Month: November 2008

Every Rebel Has Its Period

Nada Gordon1 Comment

Favorite lines from Bruce Andrews’ reading last night:

Vastly cute absentee father

mermaid neckbone

the first lady: that condom

ironic extra ass

the guano of moral value

impeach the mind

do the new pluperfect awful inside of the inside

anal glaucoma, as in “I can’t see my ass coming into work today,”

Is he a house president or a field president?

penis sings water water [here he stopped to take a drink]

neuro-Gucci

body sushi

[and my personal favorite…]

Every rebel has its period

…………………………………………….

chris cheek also gave a great reading, but I was so interested in his projections and his outfit that I forgot to write anything down. I am interested anyway in his obsession with “partials”… phonemes that suggest, but don’t complete, meaning, and how his work forefronts how compulsively and sensuously we read any text, no matter how fragmentary. Dig the groovy checker effect of his woven text/images…



Please to note, even though the photo is dark: KILT, KNEE SOCKS, BLACK BOOTS. Love it. Love it.

breakfast buffet, alexandria

Nada Gordon2 Comments

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breakfast buffet, alexandria, originally uploaded by Ululate.

Unable to shake the memory of the breakfast at the diner in Alexandria, Virginia, last Sunday morning. Not only did I eat a little customized omelet containing jalapenos, cheddar cheese, onions, and tomatoes, but also hearty slices of Virginia ham, bacon, a biscuit and gravy, a flapjack, grits, cantaloupe and watermelon, and a little bit of peach topping that was supposed to go on a waffle had I had room in my physiognomy to fit it so I just tasted the topping, which was like, hmm, alchemical essence of peach. And to think of all the things, besides waffles, available for the taking at the buffet, that I didn’t eat: barbecued chicken, macaroni and cheese, greens, turkey sausage, potatoes. Oh, just a beautiful, caloric, vibrant muchness of a Southern diner on a Sunday morning.

The thing is, I was there for poetry, not for eating. Poetry has taken me all over the place (this utterance makes me think of Robert Frost who said something like, “poetry is a kind of gloating”, exact quote to follow). What a great event, “In Memory of My Theories,” a kind of tribute to the benevolent and “inscrutable” kingpin of D.C., Rod Smith. G. and I had to leave early in the evening to catch a plane back to NYC so that I could teach Monday morning.

a different motion-feeling

Nada Gordon2 Comments

The NY Times reviewed this weekend a book by Roy Blount Jr: Alphabet Juice. I quote from the review:

Disdaining those scholars who think the relation between words and their meanings is arbitrary, he argues that “all language, at some level is body language.” …. Blount zeroes in on the expressive words that “somehow sensuously evoke the essence of the word: ‘queasy’ or ‘rickety’ or ‘zest’ or ‘sluggish’ or ‘vim.'”

I could not help but note that

[Blount writes] “‘Swoon’ emerged from the old English swogan, to suffocate, because the mind and the mouth conspired to replace ‘og’ with ‘oo’ in order to register a different motion-feeling.”