The Groaning Book Archive

Between Here and The Sound of a Groaning Interstate gathers poems written across three decades. The Groaning Book: A Poetics accompanies them, tracing the structures of attention, rhythm, and civic life that shaped their making. Together they form a single work held between lyric interior and public ground. Developed through years of cultural work in Chicago and beyond. Painting Black Blizzard by Wesley Kimler

[thegroaningbook]

My essay “Refusal and the Work of Reflection” is now up at the Pittsburgh Review of Books.

I’m grateful to Ed Simon for taking the piece, and for making PRoB such a strong home for essays that still believe in thought, difficulty, books, and the long work of attention.

This one comes out of the larger The Groaning Book project, but also stands on its own as a defense of refusal: not as obscurity, not as evasion, but as the space a serious work sometimes needs before it can be reduced to statement.

Link: https://pghrev.com/refusal-and-the-work-of-reflection/

[thegroaningbook]

I’m really glad the poems are finding readers here.

I’ve been posting them one at a time, almost like poems might once have appeared in an old magazine, except here they are on Tumbr.

They come from Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate & The Groaning Book: A Poetics: a full-length poetry collection and a companion book about the poems, how they move, where they came from, and the music, art, archives, and public literary life around them.

The poems are the center of the book. The companion volume is there for readers who want to go further in.

If ordering, I suggest Bookshop.org, which supports local bookstores. But there are other places to order too.

It’s a cool book - nothing like you would expect.

[thegroaningbook]

Bridgebuilder continued:

until one car gleaming black

with immaculate chrome

an engine that sounds

like shifting tectonic plates

passes over to the other side

the bridge sways and quakes

unseen support beams break welds

and clank in applause

the car stops the window rolls

down and a man with a beard

places his fingers between his lips

and whistles a most human gesture

to which birds swarm up

out of the forest

like the shadow

of an eclipse

machines out of my childhood

dreams with tires

as big as houses

pull out of the trees

lift the bridge from its foundations

men with arc welders

so many fallen stars

cut the bridge to pieces

and cart it away points

of light burning all the way home

I am all I have a pocket full of clouds

we all fall down

More at www.thegroaningbook.com

[thegroaningbook]

“There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is an essay on certainty, cultivation, public judgment, reading, institutional life, and the conditions required for artistic, civic, and ethical attention.

Beginning with a widely circulated social media incident involving an elderly pony in Geauga County, Ohio, the essay expands into a broader reflection on humane investigations, arts education, literary culture, military history, reentry work, social media, institutional trust, and the relationship between performance and discernment in contemporary American life.

The essay engages themes also explored in Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate and its companion volume The Groaning Book: A Poetics.

Read it here…

Originally written in Cuyahoga Valley, Ohio, in 2026.

[thegroaningbook]

The Zoo Entrance: The Poet, the Institution, and No Exit

A essay on poetry, institutions, academic absorption, and the strange enclosure of literary life.

The piece begins from an old Donald Hall phrase, but moves toward the larger condition: how poetry entered the university, professionalized itself, gained rooms, prizes, archives, and systems of legitimacy, and also found itself standing inside a structure that often mistakes enclosure for shelter.

Read The Zoo Entrance: The Poet, the Institution, and No Exit

The photograph was taken in Wesley Kimler’s Chicago studio. The wall says what the essay is trying to think through.

The Zoo Entrance is part of the ongoing Civic Poetics Archive connected to Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate and The Groaning Book: A Poetics.

[thegroaningbook]

A Found Poem: Metz Cathedral

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An essay on Midwestern poetry, regional memory, and civic literary life in relation to Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate and The Groaning Book: A Poetics. Now archived at the Internet Archive.

The Valley Holds More : KC Clarke : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

“The Valley Holds More” is an essay on place, civic poetics, regional recognition, and poetic infrastructure in relation to the poetry colle

[thegroaningbook]

The Possum by KC Clarke

From the book Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate & The Groaning Book: A Poetics

Previously published in Black River Review.

[thegroaningbook]

Skyscraper

A poem by KC Clarke

From Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate & The Groaning Book: A Poetics

Originally published in audio form over ambient composition on the album reVerse

Listen here

[thegroaningbook]

A Hungry Beast Is Gaslighting You

An essay by KC Clarke on social media, literary culture, artificial intelligence, and the long erosion of the institutions that once mediated literary attention in the United States.

