Kai Ihns. Of. Olympia: The Elephants, 2024. 126 pages.




Out of the mossy fount of Kai Ihns’s head (“vulnerable bulb”) come new tarot cards, such as “the garden of cups,” and a recipe for a mucilaginous batter listed as four parts glue, three parts elegy, with a zest of citrus; hems are gummy in a poem on compote, there’s a tropical fish named Jupiter, and love is compared to a scratched itch. It is tempting to ask what Of, her refractive new collection, could possibly be about if not aboutness. Of of, as it were. Ihns’s habits and tics—some baffling, others seemingly generative—include the lowercase I, which in the sixty-odd years since the death of E.E. Cummings (and a dozen or so Lucille Clifton’s) has gone in and out of creative remission; the theory is that i, signal flare of the poet’s humility, shies from the familiar chest-thumping of singing of oneself. Notwithstanding this weakness for teenage orthography (the book’s absolute last gasp, capping the endnotes, is a heart emoticon), I would contend that Ihns is unseriously serious and not, I think, the other way around. As she dutifully notes, lines have been snipped from the Phenomenology of Spirit and Sun Tzu, William Carlos Williams (if Ihns wants a credo, “No things but in ideas” should suffice) and the filmography of John Cassavetes. Good artists borrow, great artists steal, and every poet born after “The Waste Land” leaves a paper trail of IOUs.

                The hypnotic maundering of Gertrude Stein—Of’s patron saint, presumably—gets updated here with Fredric Jameson on Walmart and capitalized exclamations from Alexa; the return of the repressed via wifi. Originality, let alone “the nothing of a specific content,” can be tough to see. Shopping Tender Buttons around in 1912, Stein received at least one blisteringly funny snub from a London publisher (Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.) Indeed, Ihns’s objectivity sounds uncannily like “A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass.” While the bulk of Of resembles a game of telephone with a cut cord, or a pair of conch shells made to face each other (“a faint, awful, and opalescent noise”), there is also a leaf-like drifting of the spoken. Our attention to this seesawing, largely unencumbered by punctuation, is what Ihns elsewhere, with her PhD hat on, refers to as “aspect choreography.” If the rhyme and reason are as opaque as milk, usually one’s sense will be that, like in cross-stitch, it all threads up on the far side:

by what are you susceptible of description

that’s attached to me and has my nerves

in it

each thing has a wish attached

plain as a plain dime on the day-dry ground

not flat, but like it, in its very plain shine—

Ihns’s techno-innovational language is more than a little reminiscent of Karen Solie as well as the algorithmic silliness of Zoe Hitzig, albeit without the latter’s purposeful obscurity, a stylized feint that seems to betray a fear of being misunderstood (“Hope that helps,” Srikanth Reddy signs his foreword to Not Us Now, Hitzig’s second collection). Jake Syersak, too, whose poems can look like an out-of-focus photograph of clouds, to misquote a certain twentieth-century physicist. And sure, a degree of gaseous airheadedness makes Of anything but narratively solid. Having no single gimmick, however, displaces the aesthetic weight. Across multiple, fragmented perspectives, with her diction hovering between an encyclopedic level of referentiality—a bit of Schiller, then a television commercial—and cyclonic forces of personality, Ihns’s omnipresence tends to fascinate.

                With its cubist multiplicity and Apollinairean humor, the typical Ihns poem might contain a deconstruction of “lemon” or the description of one’s heart as a Chicago pigeon. Another reader may be put in mind of Pierre Bonnard or Édouard Vuillard, whose hazily textured interiors (“A figure like a sad putty heap on a chair in / a very bright room”) ultimately come down to domesticity and the stillness that obtains therein. Much else in Of bears something of the New York School’s laconic, cigarette brevity:

People retain those ideas which are shaped

like ideas

on the go i did not wish to be hired from

“A constant explosion produces all shapes”

Very Promising

Up to speed in the skiff boat

in the sleeve

            which is raw

of potential

“Lettuce for Church,” the title of the above, has a studied unsteadiness to it, of course—like that skiff, or like a fluttering sleeve. The facing recto, a mise en abyme collaged out of glass abstractions and other miscellany connected with glitchy line arrows (drawn in Microsoft Paint, by the looks of it), serves as Of’s totemic brainstem, embedded as it is at the center, just about. At well over a hundred pages, with pinched margins, the variegation of rhetorical forms in such a tight span is downright Cambrian. Ideas peep o’er ideas, and shapes on shapes arise.

Of’s fecundity is partly to do with the fact that it collects the author’s shorter chapbooks. This puts Ihns in lofty company, being a writer whose major poetic works were preceded by an avalanche of pamphlets—look at Milton. Ihns, too, attempts to justify the ways of God:

    here where signs are given through belief, which seemed

    sometimes like a tube

    also what was given is angels, eagles, or goldfish

    the summer of girls was a hot hot summer

we were told

     in our most scientific knowledges, noises

     & wetness under heaven

     when it   broke open

     that

                    god was an exercise to teach us

                think hard about premises

like all i have in my house is fridge

    thought it was a SNAKE, but it was a SNAKE

In Ihns’s retelling of Genesis, the promise symbolized by a (now tubular) rainbow is misspelled and the serpent hangs around disguised as a serpent. Except Of is decidedly more Garden of Earthly Delights—a weirder kind of paradise, in which the sacred and the profane abut. (That snake-like snake is texting with a meerkat.) The result is, well, a constant explosion, one that at times risks your eardrums (“IT IS / EXTREMELY DIFFICULT AND MAKES / MY NOSE SORE / BUT I WILL DO THIS FOR YOU, MEERKAT FRIEND”). Recall the idiom about breaking eggs for an omelet.

An avid experimenter, Ihns still isn’t ostentatious; and though there is a glut of them here, the longest poems are diminutive in their ambition. The beakers shatter easily. Hers is an avant-gardism of the small (fittingly, the book itself has all the pocketability of Lunch Poems). Better that, far better, than the literally effortless minimalism of grifters with quasi-Hellenic names like Atticus and Archibald Hades. (Hades, whose Wikipedia reads like a Graham Greene novel, has accused the publishing houses of gatekeeping, while the Napkin Poetry Review awarded her latest a rave.) The fingered wounds and cool shows of grief. “No one’s interested in your blood,” Rita Dove told the Paris Review. By way of a compromise, Fran Lebowitz, in her interview, claimed that she works “so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself.” Our need for a countrywide phlebotomy, plus or minus a few leeches, has never been greater.

Comically flat-footed, then ecstatic, then ponderous, Of can be mercurial to a fault. Like a compass at the North Pole, the reader’s needle turns in circles; yet with no dominant point of reckoning (see the top Merriam-Webster entry for “of”), Ihns’s hurricane strength emerges from that same windy indeterminacy. In propria persona, meanwhile, there is a quiet to her eye:

cheese people with surveillance vistas

keep the dead white rose in a water jar

and the thousand botryoidal fauna

called fear and dispensations

[. . .]

we had good used feelings in each other’s arms

an autumn we saw Solaris alone

slickly she says such acceptable things, like

we were all men possessed by vegetables

we lived in the pool

Elizabeth Bishop could be this mischievously deadpan—awful but cheerful, with an underlayment of zaniness (think of Bishop’s hairless pink dog wandering the streets of Rio de Janeiro during carnival). Ihns is that, and hopefully as influential.