AUX/ARC TRYPT ICH: Poppycock & Assphodel; Winter; A
Night of Dark Trees, Cody-Rose Clevidence
Nightboat Books, 2021
it was the sun
that shook
it was the thrust
& the pull
of the sun that
shook
that littered the
ground
with this.
it was the green,
the green & the blue
the green &
the filtering of light,
it was the rough
& the tumble of light
that shook &
that trembled
that came hard
forth in the light
& the dark.
it was the green
that took, the eye, caught
the rimmed horizon
of light, that brutal
unyielding
communion, shock of the surface,
shock of the deep,
it was the sun came hard
in my palm on my
wrist.
yeah right
dude.
“I’m trying to find a workable paradigm among all th fields of / thought and desire.” they write, about two-thirds through. This collection is densely-packed, writing out desire and swagger in a condensed text akin to that of texting, writing flowers and trees: “dude about the thing it is just a thing. / about this tip of asphodel n violet. / about this whim of rhyme about / the storm the form why / is it and then why / unwieldy it so [.]” Clevidence writes perception and depiction, how we are seen and see, easing between short form and longer stretches, stitching shape and sound to form bodies of earth. Referencing, among others, George Oppen, William Shakespeare, Latin, Tennyson, saints and angels, this collection contains multitudes, exploring wilderness and language as a kind of primal space, writing morning, mourning, prayer and trees. There is just so much happening here. As they write, two-thirds through:
into th raw
forest, held, as if to stave
off, th surging of
th forests, dogwood
studded, restrain
me, you can graze yr
eyes on mine, ok,
can you, in th throes
of, throw me, can
you, in th ringing
non-sense, raw
chord, data abuzz,
dumped out &
scattered as th light
scatters in th
heart, th heat, where we
are held there in
stillness, we blink in
stillness, blink
once for yes, close yr
eyes against th
falling, dusk, I blink
once into th
darkness, & hold my
breath—
As part of their 2016 interview for Touch the Donkey, Clevidence speaks to the project, which was then still in-progress:
Q: Are you willing to talk about the larger project it is part of, “Poppycock & Assphodel”?
A: .... yes..... but, I do t know how to not be cryptic. I’ve never been a fan of the personal lyric, I mean, if it sounds good, okay, but like, it just has always seemed to me to be a narcissistic waste of space, like the whole world and all of history and all the ideas and struggles and everything is going on around us, anyway so I hate myself for this project, and also I’m a lil prude and have always been quite private in my own self, so fuck me, here I am, out of a shit relationship that made me feel like I was starving to death, trapped in some medieval torture device, & then I’m out of it and... it was like coming back to life all of a sudden the world around me and the colors and the sensations of being were so... I don’t know so real and full of life instead of this bleak and endless pain, and well also uhm I sort of accidentally was also falling in love, w someone I wasn’t rly sposst to be but it just happens, I guess. anyway lots of things... &maybe we can just say there's a long tradition of queer poets coalescing sexuality w/th experience of nature, or something. Or any poets but I think queer poets especially because of... well that’s a whole other thought...Anyway so its a fucking personal lyric and I hate myself because there are really important things in this world that are way more interesting and way more pressing, but well I’m stuck here rn so.
Q: How does the work in “Poppycock & Assphodel” compare to, say, the work in BEAST FEAST?
A: Well.... it’s
very different... but what happened was this.
After BF I wrote this long, v
dense manuscript called FLUNG THROWN &... well I had just read John
McPhee’s “Annals of a Former World” and was obsessed with the evolution of
early life on earth, & flung. thrown... like I said super dense & well
it felt v serious, something about the evolution of consciousness, to feel
grief, my friend Amelia Jackie, The
Molasses Gospel, has a line “All the pain is worth it/ all the pain is
worth it/ just to have one minute/ alive”... & I was like... uhm really
cuz... no. & just something about
the vastness of geologic time & to be conscious in whatever way we, as
humans, are, in our human consciousness experiencing this tiny sliver of our
experienceable world, for like, what, a blip in time, anyway, and also to be
honest I got deep into prosody & was just rereading Hopkins, H.D. &
Brathwaite, like, trying to learn, on some intimate level, their respective
genius’ w regard to, like, how sonic & prosody & meaning can get wove
together, anyway, like I said, it’s DENSE (I was also obsessed w this idea that
like, if a book of poetry is 18$ dollars, it should... I dunno take more than
20 minutes to read, or like, I wanted, needed, to write something that felt
heavy. so Poppycock & Assphodel became sort of a minimalist jokey
slough-off of shit that was too silly to get put in Flung/Thrown, sort of like
a catch-all manuscript for one liner's & dick jokes, to like, shake the density
out of me. formally it’s very loose, but
where BEAST FEAST isn’t as tight as
I’d like it to be, in retrospect, in p&A
the looseness was a foundational necessity, like, I had to walk it out or shake
it off after the rigor I tried to put into F/Th. and then like I said it’s a
totally narcissistic personal lyric, the scope is v close n small, somewhere
between my eyeballs & th world, the lines are mostly short & turn v
fast, the rhymes are goofy, & like it doesn’t have a bigger philosophical
project that underlies it like both BF &
F/Th (tried to) do.
