If Not Metamorphic

Brenda Iijima

An author's statement

If Not Metamorphic follows after Around Sea (my first book, which was published by O Books in 2004) chronologically.

It is a lyrical study of organic and synthetic variation and difference—how this plays out contractually between the social and lingual in terms of meaning making. Permutation, polyvalence, atmospheric conditions, temporality and energy exchange are attributes of this project. I’m interested in syntactical textures, synesthesia and kinesics—gestures of being. The concerns of the work have to do with transcribing the myriad registers of ecosystem/body/mind/history/gender/sexuality/race/class/empire/politic. An attempt to make connections between compartmentalized subjects and spaces—spaces that open as participatory, inter-relational and porous.

The book consists of four long poems. A welter of questions opens the title poem. It is a dissonance chain of query. Questions refer to the power of the state apparatus but also to interpersonal subjectivities: civic, imaginative, sensual and otherwise. “Time Unions” follows. Its structure is a vortex. Within its plume are autobiographical details of the year of my birth suspended in a column as well as whirling fragments of cultural detritus. These cultural facts are a sort of dna sequence. The third sequence in the book is called “Tertium Organum,” which takes its name from P.D. Ouspenky’s Tertium Organum, The Third Canon of Thought, A Key to the Enigmas of the World. Ecological bellwethers and the fault lines of the social are the friction of this piece. If Not Metamorphic ends with “Panthering.” The impetus to write this piece came from an experience in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Along rural roadside Highway 106 heading out of town is the last extant Mississippian Indian intaglio effigy mound in the shape of a panther. In the National Register of Historic Places its historic function is listed as landscape and its historic sub-function is listed as garden. Fort Atkinson is named after General Henry Atkinson who served as commander of U.S. forces during the Black Hawk War. History as has been recorded is inconceivably unjust—and works with erasure as much as glorified exposure.