Brenda Iijima on Language

Language poet Brenda Iijima measured the amount of garbage that arrived at the dump of her hometown of North Adams, Mass. in a single day.

She constructs her poetics out of the discarded. Likewise, language to her can be of equal permanence, the bones, rock and plastic of our experience.

She read from her works in Ypsilanti last month

I write this from scraps of borrowed unnumbered paper from that night. The felt marker bleeding outside of its appointed letters. Which seems to have some bearing on this project.

Her weakness is strength, strength is weakness. Poetry is the canvas, and the food, the expression, and the wholeness. It is the biological cataclysm when body and mind collide. Poof.

Here are some of the phrases I jotted down as she read:
Rabbit Pause
Pickled Gorillas.
Isn’t it perverse that there are less than 10,000 Polar Bears in the world, but it’s one of the most dominant, ubiquitous commercial images, especially in China?
Ham, the space chimp.

(My note: Brenda has a body of work coming out called: "Some Simple Things Said by and About," a chronicle of how humans have used animals as surrogates.)

Untimely death is wiggled out of the horizon.
Preservation -- from formaldehyde to land preservation -- is a problem.

We’re meant to be inter-relational.

Tone down, simplify.

Words can be dealt with on their own terms. There are words to disappear and words to call attention. Poetry is the saturated concentrated eventful modality of communication.

These are themes she returns to in her readings. "Language is a matrix" she says in Eco Language Reader. "Everything is pertinent to linage it is the impetus of language to pertain to the environment in interchange, nothing excluded."

Heady stuff. I believe what she's saying is that instead of merely being representational of objects in the world, language is the conduit (she uses the word conduit) between bodies to communicate and inter-relate. Inter-relate in this case is to communicate on an intellectual as well as sensual and perhaps spiritual level.

Utterances become bodily substance. It's becomes matter that the body sheds through words.

Brenda is also doing research on women who were murdered in North Adams during the 1970’s when she was growing up there. Here is a YouTube video of her performing a witch dance in North Happens.