The essay argues that the crisis in reading predates AI and asks whether artificial intelligence is being blamed for damage already done by platform culture and the collapse of older civic structures.

Now available via the Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/a-hungry-beast-is-gaslighting-you

[thegroaningbook]

Upland

A poem by KC Clarke

From Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate & The Groaning Book: A Poetics

Previously published in Poet Lore

[thegroaningbook]

Mary’s Field

A poem by KC Clarke

From Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate & The Groaning Book: A Poetics

Previously published in Indiana Review

[thegroaningbook]

Wesley Kimler — Studio Works (Selections from Instagram)

Paintings and Afghan kites occupy the studio as a continuous field. Large-scale works line the walls beside Kimler’s Afghan kites, a long-running series of individual collage works with their own scale, pressure, and internal structure.

Color moves in high contrast: fluorescent pink, acid green, black, yellow, against raw wall, marked floor, and the working atmosphere of the studio itself. The pieces differ in medium and format while remaining inside the same visual force.

Within this field appears the cover of Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate & The Groaning Book. The jacket image, Black Blizzard (2021), is a painting by Wesley Kimler. The book also includes an extended conversation between Kimler and the author.

The appearance of the cover among the works marks an ongoing collaboration. The painting remains part of Kimler’s larger body of work while also carrying forward as the face of the book.

Kimler stands within the field beside paintings and Afghan kites, the artist among the conditions that continue to produce the work.

The encounter remains open.

[thegroaningbook]

Now archived: Three Machine Readings.

Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT each read Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate and The Groaning Book: A Poetics under constrained critical conditions in March 2026. The three readings are now gathered in a single document at the Internet Archive.

What interested me was not endorsement, but encounter: what three different systems noticed, misread, emphasized, and carried forward when asked to pay sustained attention to a body of human-created poems and essays poetry, art, and literature.

https://archive.org/details/three-machine-readings-between-here-and-the-sound-of-a-groaning-interstate-march-2026

[thegroaningbook]

Visit Original Link

Desire

A poem by KC Clarke from Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate & The Groaning Book: A Poetics

This recording presents Desire.

Set along State Road Two at the edge of the Okefenokee, the poem moves through heat, proximity, and risk. What begins as roadside drift turns toward encounter.

A rattlesnake crosses the shoulder. The speaker steps into its path.

What follows unfolds in close contact. The body takes hold. The moment sharpens. A drop of venom falls.

The poem holds there, within the decision that follows.

A voice returns. The snake is lowered back into the sand.

The encounter ends. The tension remains.

[thegroaningbook]

Black Blizzard

Wesley Kimler, 2021

Cover image for Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate & The Groaning Book by KC Clarke

Two connected works: Between Here and the Sound of a Groaning Interstate, a poetry collection written between 1993 and 2024, and The Groaning Book, a poetics.

“Very good, complex poem.” — Mark Strand, on the poem “Orion”

available here

Wesley Kimler (b. 1953), Black Blizzard, 2021, mixed media on canvas, 37 × 37 in., private collection.

[thegroaningbook]

Allen Ginsberg & William S. Burroughs — Poetry Center Reading Broadside Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Early event broadside announcing a Poetry Center reading by Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Posters such as this one survive today largely because of the efforts of Mark Perlberg, a founding board member of the Poetry Center of Chicago and an important figure in the organization’s early years. Perlberg carefully preserved many of the Poetry Center’s early event posters and broadsides in his personal archive.

Years later, Perlberg transferred these materials to KC Clarke. When Clarke secured the Poetry Center’s institutional archive at the University of Chicago Library’s Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, copies of these early broadsides were included in the collection, ensuring their preservation and availability for future researchers.

Without Perlberg’s foresight in preserving these materials, many of the Poetry Center’s earliest printed records would likely have been lost.

Perlberg was himself a published poet as well as an early steward of the organization’s history. In many ways he served as the Poetry Center’s first informal archivist.

From the KC Clarke collection. Related materials are preserved in the Poetry Center archive at the University of Chicago Library.