I can remember reading a late 90s study that said 15% of the poems written between 1990 and 1997 had used the story of Lot’s wife to illustrate cruel irony. An irony that women in the Bible were often nameless, and horrible things happen to people whether they have a name or not. An irony of God’s punishments missing their mark when it’s about testing “unwavering justice.” In 1999, everyone knew Lot’s wife as no one, or a person “not talked about,” until the Bible sees fit to grant her enough human volition so she turns around. Oh, “regret” to leave a home and not listen to what your husband said about turning around. Because now she’s just salt. God’s punishment proved absolute. There was something about 1990s poetry that made this moment feel very poetic. It inspired that song by Bonnie Tyler, “Turn around, bright eyes.” Tyler sang. Bonnie Tyler was known among her friends as a real pillar of salt.
Rest assured, Clevidence has not revived the Lot’s wife trope for their book about Eden grimacing while it looks out at our contemporary world. However, they have assembled an action set of familiar figures from the book of Genesis. As evocational tools. As ritualized imaginations. As incantations of whatever it is Eden means. What was thinking like for people who were “writing the Bible” and forming their worldly lives in a land that definitely had a God-like expansiveness? And what impulse suggested literary figures like “Noah” or “Adam” or “Abraham,” who explicitly commented on the multiplicity of the stars?
The Bible, and generally Western thought, has spent a lot of time generating a story line that extrapolates out from what certain men thought thousands of years ago. Especially the men who were exceptionally prone to mystical perspectives. On one hand, I would argue Clevidence’s poems show appreciation for that quality of Western thought. Mysticism indicates a kind of thinking that doesn’t rely on rationality alone. This doesn’t take away from The Grimace of Eden, Now’s critical stance to the inbred Westernness of Western thought, the men on men action that looks to cycle through the intellectual constructions certain men used to fashion “Western thought.” Only to produce an additional man-generated Western thought, so he can say he “advanced” Western culture. Who would think men could be so conscious of what other men have been thinking? Clevidence lends their own skepticism to the unfortunate absurdity of this history; however, their poems are more invested in a poetics of possibility than a poetics of protest. To borrow an image from the book. If there are billions of neutrinos passing through someone’s body, then people shouldn’t make a Western history accounting for only a handful of neutrinos passing through. Let’s hear from more of those neutrinos, please!
Because what even is nature? And what is science? And while Clevidence’s poems might not want the heavy authoritativeness Western science carries, there is a very enthusiastic intention behind most science celebrating the magic of earth, and nature. The magic of science that has been so attentive for all of history so that it multiplies people’s angles of vision. Doesn’t a kaleidoscope feel magical, even when it’s merely a multiplicity? The critique of Western thought, saying Newton was wrong, and Galileo was wrong, and Socrates, too, is not a dismissal of Western thought. It’s a what-if-we-were-to-observe-things-differently thinking. What if we were to resurrect the overwhelming fact of so much nature existing around people, and rethink what thinking is.
And while I would argue this spirit is what I often read in Clevidence’s work, especially where the work recognizes a queerness lacing through almost all nature, making a poetry about nature that feels very natural, I would say The Grimace of Eden, Now approaches nature using a primordial lens. What if there was a poetry that could see through Noah’s eyes before the flood. And he was aware a flood was coming. And instead of relegating that storyline to a Biblical obsession around cubit-measurements of a future ark, there was a story of Noah observing tragedy where he knows the world is about to end, and everyone else is committing their sins. Would that sharpen his view of nature, and scientific fact? Would he hear and understand the science of everything around him differently?
And, yes, perhaps you can see Clevidence’s sneaky persona-driven frame accounting for the anthropocene. The poetics of dread. The poetics of culture-driven people to weigh down their experience of the natural world. And that poetics is there. Poemsthatdon’tputspacesbetweenwords. Poems that make the reader climb through a series of symbols to piece a meaning together. But the Genesis-figure-as-frame also gives voice to an oracular figure who is seized by the magical nature in front of them. The nature as a vast system of sporadic events that unexplainably led to this speaking figure using language to observe what is around them. And the nature that is simply wonderful. In fact, it’s possible to read the book as an extended lyricized persona of Noah. Noah before the flood. During the flood. And then when Noah gets drunk after they’ve returned to land. This reading perhaps requires a predisposed listening. But there are images of a dove being released, and wine imbibed, and, on a larger scale, a delirious embrace of all the natural world that just keeps existing and existing and existing while the poet looks on.
There’s a possibly more radical perspective to The Grimace of Eden, Now, where it’s perhaps proposing Earth in 2024 (when the book was published) as the state of Eden before the Fall. In this reading, the inevitability of Apocalypse is even more striking. I hear it especially in “The Circuit Board’s Devotion,” where each section’s cataloguing of all that exists on earth. Like it was earth in its pure Edenic state. And there is an end of that purity impending. The Anthropocene. The circuit boards taking inventory of what they will soon be tracking with their computer intelligence? It speaks to what Lynn Keller has observed about an ecopoetic that “dwells in crisis.” Clevidence’s book anticipates a future that will lay waste to the natural world, but the poems are still appreciating the natural world’s existence. It fashions a particular kind of oracle. But what is an oracular figure? What would Noah have thought wandering his village, the land around his village, seeing a tree and recognizing the patterns in the trees that hold these particular trees together with a common name. And to know that all the trees will ultimately be destroyed.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.