Once When A Building Block by Brenda Iijima and Annie Won

[Jenna]

This chapbook is co-authored by two poets, Brenda Iijima and Annie Won, both known for writing what I guess could be called "experimental poetry" (although I suppose it could be argued that all poetry, even the most formally regimented and/or most traditional in subject matter, could rightly be described as "experimental," by reason of its necessarily curious and inquisitive relationship with language). Iijima, the more senior of the two poets, has at times been described as a "conceptual poet," working in the recently controversy-inflamed realm of "conceptual poetry." According to the "Notes & Acknowledgements" section that precedes the text of Once When A Building Block, these two poets, like the true denizens of the 21st century that they are, were inspired to collaborate on this chapbook after a conversation on Iijima's Facebook wall in which Won revealed -- to Iijima's delight -- that she was not only a poet but also a professional chemist. In Iijima's own words, "From that interaction we decided to embark on a project that involved insidious elements in the environment using language and imagery that convey their presence -- after all, chemicals, like words, are building blocks in our ecosystem. and not without consequences."

The chapbook is exactly 17 pages long, with Iijima's work appearing on the odd-numbered pages and Won's work appearing on the even-numbered pages. Both Iijima and Won work in a highly visual mode (Iijima refers to their works as "collages"), using found texts -- pages xeroxed from popular magazines, science textbooks, technical manuals, electrocardiogram printouts, and the like -- as a sort of wallpaper or backdrop on top of which they have then pasted blocks of original text, in varying typefaces. Photographs, laboratory signage, diagrams of molecules and machines, and phrases scrawled in Iijima's slanting handwriting are liberally strewn amongst the typed/photocopied words, contributing to the chapbook's multilayered visual texture. And yet, despite all this, the pages are all in black and white -- nothing that an ordinary office's laser printer/scanner combo wouldn't be able to produce -- and, in general, the chapbook's design has a jarringly low-budget feel that seems at odds with its visually exuberant content. The chapbook's cover is an unornamented once-folded cardboard sheet with roughly the same coarse texture as a brown grocery bag, except a bit thicker and sturdier. The chapbook's pages are held together by a length of stiffish black cord that has been threaded through three holes in the book's spine and then tied into a bulky double knot with long overhanging ends. While it could be argued that this minimalist presentation throws Iijima's and Won's collages into relief in a way that heightens their impact, it did leave me wondering whether a publishing company with a bigger budget might have been able to do greater justice to the two poets' boldly untrammeled envisionings.

As the chapbook's title suggests, both Iijima and Won favor an elliptical syntax in their poetry, drawing inspiration from the indices of science textbooks, in which words are loosely linked by commas and semicolons, as in this excerpt from the bottom of page 8:

"if the chemicals speak, 1100; the prison of our bodies, 49;
a holding, 4; the worms they are us, 98; very long very
monotone, 9; much like, 47; radio silence, 1-33."

The precise meaning of the poetry is therefore sometimes elusive, hanging just beyond the reader's reach. For example, a block of text at the top of page 11 reads as follows:

" The now of then, Fukushima
Story mutation/disruption/corruption
Now-longgone-bygone-forgone-there
The there of then is exactly NOW "

One gets from these words a sense of urgency, a sense of impending environmental/public-health disaster, though the syntactical/logical connective tissue linking the words cannot all be apprehended at a glance.

[Jen]

Hmmm. Sounds like one of those interesting projects, worth doing and putting out there but not exactly a good read. I suspect I would end up just shrugging my shoulders. I wonder about the production being intentional as well.