Description:
iduna is experiment in which the text (like a personality) is as if ‘set’ to proceed by accident and mistakes of machine — but then, as such, in the workings of its ‘accidents’ (as if she is margins of pages and words from ads and ‘theory’ which are composing and revealing her: as if personality which is a machine/and thus the text is akin to the memory of a Replicant in Blade Runner) the effect is seeing passionate/’personal’/’emotional’ (un)programmed memory and responses.

“If benign linearity marks the last vestige of Cartesian consciousness, Vitruvian space and Spinozan ethics, then iduna signalizes its catalectic adieu. For there is no return after this. kari edwards has written and conceived a bold, complex text that pushes lyricism to the brink of an interstice, between the Dictionary and its scream. Auto-translative, self-contaminatory, iduna never renounces its splendid linguistic excess, fabricating a textural world of legibility and illegibility, gravitation and non-gravitation, that powers its dweller (for one must dwell in iduna) gesturally around and among its morphs and torques. If Deleuze and Guattari are correct when they aver that writing ‘has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come’ then iduna provides a special map to a certain dream of Coleridge’s: the frontiers of a post-cognitive.” — Steve McCaffery

“Paratexts and processing suggestions stream through kari edwards’s iduna... The constant drive to make use of formal possibilities at the level of page and opening brings graphic format into substantive play...A machinic drive echoes in this work as a human, subjective voice struggles to come through the registers of current language events, noise, news, records, communications. The shape of a human outcry presses through the mass of mediated material. Form embodies possibilities enabled by the instructions of forced justification, font shifts, hard returns, tabs, chunked blocks, and other basic elements of text processing...Before we can ask what something means when we read it, we must ask what it means to read — and edwards poses that as a high-stakes question providing the point of departure for current poetic production. — Johanna Drucker

“Having evacuated the endemic patriarchal script, edwards writes hir own rules of the game in the wee hours when the sky turns green and binary logic decamps posthaste. Under the ruins of gender, iduna is a wild garden where ‘sexuality begets language.’ The anarchic profusion of voices, discourses, idiolects, fonts and typographies that seem to rain down upon the page becomes the new ‘formlessness’ which is the political signature of this resistant and absorptive text.” — Chris Tysh

Review

Review of kari edwards' iduna (O Books, 2003, $12.00)

http://www.moriapoetry.com/tabios900.htm
Eileen Tabios

I was fortunate to attend kari edwards’ book launch of hir book, iduna
(O Books, 2003) at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco. Kevin Killian
introduced kari and here are some of my notes from his introduction (my
notes are scattered and my handwriting bathetic so assume such caveats):

”...iduna extends kari's range -- of gender
confusion....gut-splittingly funny when it wants to be; mystical when
it wants to be....[challenges preconceived] ideas on heroism, kindness
and lucidity...”

I share Kevin’s notes as I didn’t have much notes of my own -- and
because I think Kevin's notion of how kari's work challenges
preconceived ideas on heroism, kindness and lucidity is as fabulous a
summation as can be made about iduna’s vision.

But the reason I ended up not taking notes (which I often like to do
at poetry readings) is that I got lost, at one point, into the rhythm
of kari’s words. kari is a great reader and performer: my eyes noted
with much appreciation the occasional rolling of hir shoulders as hir
words affected hir body....and in that voluntary loss to rhythm, I
mentally returned to one of my own poems and ended up rewriting -- and
improving -- its ending. For me, an elemental proof of other writers
inspiring me is when their work moves me back to my own acts with fresh
eyes because of what those writers taught.

I allowed myself the brief distraction to mentally revise my own poem
because in the 15 or so minutes of sitting there at the SPT auditorium
waiting for the reading to start, I'd already inhaled (so
effortlessly!) iduna which I bought by the entrance desk. As soon as I
opened the first page, I dived -- it was a helpless action as I was
swiftly entranced by both the imagery as well as words. iduna is not
just a revolutionary poetic text but a revolutionary way of presenting
the book.

In iduna, each page transforms itself into skin – specifically (to my
eyes), tattooed flesh. The verses are presented, but each page is no
longer a one-dimensional field. Each page has become a layered space
through a backdrop of other text printed in lighter tones; the
background marks creates layers to evoke depth from what is usually the
flatness of a page.

