If Not Metamorphic

If not metamorphic, changed by geological pressure, then what? Iijima’s newest book uses the long form, frequently in choral antiphon, to ask what kind of pressures exert change—as in the title poem, where war and human cruelty have turned even the kelp murderous—and what exactly is changed: sometimes words take on other forms before our eyes, sometimes sentences try on new endings in shameless view, and puns on popular culture poke through the deepest meditation. These poems truncate and disrupt narrative, borrowing now from the parataxis of renku, now from the verse-prose travelogue of haibun, but do not foreclose the possibility of epiphany; Iijima still envisions a “Great Swan” that holds within it creation and destruction: “Eureka / Or death?”

Praise for the book:

“Iijima’s eco-provocations have the lightness and gravitas of an improbably reconsecrated world glimpsed at its hectic, interrogatively driven conception. On the edge of loss, words have taken on direct agency.” —Joan Retallack

“Plato, arguably the philosopher with the most influence on the development of Western culture, famously banished poets from the ideal city in the name of the philosophos with a tacitly hegemonic regard for the danger posed to the State by the massive social power of poetic eros. The title of Brenda’s Iijima’s new work, If Not Metamorphic, promises the emergence of an ‘unhindered and spiraling’ structure that, as it turns out, recoups and transforms this marginalized power of eros. What occurs is nothing less than the ramified beauty of the work’s own variegated measures in a ‘continuum of elaboration,’ wherein ‘Essentiality becomes / Phantasmal’ and ‘Erotic / Rebellion’ flies in the face of a Platonically underwritten Occident that by philosophical default knows one habitually physio-psychical state, so to speak: ‘The state / Would have us / Becoming / Bland.’ Anything but bland, Iijima’s fantastically life-affirming work asks: ‘Eureka / Or death?’ My response is to read aloud in wonder and appreciation.” —Christopher Rizzo

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  Brenda Iijima’s Author Statement

If Not Metamorphic follows after Around Sea (my first book, which was published by O Books in 2004) chronologically.

It is a lyrical study of organic and synthetic variation and difference—how this plays out contractually between the social and lingual in terms of meaning making. Permutation, polyvalence, atmospheric conditions, temporality and energy exchange are attributes of this project. I’m interested in syntactical textures, synesthesia and kinesics—gestures of being. The concerns of the work have to do with transcribing the myriad registers of ecosystem/body/mind/history/gender/sexuality/race/class/empire/politic. An attempt to make connections between compartmentalized subjects and spaces—spaces that open as participatory, inter-relational and porous.

The book consists of four long poems. A welter of questions opens the title poem. It is a dissonance chain of inquiry. Questions refer to the power of the state apparatus but also to interpersonal subjectivities: civic, imaginative, sensual and otherwise. “Time Unions” follows. Its structure is a vortex. Within its plume are autobiographical details of the year of my birth suspended in a column as well as whirling fragments of cultural detritus. These cultural facts are a sort of dna sequence. The third sequence in the book is called “Tertium Organum,” which takes its name from P.D. Ouspenky’s Tertium Organum, The Third Canon of Thought, A Key to the Enigmas of the World. Ecological bellwethers and the fault lines of the social are the friction of this piece. If Not Metamorphic ends with “Panthering.” The impetus to write this piece came from an experience in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Along rural roadside Highway 106 heading out of town is the last extant Mississippian Indian intaglio effigy mound in the shape of a panther. In the National Register of Historic Places its historic function is listed as landscape and its historic sub-function is listed as garden. Fort Atkinson is named after General Henry Atkinson who served as commander of U.S. forces during the Black Hawk War. History as has been recorded is inconceivably unjust—and works with erasure as much as glorified exposure.