Clifton Snider was born in Duluth, Minnesota. A P.K. (Preacher's Kid), he moved around a lot as a boy, living in Illinois and Indiana before settling in Southern California. He is the author of eight highly-praised books of poetry, including The Age of the Mother (Laughing Coyote, 1992) and The Alchemy of Opposites (Chiron Review Press, 2000). His poetry has been published in such journals as Blue Mesa Review, Bogg, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pearl, Poetry/LA, and Rolling Stone. His fiction and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including The Mt. Aukum Review, The Advocate, and the Los Angeles Times. His novel about the bisexual leader of an 80s Southern California rock band, Loud Whisper, was published in 2000. Snider's coming out/coming of age novel, Bare Roots, was published by in 2001. His latest novel is Wrestling with Angels: A Tale of Two Brothers. His book of literary criticism, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On: A Jungian Interpretation of Literature, was published by Chiron Publications in 1991. As a critic, he specializes in Jungian and Queer Theory. Snider has been awarded residence fellowships at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY); The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico (Taos); and The Michael Karolyi Foundation (Vence, France). He earned his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of New Mexico. A political/peace activist, he is a former officer in the Long Beach Lambda Democratic Club. He teaches in the English department at California State University, Long Beach.
11 September 2001
Today the dreaded diagnosis came.
A hammer hit the woman who bore me:
terminal cancer of the omentum.
What is meant to protect now breeds armies
of greed that make a great-grandmother
look pregnant or bloated like a starved child
in a parched, poverty-ridden country.
Hope, like the Trade Towers toppled today,
transforms, deep inside her happy spirit,
like a box cutter slashed across a throat.
This dreaded day I never expected,
nor did she, I expect. Such beaming life,
so many years of memory, learning,
loving compiled in her system of cells:
they disappear into the atmosphere,--
so many losses--eldest son, husband,
last vestiges of human dignity,
she holds to them: use of arms, legs, bowels.
These go slow, but not her thriving spirit.
Like her network of blue veins, her blue eyes,
her mother love is bonded to my blood.
This is her lesson on this awful day.
published in Chiron Review
Kabul Zoo
Women, of course, were not allowed
under the Taliban to visit the zoo.
A tall creature of cloth, blue or black,
standing behind the mesh
might scare or even feed & comfort
what animals had not yet been
tortured or killed for their flesh.
While I stand isolated at LAX,
amidst cheerful, well-fed workers
who have detected traces of TNT
on a camera I purchased
twenty-three years ago,
a lone monkey in Kabul stares
through wood and metal, his face long,
wan, hoping for crumbs from the crowd.
The Taliban have fled. The bear
with the beaten nose
might now get meat,
deer might get feed,
the keeper might get paid.
The twenty-three-year old lion, Marjan,
blinded by a grenade, is famous,
his face spread over TV, newspapers:
disfigured, ragged, majestic,--his fur
matted, sticking up, hanging down,
defiant, a regal survivor,
now dead,
in a land where children are lucky
to get fodder pounded in a bowl,
where soldiers stick money in the noses
of enemy bodies,
and the spirit has barely begun to heal.
published in Chiron Review
You Tell Me
I wanted to go to Baghdad
to see the Tigris,
to see elements
of Western Civilization,
to see, if not handle,
descendants of the desert
with eyes as deep as blood,
with skin like river rocks,
children of our forebears,
cousins.
But some of them
voted for the one name on the ballot,
a man who executed cabinet ministers,
who sent young men
to die fighting a neighbor
--two neighbors--
who failed to be conquered
by the father of our
illegitimate leader, he
of the sodden eyes, who
worships blood and oil.
If I get to Baghdad,
what and who will be there
to see, to understand?
first published on the Poets Against the War website
Victory in Iraq
April 2003
Bush II sips his blood-red bubbly,
one bullet in the glass,
upstairs in the White House.
He nibbles pretzels of victory.
The horror he manipulated
exploits the TV screen.
Marines place the flag, lasso
a statue of Baghdad's dictator.