But the space is not "white space" -- it is the mussed up space of
flesh that's shown a lot of living: wrinkles, scars, bruises, love
marks, orgasmic stains, lost teeth, calluses and so on. Visually dizzy,
such that as one continues entering this *book* it was absolutely
LOGICAL that the verses sometimes would be presented on their sides or
upside down, rather than top to bottom. That, too, is a smart strategy
-- by compelling the reader to manipulate the book (to reverse it or
turn it sideways), the book provides a reason for physical engagement
(as with touching flesh) instead of just reading words.

When I first saw Kevin that evening, he joked affectionately, "Have you
read iduna? I can't even see it; it makes me dizzy."

The book is indeed dizzying...but with a center of calm so that one
ends up, as a result of reading it, more learned -- which is to say,
more lucid. How many authors can lead you into their works and release
you as a much less blinded being?

But the visual in iduna is not privileged -- read the words and they
are still masterful in ways that text is (conventionally) judged. This
poem, for instance, upends even as it pays homage to lyricism:

the hand that commits the most

I sit in those that would swim past a nobody morse code

there is harm dropping against the wall and blue screams
surround arithmetic beforehands

it is worth noting (not in any order): turquoise manners, deafen glass,
and those tiny humming
condolence(s) regulate tropical pastels between stilled yellows and
mechanical joy

it's vowel time now and my opponents arrive -- we form exploding tongue
ruts
a contortionist shifts red, the light backs up, an
engine glares –
the sea crumbles dawn –
hard known tips labor in consequence –

I notice a tumbling down, a tumbling down -- at half mast, as when one
is indecisive in the
advances of lawn care.

upon approaching the sea I think carefully and then as before –

off-color sights arrive in their appointed side lock feelings,
the margin sits and I sit in the margin.

we envelop blank falls, out of an amassing cache of unassigned sins,
sodomy lights my cathode-
ray tube, the jury sweeps by in a cause and effect maneuver –

"what we have . . . is . . . . . form . . ."

*****

When I first began writing the first draft of this review, I
synchronistically saw one of hir e-mails in which kari wrote:

“REVOLUTIONARY LIVING, REVOLUTIONARY LANGUAGE
revolutionary living is an act of living in a rolling thunder of
questions; poetic language can be an act of revolution; there is no act
but acting that is repetitive and preformatted, a repeatable act is a
conmodification of the body; there is a living revolution in poetic
language that is a continuum...their is a question that questions the
question and folds in on itself... there is veggie dogs and a bun for
2.98 at Sam dogs at 28th and Broadway.... // p. or both,”

The revolution. What I appreciate about kari is how hir activities as a
gender activist becomes integrated into hir words. The writing may or
may not be fiction. But it is truth because, first, something was lived
before it showed up in the telling. In fact, in another reading, kari
would call the presentation of hir book “queer.” Well, iduna extends
poetic tradition by not sticking to convention, particularly since,
before a revolution, words have constrained gender. Yet though this
book is “queer”, it is not alien. Because iduna manifests poetry, it
is entirely natural: “what we have [indeed] is form.”

Here's one more from kari, a poem whose fabulous title is from Ridley
Scott's Blade Runner:

have you ever retired a human

take a deep breath

turn the sky into a bite sized ball

swallow

imagine all the filth of time

the screams from war

blood shed particles

lost memories of genocide

exhaust, fumes, vapors and particles
from every motor, coal furnace, and nuclear reactor

the bones that have been crushed in machines by machines or become
machines

all the hate and violence caused by fear times 1 million and fifty-five

isolation and madness in the upper atmosphere

each and every cry from the last of a kind each and every ten billion

greed and the road paved with good intentions

take a deep breath

swallow

*****

I saw kari at another of her readings a few weeks before finishing this
review. At that reading, she read from iduna by simply reading the
titles in the book’s (Table of) Contents. It worked. It works in the
same way Page 96 offers a “poem” through the image of a black square
created through dense ink writing in the midst of the page -- that
black square contains a meaning even as it is (except for its
square-ness) an undefined image abstracted from text. It’s worth
noting that the edges to the square are not cleanly lined – of course
not. The edges remain edges even as they do not proscribe constraints,
e.g. through linearity or through evoking a box that contains.

That the book’s Contents -- like Page 96’s black square -- presents an
effective poem testifies to how kari’s iduna grasps the nature of
Poetry, at least its nature for me: that Poetry is not about words but
about what inspired the words and then what those words subsequently
inspire. Some may call that revolution from and of the word. I would
call it, “In the beginning, there was….”

Excerpt

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