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“Elements, moods, poisons, obstacles; Brenda Iijima’s poems make use of all four, particularly elements, in forming the core of Around Sea. There is a strange, welcoming warmth to these poems that has nothing to do with forcing a personscape onto the land (though Iijima is starkly aware of that force’s inexorable severity): ‘a terrestrial in the face of extra.’ I feel calm during and after reading Around Sea — not abducted, but included, as if presence could override fate through seeing, and getting it down onto the page.” — Anselm Berrigan

“A brilliant visual and musical work, where the techniques of our times are perfected and abandoned one by one. What goes up, comes down, until the only way out is with it.” — Fanny Howe

“Brenda Iijima’s Around Sea is a substantial, beautiful, and manifoldly interesting book of poetry. Her focus shifts smoothly from sonic word-play to informational passages drawn from natural sciences and even metallurgy to ecology and passionate urban sociology, and onwards. Her forms often change radically from one section of a poem to another and her rhythms are constantly changing. Readers are happily kept on their toes.”
— Jackson Mac Low

“Around sea’s surround sound’s me. It becomes me being sound being sea. Any
me. We. Around Sea’s surround sound’s we.
She sells Seychelles by the sea shore’s roar. Will it last. That is this
Book’s chore. Who could ask for more.
Can poetry preserve skies. Yes. A breath at a time.” — Alan Davies

“Neither outline nor shape: this is the molecular flux of idea…in Brenda Iijima’s hard-as-diamonds epic. Around Sea plots a threat nexus over a flowering terrain and beneath the serene deep of ‘verdure attributed to rain,’ bonitos, and species extinction…dividing into quanta of insight: the rock and steel we work and sleep in, as well as the ground we walk, support no truths that are not aerial…Iijima’s precision in uncanny exposition, social science apercu, and mercurial jurisprudence.” — Jack Kimball

Review by Ron Silliman of Around Sea, Brenda Iijima

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 Arctic. This constantly reinforcing referential frame is normative & unremarkable in much poetry – the narrative continuity of the entire School o’ Quietude is predicated on it – but here it gives the text instead a monochromatic quality: the reality effect teasingly deconstructed through a strobe of form – or it might be, were it not for the constant canceling of unlike’s negativity.

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, Bangkok, Thailand. She is also, unless I’m mistaken, the impresario of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, a micropress whose work has been noted here with approval before.

Review of Brenda Iijima’s Around Sea
WHAT GOES AROUND Alan Davies

Poetry isn’t easy to come by. You have to write it like you owe a debt to the world. In that way poetry is how the world comes to be in you.

One virtue of Brenda’s poetry is that (like all poetry worth reading (reading)) it slows us down. Poetry makes us pay attention. Things (of necessity) get caught and held.

black woodpecker

white tufted tyrant fly catcher

in the
[tree tops

Perception stretches across the universe. It’s what the universe is. It’s what we are. We’re instants of perception.

Eat an apple while you read this. It’s that time of year as I write this.

The poems look on the page the way that they sound. Pound noted from the Chinese their dictum that art imitates nature in its methods of operation.

Similarly the language can make itself. “Impossible diagnose.” Instead of impossible diagnosis or impossible to diagnose. Just enough words for the idea to attach itself frontally to the world.

You have to find a language that’s comfortable with the trees.

Brenda’s postures are adamant.

Telling this
is like being

tied to a tree
in the garden.

There’s a kind of mastery in tying the language to the pitch. As in “Telling this / is like being//” and only then a more specific remonstrance from the moment (of writing).

Mallarmé wrote that everything exists to end in a book and yet he sculpted his lines to exclude most of it. His mind ran on very thin rails.

There are no comparisons possible in the world. Everything articulates itself. In doing so (as with these present poems) it finds its own place and weight and duration and balance. All things are of like mind.

When does meaning take over our reading experience from sound? When it forces us to slow down.

Of course the two are in a balance like maybe particle and wave. But still we separate them out to make meaning of how things work.

The poem addresses these issues when it varies its own speed.

Sometimes words that come slowest to our attention command it most. Some words unwind slowly towards a then familiar end.

