AND COULD THEY HEAR ME I WOULD TELL THEM (CODY-ROSE CLEVIDENCE)
Bio: Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of BEAST FEAST and Flung/Throne (Ahsahta, 2014; 2021) as well as Listen My Friend, This is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night (2021, The Song Cave), Aux Arc / Trypt Ich, (2021, Nightboat Books), and several handsome chapbooks, most recently DEARTH & God’s Green Mirth (2022, Fonograf Editions). They live in the Arkansas Ozarks with their two dogs, the Bird and Ramses II, and an absolute lunatic cat, Monkey.
Book Title: Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night
Press: Song Cave
1. What is something that surprised you during the writing, editing, or publishing process for Listen My Friend?
One thing that ended up shocking me what how compulsory it felt, by the end, while I was writing it, how it felt like a virus that took hold of my entire mind—I’ve had that experience before but never so for such a long and intense duration, which, I guess, ended up being the thing itself, the project itself, this like durational attention, but I was very surprised and relieved at the almost physical-mental release I felt when I stopped it, like I had given birth to a bot fly or something.
2. How might you describe the “experiment” or challenge of this book? What form, procedure, sound, or mystery enlivened your mind while writing?
The test, for me, I think, was to be serious. Serious about writing it, serious about researching it, serious about thinking through and along and with it. When Claudia Rankine wrote Citizen what surprised and inspired me was her clear demonstration that the job of poetry could be whatever you needed it to be, in other dimensions besides the like “poetic” ones we are taught to think of. My other poetry is flippant and… I don’t know silly in some way, and that was not what this project required, and the experiment, for me, really became… not being funny, not slipping in a little rhyme here and there, etc, but just, doggedly being serious and rigorous with the thinking, even if it’s spiraling and not conclusive (what could honestly be) and inside my own self in a kind of bleak way (for which I’m sorry).
3. Can you discuss an edit, idea, response, or interaction with another person that helped this book find its way in the world—aesthetically, materially, visually, structurally, spiritually…?
I think it was more the lack of interaction that spurred the project because I was so desperate for someone to talk to, somewhere for my thoughts to be that wasn’t just beating around in my brain without purchase. I didn’t show it to anyone until really late, to my brilliant friend and poet Sara Nicholson, who was visiting my mom with me, just being like… is this a thing? is it real? is this something I can just like, do?? Sometimes that’s hard to see, for yourself. And she just calmly and kindly fixed all my egregious spelling and grammatical mistakes.
4. Is there a physical place or space you associate with the poems in Listen My Friend?
I had driven north, from Arkansas, through like Missouri, Indiana and Ohio, up through Pennsylvania etc, to visit my friends in western New York and then to visit my mother, in July of 2020, and then back down, the whole trip took about a month—and just driving through America on the little roads, small highways and back roads, the people living their lives in different towns, the sides of highways changing, the construction sites and crumbling disrepair and old infrastructure of this stage of America, like everything is falling apart and being built and people just living their lives inside/alongside it, I always sleep in my truck at different camping spots or national forest parking lots or places where some locals have made a 4wheeler trail and a firepit along a stretch of otherwise undeveloped or forgotten river, like usually the sort of trashiest left-behind or forgotten scraps of place where one can feel free in the sense of not being perceived, I don’t know, I love America actually I think, whatever that means or looks like, like not our policies and prisons but something else, some failed other thing, and all the people and lives in the places, and it makes me really sad a lot, I remember just bursting into tears at some old chevy for sale in someone’s yard somewhere in Ohio that he had mowed around, I think that chevy made it into the book, but that drive for me felt like it was the final gestation of the chrysalis stage of LMF, listening to James Gleick’s Chaos on audiobook and that It Could Happen Here podcast, feeling autonomous, anonymous and invisible moving through the whole landscape and hellscape of this country with my thoughts as the world went on around me.
5. What’s something that feels difficult about having a book—or this book, specifically—come into the world?
Well my whole ass private life being in it was kind of odd!! Sometimes my friends say they’re teaching it and I’m like Oh God! I didn’t mean to be telling your 18 yr old students some of those things!!
