A Revolution When Whispered: A Review of Inconsequentia

Dereks Pollard and Henderson’s Inconsequentia made me belly laugh within the first five pages. I guffawed. It was embarrassing; thank god nobody was around.

Reading Inconsequentia, a collaborative effort by Derek Henderson and Derek Pollard, isn’t altogether different than reading highfalutin, high-concept books from Po-Mo darlings like Lisa Robinson and Bernadette Mayer, but it’s not the sort of book you want to whip out in a café to impress the cute hipster girl in the plaid shirt. You will probably let out a few loud, embarrassing, monosyllabic laughs here and there. Hell, you’ll probably drool a little. Don’t misread me, though; none of this is bad news. Rather, it’s testament to the gleeful abandon with which these Dereks approached the making of this book, and to the huge degree to which their effort is truly engaging.

I don’t know anything about how the Dereks achieved this collaboration. I imagine that they emailed. I imagine this only because “’invisible typewriter’” is identified as a “revolution when whispered,” and I’m fairly certain that “invisible typewriter” is a lolcatz meme. That’s the only “clue” I get, though, because the result of whatever method the Dereks employed is a strong, consistent, and very flexible voice.  In fact, that might be a generative principal of this work: the elusive “product” generated from multitudes.

people everyone

morning always

from It

creates itself

Inconsequentia arises from and seems to enact the chaos of order-making. “We sort through the making of This: / Like parents, spawning certain Things.”  It is the celebration of things, and of making them in which the book seems largely to be engaged. If the “we” in this excerpt might be read as a simple clue into the logic of this collaboration, here is a counter example as confounding as it is exhilarating: “Respond to this,” chides page forty six. “If you. You are not continuing it,” page forty seven seems to reply.

This exchange can be read as a) an exchange between collaborators, b) an admission that there has been no such exchange, c) an exchange between the voice of the speaker and the reader, or c) a hell of a lot of fun. There are other instances of things that look like multiple voices blending into one:

If you read

I am breath I am air.

I am spawned.

Convincing ploy-univociallity follows form an interrogation of the author / reader / author / world dynamic, the act of creating “It,” a product wrought of processes, but perhaps the heart of this work is its persistent sense of humanity. Inconsequentia struggles for the poem, offers it up, and asks for approval. The result is a never-boring exploration of the poetic consciousness, couched firmly in a contemporary moment, and grounded by the proximity of such wonder to the mundane.

That’s just about enough from me.  I’m not here to read the book for you, damnit. I’m just here to tell you that Inconsequentia is an important book, and that you ought to go pick it up.