The wonder
of a whirlpool
dish
washing
machine

In the case of these poems meaning accrues by dint of repeated hint. These suggested thoughts start from the lefter side of the page and are sort of punted out. So that meaning is an accumulation of suggestions.

At the heart of this book is its heart.

Each solar cell system
Each cellular solar system

Of course it’s not that simple. Not by any means. But the whole (sic) can be seen to spin into and to spin out of that. Those words. Not what they describe (in a way) but the words themselves.

These things themselves then (these systems) are described to be “Twinning alchemists” which (we see) they must be. And then from this the metaphor (no (the example)) of a “Balinese girl in a trance” erupts.

We could say that poetry is composed of strands of reality.

The universe isn’t made the way we think it is at all. It’s all made of thought. And thought gets housed in language. (The beginning of the problem. And from time to time its solution as well.) Housed so to speak.

It actually takes a certain kind of fearlessness to talk about the condition of this earth at this moment. We’ve already totally fucked it up. Any change might now come too late. It may indeed end in fire or ice. Or in both. So to speak lovingly of the place at all...

Just the landscape
before realization

before resource
before it could

speak. Just the land
scape before it does

before we could
before the land

scape is lost
just the landscape

before it is kept
in keeping

before image before
imagine just the

landscape. Just the
landscape before

us strange and un-
bridled just the land

scape lone and
bright. Just the

land
scape lost.

(That is all of poem 14 from section O (alpha or numeric (but certainly round)) which follows sections I through IV (survives them? – is still there after them) but just before (penultimately) the ... section (the one that we might be going on with).

That’s the section’s name you might say.

...

Dot dot dot.

Perhaps this is the place to say something about structure. Perhaps now is the time. Structure inheres. It is inherent in each thing. It is how we tell one thing from another (one of the main ways anyway). How we (convince ourselves that we) can see the spaces between them.

(Perhaps here is the time. Perhaps now is the space.)

So everything that gets written has structure in it somewhere. I say in it but someone else might equally find the structure an external armature or something of the sort.

In a serial work such as Around Sea the structure would appear to be primarily a linear movement from beginning to end. (Whether it’s the poem that moves through the reader or the reader that moves through the poem is another matter.) But there are a number of things (also structural) that interrupt that linearity and enforce types of verticality. One of the most obvious might be the division of the book into sections. Various tonalities bounce the horizontal. And then the whole relationship of form with content gets foregrounded as different meanings (with their distinct durations and so on) impart their fluctuations to the otherwise basic forward movement of the text.

I won’t say anything more about the structure of this particular book. (Except perhaps to say that it’s grounded in what surrounds us – what we would do well to see.) I don’t think it’s the job of a book critic to offer a reading of a book. The job is to offer a way or ways in which that reading can be done. The book article (never a re-view really) is always written from within the book.

Meanings do accrue. Whether they’re voided at more or less the same rate at which they’re taken in is something I don’t know. It’s probably more correct to say that it’s what surrounds us – that we’re in it. So meaning’s that Around Sea too.

Penned realms

Brenda Iijima, Around Sea, O Books, 2004

Excerpt

12.

The zeros and ones
which form the web

and the ones and twos
which form us and use

in a blood orange
bed in a membrane

green leaf. Cloning
in low gear. Two eyes

for an engineer. Two
gonads follow the

parsimony of binary.
Wherever there is

redundancy, lay
more eggs. NASA’s

low numbers. Buddha’s
big toes. Muhammad’s

breath. A mote for filling
a potential in massing.

Exponent that acts.
That acts up.

10.
A poem for the land

Corridor after corridor of land
and a pock-marked sky.

The passage is wide
open
to the solar
system.

Still sister
is in arms
spiraling

outward
or inward.

Telling this
is like being

tied to a tree
in the garden.

2.

Jungle cleared
Ferruginous cliffs blasted

Upon a settlement
Green palisades

Margin housing
Morning high above head

Tropic to
The last drop

Tepid infested regretted
Burnt paper

Angry protests
Somber paramount

Seersucker
Briefcase

Sacred
Animated

Blood vessels
Blood bath

Almost inconceivable
Gossamer buffalo

Patio
Ratio

Endanger
civil