Bush II must telephone Daddy. First
he belches from a toothy Texas grin
under brine-black eyes,
a brainy mangle of manure.
Somewhere in Baghdad,
on a solitary bed, lies an
armless boy, newly orphaned,
his face asleep, innocent agony.
first published on the Poets Against the War website
Ode to the Banana Slug
Oh slimy California native,
northern forest dweller,
leaver of mucid trails
on kitchen surfaces,
oh happy creature,
phallic mascot, mollusk,
whose entire body smells,
whose tentacles see,
whose smiley-face &
long fat yellow body
slithers through the U C
mug of Santa Cruz, who
snuggles in glasses
over airhead eyes,
a cartoon grin
on a sweat shirt,
holding a book of Plato
in thick yellow fingers.
Oh slimy California native,
available in stuffed, crawling
versions, squeezable & soft,
I see you nibbling with many teeth
through the redwoods,
munching native greens,
creature both male & female,
who mates when it rains:
hours of circular contortions,
genitals the length of your bodies,
so tangled together
to get loose you must chew
each other's phallus to bits.
published in RipRap
Aspen in the Wind
When I think of what you do
I think of a painting by Caillebotte:
three men scrape a hardwood floor,
their strong backs bowed, bent
like the wood, their arms too--
perpendicular or parallel, brown, potent,
symmetrical as Degas dancers,
fragile as they are firm,
autumn aspens in the wind:
they fill the eyes with gold,
the ears with vibrations.
The air oozes ripeness.
from The Alchemy of Opposites
(2000). A translation into French is available at
http://www.csulb.edu/~csnider/art.poetry.html
A Review of The Alchemy of Opposites by James Benedict
The subject matter of Clifton Snider's delightful collection of poems The Alchemy of Opposites is, as suggested by the title and the cover illustration - a cave painting from the Niaux cave - couched in experience related to archetypal subjects. Written on the premise that profound experience can be found wherever we are, if only we care to look, the poems span a wide variety of themes divided into seven sections, which partly indicate their chronology and partly their thematic content.
The central underlying theme of the collection is the mysterious disappearance of Snider's older brother Evan Allan Snider - also the subject matter of his autobiographical novel Wrestling with Angels (Xlibris, 2001). The elegy "A Last Good-bye" on one of the opening pages attempts to come to terms with the lack of data surrounding his brother's presumed death and the realization that the mystery will never be solved. This painful situation is the subliminal point of departure for the collection, which consists mainly of a sequence of strong poems dealing with loss interspersed with nature poems, poems on art and artists, poems of love and friendship, spirit of place, etc.
Inevitably the subject of the poet's brother bleeds into extended elegies on lost significant others; from a Norwegian cousin in the poem "Holocaust", a student activist who was deported during the German occupation of Norway, to "Homomonument" describing the pink granite triangles, near the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, commemorating Hitler's gay holocaust. A host of AIDS lost lovers and friends are also remembered in the collection, as in the poem "Survivor":
The loss of a hundred once familiar faces, faces that blend into one black space like the entrance to a cave a bat cave with guano rotting, exuding ammonia, poisonous to human breath. (18)
The profound healing process engaged in the poem is negotiated in the alchemical terms of the nigredo (the blackening) and the putrefactio (the rotting). These are initial stages in the alchemical process, whose goal in Jungian terms was not the making of the material gold, but rather the philosophical gold. Jung translated this concept with the term "individuation" and defined it as "the integration of unconscious strata into consciousness", stressing that the process, not the end result, is the central preoccupation in alchemy. This is also Snider's main project, though of course direct references to the time-honoured process can also be found (in "Le Mont St. Michel"): "The lights turn stone into gold…" (138)
The poem "Survivor" opens the theme of AIDS related deaths which surfaces with regular intervals throughout the collection. The once familiar faces disappear into the black space likened to a transformative cave - a metonym for the alchemical crucible. Subsequently the cave-crucible fills with rotting raw material and vile poisonous airs signalling the putrefactio, related to the nigredo, both initial stages of the alchemical process. Here the alchemist traditionally works his way through a profound depression, projecting his unresolved emotions into the operations of the process. Just as a seed crystal of gold was traditionally added as enzyme to transform the raw material, darkened by initial combustion in the crucible, the poet's philosophical integration and voicing of the horror belabours the depression, while the primal matter graduates from ammonia to oxygen. The oxygen in the cave-crucible (complemented by the Niaux cave ox image on the cover) reflects the philosophical gold of the reference myth of alchemical transformation and stresses the processual nature of Snider's collection: Alchemy is continually engaged in his poetry whose sustained focus is on healing through dynamic experience, insight, and love, as celebrated in "Hanging On" and the eponymous poem "The Alchemy of Opposites", both dedicated, like the collection itself, to Snider's Guatemalan companion. Here the traditional heterosexual opposition, the mysterium coniunctionis of the alchemist and his mystic sister celebrated in the reference myth, is translated to an intermale nexus of "mestizo fire and Nordic reserve" (130).
