An Overheard Promise

Ianni, Jo. inside inside inside. Ottawa: Apt. 9 Press, 2022. 24pp. $10 USD

At the launch reading for inside inside inside, Jo Ianni read this poem, whose title is its sole underlined word:

wrist flick stone flat round perfect pitch skips over over own ripples made ripple reach back for shore (1-6)

 Note: the numbers in parentheses here (and throughout the review) denote line numbers rather than page numbers. The pages of inside inside inside are not numbered.

After Jo read the poem once through, he did so again from the beginning, only this time a member of the audience stood up and joined him in the recitation. Then once again, with another audience member joining in, the “ripples” in the poem became realized as a concrete amalgamation of all these voices reading together. Jo repeated this performance at another reading hosted via Skype, where even digital latency & layering were players in the poem. The repeated readings are, in a way, ripples of sound & sense across spacetime, no?

I share this anecdote because I think it tells two shining truths about Jo Ianni’s poetry: first, that it is fundamentally collaborative—whether between multiple performers or between poet & reader. Second, Jo’s poetry makes much of its magic with sound, and the short i’s of “ripples” are just the tip of a sonic edifice that jumps to build itself off the pages of inside inside inside. It’s a body of work that has been under careful construction for some time: Jo’s history of involvement with the Toronto poetry scene is studded with call-and-response (or even one-on-one) readings, intimate living-room workshops, and other occasions to commune in real time with other poets. On the asynchronous side of things, his tremendous trust in the sensemaking capabilities of his readers will, I hope, become apparent in the excerpts quoted in this review. 

One example is the poem, “finish,” which begins like this:

The gift of flesh to hide + find the key’s rattle

Overheard promise from the spider
in my hair (1-5)

Like the ripples in “ripples,” the juxtapositions in this five-line excerpt lend texture and color (maybe a kind of finish, even?) to the poem’s images & ideas. Although its sensory details ring specific & concrete, “finish” has an abstract opening line that invites the reader to interpret the poem in a more philosophical context; the first phrase, “The gift of flesh,” brings to mind Jacques Derrida’s writings on the complexities and paradoxes of the “gift,” which makes perfect sense in the reciprocal context of Ianni’s participatory poetics: in performing his poems Jo literally embodies the kind of giving-over of the poem to a reader/listener enacted with “flesh” in this text. There is also an echo here of Heraclitus’s famous dictum, “Nature loves to hide,” with Ianni’s playful twist of swapping “flesh” in for “Nature,” as well as joining the conjunction with a literal cross (“+”) instead of the word “and.” 

These choices speed up the line both visually and syllabically, quickly shepherding the reader into an almost metaphysical realm that culminates with the rhyme of “hide” & “find;” their long i sounds not only echo the chapbook’s title, but also seem to recall the game of hide & seek — a metapoetic invitation to attend to the sounds of the poem in the same untutored way we might listen along to a campfire song. The reader hears there’s a “rattle” (which we could just as easily associate with a baby’s toy as with a pair of lungs near death), and then there’s a stanza break that maybe suggests the sonic excess is a “promise”. But whose promise? Who gives the first line’s “gift”? 

I love this passage because it positions the spider at the end as a little philosopher-homunculus, just as responsible as the speaker is for driving the poem (like Ratatouille meeting a much kinder-hearted version of Jonathan Edwards’s infamous arachnid). “finish” continues, playfully:

An itch
A stare
Then upstairs crushed into bed dismissing myself
of any more bad ideas (6-12)

There are a few interesting slippages here. First, the homonymic pairing “stare”/“stairs” gives an ordinarily flat form of looking some vertical depth, a nice setup for the following lines which imply a kind of fall: “crushed into bed” (5). Next, there is the unusual grammatical permission of using the word “dismissing” —all its connotations of the school bell, waiting for it to ring—as though it takes both a direct object (“myself”) and an indirect object (“any more / bad ideas”); this moment is reminiscent of the class-clown figure, as if the spider from the opening stanza is Bart Simpson at the chalkboard, scrawling repeatedly: I will have no more bad ideas. 

These examples are lessons in how Jo Ianni’s poems operate in the joyful betweens of language—as another poem on the same page puts it, “under spell / under spider bedfellows / living between” (7-9). Even the underlines in inside inside inside do meaningful work: as readers, we usually expect poetry books to be laid out such that the title is at the top of the page and the poem is underneath — but in inside inside inside, there are no overhead titles. Instead, as we saw at the beginning of this review with “ripples”, the title of each poem is underlined where it appears in the text of the poem itself. Poems also bump into each other, usually two to a page but with no fixed rule. Putting the title in the middle of the poem cheekily subverts our expectations about even the very the form of the book. (As a kicker, iii’s pages aren't numbered.)

