Loyal to the Sentence

Small Talk
by Acie Clark

The coffee was good. The morning is still

young. I am making eye contact with the red dog

as he shits under a pink magnolia tree.

People on the internet inform me that this

(the shitting, with the sustained eye contact)

is a demonstration of animal trust, is vulnerability

in its most practical iteration: a question.

Will you come watch me while I write these poems?

Can I bear to let you see me change?

Pink blooms fall around the red dog.

February is April in Alabama.

I am trying to remember I have something to say.

Reprinted from Small Talk. Copyright © 2026 by Acie Clark. Used with permission of the publisher, Hub City Press. All rights reserved.

Like many of us, I have a habit of drinking my coffee without paying attention to the process. When working at my desk, I’m guilty of throwing together an unspecific amalgam of milk, ice, and coffee and slurping it down in minutes. No one at the office asks me about my experience of drinking it, and I have no reason to report on the beverage’s quality or any subsequent enjoyment. We’re all drinking the same brew, after all. What could there be to say?

The first stanza of Acie Clark’s debut poetry collection, Small Talk, reads, “The coffee was good. The morning is still / young. I am making eye contact with the red dog / as he shits under a pink magnolia tree.” With these three lines, we are brought into an early spring morning, on a walk with a red dog, musing on the quality of an otherwise utilitarian morning routine. Clark also evokes the bowel movement—what, for many of us, human or otherwise, is a daily morning activity. Among this mundanity is the shocking beauty of tree branches bursting with pink flowers.

In this eponymous poem, Clark’s speaker adds context about the nature of the canine eye contact. Reporting from Internet research, he says the eye contact “is a demonstration of animal trust, is vulnerability / in its most practical iteration: a question.”

The next stanza opens with the first address to the audience: “Will you come watch me while I write these poems? / Can I bear to let you see me change?”

Then, back to the present vista, and a statement of purpose. “Pink blooms fall around the red dog. / February is April in Alabama. / I am trying to remember I have something to say.”

What follows in Clark’s collection are poems that dance with what it means to be, literally, in conversation. What is the exchange achieved between two people in the realm of language? Can the past self be in conversation with the present self? Do we have what it takes to let other people see us change?

The word “conversation” comes to English from the old French conversacion, roughly translating to “way of life.” The Old French stems from the Latin words conversationem and conversari, meaning frequent use of a home, or more simply, living somewhere. The word conversari specifically implies cohabitating. From this, we can understand that, at its root, being in conversation implies a repeated sharing of intimate space. Think about your most successful or unsuccessful cohabitation experiences, whether they be with roommates, lovers, or family. Is there space to communicate both the shallow mundanities of your day and the deeper things that keep you up at night? Are your walls covered with pictures of people who no longer exist, either because they grew up or passed away? Who makes the coffee in the morning?

These questions underlie Clark’s masterful debut collection. Small Talk moves like the platonic ideal of a conversation; what begins with discussions of the weather and coffee might become deeper reflections on childhood, gender, and romance. Although we may end up in the same casual place we started, we have revealed our inner lives to each other along the way and met those vulnerable moments with curiosity, reciprocity, and humor.

_________

Two years ago, when Clark and I taught together at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, I had the pleasure of hearing nascent versions of some of the poems that appear in Small Talk. This last month, I spoke with Clark about the book, his writing process, and how Small Talk grew from a chapbook to a debut collection.

While writing during his fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, Clark realized that “some of these poems need to change in radical ways.” He wanted to structure his collection “how a conversation works, how you get to know someone,” and he began the work of having the poems speak not only to their audience but to each other. In some cases, this meant completely restructuring poems by breaking up the line or removing antecedents, and in other cases, Clark had to allow poems not to change, to “let them hold what had been true.” In the process of writing a book of poetry, Clark found what makes a poem distinct must change depending on its neighbors.

