it’s of! it’s of! it’s of!: An Interview with Kai Ihns
Kai Ihns | OF | The Elephants | October 2024 | 126 Pages
I haven’t been able to shut up about the poetry of Kai Ihns for several years running, and I don’t suppose I will any time soon. A few years ago, she taught a class at the University of Chicago on repetition in poetry and film. It was during that time that I first encountered Sundaey, her debut collection. It was and remains a stunning book, taking a near-scientific interest in using a single word dozens—or even hundreds—of times in a row, occasionally adding a new word or phrase in an effort to catch the original in the act of changing meaning.
Of, Ihns’ second collection, is the quantum theory to Sundaey’s Newtonian mechanics. Exhibiting a similarly obsessive attention to linguistic and personal aspect, Of does not attempt to study singular changes in meaning as they happen, but to identify and capture all real and potential interactions between a given set of words as social entities. “I can’t help but understand,” she writes in REPAIR HOURS, one of the book’s three prose poems. The scientific eye of the poet becomes compulsive, ever reorienting its vision of syntactic and semantic order. Ihns examines time and again the entire potential of a linguistic space and the infinitely dynamic meaning it holds. She takes as her duty the unending work of understanding what is and what could be. The thesis of Of is, perhaps, the informative and orientational mandate of the word “of” itself. For Ihns, pivoting on this preposition is the origin of all interest and all sense. “Of” is our most powerful social preposition. It connotes relational direction and syntactic hierarchy, thereby defining the dynamics of a sentence or phrase and the meanings that each may build. To toy with this word is to resist the stabilization of syntactic social dynamics. Reading Of is like watching a performance artist endlessly stack a matryoshka that is designed never to fit together: It generates an understanding that rejects any absolute relational knowledge in favor of new vantages, a kind of perpetual curiosity machine.
Ihns’ work inspires an empathy for syntax, laying bare the massive effort expended by words-in-relation to sustain their arranged meaning while simultaneously demonstrating the ease with which any of us could upend their fragile ecosystems. And, to the extent that an empathy for syntax can have a relational analog among people, Ihns posits a similar fragility between social beings. One of the more striking tensions in Of is between the intellectual understanding of the discomfort(s) or exhaustion heaped upon language amid its syntactic metamorphoses, and the personal discomfort of holding or being held in multiple viewpoints. Of is unique among Ihns’ oeuvre for its inclusion of prose (poems). Where the book’s verse seems to instruct the reader in the technique of her thought, Ihns’ prose seems to be a real-time document of her thinking/feeling. In these sections, the sentence-entity becomes loaded with a palpable discomfort not endemic to its syntactic energy or mood, nor a result of contortions demanded by the author, but rather as a reflection of Ihns’ sense of kinship language, with the work she asks of it, and the effect that its malleability has in turn had on her mode of perception.
Ihns is one of our great iterative poets, though to say such a thing is to consign her work to too narrow a celebration. She is nothing less than a blindingly bright star in the American avant garde. For my money, she is the heiress to Leslie Scalapino’s vast poetic legacy. We are lucky to be reading her work as contemporaries.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kai Ihns: I’ve not done a lot of interviews in actual life before.
Evan Williams: I usually do it over email. It's very daunting. A lot of my friends are journalists, and every day they're out there, like, gumshoeing it. I have no idea what I'm doing. But I do have so many questions.
Of reads to me as almost obsessive in a completionist way. On a content level, it feels like you're trying to fulfill as much of the documentary potential in interactions as humanly possible. And also, on a linguistic level, there are a bunch of places where it’s as though you’re compelled to twist a given chunk of language in every possible way it can be twisted before you can move on. It’s very satisfying. I guess another way to think about it is as a kind of maximalism, almost, but not in a maximal way. Almost like a minimal maximalism.
KI: I haven't thought about this before…Okay, so two things. Before I tried to do poetry, I tried to do painting for years, and I totally, sadly, realized I wasn't a painter. What I was really interested in in painting was vantage and perspective and how things look when seen from different angles, or as a different kind of looker. I was really interested in perspective distortions, like anamorphosis, things like Renaissance conventions and perspective. That interest stayed with me into my scholarly work, which is about aspect change, so this idea of one thing that morphs its nature through potential vantages is something I'm interested in.
I think conceptually that that's also true for relationality. It's not something you can see. It's not materializable as an object. It's something that you have to iteratively take and see repeatedly and work out in time, and it changes. So I think I'm really interested in things that iterate and shift depending on context, depending on vantage, depending on perspective, depending on relation. So maybe that's what some of that is.
EW: What is anamorphosis?
KI: It started as this, like, Victorian parlor trick. Maybe it was written about before that, but it was this way of drawing where you would take an image and distort it by taking the image, gridding it, and then drawing that same grid in a sort of radial distortion, then replicating across from the rectilinear grid to this stretched grid. And then if you put a cylindrical mirror in the middle of it, it appeared normally only in the mirror because the mirror corrected the radial stretching. But when you looked at the object without the help of the mirror, it was a weird smear.
EW: I'm curious about the aquarium picture in the book, because it feels like that to me. I couldn't tell exactly what it was, but I knew that it was aquatic in some way.
