Full disclosure, I am beholden to Cody-Rose Clevidence. Like when you hear a baby go “Gaga,” and you hear the grown-up close by say, “Gaga” back. I’m both those voices. I’m a recording of those voices you look at on your phone the year after they were saying “Gaga” to each other. Is this a weird devotional. I can’t help being devotional and exclamatory and bodily involved with reading Clevidence’s poems. Because it feels like their poems are inside my mind, or I’m sharing their mind with mine, or their poetry voice takes up all the space in my mind.
And this particular poem, which I found in We Want It All, the transpoetics anthology published by Nightboat Books, is mind and breath. Like the breathing when you’re beholden to nature. You feel the nature inside you, and your breathing changes. You’re enthralled. Your body’s rhythms are in every part of your body.
what is it that gathers
from “FOR THOSE ABT TO ROCK, WE SALUTE YOU”
in th cool dusk
at yr face—yr hands, unbound,
open now, to let th cool air through, whole
night, each season, no rhyme, no nothing
Piling on. From these lines in the poem on it’s this piling on of sensation and captivation and the again and again that happens in the mind as it absorbs everything. Sometimes even jumbling the sensations together, they’re coming so quick, like “th stillness of yr autumn th shallow waters / of th lake of yr heart full of frogs.” So the poem isn’t just the quickened sensations coursing through the poet, they are the poetic moment naturally conflating these moments, spontaneously poetic, as the case may be. It feels like Robert Duncan inhaling fairy tale and nursery rhyme and nature in his “The Structure of Rime” poems. The poems aren’t just vibrant with the poet’s fascination with nature, they are the brightest living moment implied when peopel use the word “vibrant.”
And yet, Clevidence gives even a little bit more with their humor. The call out in the title to AC/DC. The evocation of “the great rope which tethers earth 2 sky” in the opening line, and the hilarious possibility that this could be what the AC/DC song feels like. Or how this song could genuinely open the poet to this moving experience.