Hillbilly LOL-egy: On Cody-Rose Clevidence’s “Aux Arc Trypt Ich”
Cody-Rose Clevidence | Aux Arc Trypt Ich | Nightboat Books | 2021 | 172 Pages
Cody-Rose Clevidence’s Aux Arc Trypt Ich is a book of three books, a standout achievement in the poet’s relatively brief career of un-relatively prolific output—in addition to two chapbooks, the triptych is the author’s fourth full-length collection, and their third since 2018. Turbulent, comical, often cynical, it is a book of devotions, making room for the solitary conversation of introspection, and dredging the reader of both the holy and hard to deal with. The titular phrase Aux Arc refers sonically to Ozark, the original French name for the geographical area that spans most of the southern half of Missouri and Northern Arkansas, a region of limited culture aside from living-history tourism, swept up, in recent decades, by various television treatments. Clevidence, a from-elsewhere transplant, has made their home there and seems intent to stay. For the reader unfamiliar with the territory, the mark of verity in Clevidence's writing occurs in its adherence to underbrush, the flowering dogwood, the sweetly hidden creek:
O arkansas […]
—where ‘th sun
don’t shine’ o go down deep
into th ringing field, & find th right call-note—
(“THESE BROKEN ROUTINES OF EARTH”)
From its rediscovery by the extractive, exploitative tourism industry at the birth of the last century to its disastrous role in national policy in this one, the Ozarks has always had its share of visitors who put on to have discovered it for the first time. Perhaps in a culture constantly on the verge of slipping into ever new barbarisms, any move toward a tangible paradise would be desirable. By these perpetually fresh perspectives, the foundations can remain the same—a community of poor livestock traders and craftspeople, impoverished but closer to the heart of nature—kept at safe distance from local revisionists and the evolutions of progress. Consider Harold Bell Wright, who penned the region’s first literary hit in 1907. The Shepherd of the Hills was a book written for the New England rail-inclined (among them, a pen-ready Robert Frost, cf. “The Figure in the Doorway,” 1937) that sparked the Ozarks’ surviving tourism industry. Full of local color, sentimental, the book endlessly notes the contrasts between its nobly primitive subjects and its educated readers:
We, who live in the cities, see but a little farther than across the
street. We spend our days looking at the work of our own and our
neighbors' hands.
“Small wonder,” Wright strategically continues, “our lives have so little of God in them, when we come in touch with so little that God has made.” This embrace of what the Ozarks exemplifies—relatively untarnished natural space, a pure white culture—has long been used to reprove as well as justify on grounds of progress what the civilized, urbanized America typifies. Clevidence’s proclivity to shorten “the” to “th” brings to mind, among others, the two bumbling Ozarks caricatures from the Looney Tunes episode “Hillbilly Hare.” While intentional in its sonic capabilities, which serve to elide without abandoning the sometimes superfluous definite article, its association with the long tradition of rural speech minstrelsy puts it in tricky proximity to the question of whom the reader is encouraged to attribute the voice. It is never clear whether the author intends it to be taken as a joke or homage, whether or not it even fully trusts its own comedic or honorific affect. And so, why should we?
There is, after all, something Easter-y about how the snaggly, cranky hill country can bring out the supplicant in one. Rarely if ever does Clevidence’s speaker address God by name, but if there is religious work being done in this volume—and it is hard to argue otherwise—it is that of rigorous profanity. There is an ornery, sometimes cheesy familiarity with the deity. “[O] dude of all o daffodil” (“THOUGHT THO TENDER THOUGHT THO SPRUNG”), one line goes, a trickshot fired through Donne and Wordsworth simultaneously. By definition, the profane does not necessarily imply the un-holy or sinful, but constitutes sacred acknowledgement. It knows it is wrong. Like sacrifice, profanity entails lifting something earthly up to the divine light so as to let its veins become visible. From “APEX | PRAY” in the volume’s first book, Poppycock & Assphodel:
dude about the thing it is just a thing.
about this tip of asphodel and violet.
about this whim of rhyme about
the storm the form why is
it and then why
unwield it so
No longer is there a need for the poet to metaphorize, nor to valorize the unmediated experience with Nature. The human body reacts with sticks and stone by thresholds, where the nerves race, open to the falsity of signs. “There might have been an ambush in it,” the speaker fears, “no voice of god, no prayer, / just ‘the thing itself’—” reads a poem from A Night of Dark Trees. The ding an sich, or thing-in-itself—MacGuffin of Enlightenment philosophy—has been knocked down a few epistemological pegs in the realm of a God who may as well have no interest in allowing His world be made known. What does the poet have but language, always reaching beyond its parameters?
What Clevidence has taken up most shrewdly from the history of devotional lyrics is its arsenal of imperatives. Also from Poppycock and Assphodel:
shake loose the
sudden sun come
down a
ringing
thing
in
me
And then from Winter:
reel me from petal 2 ask,
then to gift of th sudden storm
There is no "please," but rather the expectation that the divinity, the world-system, do as it is meant to do. Or as it was created to do, a scientifically informed teleology:
I think the world evolved organisms to feel
it. to crawl across its surface impelled or repelled by the feeling
of it. to hold it inside of them. which we do.
(“Pollinate; By Hand”)
Although thank God, or whomever, that in this predetermined petri-dish we retain the compunction to judge:
what a dumb
sensory apparatus this orchard is
(Winter)
There is no use assuming some position from which the nature, that is beneath us, can be preserved since its very presence exists partly in us, and the other part for us. Neither is there use in expressing some nature prior to the human senses, one that would be purely expressed:
this body is a form destined to the world [...] a sort of open circuit
that completes itself only in things
(“GAVE A BANQUET UNTO TH SORROW OF IT”)
Privacy has nothing to do with this solitary religiosity, but with the reality of the cells. The wretched gift of being born, the terror of being, let alone the terror of being known, is enough to keelhaul one, as gestured in the volume’s first, unincorporated poem, “ORCHASTROPHE:" “‘an ordinary error placed me here’ // in the serotonin corridors of my wilderness.” Attention is paid to the internal mechanism, and yet, the poet admits, “as petals / fall triumphant… so too… I am at a loss.”
