thehumanprojectofgrasping: Lindsey Pannor on Cody-Rose Clevidence’s Dearth & God’s Green Mirth

Cody-Rose Clevidence’s latest, a tête-bêche chapbook from Fonograf Editions titled Dearth & God’s Green Mirth, guides us towards their sense of what language is and does and can do. At the initial moment of reading, the words DEARTH and DEAREARTH float with widened kerning and vertical overlap, titling the opening passage by shadowing one another. In the pages to follow, Clevidence performs the same gestures as these characters. They name contemporary life’s dearth and contamination as pressed up against the dear earth’s many remaining abundances, finding that the livable and inevitably connected overlap of the two lies in practicing naming and noticing. This practice is done, in part, to relinquish our inherently insatiable desires for sense-making.

o you idolaters of heaven … hold out your hands, like this, / like this to touch the things, the objects of the world. As akin to mythmaking or authoring medieval bestiaries, Clevidence demonstrates throughout the first half of their chapbook that this textual touching is, alone, enough of a way to know this planet on which our lives play out. “EARTH 1.0,” a single stanza poem, is made up nearly in its entirety of phrases bookended by “this … earth,” where Clevidence sketches a landscape whose physical and temporal scale has collapsed.

this gun-holster earth this daydreaming of an imaginary heaven earth

this abalone-shell-that-I-use-as-an-ashtray earth this multiple wavelengths

of light earth this swaying congregation earth this ever increasing hum

this spontaneous generation earth this night sky earth this in our hands earth

Training their viewpoint variously, from as vast as a hum to as singular as a gun-holster, Clevidence convinces us that they have begun the endless project of encompassing our home on the page. Heaven posed as imaginary and daydreaming begins to lay the ground for their contrasting god and the earth. The last line of this poem, “this perch from which,” solidifies their assertion that it is the landscape which liaises our existence and gives a context which is in and of itself a meaning.

In a similar mode of repetitiously deepening definition, “[ BRUTE… ]” lists the things that encompass the brutal, including but not limited to “multifaceted ways of knowing,” “mythology of knowledge,” “scaffolding of the mind,” “inability to communicate.” This stanza concludes its list with

[the] brutal rhythmic heartbeat of the sun.

(((O)))

This is the heartbeat under which we wake up, over and over again, to that brutal drive towards knowing. Vital to the project of the chapbook—and a counter to that brutality—is the fact that Clevidence demonstrates this rhythm and all its implications through their use of the letter O conjoined with parenthesis. These characters illustrate rather than directly articulate, thus calling us back to the fact of language as the poet’s medium, and its subsequent ability to produce ontological salves for those brutal needs to know. With the same kinds of tangibility, in “[ ALLEGORIES ],” they assert that “syntaxloopslanguageintoconstellationsofrelationalmeaning,” citing, on the next line, “thehumanprojectofgrasping.” Calling back to all of us idolaters of heaven, holding out our hands to touch the truth of the world, they complicate the haptic with a quality of grasping, especially regarding finding constellations of relational meaning. In removing the spaces in between words but preserving the grammar of a comprehensible phrase throughout the entire poem, Clevidence gestures towards the writer as capable of eviscerating just enough of the brutal urge to grasp as to still permit knowing. “Thisconstantlonging”—to root at truth through interpretation by approaching everything as allegory—is tempered through the removal of the space as well as gently taunted by this removal’s encouraging analysis.

Much of the brilliance of Clevidence’s work lies in their ability to take up the dismal aspect of one’s “detritus of thought, thoughts just utterly / piled up in heaps of void” alongside polluting objects like “your soft bed of microplastic fibers” and remind their readers that it is “all gift.” Once having, as they put it, practiced how to see, we are able to close our eyes for a while, put cold potatoes on them, and forgive the torture of attempting to understand this place where there is still nothing to drink, despite our having prayed for rain.

In subsequent poems, they not only forgive, but use language to give up on prayer entirely. They revert to their own hand to name the truth of the beauty in all that gift. With stanzas like the one below, they trace and distill the parallels of digitality with the classically pastoral, concretely envisioning how we may reconcile the many histories of our current reality to best clear the path to pleasurable survival.

chyrsathantheums, blue 0 asterisk >> crispr +1, locking-mechanism

melody, gigabyte, oxytocin-release ::: increase, blink—

trumpeting angels, <<< 75 mph, cellophane, drool, all mammals

have nipples 0 pleasure circuitry = pain circuitry, (I) think (?)

The final poems in this section are all titled after void, the soul, the infinite, nebula—those things which are inherently incomprehensible and yet still characterized by beauty and awe. The combined ability to see clearly and name what is true (while recognizing the awe-inspiring parts of it all) is what Clevidence believes to be enough. Not only are they enough, but they are all that we have, and they wonder somewhat relentlessly “what god are you, to ask this of us;” what god would drive us towards being so “violet with meaning-making, rife with words, all-searching—”

Though Clevidence never directly answers that question, they do, in the tail-to-head portion of the chapbook, titled God’s Green Mirth, relentlessly goad whatever god that is. The poems move from having been in a classic serif typeface in Dearth to a slab serif, and become untitled and expansive. Playing with the form of a document, the poem equates god to the speaker—Cody-Rose—and asks directly

who do you think it was that blessed you?

god ☐              I, Cody-Rose ☐                      unsure ☐

Considering this parallel, Clevidence’s continual wordplay throughout the piece reinforces their philosophy regarding language as established in Dearth. They frequently use slant rhymes when listing objects and affects which allegedly belong both to themselves and to god (for example, pearl/peril/navel/evil). Toying with rhyme as the convention guiding their perception allows them to effectively approach said imagined god with their own sense of poetic mirth. This linguistic play, with truths that many consider sacred, makes visible god’s unreality as Clevidence changes him solely through language. One realizes that they have no ability to truly know whether it was Clevidence or god who blessed them.

They wonder about all of the things they would do to god, could do to god, and in the act of writing are, in fact, actually doing to god. They ask the poetic you “how many vowels / can you cram into the mouth of god;” they ask “how flammable is your / god is mine?” The answer to these queries clearly being: as many or as much as one can imagine, for god is merely a word on a page. Clevidence makes it clear that the god which they are approaching does not exist but, for those who do ascribe to it, transports believers to a world wherein nothing is real nor true in the way that they themselves so painstakingly articulated the former half of the chapbook.

Their answer, then, to “how can we stay here on this earth / how can we stay here on this earth / how can we stay here on this earth / how can we stay here on this earth” becomes clear:

music of my same spheres, hyperreal in the synthetic light, the permission I give myself,

peach-pit of gods longing, slingshotting angels all about the blue sky— the sugarsweet

of most overblown hallelujahs—the throat of gods warblers— I will make my own flute.

The heavenly spheres and Cody-Rose’s lived spheres are one and the same. The synthetic light is not synthetic at all, but perhaps, even more “natural” than the natural light. They show us, in doing it themselves, how to survive—they do not wait for a god’s answer, or pray to anyone; instead, they distill god’s longing to a peach pit, they clear the sky of angels, they find hallelujahs overblown and saccharine. In place of all of this, they give themselves permission to make their own flute. They give themselves permission to write the chapbook that they have written, and to contend with the integration of all that warrants dirge with all that remains.