I was carrying around Brenda Iijima’s In a Glass Box because it fit perfectly into one of the interior pockets of my suit jacket, so when I got a chance between sessions at this conference down in Falls Church, I sat down & read. I can’t always do that at work – my head is often too filled with the clutter of the job – so it always feels like a special pleasure when it happens & I can connect with some first rate work. Genuinely good poetry – almost irregardless of kind or school or mood – makes me feel happy & optimistic, just to know that there is something new & wonderful under the sun. Which is how I respond to In a Glass Box.

 

Reading Iijima made me think about line breaks. In particular, the poem “Georgic” did:

 

Hot blood at slaughter. Immense pigs flee
and join us in the garden. Sickening stam-
pede and screeching hooves. Crush bulbs;
delicate protrusions, for they flee a farmer’s
lot, gush and intuition. Coiled barbs
rusted. Pink toes on soil and tattered leaves.
Make way among the shrub,
tree line and eye line. Solar bath. Storing
life in thick but invisible coils. Among
weather, by whistling branch, a path
determined by wind. You might. Veins
of a leaf, a thick black burl and a copse
of birch. I endeavor and echo. Color muscle
bind and mate. Spectrum lush, push mixtures;
tinted emotion, anterior spring; two bright
fools of air, our longing organs, spittle
and titted, furry bark, scarlet poison
berry. Only scantily clad like an inference,
like zealous sun; blades of wild grass.
Cool, thirsted, these bewildered beasts

I’m really intrigued by that mid-word linebreak at the end of the second line, and indeed by the line breaks in this poem & Iijima’s book overall. One can tell instantly, I think, that Iijima is a younger poet than, say, I am. It’s almost as if how, at least once free verse, so called, became the standard (or unmarked) poetic form, how line endings are handled has become almost the carbon dating of poetry. Thus one would see immediately that an Iijima is younger than a Silliman is younger than an Oppen is younger than a Williams.

 

I’m making this claim almost just by gut feel. But what do I mean if I look closer at this question? Consider, for example, this same text – although of course it wouldn’t be the same, really – if one were to string it out as a list of numbered sentences. 

 

1.      Hot blood at slaughter.

2.      Immense pigs flee and join us in the garden.

3.      Sickening stampede and screeching hooves.

4.      Crush bulbs; delicate protrusions, for they flee a farmer’s lot, gush and intuition.

5.      Coiled barbs rusted.

6.      Pink toes on soil and tattered leaves.

7.      Make way among the shrub, tree line and eye line.

8.      Solar bath.

9.      Storing life in thick but invisible coils.

10.  Among weather, by whistling branch, a path determined by wind.

11.  You might.

12.  Veins of a leaf, a thick black burl and a copse of birch.

13.  I endeavor and echo.

14.  Color muscle bind and mate.

15.  Spectrum lush, push mixtures; tinted emotion, anterior spring; two bright fools of air, our longing organs, spittle and titted, furry bark, scarlet poison berry.

16.  Only scantily clad like an inference, like zealous sun; blades of wild grass.

17.   Cool, thirsted, these bewildered beasts

The poem itself has something of an outward spiral, moving from some very specific imagery of doomed pigs have temporarily escaped into an (off-limits to pigs) part of the yard. One might conclude that the subsequent imagery represents a kind of verbal cubism of the yard & setting itself, moving even further to basic human possibilities (“I endeavor and echo.”) before being yoked back in the last line to initiating image of the pigs. In fact, the experience of reading the poem feels much richer than that simple explanation suggests: the specifics everywhere leap out, as profuse & intense in their color as autumn landscapes in New England. Some extraordinary small details are tucked in here – “our longing organs, spittle / and titted, furry bark.”

 

It would be an interesting experiment to give a writing class these numbered sentences & tell them to make a poem of them and see what you got. Here, for instance, are couplets of six-word lines, a mode that Bob Perelman has used to good advantage:

 

Hot blood at slaughter. Immense pigs

flee and join us in the

 

garden. Sickening stampede and screeching hooves.

