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The Sore Throat and Other Poems by Aaron Kunin

Fence Books, 2010

Review by G.R.O.A.N.



A pleasure of¹

Insufficient funds²

Of voices demanding simple³

Formal rei[g]ns, ragged⁴

This manifold failure⁵

Of shame to be other than⁶

Writing about writing about talking about us⁷

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1

The Sore Throat wheezes most consistently with the pleasure of textual desperation, a gymnastics of the imprisoned
tongue, presenting a confined space tinged with the hot breath of a damaged throat (the core of which is an unrelenting
mundanity; not diseased, not flayed, but erupting from a common, vaguely unpleasant infection, a minor malady, a
sickness unto dearth). This book is a delight in the way that watching a drunken, curbside woman weeping into her
handbag is a delight. It is a recess suddenly revealed, a raw complex of simple inabilities. It should not be a delight,
but it is—the pathos is almost insulting in that it cuts both ear and tongue, speaker and receiver. The result is deep
intimation between the slightly wounded.

2

What we have is a lack attended by a lot of questions. Buy this book, but buy it with something other than money.
Currency, like articulated desire, is empty gesture: it supposedly holds weight in other realms of experience, but in
Kunin’s shame-based economy, the money, in any amount, is never enough to offer the individual the security it
desires. God is no less a gesture, nor is love. Thought is perhaps the most interrogated realm, the most able to be
communicated and therefore the most able to fail under these heightened expectations. Distinction between mind,
thought, or body is an unnecessary contortion. Not even nothing is unauthorized.

3

Kunin situates the first section of the text as a (revised) translation of Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”. This
textual situation, of initiating translation within a language (implying that the gulf between poets, especially poets of
distinct generations, is as wide as the gulf between different languages), is considerable. The concentration of potential
renditions into a “severely limited vocabulary” is one way to approach a severely widespread epidemic of shame in a
culture dedicated to openness, one that hides shame behind the façade of rights regarding various forms of protected
speech. Speech, when it fails, essentially needs protection, but this protection is what keeps it from escaping mediation.
Speaking commonly, each individual’s vocabulary is generally limited in much the same way as Kunin’s formal
process, an insight that drains language of the stable bridges that it conjures in its most rudimentary bindings. The
notion of the revised translation (many of the poems of The Sore Throat’s first section appeared as early as 2004 in an
online-only release entitled “The Mauberley Series” through UbuWeb) also implies that translation is conceived of as
realistically more a process than a product, more a paroxysm than a pantomime.

4

This is a very different book from Kunin’s earlier work, Folding Ruler Star, in
which poems were syllabilistically
incised, throttled and restrained from venturing beyond a codified length of expression. The Sore Throat, instead,
crawls exhaustedly into an ever-opening horizon of unsettingly simple diction, into forms that ensnare contradiction, let
it flail and later release it to the soft lap of whitespace; the most bland of landscapes is the most frightening.

5

6

Pervasive entanglements, finally resulting in a parody of the self. The preface to this work ("Note on Method")
inspires a blurred narrative presence: Kunin, in this work and in other interviews, openly writes/speaks about the
experience of notating the external world’s language-din through the physical tic of his “binary hand-alphabet”.
However, this is not a simple notation, the hand acting as a dictaphone, but a creative gray-space in which the operative
device of the writer receives, generates and assembles experience. In other words, the alphabet turns in upon itself,
recording the individual twitch of the hand that records the outer world. Snatches of conversation become snatches of
the self; din becomes him, multiplied. The experience of the world and the experience of the hand experiencing the
world is a process invoking translation, a space where language meets gap and bridge and yet, must fall.

7

Or, this should read “Writing unsuccessfully about successful writing about the failure of talk between ourselves.”
Kunin’s work discriminates the voice above all other noise; poems are wrenched, simply, from a throat garotted by
its own instability. But the book is finally more than this, its parts. It is a stable nation of formal divergence, machines
making brittle music to glitch to, a hand confidently failing to denote the entire quiver of the throat-string, a voice
falling upon other voices to insinuate a pile of imploded harmonics, and tables of whitespace indicating an ordering of
absences. If a thing is worth reading, The Sore Throat and other poems is worth reading.

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Aaron Kunin grew up in Minneapolis, was educated at Brown, Johns Hopkins, and Duke. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Fence, The Germ, No: A Journal of The Arts, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Poker, and elsewhere.

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G.R.O.A.N. is a collaborative-action imprint currently based in the
Netherlands. They can be contacted at: groanpoetics@gmail.com.

