Unfolding the Cranes

2-D vs 3-D

Three views of the paper crane align vertically down the page, each photograph providing a different angle of the letters written neatly upon the creature’s paper skin.  Nowhere else in the book does the poet reveal the pattern of the lettering, nowhere does she decrypt or decode the bird’s poem.  When giving the pages a perfunctory glance or flipping through, the origami seems  an anomaly; three pages of shapes, folded animals stuck in the centerfolds of a conglomeration of words. Most readers may glance at the pictures, think something to themselves either about the poet’s ingenuity or craft, then will continue turning the page.
Oni Buchanan is a poet and author of two books of poetry: What Animal (2003) and Spring(2007). I met her at her poetry reading and class at Bucknell University . She spoke about her art:

Class: The origami pictures were pretty
Poet: They are poems
Class: But how can you read them?
Poet: What would you have to do to read them?
Class: (silence) I guess you’d have to unfold them
Poet: Right. And how are you going to unfold them?
Class: (silence) Would you make the origami yourself?
Poet: Right! Yes! And then?
Class: Write the letters on the bird the way it shows in the pictures?
Poet: Right! And then?
Class: And then you’d unfold it and read the poem
Poet: Exactly! My point with the origami poems was, in part, that as a reader, you only get a limited part of the poem, only the surface level of any text is available if you don’t engage with it, turn it over and touch it.  You have to be curious enough about the poems to take the effort to physically make the shape, copy down the writing, unfold it and read it.  But once you do that, it’s like you’ve found your own secret little hidden poem. It’s almost like you wrote it yourself, but in a language you didn’t quite understand until you’d finished.  Art is supposed to be interacted with, touched, poked, folded…sometimes you have to get in and do it yourself or it won’t make any sense at all.

I went home that night, folded paper cranes and wrote the the fragmented letters and words with pen upon the paper wings and neck.
I opened the bird’s folds.

=  no don’t let them
run away they won’t
survive on their own
for the world is
cruel and objective
unswayed by
innocence by sweet noises
and softness
the thing with teeth
comes is hungry
and tears to shreds
the soft, folded ears
the vulnerable belly

(Poem by Oni  Buchanan)

Oni Buchanan’s origami poetry strikes me as a beautiful, poignant metaphor for just the type of enigmatic quality literature possesses, and the reader’s attention and curiosity that it requires. Sometimes, often, even, there are worlds beneath, between and within the folds of text that are available only to those who devote the time to question the birds on the page, to wonder what they hold, and to physically fold the paper, write the words, and unfold them to find poetry.  This is the reader’s responsibility, part of the dialogue between author, text, and the active reader.
Looking at the context of the book as a whole, this poetic experiment is not surprising, nor is it incongruous with the work Oni Buchanan sets out to explore. She is fascinated with the playful nature of language, with its hidden facets, she invents games and verbal codes, extending the challenge to break patterns, find connections, and interact with language in creative, innovative ways to her readers. For this writer, poems are akin to chemical reactions, in that each element is deeply dependent upon those that act upon it. In a lab, as in a poem, an experiment may culminate in an explosion, a noxious gas, or an alchemist’s precious metal.

Oni Buchanan’s poetry is often both conceptually and literally interactive.  Attentive, curious readers are rewarded for taking initiative and breaking the code.  In a series of poems titled “The Mandrake Vehicles”, the poet worked from source texts, finding resources detailing characteristics, facts and folk lore about the mandrake root and created from them blocks of prose compiled of images, phrases and ideas about the root. Through seven stages of deconstruction, Buchanan plucks the “heavier” letters from the lines, leaving the “lighter ones to float as the discarded letters drop as residue to the bottom of the page. The remaining letters push together and form a poem. The process repeats, and by the seventh step, the poet has revealed to herself and to her readers to secret poems that existed within the block of prose from the very beginning––the surrounding field of language needed only to be excavated before the poems could emerge and speak.
Here is another example of Buchanan’s affinity for revealing that which appears to be hidden. She finds poetry within the folds of a bird, a frog, a cube, and within blocks of prose. The Mandrake Vehicles are another beautiful demonstration of deformative and performative operations; a testament to the hidden things one can create, unfold and extract, like a silver string from a scarf.

Poet: The best part, for me, about The Mandrake Vehicles is that there are an infinite number of undiscovered poems hidden in these texts that I haven’t discovered yet. Maybe I never will, but you could. There’s a potential poem embedded in everything you read!

The link to the interactive website featuring The Mandrake Vehicles is:
http://www.conduit.org/online/buchanan/buchanan.html