field is green.” And resignation brings with it a kind of peace, as in a poem written on the poet’s birthday in a lonely Florida town: “It is not Paris it is not Florence / but it has majesty in its anonymity.

The New Yorker

All of the following 18 debut titles will be published in time for National Poetry Month this April. While the title poem is familiar from its recent publication on the back page of the New Yorker, the biggest chance of a breakout for Spencer Reece's The Clerk's Tale rests with Reece's street cred: he is an assistant manager at Brooks Brothers in Palm Beach. Those looking for the male equivalent of Deborah Garrison's A Working Girl Can't Win may be momentarily disappointed in the fact that few of the other poems work as critiques of working life and store culture, but should be buoyed by lines like "You are being born. Feels good./ Something enormous kisses you." Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

By day, Reece works as assistant manager at Brooks Brothers in Palm Beach; by night, he writes poems so exquisite, atmospheric, and varied that his first collection was deservedly selected by poet laureate Louise Gleck as winner of the 2003 Bakeless Prize of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal