j/j hastain responds to Carrie Hunter's The Incompossible

Carrie Hunter’s The Incompossible is a hungry book that is evermore increasing hunger in us. As “a continuous transposition”--as a “mutual mastication” it is composed of and upholds zones of necessary fragmentation. We feel these fragmentations in our bodies as we move through (the book that is also a body) via both a process of stitching and of breaking down. The Incompossible fills us with bends and blends for a new grace. So “clandestine “among”— wherein we can be uncertain at the same time that we are sure. How comforting! How daunting!  True to what I believe to be Carrie’s impetuses here “what I inhabit makes me disappear.” And we can and we do disappear. Disappear as we are appearing! Oh gravities! Oh gift! “No such thing as interior or exterior” [] “we are spinning” and in that spin—that lucid pirouette—the reeling and the rotation grounds us as it make us levitate. I am saying “there is no such thing as opposites, only variations” and we feel these variations deeply as we travel through this moving mirror that is also an echo-location repeating its portions as bends.

The Incompossible is available through SPD.

j/j hastain is the author of numerous full-length, cross-genre works such as: asymptotic lover // thermodynamic vents (BlazeVox Books), our bodies as beauty inducers (Rebel Satori Press), and ulterior eden (Otoliths), as well as many chapbooks and artist’s books.  j/j’s manuscript Let was a finalist in the 2010 Kelsey Street and Ahsahta book competitions. In 2011 j/j’s book we in my Trans was nominated for the Stonewall Book Award.

Permutations of The Arakaki Permutations

Jared Stanley responds to Arakaki Permutations

I love Jim’s project – his desire to bring his poetry writing and the embodied practice of the Kata together might seem kind of scary, or too pure, or something, but you know, there’s drama in its rigor and (should I say it?) faith in its unity of purpose. Mostly it’s a great pleasure to read – the mind turning the graphemes into motions. It’s exciting, and more than anybody else I can think of, Jim’s trying to write poems that are embodied (not ‘about’ the body) and are, at the same time, about a rigorous, demanding idea of embodiment. Jesus fuck, that sounds like a blurb.

Has anybody mentioned the form of the book? It’s divided into five sections of permutations of the first poem in the section. So, the first line of the first poem, is ‘word.’ This serves as the title of the next poem. The second line is ‘in process’ serves as the title of the third poem, and so on and so forth. There’s a kind of rigorous efflorescing out of the first poem’s primary intention which I find super exciting, hinting at levels of meaning that can be endlessly generated from the first line. And they’re not glosses, or poems dependent on each other, permutations, gusts and motions of changes.

Permutation. Do I even need to say it? It is the most important gesture of poetry, in these days of endless, extrusions, transformations, metamorphoses. So much of it seems uncontrollable, apocalyptic, I don’t know, disordered, some fearful inevitability, nihilistic even. (I read this headline: Ocean Noise Pollution Blowing Holes in Squid’s Heads) So, sometimes, I think of permutation, and I am afraid of such things. This world has trained us to fear transformation.

But not in this book. Here, permutation and change are ‘of the process’ – should we have a look?

Arakaki no Jo

aroundabout way to confer

saplings

            storm-knees

out

cropping with the best of all

intent  rivet gatling

in the offing

            rapid-fire

exit

strategies  break one loose

I want to stop and hear the cryptic echo of ‘conifer’ in there. And indeed, the permutation explores the echo fully. The violence of motion, and of rhyme! Can you imagine sapling and gatling together, in this way? the motions of the kata are supple (saplings).

Here’s the permutation of the third line, exciting to me for its animistic conflation of trees and body parts:

III. (storm-knees)

bough (breaks)

below

the tension wire

by swinging it low

you get

a battery’s worth

of spent shells

whorl’d

and without care

in ward or wood

or that

centrifugal stress

intertial force lost

as it’s

flung from orbit

The permutations linger on pain or violence. The suppleness and grace of the knee is snapped or broken, and the language is rife with the special intensity of concentrating on the work a knee does – you know it when it stops working. I don’t know if you’ve seen either Grizzly Man or Twin Peaks, but both the movie and the TV show have these amazing shots of trees, just trees, in motion, in wind, both supple and breaking, falling apart, being acted upon. There’s a similar feeling of an invisible strength made visible in a form in this poem, of centrifugal stress – now you, and your reading mind, are flung –are you not? 

Jared Stanley is the author of Book Made of Forest (Salt, 2009) and four chapbooks, including How the Desert Did Me In. With Lauren Levin and Catherine Meng, he edits Mrs. Maybe, a Journal of Skeptical Occultism. He is a member of Unmanned Minerals, an art collective, and lives in Reno, Nevada.