KI: That’s in a section called Green Sky, which was originally an independent little chapbook thing. The aquarium photograph I liked because it's, well—you can't see me really, but I'm there. It's a selfie. It's like a selfie in a mirror, but you can't see the subject anymore. You just see these intercutting layers of receding texture. I'm walking in the light that's producing this kind of recession effect. But there's no person that's there. There's something about this way of being or way of seeing or relating that distorts what appears, but there can only be images of the distortion. So that photograph is like a self portrait, but it's only a portrait of the distortion I produce by being there. It's at Shedd Aquarium in the children's exhibit.
EW: I don't see photos in books of poems, really ever, with the exception of Nathan Hoks’ work. What was the impulse?
KI: Originally, all of the images and the title were in color. I didn't know it would be black-and-white until it printed. It's fine. I think it's worse with color. The first page of the section says “Green Sky.” That “green” should be blue. The other blob-like thing is a glass piece my partner made, and that collection of images, kind of with line drawings on them, are also his works. I think he's really interested in art objects that are multiple things at once, or that are somehow trying to be several different concepts that can't actually coexist, but somehow do in this object. And to me, something about that problem is like this sort of mirror of the problem of being a person constituted in relation to all these things. So I think that they felt like funny inversions or mirrors of each other, but also are in relation and explain each other.
EW: I do also want to talk about the color green. It appears thirty-some odd times in the book.
KI: So it's funny, I feel like the color I used most is orange, which, now that you're saying it, though, it definitely appears less often than green. But the thing that happens with both orange and green is there are shadows that are that color. For some reason, there's a poem called orange shadow. There's an image of someone down in an orange shadow. And then there's this poem called “Painting Ideas” that talks about a spruce shadow out on a green field. Yeah, but orange, to me, feels like the color of the book, even though it's gray.
I mean, the biographical fact of this is that I became obsessed with plants and growing plants and cuttings. The other thing that I would say is that green is liveliness, aliveness in the world—and it’s also poison.
EW: The other thing that came up frequently was jewels.
KI: That's something that I continue to work with. It's kind of a similar dual symbol. It feels like I have this feeling that is what it is. I don't have the concept. I feel like once I can conceptually know what something is, it's no longer something I'm actively working with as hard material. And I feel like this is when it's still I don't know what it is.
EW: It had a tremendous presence on the page. As a word, it feels very, I don't know, grandiose in some sense.
KI: It’s a fantasy word. What is a jewel except, like, something floating above the ground in a video game? It’s not a real thing; it’s a kind of fantasy nostalgia object. I think I often use it that way, where it’s not even an object. I feel like I'm interested in these grand, very romantic fantasy objects and words and, like, how they can hold a mirror to the actual world, resist that or just duplicate it.
EW: I do want to ask about the prosier bits of the book. It's not something that you did in Sundaey. Many of those wound up being my favorite pieces from the book. It often felt like the lineated poems were explaining how you thought, and then the prose poems were you thinking. I feel like this is also true of people whose work yours reminds me of, especially Leslie Scalapino. How are the prose pieces working for you?
KI: Yeah, the first piece in there that I wrote was Antonia. I was a teaching assistant for a high school creative writing class, which in many ways was very sweet, but most of what I did was listen to conversations. It was a summer intensive, so it was like six hours a day for three weeks, and I was just listening to six hours of conversation a day, mostly about fiction. And so I found myself really irritated. Nothing against the class, but, like, just whatever. So I started writing these sentences on my paper while I was waiting, and then I started writing in sentences. And I never write—I've never written in sentences before. And then there's this figure of Antonia, who kind of was the subject of the poem, but she's a fragmented subject that comes in and out of being in the same way that I think any “I” of the poems does, this kind of amorphous thing, like the picture. Antonia is the same way, a fictive subject instead of a lyric subject. Anyway, that was kind of my first experiment with prose. I liked it, and the way the subject was working was really interesting to me.
The really long prose poem, Repair Hours, I wrote while I spent months in a really scary, hostel/Airbnb situation in Paris while finishing my dissertation, and I was, like, really uncomfortable, like, physically and personally. I was interviewing Alice Notley, actually, at the beginning of that time, and she did this thing where she'd write a little bit each day about what happened that day. And I was like, I've never done that before. I'm having a really bad time. It just became this Purgatory, this perpetual situation. And in this situation, I was interested in my day. The daily is never real, but somehow it felt possible to let that in. While I was there they were repairing the roof of the place where we were staying—it's an attic unit, and they were repairing the roof of the whole building. There's something about being in proximity to something really intense happening and trying to write. It just became this thing that repeated throughout my entire time there, and kind of structured how I was thinking about being in relation to things, like through a membrane. I was sitting in a closet, basically, with roommates all around, and I could hear everything they were doing. It was a really intense relational wallspace.
So both of those came out of just being uncomfortable. And then Shopping Music. There's this really kind of bad movie called Piano. Okay, I really love this movie. I think it's in this mountain town in South America, and there's a lot of really cool, super stylish reggaeton dancers and their grumpy dance teacher who's like, this isn't real. That music, like a lot of music I like, is very repetitive and has a compelling, somewhat interesting rhythmic structure to it. But I was like, so much of what I listen to is this music that, like, keeps me going through my day, and then, you know, there's this kind of rhythm of life that’s hard to get out of. A capitalist society runs through everything. The prose is often much closer to the material stratum in my daily life.
EW: I'm thinking about how the sentence and fiction and novels and things of that sort are so steeped in the discomfort of writing them, they're so miserable to work on. And also here they're coming from some source of misery too.
KI: A kind of discomfort medium, yeah. Yeah.
The title of this interview was taken from a line in Ihns’ the world of flying motor projects (Sundaey).