speak, rock. like a bad tongue, ugly in the
mouth of the world.
speak, first nerve, first chord, now-cold sea
seed in lace blooms by the grey shore first
sign.
hard rocks horde crystals under oceans, speak, nitrogen
speak,
carbon, reed genesis like the first breath.
acidic
ocean of forgetting, second sign
is quartzite, pink like an eye
upturned in the metaphoric face
who ate hir children as
rocks
speak, children of rocks
radiated,
ultra-violet, sinuous Lethe
who ate first rocks radiant in the night-sky,
grew
slowly. (“[AGATE/ALGAE]”)
I’m
a little late to this, but finally spending some time with the precise and
punctured exuberance of Cody-Rose Clevidence’s second collection, Flung Throne (Boise ID: Ahsahta
Press, 2017), a follow-up to Beast Feast
(Ahsahta Press, 2014) [see my review of such here]. Flung Throne is thick, massive in scope, and speaks in a
skillfully-garbled speech, writing “speak again, bastard, garble it, first
throat, choked first. how long a / hollow is anchored, breeds open, raptor,
captor, larva, shell & home” [“ASTER[ISK] PULL// POOLED FORTH”]. Clevidence
is clearly a poet of large projects, writing expansively and thoroughly against
and through an idea, comparable, perhaps, to the work of Winnipeg poet Dennis
Cooley in terms of scale. Flung
Throne engages with consciousness, mythology, science and the natural world,
and the progression of life on earth while writing out a language open to high
and low speech, pop culture, slurred and guttural utterance amid and even
essential threads of wisdom.
//
Darwin’s pond the lake
in me Orpheus
the opposite of Lethe
my hound
my sound
my skin
be bright
yr (my) flint-
knapped-
tooth,
then—
I remember
split the arrow shaft in me
grown deep | take root
the crack thru me
may yet be a wound in the earth.
// (“APE|ANGEL”)
There
is something quite compelling in the way Clevidence combines phrases and
language, blending high and low language to propel through sound, thought and
ideas. And who couldn’t love any poem, book length or otherwise, that included
such as:
heliopteryx abysmal gonad
surround a man
w
coward
/
w
embrace
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.
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