Ange Mlinko
Nothing Matters But the Quality
of the InspirationJordan Davis
Orange Room: Poems 1990-1993
Always-Already: Poems 1993-1995
Subpoetics, Self Publish or Perish
Brenda Iijima
Person(a)
Portable Press, 1998I had a memorable discussion with two young students in the town where I lived in the Middle Atlas Mountains. While careening in a grand-taxi at sunset, the desert turning mauve around us, they treated me to a passionate, yet technical, lecture on ancient Arabic verse. Suddenly my rhapsodes slumped back, declaring that the modern world spelled the death of poetry. "Life itself" one boy said, "is becoming less beautiful." And, thanks to TV, the Arabic that people spoke was becoming degraded.
Another time, a young poet I met grew perfervid in his description of his birthplace, Marrakesh — "It is very poetic!" as if this alone accounted for his having come to write poems. Was it the way the setting sun strikes the rose-and-peach colored medina walls that was "poetic" or was it also the ruins, the detritus, of that ancient city? Would he have found poetic Swift’s "A Description of a City Shower" (1710) which still bears a passing resemblance to life as Moroccans know it:
Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.Is it that we no longer have butchers’ stalls that makes life less poetic? Or is it more insidious — that things that used to tumble and ratchet and pump now hide behind consoles? Or is it even more disastrous, because our daily vocabulary, rather than having good earthy monosyllabic "dung" and "sprats" in it, has "television" and "computer" and "DVD" in it instead?
Well, all this is moot: like they say, it ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at. Poets are born every day, in all kinds of deserts — and your camel is another poet’s daffodil. The only reason I bring this up as an entry to talking about Jordan Davis and Brenda Iijima is because I can already foresee the criticisms of their work that stem from an idea of poetry rather than an openness to the pleasures, new and old, available to eyes and ears — a pleasure without recourse to, say, concerns that the work is too lyrical, or not hip to the historical moment, or not "serious" or political enough. …
And yet if I were going to have "an idea" about the work of Jordan Davis or Brenda Iijima, I would say they’re in the lineage of:
* the Sappho of "Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet the most beautiful of sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s whatever you love best." (trans. Jim Powell)
* the William Carlos Williams of first blades of grass struggling up through March mud
* the Bernadette Mayer of The Golden Book of Words
* the Frank O’Hara of
When I was a child
I played by myself in the schoolyard
all alone
...
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!Brenda Iijima and Jordan Davis both deal in beauty, and both are sentimentalists, but their sensibilities wouldn’t mean a thing if they weren’t also musicians of language. She says, "Specifics ebb and flow past being/ to be and is, there soundly/ Park." He says, "The coupled black-coat/ couple on the bench là-bas/ has gotten undone/ and gone by./ They stand behind/ a pine tree." There is a similar sleight of hand in how "park" surprises, throwing syntax into relief after a paratactic suspension, and how "couple" is "undone" by the weight of being adjective, verb, and finally noun. Meanwhile, "park" harks back to "specifics" in an echo of iambic tetrameter; "coupled black-coat couple" "la-bas" "gotten undone" "gone" "behind" and "pine tree" depend on the interweaving of its l’s and n’s. This musicality is full of sentiment — and full of poetic history too.
What of sentiment in these books? It is domestic and sweet like love in the Renaissance: wooing without wounding. Brenda, especially, can carry a tune and hit the high thees and thys. You can see through this to the Bernadette Mayer in her (Sonnets, The Formal Field of Kissing), as you can clearly see through Jordan’s little-boy exuberance to the Kenneth Koch in him. Mayer and Koch may lurk in the prosodic background of Person(a) and Orange Room / Always-Already, and since excessiveness is their (Mayer & Koch’s) very modus operandi, Brenda and Jordan may be accused of imitativeness. But maybe excessiveness is too little practiced by anyone else. Jordan says: "Damn! The arch of am, to greatly be of hyperbole’s heritage! / The morning’s to sip like ginseng." Lyric demitasses overflow with visions of a blurred city: the swift movement, the riot of patterns, the flash of a beautiful face.
