1
Unlike the scattered seamount, unlike the ridges, unlike the bed
of the sea, unlike a typical volcanic cone. Unlike winddriven
currents, unlike the continental mass, unlike a submarine canyon, unlike the
several hundred upper fathoms. Unlike harbors, unlike
capes, unlike towering shapes, unlike black rock. Unlike
subterranean fires, unlike deep unrest. Unlike
islands, unlike fog. Unlike lava.
Unlike the birth of an island. Unlike the planetary currents, unlike the
epicenter. Unlike icy water, unlike partial thaw,
unlike tidal movements, unlike the sky. Unlike raw
productivity.
Even now
Whenever
I read in public for any length of time at all, I hyperventilate. A 40-minute
reading leaves me light-headed, to say the very least. As those who have
approached me immediately after such events may have noticed, I am very much in
an altered state by virtue of having read. I sometimes find, even just an hour later, that I have almost no recollection as to who
approached & what they might have said. Then later I fret that I’ve come
across as impossibly rude or spacey or both.
One
thing that did occur at the Church after I read there nearly two weeks ago was
that, among the people who came up with books they wanted me to sign, was a
young woman who introduced herself to me as Brenda
Iijima. As she handed me something – I have no memory of what – to
sign, I reached into my own backpack & pulled out Around Sea, which I’d been reading over dinner right before the
reading, for her to sign as well. I
love symmetry. And I can prove this wasn’t an
hallucination because my copy of her book is now signed Terrestrially yours + infinity. I guess she must have noticed how
high I was.
“1”
is the first piece (duh!) in a series whose only title is the Roman numeral
“II,” one of six such series in Around
Sea: I, II, III, IV, o, … Yes, that ellipsis is a
title. I read these as a series of suites, more than, say, as aspects of a
single poem, largely because of great the range of material Iijima takes on in
this work. Still, it’s worth noting that the whole of section I originally
appeared in The East Village Other, No. 8, where it was entitled “from Viewed from the Sea.” So the book as a
whole is clearly One Thing.
As
the fourth of the pieces selected for this blog’s test of anonymity, Iijima’s
poem suffers unfairly by its position. Generally, it was read by readers
already taxed by whatever effort the three pieces before it required. Its use
of parallel construction, an important device also in “Swamp Formalism,” tho
employed here quite differently, was taken by a few readers almost as a
transcendental signifier. As with every other piece, a couple of people,
including Pamela Lu, listed it as their favorite and one or two – notably that
Midwestern poet, himself anonymous – really could not stand it.
Reading
the reactions, I was reminded of the degree to which this exercise turns out
not to be about close reading – let alone contemporary poetry – so much as it
proves to be a Rorschach of aesthetic value. After all, specialized readers –
or at least so went the New Critical line – would tend to come to similar
conclusions if they could in fact just examine the poem “objectively.”
I
can, I think, explain why every one of these texts is well written, if by that
I mean that the text is an effective, inventive, tightly composed instance of
the author’s intention. Yet, as should by now be apparent, that is hardly ever
enough. Because values are hardly ever “obvious,” let alone
“objective.”
Consider,
for example how Iijima uses parallel construction, compared with Lisa Jarnot’s
deployment of the device in “Swamp Formalism.” While it is the most palpable of
Jarnot’s devices, it is only one of several instances that build contrasting,
sensual structures within her 25-line poem: “as if” accounts for just 20 of the
146 words, 13.7 percent. “Unlike” represents 25 of the 87 words in Iijima’s
text, 28.7 percent. The feel of the two texts is, dare I say, decidedly “unlike.”
One
could write an entire paper on the vagaries & nuances hidden away in “as
if,” a comparison that pulls away finally from being a true assertion, its
push-pull dynamic articulating a double-sided economy of desire. “Unlike” is a
far less ambiguous term – it’s the exact denial of syllogistic movement, A ≠
B. Indeed it was this constant, obsessive negation, this depiction only in
terms of categorical opposites that appealed to the boy in me who once started
a long poem of his own with “Not this. What then?” I will concede to an
intense, almost visceral response to “1.” Whatever Iijima’s selling, I’m
buying.
There
are two other formal elements in “1” I should note. The first is how Iijima
uses sentence length within these stanzas, which almost feels to me similar to
the elegance of Baudelaire’s counting sentences within his prose poems. The way
I read Iijima, the unit is the phrase, a number you can almost get to by
counting instances of “unlike”. Thus we see in the first two paragraphs
something like a reverse zoom effect:
·
8,4,2,2,1
·
1,2,4,1
The
telescoping effect is more sensual than that list of numbers suggests – the
second sentence of two phrases in the first paragraph differs from its
immediate predecessor through the elimination of adjectives, so they’re
parallel & yet they’re note. Note also that Iijima isn’t simply deploying a
down & back structure here either – she breaks off the progression at the
end of the second paragraph and the third, spatially distance stanza – as a
single phrase, it doesn’t have much of the sentence, let alone paragraph, about
it – the one phrase in the poem lacking an “unlike” hovers out there in all its
difference.
But
the most distinct aspect of this poem lies not in its use of post-avant forms
but rather in the language that follows every “unlike” – a vocabulary that is
very much “around sea,” so to speak, terms that suggest the ocean & the
Iijima’s
has emerged as one of the smartest new writers around. In addition to three
other, earlier books of poetry, she’s just published an
monograph, Color and its Antecedents, from
Yen Agat Books in that bastion of pomo,