Thus, reading Jo’s poems can be a bit daunting if the reader sees their task as extracting a narrative or A-to-B arc from the lines. In fact, “the sunflower’s head” uses its beginning to dramatize exactly this space of uncertainty:

In a rush rush from what or
(?) do I mean why a yellow stung and later angry for then staring at
back of the sunflower’s head sorry (1-8)

The way this excerpt defers any pronouns (“from what”) and relies on prepositional phrases (“angry for / then staring at”) brings the reader into the speaker’s confusion (did you, as I did, misread “sting” for “stung”?), before providing an apologetic relief at the end. The word “staring” reappearing near the end might make the reader think again of the spider-adjacent “stare” in “finish,” at its little Spenserian comedy: one can imagine the poem’s speaker apologizing to an invisible wasp or bee for the impoliteness of gawking at their friend, a big flower, from behind. Note too that if there is a literal “yellow” wasp or “angry” bee in this poem, the poet isn’t figuring them in verse or depicting them directly. Instead, they are implied only as color & feeling. In Ianni’s poems, one does not stand to one side and sketch the bee or pin it dead to the board of disembodied nature; rather, one turns one’s flesh in the same direction the bee is facing, looking as they’d look, seeking as they’ve sought.

The reader in inside inside inside is witness to the emergence of a bestiary of the very small &/or the multifarious: spiders, ants, snails, flowers, & clouds appear in the poems, as well as larger animals I always imagine in the plural like geese, fish, & even wolves. “the sunflower’s head” in particular made me think of one of my favorite Robert Lax poems, “A Problem in Design” (which prominently features “big flowers”). Lax’s spatiality and minimalism aren’t the only elements his work shares with Jo Ianni’s poems, though. His poems can feel as though born of a kind of philosophical meditation while also refusing to be cornered by the trappings of prosaic argumentation or linear logic. In this sense, we can see a connection between both writers at the end of “the sunflower’s head:”

the drawings (chalk)
I don’t know of what some childish assumption
the presence of stretched out form a cave and it’s inside me
and I’m inside it (11-17)

In addition to being one of the most concise critiques of representation I’ve ever seen (the confession, after the parenthetical, of “I don’t know of what”, “of” the only unstressed syllable, a prosodic enactment “of” the silliness of the question, of mistaking the part for a whole identity), this almost-eponymous passage gives some hints of the kind of play Jo’s poems are interested in. The poems’ speakers are neither Plato’s cave-bound prisoners, perceiving only part of the truth, nor do they number among the mythic few who have ventured out of the cave. Instead, they are burrowing through the very earth the cave is made of, like Theodore Roethke’s lowly worm climbing up the winding stair of sound & song.

Between the two afore-quoted sections of “the sunflower’s head” is a small, musical couplet: “rhythm of fabric moving / some song in relief” (9-10). Like Roethke in “The Minimal,” Jo Ianni studies “the lives on a leaf: the little” (1) creatures and movements and snippets of language that remind us we’re alive in them, and they in us. Roethke is philosophically a good touchstone for Jo’s work, I think, but sonically and syntactically Jo’s poems are much closer to those of Hoa Nguyen, who Jo has read closely & learned with & from and whose non-binding edict to “Write fucked up poems” Jo’s work feels like a direct & exuberant answer to. I’ve always loved the late Callie Gardner’s gloss on Nguyen’s poem, which opens with a bit of exposition that is right at home describing the poems of inside inside inside:

When I taught intro-to-poetry classes, I ended each term with ‘Write Fucked Up Poems’, by Hoa Nguyen, not only because I did want the students to write fucked up poems, but also because it is a keen illustration of what a fucked up poem is; it rewards some of the orthodox skills of close reading, but also shows it up as an imperfect mode of understanding.

That’s it, just there. I couldn’t come up with a better way to describe Jo’s poems’ gentle resistance to being clearly understood, their small hiccups of nonstandard spelling or syntax. Gardner goes on to discuss with great care the puzzling moments in Nguyen’s poem—why the specificity in certain places, the deferred namings—and this kind of delicate questioning ports beautifully to a moment from the last poem in Jo’s chapbook, “the orbit room”: 

I play w/ my keys 
that’s how I keep sure there still here
  and not lost (5-8)

I hardly need to draw for you the first line’s musical parallel to the transpositions of the jazz musician, or the gently ironic ambivalence of the word “sure,”, which can be a dangerous marker of certainty in the wrong hands. It describes instead a relationship of touch with something hidden in the speaker’s pocket: there are so many ways of knowing in this little book.

Ianni closes inside inside inside after the enigmatic line “there still here,” whose first word of course we want to read as “they’re.” The keys, as they rattled in “finish,” bring their tactile unquiet with them into a weird, transfigured paradise of the poem—where every sound is saved, “not lost” and, in fact, sacred.

There are volumes still to be written about Jo Ianni’s poetry, and I hope you, dear reader, will write the next one. Ianni’s collaborative poetics asks much of us as readers and rewards our reading amply with the sights, sounds, and touched things that make up a poet’s sensorium, which this book reminds us is also their lived life. inside inside inside is the first soft stitch in a life-poem tapestry Jo Ianni is, in his words,

weaving
impossible
out of this thin air (1-6)