Kai Ihns has written at least one perfect poem. That poem is titled “By Love I Mean What You Mean Now” which appears in her collection, Of, from The Elephants. She may have written more than one perfect poem, but, to us, there is no remarkable difference between writing one perfect poem or a hundred of them (in fact, the more perfect poems one writes would only begin to work adversely, introducing a prevailing sense of incredulity that may belie the perceived perfection of the others). For the sake of not burdening Kai with the responsibility of writing perfect poetry, we will only refer to one of the poems in the collection as “perfect,” although there may very well be more. 

The perfect poem (whose title is also, appropriately, perfect) reads as such: 

By Love I Mean What You Mean Now 

there is a scrap in the sky

it itches when i itch it

so we are in love 

a woman skates a lane on the frozen lake 

some of the fish are dead 

some are not 

We don’t have to justify why this poem is perfect. It won’t influence wherever you might arrive. Some people like the Beatles. Some people wear those well-intentioned but ultimately reactionary shirts that read “John Lennon Broke Up Fluxus.” We don’t really care either way. What we care about is how Ihns short-circuits the dense subject of Love into a surprise of liminal interaction. 

The poem does not address a “beloved” but a set of conditions, which is closer to what the ontological distinction of Love hinges upon, not something supernaturally indwelling, but a banal register of acceptance. Don’t get us wrong, Love is beautiful and the only reason to endure the myriad horrors of existence and all of that, but it's not mystical. Ihns’ poem distills the pragmatism of Love, which is nearly as ineffable as the subject of Love itself. If the first stanza is a reaction to the conditions that preempt Love, the second stanza utilizes a separate subject to do its work. The woman imposes her own path upon the frozen landscape which exists in a Schrödingerian state of indeterminancy. Above, a free subject navigates the surface; below, the organisms of that environment live or die indiscriminately. While we absolutely abhor rhetorical questioning, is this not a precise depiction of Love’s inevitable conditions? Its illusions of agency? Its little and incremental deaths—the end of a relationship occurring usually when the dead fish outnumber the living. Ihns’ poem insinuates the conditions for Love’s survival in the title—self-abnegation. If you disagree, you’ve never been married and that’s okay, you shouldn’t get married. We, as readers of poetry, also try to write it, and we can say that if we had thought to end a poem “some of the fish are dead / some are not,” we would think pretty highly of ourselves, if for only a few minutes. Dear reader, we did not think to write these lines, but Kai did, which is why we’re all here right now. 

It is in a poem, no less perfect (we know, we know) than the previous one, titled  “One of Them Are” (amusingly Ashberian in its flouncy verb agreement), which opens, “being produced by something capable of producing it” where the collection’s interest in language as a modality of labor, as well as the structural tautology of this labor, becomes apparent. We think often about that H.D. line, “I, the industrious worm, spin my own shroud.” Ihns seems to be speaking next to H.D., a tautology of fabrication that buries its fabricator. There is a sinister eternity contained in this line, the cycles of production unforgiving and continuous, reliant on the mere capability of their production rather than the virtue, skill, or meaning of such. We so often undermine the labor of poetry simply because it doesn’t pay, which is not specific to poetry but to any modality of labor that cannot be quantified by a preexisting system of monetization. Poets, who tend to be Marxists (although upsettingly too often Marxists-with-trust funds), still confound the notion that their writing is labor, whether it is compensated by a sovereign economic system or not. We think H.D. was onto something when she was talking about the shroud and we think Ihns is onto a similar something when she delineates the eternal recurrence of the means of production. 

Lo! There she goes again in “The Shopping Music” when she says “A language is a kind of thing a work can be done into…” Derridean critique of logocentrism intact, who gives a shit? The reliance upon the written as a determinate of “lived experience” is secured. Call it cultural hegemony. Call it colonization. Call it fascism. The point is we have to live like this. Césaire knew this, which is why he wrote in a French that simultaneously fucked French. Do you know how fucking hard that is, dear reader? To expose the nuts and bolts of your own prison only to transcend from within it? All of that motionless veerition—that’s the work. The language is the work. When poetry can often feel like the pretense of an occult practice or a mystical communion with the ethereal fictions of experience (e.g. “it just came to me”) we forget the order of operations, and that, just as Ihns states, language is something we do work into. Perhaps we’re a bunch of pinko sluts, but we see the value in this acknowledgment of language that preempts its own limitations, not in a banal, vocational way (although that’s fine too), but with respect to the maddening hours of syntax and extrapolation. The question is deceptively simple: how do we make the sentence speak?

Ihns may easily catch us off-guard with her way of catching moments of incongruity, “a longing that takes the wrong object” or “Like shitting next to a stranger at an art museum,” she says in “Repair Hours.” Whether we’ve ever been subject to the latter occurrence matters very little, because it contains the conditions of the former, which we have all experienced. Shitting is similar to longing. We long to shit. We shit while we long. Our quiet shitting moments are close to our days, our functions, our distinct ways of thinking our way through a variety of problems. There is a sensitive politics to shitting that is contingent upon its context. By disrupting the privacy of the shitting, Ihns mirrors the incongruity of the subject which receives the wrong object, a longing ostensibly wasted on an inadequate vessel for its expression. This incongruity is palpable. It eats at us. We long, then for the chance to rectify it. Invoke another object of desire. Invoke another opportunity to shit. 

Maybe this is all a problem of individuation that Ihns is trying to approach. Is there a way to be distinct from the noise of the surrounding material (and non-material)? Mahayana Buddhism would say no, but Ihns might say, “you must find another way to get free,” which is the aphorism offered by a donut in “Blinker Description”. However, we think the Buddhists would agree with the donut. It’s an airy enough suggestion, full of verve and speculation. I’m not sure that we receive the totalizing answer to the donut’s acumen, but there are modalities of distinction ever at play in the poems. 

A potentially useful moment:

to What are you susceptible by description

the there there, when it repeats

murder, anthrax, and beautiful scenery in Montana

murder anthrax beautiful scenery of Montana

Ihns works to individuate this politics of description and the imperious nature of a referent, the “What” an operating force of power to which the subject is susceptible to, defined by. The double there, a Steinian echo. Does it reinforce or does it negate? Then the anaphoric list, which at first seems a disparate catalog, by its second pronouncement loses its distinctions, the murder and anthrax constitute the beautiful scenery of Montana rather than appear dialectical to it. Is there a material oneness to consider here? Are the Buddhists better materialists than the Marxists? Probably. Ihns invokes Frederic Jameson, so we can guess where she might stand, but our point is not to leverage ideologies petulantly against one another, but rather exploit a practical absurdity. We are attracted to this moment of struggle where every point of distinction and individuation is reliant upon an imperious referent. This feels consistent with capitalism, where the dollar spent is not a physical unit of ownership and exchange, but a referent of repayment to a national debt. The banknote, even in a physical form, does not exist, but only signifies a loan from an imperious origin, only fungible in a certain context. Our obsession with fungibility goes far beyond the subject of currency. We know this but we lose sight of it because our survival is contingent upon our fungibility. Ihns’ work continuously pulls us back to this awareness, a nature both marked by preeminent transaction and distinction where these systems of value categorically define and censure and lead us to troubling conclusions. 

“I am just bad, not useless,” being one. “No one was a mineral / after all,” being another. Or, perhaps most cogently, “i’m the luckiest boy when i disconnect from becoming.” Of is a book to challenge our rote mistakes of codification, to lambaste the perverted fallacies of solipsism, and to exploit the process of individuation as subject to the same industrial complexes we hoped it worked to free us from.