Ongoing notes: late March, 2021: Cody-Rose Clevidence + Ana Hurtado,

Is it spring yet? Our wee monsters are in the backyard every day, returning to the house all covered in mud, so it would certainly seem to be. They are very, very pleased.

It also means there are far more baths than usual. They seem not to mind this, either.

I’ve been, unrelatedly, in an above/ground press publishing frenzy lately. Have you noticed?

Ridgewood NY: Recently I received a copy of Cody-Rose Clevidence’s chapbook, “BEHOLD A MAN” (Ridgewood NY: auric press, 2020), a small item produced by Tessa Bolsover and Michael Cavuto in spring 2020. I’m not sure if Clevidence is working a slant reference to Christina Rossetti (“Behold The Man!”) or even a sly reference to Robert Creeley (“I Know a Man”) with their title, but this chapbook-length poem, subtitled “THORACIC CAVITY | EXPERIMENT / m notes on form,” writes out a sequence of ninety-nine short exploratory bursts of lyric, exposition, theory and language nodes, working to form, together, a way in which to speak of writing, language, the body, story and myth.

3.         homo digitalis
            homo erectus
            homo dentata
            homo phalarope & ibid.
            homo longitudinal &
            morphism & pineal & of
            longing.    << home
            is where// home is
            where 

                        || & I, I curve 2 th
                        earth, my son, Oedipus
                        of form || & so
                        conceived & so
                        to conceive it is done
                        , when u
                        kiss’t it  << chimera,
                        opticon, this is
                        so weird, heave yr
                        tentacles forward
                        my inkling yr noun
                        & spring—

The “notes on form” reminds of some of the stunning chapbooks that ugly duckling presse has been producing around such lately as well [see my review of one of them here], as Clevidence [see their interview at Touch the Donkey here] writes on form and formation in fascinating ways, connecting writing to the body, queerness and queer theory, and writing the body to references of transitioning. I’ve long been an admirer of the explosive, expansive and fragmentary nature of Clevidence’s work, but the stretch of this certainly provides new elements of clarity in their work, writing a language and thinking slant and staggered, parsed and staccatoed into an accumulation far more than the sum of such works. Clevidence writes of how the world began, new beginnings and begun, referencing William Blake, pearls and castration, “a hundred / thousand crocuses / fuck you / in yr mouth / gently, / sweet friend” (“14.”). “should I go up to a hundred?” they write, as section seventeen.

66.        th body makes do with what it is
            th body improvises tools from its environment
            th mind constructs for th body another body
            body body body body
            lieu lieu lieu lieu
            th broken tool
            / reveals— 

                              [my magnets, wrench & bluebird of my soul
                              Renounce!  what fear is this— ? I kiss yr swan,
                              I Capitulate— I dis-assemble
                              I don’t even have any horses
                              for these reins, not even one
                              single horse just these two tiny, tiny
                              bluebirds
                              of my soul—

th revelation of th broken tool ] in me

Quito Ecuador: I was immediately struck by the sleek and nuanced prose poems by Ana Hurtado, from her chapbook Miedo al Olvido: Poems from an Uprooted Girl (Bloof Books, 2020). Hurtado’s poems are composed as dreamlike prose, unfolding lyric scenes. Her poems are set in short section/groupings, which is curious for a chapbook-length collection: the four poems of “Chamita, Venezuela, 1991,” the six poems of “Wava, Ecuador, 1997,” the four poems of “Maracaibo, Apart,” and the five poems “A Quito of Me,” most of which extend no longer than a page each. Her short narratives are curious, blending storytelling elements of memoir and the postcard story, writing out elements of dislocation, location and connection. “The shadows below our bodies,” she writes, as part of “MY FATHER,” “turned into permanent figures of us: three South American children, / bewildered by sharp American grass, Floridian tornadoes, and prying / worms.” There is a delicate care to these stories, these sentences, one that allows her narratives to unfold with a lovely curiosity and slowness. These are poems of belonging, and beautifully so. I am wondering: might there be a longer, larger manuscript of these pieces? I would certainly hope.

OUR SCHOOL SECURITY GUARD ANGELITO ONCE TOLD ME A STORY ABOUT HIS MOTHER AS I WAITED FOR MINE TO PICK ME UP FROM SCHOOL.

His mother kept two cockatoos in her bedroom. They sometimes shat on her bed, nightstand, on framed pictures of Angelito’s grandfather. But they were her family. He once walked in on her cuddling with the birds, feathers covering her sound-asleep body. My mother is a bird, he realized. He asked me if mine was, too. Tal vez, I responded. Mami finally showed up in her giant truck, an hour late, and Angelito held the car door open for me. We both knew she wasn’t. Today I was told he died by lightning. El guardia Angelito tapped our school’s power lines with a wooden broom, trying to save a bird’s nest from falling. Two blue eggs never cracked or hatched. They stayed whole or dead. Kids didn’t know the difference. The entire tenth grade of Colegio Menor now knew man could ignite electricity with kindness.