The cave-crucible theme of alchemical transformation resurfaces in the collection's final sector "Spelunker". Here Snider's passion for speleology is charted in direct and metaphorical ways. The poem "The Cave of Niaux" finds the artist as a spectator in sacred vaults of Neanderthal and Cro Magnon worship in France:
From these cold, faceted walls, messages from a prehistoric past. The paintings speak to my living heart…(140)
The shared visual experience graduates to a numinous participation mystique. While realizing that there is no return to authentic experience on this "pilgrimage to the past" (140), art still attracts as parable. In the previous poem "Spelunker" Snider describes the passion with which he negotiates archival caves in a quest for self-knowledge, uncovering data "like prehistoric notations that I must learn to read" (137).
The final poem in the collection "The Cave of Niaux", ends on a processual note, a dedication to a collective numinous moment, which, in accordance with its alchemical reference icon, the philosophical stone, is ephemeral:
We gather torches and trek back, different now, bonded, purposeful, if only for the moment. The opening blinds like a blast. (141)
The author relates the experience of the archetypal paintings in the cave, a becoming metaphor for the unconscious, to his own syncretistic (Christian/Amerindian) rituals, and reborn from the underworld he returns to diurnal matters. The evocative poem, which metonymically describes the poet's quest, is rich in classical intertexts such as the myths of Demeter and Persephone, the Eleusinian mysteries, Orpheus and Eurydiche, Tammuz and Ishtar, and of course the appropriate man-to-man epic of the Babylonian Gilgamesh.
On a different level Snider's Zuni fetish collection poems relate to the subject of healing through creativity. They are reminiscent of Bruce Chatwin's Utz whose main character towards the end of the novel realizes the psychological implications of his passion for collecting: It is a therapeutic protection against loss. Snider's poems do not point to this; clearly he is immersed in the profoundly traumatic task of coming to terms with loss, a process augmented by research into the deepest layers of the psyche, which he mediates by writing, recording personal microhistories, sublime and prosaic epiphanies in nature, art, the quotidian, building a home with his lover, collecting, etc.
Snider's theoretical and practical focus on alchemy as a vessel of healing and individuation is part of the tradition of alchemical revival initiated by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, and explored by Patrick White, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc. In this chronicle of spiritual work related to loss and grief Snider's stamina shines through every poem, giving a new meaning to the term "healing fiction", which, as described by James Hillman, is a significant contemporary variation on the alchemical process.
I respect the author's focus on the apparent chronological sequencing of the poems. However, I would have preferred a comprehensive thematic structuring of the poems into for example elegies, poems of love and friendship, ekphrastic poems, poems about artists, animal poems (often related to the Australian poet Les Murray's work), poems of place, etc. There are many poignant poems and important graphics of fin-de-siècle gay sensibility in this collection and I suspect that the cumulative effect of a thematic ordering would add to the pleasure of reading Snider's work and the profound insights it shares.
first published in Chiron Review, also in Gay Today
Clifton Snider's website: http://www.csulb.edu/~csnider/