Incandescence and temporary beauty: a poetry reading with Malachi Black and George David Clark

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 3 features poets Malachi Black and George David Clark. Malachi reads multiple poems from his new collection Indirect Light: “Bildungsroman,” “Old Polaroids,” and “In Our Perishing Republic.” David reads multiple poems from his new collection Newly Not Eternal: “Song of the Genie,” “Ultrasound: Your Picture,” and “Washing Your Feet.” Malachi Black is the author of Indirect Light, just published by Four Way Books, and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale UP, 2013), The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016), and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence, 2023). A 2024-25 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Lithuania, Black has also been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. Black’s poems have several times been set to music and have been featured in exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad, including recent and forthcoming translations into French, Dutch, Croatian, Slovenian, and Lithuanian. Black teaches at the University of San Diego and lives in California. Learn more at www.malachiblack.com. George David Clark was born in Savannah and raised in Chattanooga and Little Rock. He now lives in McMurray, PA with his wife, Elisabeth, and their four children. The author of Reveille (winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, Arkansas) and Newly Not Eternal (LSU), David’s recent poems can be found or are forthcoming in AGNI, The Believer, Crazyhorse, Five Points, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Image, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. After earning an MFA at the University of Virginia and a PhD at Texas Tech University, David held the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Poetry at Colgate University and, later, the Lilly Postdoctoral Fellowship at Valparaiso University.  He’s received additional honors from Southern Poetry Review (the Guy Owen Prize), Narrative Magazine (the 30 Below Prize), and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (a Walter E. Dakin fellowship), among others. The editor-in-chief of 32 Poems, he previously served in various capacities on the staffs of Meridian, Iron Horse Literary Magazine, and the Best New Poets anthology. Since 2015 David has taught creative writing and literature at Washington & Jefferson College, where he is now an associate professor. Learn more at www.georgedavidclark.com This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website or Simplecast podcast feed for more episodes. Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more and get in touch: poetrymedicineforthesoul.com