Here's a review that I did for the winter 2005 issue of The Poker, which is a journal I'd definitely recommend. The new issue (Summer 2005) features really good work by Rodney Koeneke, Rodrigo Toscano, John Latta, and Mitch Highfill among others, including a previously unpublished poem by Jackson Mac Low.
Around Sea
Brenda Iijima
O Books, 2004
Born2
Allison Cobb
Chax Press, 2004
In her evolutionary epic Around Sea, Brenda Iijima states "I wasn't abducted / I was included." This is a significant distinction for a poet who understands how language is always implicated in the abuse of power, at its worst evoking an oppressive "system" in which "Heavily armed troops / file noticeable nails." Iijima knows how words can move, almost innocently, from nature to violent culture in the blink of an eye:
Amoeba.
Amida.
Suddenly
Civilization.
Vast
Nation.
Battle
ready.
Similarly, her writing in this book slides between homage and caustic criticism, massaging these ambivalencies through a deadpan, quirky lyricism or "alien talk" which figures by the ways in which it differs from ordinary speech: "An instance. / inflected like this / leave it androgynous". Iijima's speaker, a "terrestrial in the presence of extra," sees both nature and culture anew from a strange perspective:
Window with shutters looking on to snow-covered mountains
Alien surface or sandblasted territory ALIEN
SPOTTING
By inserting her perspective at the moment between earth elegy and cultural critique, between pastoral and panopticon, Iijima manages to do both in a way that eludes the reifying power of "system," avoiding the sentimentalization of nature or the re-creation of cultural oppressions.
before image before
imagine just the
landscape before
us strange and un-
bridled just the land
scape lone and
bright. Just the
land
scape lost.
A central ally in this fascinating attempt to circumvent "the master's tools" is the notion of collage. This primarily visual poet's patterning allows her to evoke a world in which words are palpable things, like scraps of paper plunked down. Add to this an Adamic awareness of naming in the correlation between words and things, and you get wonderful passages like the following.
Circumference: deep water species: beroe;
Minute entomostracous crustacea&
flying fish, bonitos, al-bakurah
coral and sea fan and tangle,
blooms and the palms
Combining an almost projectivist poetics reminiscent of Olson with the vocabulary of Stevens and a way of proceeding derived from Williams, Iijima names her odd version of cultured nature into being in a mode consistently "Pastoral" yet "no, not / ideal undiscovered."
The notion of colonization and the traces of its power in language are also themes investigated by Allison Cobb in her book Born2, a work centered on Cobb's birthplace of New Mexico and the legacy of the atomic bomb, overlaid with echoes of conquistadors and the recurring motto "Paso por aqui" ("passed through here"). But while Iijima sees the panopticon from a metaphorical distance, Cobb finds herself in the thick of violence, writing a world in which "Armless, each tender-headed General has packed up his own hair satchel with teeth." Cobb acts the messy role of the genealogist who finds herself imprisoned and oppressed by the historical events of a specific time and place which consitute an important part of her politics of personal identity. In fact, this world is at times so oppressive that it needs to be leavened with humor: "Who is not a rose and not groves but more like a spear as is Dr. Oppenheimer grinding his bones. Dr. please not so noisy." The childlike voice here encourages the reader to participate in acts of reading that blur boundaries between intimacy and cruelty, like the character who "…puffs he huffs he / Tender lets fly his bright / Bullet". So perhaps it's not really humor Cobb employs, but rather sarcasm as self-defense, creating ambiguously threatening scenes which also disorient: "Now Rose has a wound head -- how soft it is!" What's perhaps most disturbing about these scenarios is that we know there's some violence being enacted, but the innocent veneer's euphemisms don't allow us access to the gory details.
Cobb uses this sense of euphemism to continually re-contextualize certain terms so they acquire a contradictory history. For her, words are not objects so much as they are a nexus of sometimes conflicting associations. Cobb's character "the little box book" for example acquires resonances of the poet's mother (as protagonist), a baby, a pregnancy, the clitoris, and the atom bomb itself. Haunted alternately by Stein and by Duncan's tone-leading, these poems develop a vision of language as primarily sonic and organic, in which sound patterns disconnect accustomed ways of making sense while forging new kinds of connections through anaphora and juxtaposition: "There is that that wants for it all to burn: watching what wants." Though at times these methods produce a polymorphously perverse and nightmarish world, this is Cobb's trade-off in attempting a new vision of desire after the fact of violence, one in which "we make all that trembles and all. That trembles the names from us."
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