Anxiety is all but banished from this realm: I seem to have read the word "happy" or "happiness" more times in Always-Already than in any poetry book ever. This of course drives anyone with preconceptions about poetry to foaming at the mouth — the idea that poetry should be this or that ("confront the problems of our time," say) ignores what it is, or does, like flex syntax thus:
The iris like a bag of ice dropped factories open to sunlight
On the paper of the sea draw a shield in blue ink for meor conjure an image like:
The decimal’s shadow lands hard on a student.
Nouns, nouns, and more nouns: the poems and their nouns pile up until they achieve an abstraction through materiality. It’s almost surprising in this poetry of situations.
It was pomegranate and she
Smiled red and said
Here and he was in intense pain
And could not move and she, hearing
They had gathered all the mallows
They wanted for the recital,
Said goodbye and turned away.
I cannot move he said vaguely
Through burning lock of muscle
In his back but she was gone
On a school bus of students
Playing games of prophecy
With paper.It’s the unforced originality of Jordan’s "Hero and Leander" that gets me. Little splashes of informality, like "the sun/ Was so pestering" or "But Leander felt funny" break from the Loeb-translation tone we’re set up for in the first lines: "Yet in that silver age/ A pale boy/ The sea god’s love." Where myths are usually translated and related by the expert-adult who usually — implicitly — derives satisfaction from the gods exercising their prerogatives, Jordan the poet-youth takes Leander’s side and envisions the moment Leander first sees Hero. Leander’s eventual drowning isn’t alluded to, even if the sea god’s jealousy foretells it. "Leander you will / Burn out there!" cries the sea god. Between the burning of love and the inundation of being loved, the psychic lives of the boy in ancient Greece and the boy writing this poem in the 1990s meet across millennia.
Brenda Iijima invokes her myths rather than retells them, submerging narrative in oceanic solution and leaving crystals from the encyclopedia undissolved:
According to legend, poppies grew from Venus’
tears when that goddesswept over the death of Adonis. (Venus became Callipygos,
no) Melpomene gardeningThe bliss of love she missed knighthood in flower
and diary entries allegeddiscovered by Ceres on the island of Mecona burning paper flowers
certain fields delicate petals foreskinsmay produce 3200 seeds
hence symbol of fertility:"Ante fores antri foecundu papavera florent" O Ovid!
I like how this exotic vocabulary sweetens the drink. I like how she invokes Venus here, as she does Duende in a poem where the speaker shaves her husband’s neck in the bath.
In an age where journalism has honed and hardened prose into a sleek information delivery system, Brenda’s slippery poems seem to be written in oils. It brings to mind Herrick’s love of wantonness. In "Accoutrements" Brenda offers us a poem of couplets, each couplet mentioning a fantastic article of clothing from some attic chest:
felt fedora with red pheasant feather
They sanction passionslice of lace from a white dress
Honed in intimacy — embracegray flannel trousers
Theirs is to be one closelyEach article of (ad)dress is handed an identity, but no forced parallelisms taint this concept-poem-gone-reverie. Rather than ossify a list like this, or make it into a workshop exercise, Brenda makes it bubble.
There’s a sense in Brenda’s and Jordan’s work that no one’s looking over their shoulder, that they’re more concerned with seeking inspiration than figuring out how to keep a step ahead of the art-historical moment. It’s true that I, for one, am not waiting for the Next Big Thing (someone just challenged me, "Name one great poem from the past 10 years!" meaning, of course, that there is none, and our times stink) but I am always waiting to be inspired, which is a Pretty Small Thing, and yet is a gift from the gods and a sign that our times are not so mean and bereft, or so little deserving of grace. Paraphrasing Pound paraphrasing Sappho, nothing matters but the quality of the inspiration.
Readers should note I am using the word "sentimental" positively to refer to a quality of foregrounding emotional response rather than intellectual response. It is not being used in the literary/pejorative sense, in which case I would use the word "maudlin." It seems to me this distinction is well worth making.