6. What do you appreciate about the press (Song Cave) that published this book?
Song Cave is just wonderful in the range and depth of the work they showcase, it’s like having a poetry sommelier instead of buying the Walmart wines—but the real question that flies around in my head is sort of the opposite or inverse; why are the mainstream poetry presses so mediocre? Like how on earth, when there is so much exciting, really good and true, shining, interesting, etc. & in so many different ways, poetry happening out here, how on earth do they publish such bland, trite and hallmarky poetics? I don’t know what the answer is but I’d hazard a guess that it’s nepotism at every level of the large publishing houses, everyone who doesn’t actually have an eye or an ear or the real like, skill, gets a job through their nice professor or their aunt or some other inter-academic-social-world connection and then goes on to reinforce that mediocrity from a place of authority, ad infinitum, but it’s astonishing really how bad the work they put out is and it’s against the wider backdrop of this enforced branded blandness that small and independent presses are working. To me that’s what’s so special about The Song Cave and so many other small presses is that the editors really care about the work itself and what it’s doing, and care enough to work to build the space and the world in which people can share these brilliant and exciting poetries, with just like sheer determination, against the backdrop of all of that, like to shine some clear light against it and be like, look, here is something actually real and cool! It’s not just that they exist in a vacuum, it’s that they have to hack out an actual space for these poetics to breathe and come into the wider world, to be shared and appreciated and in conversation with each other, against pervasive other forces that dominate and squelch the bigger thoughts about what poetry is and can be. Janet Holmes who ran Ahsahta was like that too, just a brilliant reader and curator and champion, and I still feel the deficit of the kind of rigorous, bordering metaphysical, poetics that was left like a gaping hole in the poetry world when Ahsahta closed—and even that, especially that, makes me so grateful for the editors of all of these small presses, like they are shepherds and stewards of the vitality of this small world and losing each or any one would be like losing a whole species, a whole range of future possibilities.
7. Do you recall the most recent small press (micro, indie, DIY, university) publication you’ve recommended? What made you want to tell someone about it?
One thing I did somewhat recently was do an Instagram post just as like a life hack/poetry-book-choosing PSA and it was just a picture of a stack of books, of the spines, so if you know what presses you like then you can just glance down the spines at a bookstore and weed out/weed in the ones to even look at or look through—I think most poets know this but most non-poets don’t and I just wanted to help save everybody some trouble and time in wading through it all. But so my stack was The Song Cave, Burning Deck, Ahsahta, Milkweed, Nightboat, Omnidawn, Fence, Futurepoem, UDP, Litmus, Action, CSU Poetry Center (I’m not lying!) & The Cultural Society, tho recently I’ve been adding Copper Canyon because of a lot of the translations they’ve been putting out. So many people dislike poetry because they pick up some Harper Collins or Penguin Random House book that’s more boring than hitting yourself with rocks or cringey with like, fake deep introspection or whatever, and then I have to say I’m a poet? in public? it’s embarrassing! But when people start thinking of these small presses as where the interesting, exciting things are happening, explorations at the junction of mind and self and language, sound and thought, thinking of the small presses as more like record labels in the 90s, where ideas about what poetry can do and where different poetics are taking shape(s) and influencing discourse, then I think that will yield better understandings and also help people find poetries they can actually be excited about!
8. Is there a text, song, piece of art, or made thing that your book talks to, borrows from, fights with, or is in tribute to?
Oh Jesus probably every book in the annotations, I was so lonely and like, starved for conversations, first I was teaching out of state and just like, sitting in my little linoleum floored apartment with nothing to do and then back home in the pandemic so I couldn’t go visit anyone or have visitors and I just decided, isn’t it somewhere in Montaigne he says something like “all my friends are books” and I just thought to myself okay I am going to have these conversations in my head with all of these books and thoughts and ideas and podcasts, there are these Robert Sapolsky lectures on YouTube about human behavior and those felt important and formative, it was not quite like hosting a dinner party in your brain with all the ideas of all the books and media you’re reading, seeing how they could be in conversation with each other, but a little it was. Like braiding. It took the edge off the loneliness, but only a little. As far as tribute, there is a big sense in which the project was in tribute to my dad, who was a cultural anthropologist working on a book about death rites and structures/ideas and rituals of belonging in different societies, marriage, fertility, taboos, etc. and he died before finishing that book which he worked on for over 30 years, and what I really missed, and miss, most was having conversations with him about all of those things, and trying to carry the legacy of those thoughts and ideas and inquiries that we had shared, forward.
9. What adventures are you looking forward to, thinking about, or practicing now?
Sometimes I’m just waiting, and right now I’m just waiting, seeing if some strands start to take shape—I rarely read or write in the summer, because the whole world is out there, and my garden takes most of my time because I’m obsessed with the impossibility of like, growing food… building a whole civilization… seems fake to be honest. But I’m getting better and it’s getting less existentially dreadful to try, each year. But so that’s an adventure of sorts, a small one. And I live in this stupid way where everything is always breaking and I’m always fixing it, which keeps me busy, I guess.
10. Who will you gift a copy of Listen My Friend to? Or where will you leave it for someone to find?
Well—this one stumped me because I gave it to everyone I wanted to give it to like including sending a copy to Robert Sapolsky at Stanford even though I’m sure he’s never going to read it—so then I think what I’m going to do, whether or not they’ll accept it is another thing, is give a copy to the tiny Winslow Arkansas library, which is the town I live in/outside of. I don’t… think they’ll like it… but maybe!