Travis Sharp's Yes, I Am a Corpse Flower

Reviewed by bonnyCD

(KFB, 2021)

Yes, I am a corpse flower
This, the first of six poem organs that constitute Sharp’s book, sets us partly down the rocky path of perfumey abstraction (the epigraphs at the top of the book certainty don’t help my wariness*), but questions of who is “meatless” and “meaty” and “meaty” and “meatless” again are gradually overtaken by textual and aural procedures of deformation and reconfiguration that undergird the entire book—effective, meaning-generating repetitions. The necessary shift from ‘thinking about meat’ to ‘meat thinking thru the world’ is really remarkable, and offers us a unique work of ill/queer goretesquerie, of body-embodying body-first verse that pairs nicely with a glass of something fruitfully heady like, say, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.
 
The felt and the heard, “hard / of hearting”, the outdated Pop sensibility of the “ravenous gape [which] brings all the ravenous insects to the yard,” gape and insect one in their ravening, where when one “waxes my chassis. He wanes my rest”. Sharp’s rhetorical wit should not be underestimated, but it’s less clever than it is the persistent application of force against language+the body to discover which shapes survive pressure, a diagnostic to determine which ones cum when bullied and get the rest both slippery and sticky for it. The “rest” above reads as whole, but also recovery. Polyvalent, webby, thrust in many directions at once to the reader’s delight.
 
Sinister queer agenda
I am not a big fan of recycling chapbooks into trade books. It puts a pick into the head of the book-ness of the chapbook, doesn’t it? Enough that I’d almost rather not touch on it here at all. But Sharp’s speakers “ask politely repeatedly”.
 
More of the slippage, the language-body and body-language under duress, where the “integral” body emerges “Integreal”, and questions of plant body and meat body and their shared eventual corpse are metered out in single line stanzas, an even pace; the poems in SQA do occasionally erupt into a couplet or even greater masses, reminiscent of root balls or dirt clumps.
 
I think SQA is the most abstracted and least rewarding leg of YIAACF, I think for its fragmented, one-sentence-then-another-stride. More of the outdated Pop allusion (here “a blender for a / heart” for Eve 6’s “Inside Out,” and earlier, Kelis’ “Milkshake”); jargonia** like the “glossolalic” interrupting how we “dream so much of body…dream of body in the forest”, glossolalic paving over the obvious glossolilac trying to spurt thru that, endless I definitions, all a sentencing to death the political valence of a work like this and only rarely letting its ripe Corpse Flower vapors spring to freedom (such as the verbing of sentence to “asentence”, made new and worthy in such novelty).
 
Sharp is insisting “I run out of room & write over words. / I make new words by layering”, but there is no collision or overlay or superposition at play in SQA, and I don’t care what I is up to, how greedy I is for abstract saturation (the abstract cannot saturate, that’s the whole problem).
 
Tell me, what is “the unlanguaged ejaculate of the sentence”? I am a truffle pig for poem things, I am happy to put my nose to the mulchy pomearth for things, but this stretch of YIAACF is more detergent aisle than compost pile.
 
If you’re wondering why I’m so hard on this, return to my opening remark for the section. This is a very different book crammed inside an otherwise choate flow. It lacks the recursive and rupturing appeals of its “BODY WITH BODIES FOR ORGANS” in its formal procedures. It’s a good problem to have, writing things that are diverserer and wellweirder and embettered over time, that make visible an/other book as a foreign entity erupting in the body without producing pleasure.
 
The body under valuation: a musical
Extremely difficult to talk about, because it should be staged and polyphonic and that obviously cannot work the same way on the page. But there’s things at work anyhow.
 
The concatenation of body parts to their place within and without the outer world is a very traceable and worn path, made richer for Sharp’s trodding down it as well, where “the road is connected to the tax dollars I don’t have to pay because / I’m poor / and my poor is connected to my parents’ poor / any my parents’ poor is connected to the trailer park”, and on and on, to first crushes, from the boy to the cock to the ass to the compliment to the mouth to the esophagus and on and on. No I outthinking the immensity of literally everything else in the universe here as in the invasive chapbook previous.
 
In contrast to the thought-terminating abstraction of “unlanguaged ejaculate” I question above, this musical offers us generative questioning, like, just what is “a gendernonconforming / Butnotthatpretty / Justalittlepretty / boy to do?” A cynical reader might think this a Pollock-y Idpol splatter word-salad, but really it’s a cheeky rebuke of Capital, playful and fun and not so feckless in its pew pew at such an obvious target. Abstractions can’t abstract their way out of a paper bag, but good poems can help you laugh, turn the bag into a ventilator for a minute.
 