If Not Metamorphic by Brenda Iijima

Ahsahta Press, 2010

Reviewed by Christopher Kondrich

In the collection of essays she recently edited )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)), Brenda Iijima writes, “Poetry can actively engage blind spots – where conditioning, denaturalization, and denial for instance, have buttressed the status quo, politically, socially, spiritually, and environmentally, leading to a degrading ecosystem that places terrestrial wellbeing, everyone’s wellbeing, all living organisms, oceans, forests, etc., in jeopardy.” In her new collection of poetry If Not Metamorphic, Iijima addresses our ecological predicament by using language “as a means to create and articulate alternative strategies for living.” Both )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)) and If Not Metamorphic were published this year, and seem to be companion pieces. If Not Metamorphic represents the actualization of the philosophical and linguistic imperatives put forth in her essay in )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)), and largely succeeds in articulating an alternative strategy for living that is jarring, terrifying and somewhat sublime.

The state of ecopoetics as presented in )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)) is one that is complicated by a troubled relationship with the ‘I’. In her essay “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux” contained in )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)), Evelyn Reilly captures the concerns of the ecologically aware as being “a matter of finding formal strategies that effect a larger paradigm shift and that actually participate in the task of abolishing the aesthetic use of nature as mirror for human narcissism.” I believe Iijima would agree. In “Tertium Organum,” the third of four poems in If Not Metamorphic, Iijima writes, “I has been extricated from / gesture, endures as a symptom,” but of what? Of language? Of the human projection of self onto nature through language? In Nature, Emerson asks, “have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?” This is an issue Iijima addresses in “Tertium Organum” with a “message of self-erasure / read theoretically.” If Not Metamorphic is an attempt to erase the self through the violence inherent in language, through the violence language inflicts upon that which it describes.

Language assigns, conditions and codifies. The brain can only narrow its “winnowing screed,” as Iijima writes in “Tertium Organum.” Throughout If Not Metamorphic are signposts of contemporary life; each page contains several words that refer, redirect and re-contextualize the images, ideas, feelings that contain them. The phrase “composted lexicon” appears near the close of the magnificent poem “Time Unions” and one cannot help but apply the purpose and performance of a compost pile to the language of If Not Metamorphic itself. Language that has been left to decompose and develop bacteria is now being used in different ways, for different purposes. Words and phrases that have no cultural reference have been broken down with those signposts of contemporary life to create the “skeletal nomenclature,” as she writes in “Tertium Organum,” of a whole new entity. Cultural signposts such as “industry,” “tear gas,” and “sanctions” are complicated by context, and tempered by tone. Iijima removes a historical legend from the compost pile as “don’t tread on (me) / do not” and doubles-down on her self-erasure. At the end of the poem, she writes a litany of pictures, of differing images:

pictures of rivers
pictures of rivers
pictures of spinal columns
picturing the body, picturing dog
optical illusions have pictures
the autonomy of one owl is a picture
upside down picture
whereas mirror animation picture
when in fact picture picture
pictures picture
picturing pictures solidified
it’d felt as if I answered

Just as mountains are emblems of thought for Emerson, for Iijima pictures are what we make images and objects into with a kind of violation. She tries to break the system down by resisting language, letting language resist itself. When she writes, “it’d felt as if I answered” it is a lost-for-words moment in an attempt to lose one’s words, one’s language and self. Losing one’s words is what we may need to embrace what we violate by describing, equating and aligning with the cultural detritus we use those same words to discuss. Losing one’s words is what may be needed to let mountains be mountains.

And yet Iijima allows her poems to have moments of awe and discovery. Often the discovery is what language has turned itself into, but there is a passage in “Tertium Organum” that nears the sublime:

Numerous numerous worms play with
pulp rose thorns mulch
then I shovel deeper
uncover rocks
The circulatory systems of trees lay here
Bamboo pleasure
showing groin
as sexy as elbow

Even though the “I” appears, this is a moment that is not marred or denigrated by the “I” and its actions, by the referentiality or intentionality of language. Shoveling deeper into the earth is an act of connection that renders the “I” irrelevant. If Not Metamorphic is full of these moments – perhaps not as explicit, perhaps only theoretically – moments that do not so much solve the problems of “I” in an “I”-consumed world, as reroute the mind around the “I.” If Not Metamorphic attempts to tread new pathways between sign and signified, between “I” and nature, in such a way that composts those descriptors, those categories of a violent mind into something new, something useful.

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Brenda Iijima is from North Adams, Massachusetts and studied at Skidmore College. In addition to writing, Iijima also paints, runs Portable Press, and teaches poetry at Cooper Union. Other recent works include a collection of essays edited by Iijima, )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)), and a collection of poetry, Revv. You'll--ution.

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Christopher Kondrich is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver. Selections from his book-length poem Canto Fermo have or will appear in Boston Review, Free Verse, Meridian, Notre Dame Review and The Journal.