Crush bulbs; delicate protrusions, for they

 

flee a farmer’s lot, gush and

intuition. Coiled barbs rusted. Pink toes

 

on soil and tattered leaves. Make

way among the shrub, tree line

 

and eye line. Solar bath. Storing

life in thick but invisible coils.

 

Among weather, by whistling branch, a

path determined by wind. You might.

 

Veins of a leaf, a thick

black burl and a copse of

 

birch. I endeavor and echo. Color

muscle bind and mate. Spectrum lush,

 

push mixtures; tinted emotion, anterior spring;

two bright fools of air, our

 

longing organs, spittle and titted, furry

bark, scarlet poison berry. Only

 

scantily clad like an inference, like

zealous sun; blades of wild grass. Cool,

 

thirsted, these bewildered beasts

And here is a version whose linebreaks hover between sense & the rhythms of speech (more akin to Williams, at least in my imagination, than to the Projectivists):

 

Hot blood at slaughter.
Immense
              pigs flee
and join us in the garden.

 

Sickening

stampede and screeching hooves.

 

Crush bulbs;
delicate protrusions,

 

for they flee a farmer’s lot,

gush and intuition.

 

Coiled barbs rusted.

 

Pink toes on soil and

tattered leaves.
                         Make way

among the shrub,
tree line and eye line.

 

Solar bath. Storing
life in thick but invisible coils.

 

Among weather,

by whistling branch, a path
determined by wind.

 

You might. Veins
of a leaf, a thick black burl and a copse
of birch.

             I endeavor and echo.

 

Color muscle
bind and mate.

 

Spectrum lush,

                       push mixtures;
tinted emotion,

                       anterior spring;

 

two bright
fools of air,

 

our longing organs, spittle
and titted,

furry bark, scarlet poison
berry.

 

Only scantily clad like an inference,
like zealous sun;

                        blades of wild grass.
Cool, thirsted,

these bewildered beasts

One could make a game of this almost – and with almost any text, not just Iijima’s. I can hear, for example, how a younger Creeley might have turned that four-word first line tin a couple all its own:

 

Hot blood
at slaughter.

 

Indeed, it takes almost no imagination to hear that in Creeley’s distinctive voice, the heavy, rasping break at the end of each line.

 

Now none of these versions, you will note, are anywhere nearly as good as Iijima’s. Her lines, her text actually does require the particular form she gives to the poem. And this is what most mystifies me – because given those words, I just couldn’t do it on my own. Iijima is obviously hearing something quite distinct that is just beyond my own auditory range, or at least my ability to reproduce in writing. Where this is most clear to me is that midword linebreak stam- / pede. I simply can’t imagine a midword break like that being anything other than heavily emphasized, a pause for great effect. But my reading of Iijima’s text tells me in about five different ways that to hear a heavy pause there constitute a misreading. Even the two lines that end in periods do so in ways that soften the break. Similarly, the very last line of the poem has no punctuation at all. And two employ semicolons – is Iijima the last poet to truly believe in the semicolon? Even by my own generation, this doomed bit of punctuation had largely disappeared.

 

There are, of course, some counter tricks here, reasons why Iijima’s version is the best of all. Anybody writing these words & thoughts to fall into – flow into – another form (as if into a container), would write & edit those very lines differently. It wouldn’t actually be the same text. Indeed, from a grammarian’s perspective, there are only two sentences – numbers 2 & 13 in the list above – that are syntactically complete (unless you count also the command at number 7). Iijima’s poem is very much woven from partial fragments and this seems integral to its vision & statement. Thus a phrase such as furry bark foregrounds itself as an image, tactile & funny & completely imaginable precisely because it is embedded into an allover surface composed of like parts.

 

Writing this well is never easy & certainly not as easy as Iijima makes it seem. I’m reminded of the fact that Jackson Mac Low always used procedures to break down the expository & narrative habits of mind of his early poems & that it wasn’t until the langpos, most of whom are young enough to be his kids (he’s older than either of my parents, for example), showed up that he seemed to pick up from them/us how one might free-write toward such a surface. So that’s the sense I have of this text of how Iijima is using the line. If I ever want to be able to do that, I’m going to have to study how she & others of her age cohort produce so gracefully something I couldn’t construct at all.