Listen My Friend, This Is The Dream I Dreamed Last Night

Cody-Rose Clevidence’s book-length, single-paragraph poem asks nearly every question imaginable about who we are and how we got here. The opening sentence prepares readers for Clevidence’s range, with nods to perceptual science, animal tool use, morphology, human emotion, and physics: “the binocular vision, the grasping-hand, flat teeth, reverie, grief, mourning, string.” At the heart of this poem is a twinned question about what it means to be both free as individuals and responsible for each other.

To address this question, Clevidence draws together lengthy quotations from numerous sources (Hannah Arendt, The Declaration of Independence, and The Lost Cities of Africa, to name a few), personal memories and narratives (focused in particular on their relationship with their parents), and descriptions of landscapes (especially of their home in the Ozarks). In addition to wrestling with biological determinism and examining an exploitative economic history, Clevidence also documents the catastrophic events of 2020, including escalating COVID-19 infection rates, police killings, and drone bombings. Implicit throughout is an insistence on empathy as that which might allow us to transcend our entanglements in structural violence. Moving seamlessly from sweeping vistas of the massive structures controlling our world, to the human scale, and the individual lives implicated in and affected by these systems, this poem draws attention to our fundamental interconnectedness: 

I think of freight trains running across America at night, the wind, the stars, the geometries of the tracks flat on the land, all of them on their interconnected tracks, their constant noises of machines and metal and engines, occasionally running their long length of linked units under a streetlamp at an intersection somewhere where cars wait in a line on either side, the headlights stretching out into the distance. 

While the discursive heftiness of this work can feel intimidating at first, Clevidence manages to engage the reader so that they feel swaddled in a highly stimulating conversation, awed by the web of relations that are lifted into view and moved by Clevidence’s powerful personal reflections.