Clark’s early stages of Small Talk grew out of a daily practice of writing sonnets. “The sonnet made me write a poem I didn’t know to show up for,” Clark told me after I asked him if the formal constraints of the sonnet gave him something to embrace or push against. He used the 14-line form as a practice of “micro nonfiction,” exploring seemingly simple topics like the morning coffee and allowing those ideas to mature over the course of the 14 lines. Sonnets have an explicit deadline (14 lines) with an implied complication at about halfway or three-quarters of the way through the poem (the volta), but the amount of water a sonnet can hold vastly varies between classical forms, like Italian and Elizabethan sonnets, and the contemporary sonnets of Diane Seuss and Megan Fernandes. Clark used these formal considerations to give their daily practice a specific structure, but once he began working on poems in the context of a larger book, some poems required release from their original form.

I asked Clark if the 14 lines of a sonnet were initially a help or a hindrance, and after a thoughtful pause and knowing smile, Clark shared that he “remains mostly loyal to the sentence,” rather than the line. When working on lineation, Clark asked himself, “How can the line make music of the sentence?” He shared with me a belief that the end of a line of poetry is an abyss where a reader’s mind can leap into imagination before moving to the next line of a poem, so a poet’s line breaks need to allow for those cognitive leaps while, at the same time, providing a guiding hand for the sentence’s logic and integrity. Clark keeps one question at the front of his mind: “What am I asking a reader to do?” 

When I posed the question of how compiling and editing Small Talk changed Clark as a writer, he replied, “All I figured out how to do is ask better questions.” He pointed to his poem, “Annual Honesty,” which includes the line, “At some critical place inside me I feel underprepared, unpracticed.” Clark brings this beginner's mind with him into much of his writing, and that sense of humble discovery permeates the collection.

The irony here is that Clark is hardly “unpracticed,” and is in fact an advocate for writing-as-practice: “We as writers need practices our bodies recognize… we’re so quick to say, ‘It’s writer’s block.’ But what is it [really]?” At Interlochen, he led a seminar on practice named Practice Makes, where he explained to a room of eager but camp-weary high schoolers that a daily writing practice can take myriad forms. Clark explained the way our bodies rely on place, sounds, smells, and tastes to feel safe enough to write, and that repetition begets repetition. If you want to repeatedly write, you must write repeatedly. Clark also rightly pointed out that many poets have other lines of work; how will you fit in your poetry to a life where you are also an educator, a doctor, an analyst? In our conversation, Clark shared that his goal is “a practice where poetry is strewn about our lives.”

By finding a place for poetry in a daily routine, Clark allows himself a living record of lines, images, and passages. This practice helps to preserve a lineage of thought that Clark later shapes into a poem that can stand on its own. In Small Talk, there are a powerful series of poems in which the speaker remembers instances of change and transformation with specific members of their family. Each of these poems, titled in sentence case, explores a moment when selfhood becomes uplifted, obscured, or violated through an interaction with another person. In “I was my mother at the start of the year,” Clark’s speaker describes the chilling but too-familiar experience of speaking with an elderly relative suffering from memory loss. Clark’s careful repetition in the last stanza of the poem poses a devastating yet tender surrender to the loss of a loved one’s mental faculty. “Most days, everybody was my mother. I was my mother last we spoke. / My mother’s mother said I love you, and as my mother I said goodbye.”

What makes Clark’s collection successful is the meticulous unspooling of memory and the speaker’s insistence that he is right on the edge of articulation. In “Epistolary Poem,” Clark’s speaker states clearly, “I want to learn to shoulder the silences I’ve left, wholeheartedly. / I want to address my selves dearly; I want us all to exist.” This desire for proper address implies an idealized outcome of communication that is not currently within the speaker’s ability. In Small Talk, the reaching for articulation is itself the act of articulating; always a project tinged with failure, but more than worth the effort.

To close out our interview, I asked Clark about a non-traditional place where he would hypothetically love to read a poem. “My silly dream is at a minor-league baseball game. I’ve held for a long time that in another life, I know for a fact I’m a minor-league baseball player.” The comedy of his answer notwithstanding, I couldn’t think of a better place for a poem from Small Talk to receive an audience. Just think about it: what else is there to do at a baseball game but grab a hotdog, sit next to your loved one (or a stranger), and start a conversation?


Learn more about Acie Clark here.