Formally, Aux Arc Triptych bears clear influence of the Baroque, chiastic, and emotionally mythologizing poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance (definitely Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser) and shares with these poets an impulse to fudge the difference between the lyric and philosophical theory. Blaser’s lyrics often flowed by way of a marbling effect, faithful to multi-perspectivism at the sentence level, as if he were attempting to enact what the poet’s favorite philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, meant by suggesting a world comprised of an infinity of simple substances. Blaser would have loved the gregarious molecularity on display here:
go boom go blue
-ming in us go
& gouge or gorge
yr gorgeous
eye what
can
survive
(“THE DEMOLITION OF THE CATHEDRAL”)
Clevidence takes as much inspiration from popular scientific literature as from classically phenomenological thinkers like Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and especially Heidegger. For example, they love to utilize, to comedic effect, the latter’s concept of thrownness, the sense by which subjects find themselves existing in the world, naked and afraid. “[If] I could only find a place— / to get thrown,” they write in the appropriately titled “Holy Spirit GTFO.” The mystery of the pun in the author’s third collection, Flung/Throne, should be evident in this light as well. Stochastic terror, wonder, ennui, plus “all the feelings of excruciating joy” (Winter): it is all present. Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger have held high positions among poets of the last few decades, no doubt for their provocative opacity, having invented distinct literary styles that emphasize the use of certain terms over and beyond their gathered meanings.
Rather than what we might typically expect from an avant-garde poet who spends most of their time in the woods, these poems could best be described as post-ecological, poems that—aware beyond all of their lyrical-ness, often distrustful of it, even—take into account the genealogical current running through poetry’s entire pastoral history and, literally, dig for a better access to the sublime:
I am trying to find a new paradigm
among all th fields of thought
& desire, & also trying to plow
th damn meadow over
(“THESE BROKEN ROUTINES OF EARTH”)
Like the author of the Psalms, the speaker in the volume proclaims the roughshod glory of Nature’s divinity, though specifically as it reacts to the twenty-first century human subject, which, with all its addiction to screens and minute parsings of desire, fizzles instead of bangs. Rather than being political in the topical sense, the poems stake a passionately aesthetical ground, not afraid, even gleeful at the opportunity, to universalize. “It’s a shit world my petunia stuck / in an obscene gesture of delight,” reads a line from “Pollinate; by Hand.” The third portion of the volume, A Night of Dark Trees, wades far into this sensual, tragical placement of Being.
Clevidence finds no kith in the uncritical disciple of Nature, nor the overtly political warrior, whose rage often remains rage without coalescing into much of an action plan. Clevidence’s work describes rather than diagnoses. It is the author’s acknowledgment of the no-longer empowering imbrication of social value (of technology or nature) and personal affection that places these poems in a contemporary milieu. This is the author’s prescription, in the sense of where they are coming from, of what goes largely unwritten in the work, but signifies the theoretical work done beforehand. No longer empowering, but perhaps overpowering in a sexy way:
bright lichen on the wet bark : fog low
in the holler descending : some internet
on th’ internet […]
it gapes me
(“GR]APES OF TH’ OPP]OSITE OF WRATH: BEND ]OVERBEND ]BACK”)
Because for all of the punning stunts these poems do on the contemporary linguistic trampoline (“gloriole / lol;” “succuming / becoming”), all of the innovative concretizations, portmanteaus, and attention to the arrangement of words in space, Clevidence’s overriding mode is anachronism. Clausal anaphora abound, “where the ache was planted… where the echo answered,” bringing to mind the reappropriation of that technique by Eliot and Pound. Clevidence loves to get Homeric about the small stuff, once again from “Pollinate; By Hand:”
Who calls up, as the sap is called up, when the days get hot
but th nights are still cool, and th chorus of birds starts before
th dawn
Notice too the exploded latinate construction of “What THY Fuck,” an emphasis on clausal arrangement that edges ekphrasis and ecstasy alike:
to trespass—on eyelid and armpit
alike—summers lake of summer—all
the lakes of summer—take me
It is no coincidence this poem begins with an epigraph from Tennyson, whose own nostalgic medievalism afforded the poet a lineage on which to base his modern melancholy.
Despite its contemporary concerns, use of the plaintive diction of the Romantics regrounds certain assumptions of what poetry can accomplish, formally, in tradition. After all, it was with similar language that William Blake diagnosed the ugly dawn of the Capitalocene, and which Clevidence seems to further diagnose from within it; or upon it, along the tightrope experimentalism of queer desire. Or is this something else entirely? To evolve, the author reminds us time and again, is to further ensnare oneself in the belief that we are destined for more; more metaphor, for example, more innovation, when it is clear—at the microscopic level—that nothing changes, only dies, la petite mort. Perhaps this anachronistic showboating, a collaging of the old that, unfortunately, gets old quick, is not anything other than an attempt to turn back this bio-catastrophal clock.
Although the author admitted in a 2017 interview with Rob McClellan they began this volume as “a catch-all manuscript for one-liner's & dick jokes, to like, shake the density out of me,” it emerged a hefty project, less cohesive maybe than the author’s other collections, but denser by the striking disjunctive connections made between its formal lubricity and philosophical darkness. What remains is an engulfing work, thick and tangled as the view beneath the Ozark canopy literally mirrored and embossed upon the book’s cover.