In “farming my organs / The only one I can / extract from the ground / of my body is the skin…the only organ that / lends its name to the / act of its own removal / I skin the skin” brings to my ear Mark Anthony Jarman’s “Burn Man on a Texas Porch”: “the skin’s the largest organ / mine’s a little out of tune.”***
 
And teeth, toothy teeth teeth, feeling the commodification of queerxperience in real-time: “but in the documentary version of / what really happened there were / lots of happy white gays / reaching for the bouquet,” the “straight / to Netflix film version” with tokenized corrections to the white horde of bouq-gay snatchers; no winning either side of it, a touch of lucid cynicism in an otherwise not overwhelmingly cynical nor scabpicking book.
 
And at last, exhaustion: “we give up / the notion of fucking / and just sleep for a while”. So very real.
 
I guess we should talk about our feelings
“If sadness is a form / of resistance then / we’re doing very / well”. Calls to mind arguments like Hedva’s “Sick Woman Theory,” wondering aloud what can even qualify as political from positions like a dispersed body, a plant that blooms almost never. “body I’ve / been re / searching / for a means / to break you / into a cipher / able form”, a search for a cipher, an able form, a cipherable form, body as puzzle and answer key in one knot, the desire that the body might “let / me wrack this / ability to distinguish / between this & that”. And a touch of weariness, “a / litany of bad / intentions a bad / case of memorial / revisionism”.
 
Protean shakes: a biography
Language machines, “he grew up / in a loving / machine it / found him / took him in / fed him cotton candy / bathed him in glitter / filled his head with / dangerous cogs”. Adolescence hitting walls of language limit: “the boy quiets / after years of silence / the machine grows concerned / and then grows tired / the boy invents / a language of gestures…the machine is impressed / by the boy’s resourcefulness / even in silence he gets his way”. Those thresholds of knowing, that you cannot unlearn an event, “he forgets what it feels / like to not be touched”. An eventual reformation, the titular protean adaptations. Very curious poetry here, opaque but not frustratingly so.
 
OrganGrindr™️
Cronenberg-ian spectacle, to pry open or lop off and show it off too, for example in the persona of the PANCREAS: “What I wouldn’t give for an audience. I’d make another sex tape. I’d kill a man. I’d pull myself open and leaking into the fluids surrounding I’ll be inside and outside, me and we. The green tinge of it”. In and out, me and we.
 
No discrete moments. Slippery-think, queer in Freccero’s sense where slipperiness contributes “resistance to its hypostatization, reification into nominal status designating an entity, a thing, and to allow or to continue its outlaw work as a verb and sometimes an adjective” (Queer/Early/Modern, 2006).
 
Where poem LEFT KIDNEY is on the right hand page and following it is RIGHT KIDNEY on a left hand page, though when you flatten the bookbody to let the shared KIDNEY page yearn straight upward like a sprout, scalpel-ed from the rest, bird’s eye there’s a left kidney on the left side of the sheet and a right kidney on the right side of the sheet. Is YIAACF that invested in its bookness, its material thinking? Impossible to tell. But as the best poetry does, it generates invasive readings of it, mint-think rioting across the garden of it. It reacts in real time.
 
STOMACH reiterated and redacted and bracketed (literally in this case, parentheses manifesting by v3) into links of stommysausage.
 
A wise choice to end YIAACF with the book’s strongest poeming, nostalgic for its phantom appendix, retracing the earlier concatenations and language-body body-languishing of those linkages, jagged and modular de/re/formations of the “redress” to the “red dress”, jagged and modular as a swallowed Lego on a redressedyssey thru the entire gorious body.
 
The stench of the rarely blooming flower, where we flay, pray “for perforation (perf me, perf me!),” a fumey U reveals itself in the gap, rot and B.O.-got bodies, potted root-rotted plants. Not the heady perfume of abstraction, but the carrion/clarion call to come pollinate while the getting is against all odds good.

*I’ve no real problem with Brossard (and haven’t read Stecopoulos), but Brossard’s work is not so concretely candid, fibrous, or gnawworthily meatlike as Sharp’s approach here is (I don’t think Brossard would be interested in being that bo[l]d/ily). As a rule, writing that’s up its own ass is often the furthest thing from literally venturing up its own ass, which is infinitely more vital. I was surprised to read Sharp held an MFA, even, given this book is quite good (broken clock twice a day, etcetera). 

​**Yeah, I’m inventing a jargon term for jargon to illustrate the point.

​***This is from memory. If it’s apocryphal, then hunt me down with sharp sticks and heavy rocks. 

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​bonnyCD is a writer, film- and rug-maker living and working in rural Alberta (treaty 7 territory). Their book-length poem The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux is available from Gordon Hill Press (2023), and their most recent chapbook GLADDENER (Anstruther) and ephemera Banazir Galbasi Doubtfiring with the farmerettes... (solipCYST) were released fall 2025. They sometimes also unhappily publish as Benjamin C. Dugdale for so-called 'professional continuity.'