Q: How does one pronounce the title of
A: Iduna.
Sorry about
that.
Iduna, if
one hunts about the net using wild cards & the like, turns out to be a variant
name for Idun, the Norse goddess of eternal youth who married Braggi, the god
of poetry. Guardian of the golden apples of youth, Idun was once kidnapped by
the storm giant Thiazi, only to be rescued by Loki,
who changed her into a nut. Yeah, I like Braggi as the god of poetry too.
I’m reading
with kari next Saturday at La Tazza & will be curious to hear whether
(& how) this San Francisco poet reads from iduna,
as it’s spelt here (edwards has a thing about capital letters, shared with
the likes of e.e. cummings, David Antin et al). The
book, as I view it, is an extended meditation on how do you read this? Page after page of problematized texts, more
often fascinating than not, but not exactly given, at least as far as I can
tell, to the ear.
If
ear-driven poets, such as Stacy Szymaszek or Graham Foust often start with a
page that seems absolutely empty, silent, white before syllables rise up off or
out of it, edwards seems not to believe in the existence of blank pages at all.
Thus on the page to the left of the table
of contents we find one quotation from Catherine Clement pretty much where
& as you might expect to find a quotation. But there is a second one from
Deleuze & Guattari in the upper left hand corner titled at a 90° angle. At
the page bottom is a line of type that reads
yo-yo fact
iman
whiz lobe kept lira kook salt size land
A similar
bit of verbal scat runs along the top border, upside down, starting with the
words “book deep hell….” Behind all of this lie two or three layers of
lettering, almost as a watermark – except that the background changes page by
page – some of the letters in a solid gray pseudo-script font building along
the left & right margins into syllables (gens, to, skev), others merely in outline
& so large they’re hard to get a visual sense of. This is as functionally
close as we get to a blank page – even the table of contents has the
upside-down top border & the pseudo-watermark scripts crowding the text.
Ah, but then there is the detail that there appears to be no discernable
correlation between this page labeled “content” & the contents of the
remainder of the book – it’s a work like any other. Palimpsest,
anyone?
My
immediate instinct is to register anxiety – there are more details here than I
(& very possibly anyone) can absorb. Yet almost instantly, edwards lets you
know that the author is fully conscious of the effects this kind of text
creates:
[this can be no salvation –
there’s
no moderation in the details]
reads a
stanza on p. 8, on what, if “content” really were a table of contents, would be
the first poem (save for the fact that its printed on
the left-hand page – no blank space here!).
The lines jump out no just for their content or the parenthetical markers, but
also because it’s the only one that strays well to the right of the surface
text’s left margin. The title of this text is it’s the sounds that ignites a thought.
Beyond the sheer irony lies a second layer revealed, quite accurately, by the
grammatic disagreement in number here.
On one
level, these are identarian texts that remind me of first-generation gay
liberation pamphlets produced by such poets as Judy Grahn or Aaron Shurin. On
another, however, these are identarian texts for an identity totally up for
negotiation:
I am a man being a woman
I am a woman being a man
I am a homosexual being a
straight woman being a homosexual man –
I am a homosexual woman being a
straight man being a homosexual woman –
reads the first stanza of “november 28th’s
carrier pigeon” (which may or may not be an allusion to Thanksgiving, but
definitely is playing with multiple available connotative schemas for those
last two words).
The second stanza continues:
I am a tree in disguise
with an edge predicament
I am a young boy being a young
girl being
whatever for gazing elder eyes
I am licking an envelope over
and over and over
Suddenly
the bald proclamations of the first strophe take on a whole new light. Typical
example: where the long lines of the first stanza were allowed to flow over to
the next, like prose, edwards introduces a stepped line – with an edge predicament – precisely in order to accentuate the
fact that the third line’s turn is not, in fact, more running over but is
enjambed – an edge predicament indeed! Nor is it any accident
that disguise sets up the rhyme with eyes in the fourth line. But it is the
complete unpredictability of the last line here that resounds most strongly for
me. edwards is capable of moving, almost instantly, from the most over-the-top
melodramatic agitprop to quiet utter specificity & back again, and does
this well as I’ve ever seen it done.
The days
when a Gertrude Stein (or even a