By Adrian V. Thorne
The central difficulty presented by Nada Gordon’s poetry is not that it is obscure, extravagant, vulgar, or indifferent to the conventional satisfactions of lyric form. These properties have long since ceased to constitute serious challenges to an educated readership, particularly one accustomed to the institutional conventions of experimental writing. Gordon’s difficulty lies elsewhere: in the extraordinary ingenuity with which her poetry converts its possible deficiencies into the grounds of its own vindication. Prolixity becomes abundance; arbitrary association becomes linguistic freedom; compositional negligence becomes an openness to accident; appropriation becomes evidence of the collective nature of language; and self-indulgence, that most obvious objection to the work, is anticipated and extravagantly caricatured before a critic can adequately formulate it. What results is an aesthetic so accomplished at representing its own contradictions that representation repeatedly substitutes for responsibility. The poet knows that she is vain, excessive, compromised, acquisitive, inconsistent, and intermittently ridiculous. She takes pains to demonstrate this knowledge. Yet the acknowledgment of a deficiency does not establish its aesthetic value, still less its ethical legitimacy. Gordon’s fundamental confusion is to treat self-awareness as though it were a form of exoneration, as though the performance of critical intelligence absolved the artist from the consequences of what that intelligence discovers.
The confusion is visible in the briefest of her characteristic gestures. In “Gorgeous,” a sprawling sequence of fragmentary poems collected in The Sound Princess, Gordon writes:
granite taken for styrofoam
out of the doldrums
and into—pardon me—puissance
The joke is neatly timed. The incongruity between granite and Styrofoam establishes an initial disturbance of material expectation; the familiar phrase about escaping the doldrums prepares an energetic transition; and the ostentatious abstraction “puissance” arrives with an apology that invites the reader to enjoy the pretension without condemning it. But the apology does not modify the pretension. It provides a means of preserving it. Gordon’s characteristic self-heckling allows her to perform a questionable rhetorical action and immediately assume the superior position of the person who recognizes its questionable character. The reader is thus expected to admire both the extravagance and the sophistication of its dismissal. This is not the relinquishment of authorial vanity but its multiplication. The poet becomes performer, audience, and critic of her own performance, with the considerable advantage that every objection can be incorporated into the entertainment.
The more serious problem with “Gorgeous” is structural. Its discontinuous fragments generate an atmosphere of unlimited linguistic possibility, but the poem offers remarkably few means of distinguishing an indispensable verbal discovery from an attractive accident. Consider:
otter games and
more distantly
the water (wonder) horse
The parenthetical transformation is charming, but its charm should not be confused with necessity. The addition of “wonder” creates a momentary oscillation between an aquatic animal and a creature of fabulous possibility. The mechanism is transparent; what remains obscure is why the resulting transformation should matter beyond the immediate recognition of its ingenuity. Elsewhere, “wine-lush musk (muscle*)” or “toe painted topaz or roan” performs a comparable operation of phonetic or semantic disturbance. Such effects can be repeated almost indefinitely, and their indefinite repeatability is precisely the difficulty. Gordon’s poems do not merely invite readers to recognize associative possibilities. They repeatedly imply that the recognition itself constitutes an artistic achievement. What is absent is a sufficiently discriminating account of why one possibility should be retained and another abandoned.
One might compare this procedure with George Oppen’s fragmentary propositions, but the comparison exposes the weakness of Gordon’s achievement. In Oppen, the interruption of utterance registers a resistance encountered by thought in its effort to remain answerable to things. In Gordon, interruption frequently provides the opportunity to escape a relation before it acquires consequences. The fragment “working mind’s fumbling ‘greatness’” might be regarded as a moment of self-suspicion, while “love of blurbs, of visibility” announces the vanity of literary aspiration. But the knowledge produced by such admissions is curiously inert. Vanity has been acknowledged, and the poem proceeds. The governing assumption seems to be that an artist who can identify her own motives has thereby subjected them to adequate criticism.
The danger is that the poem’s apparently radical openness conceals a deeply conservative attachment to an established repertoire of effects. Gordon’s verbal surfaces are crowded with bodily curiosities, exotic lexical materials, ornamental textures, parenthetical qualifications, and ostentatiously comic collisions. Yet the procedures through which these materials are transformed remain remarkably stable. “Gorgeous” repeatedly astonishes at the level of the phrase while becoming predictable at the level of compositional behavior. Its novelty is continuous and therefore increasingly unremarkable. The poem’s apparent refusal of formula has become a formula for producing the appearance of refusal.
“Professional Poem,” from Emotional Support Peacock, reduces the problem to an almost embarrassing simplicity:
O subchanters of the malversation,
you heriots of gemallion ell …
why all this drogulus? this axiopisty? this phit?
Here the sound of intellectual difficulty appears to have become a sufficient substitute for the intellectual relations through which difficulty might acquire value. The poem borrows the gestures of elevated address, rhetorical interrogation, and specialized knowledge, but the resulting performance has little direction beyond the accumulation of improbable language. A further succession of lexical inventions would alter the poem’s atmosphere without appreciably modifying its implications. The title supplies an additional irony by suggesting that the poem is implicated in the very professionalized literary culture its extravagant diction presumably mocks. But this self-implication again performs a suspiciously convenient function. Having made the professional poem ridiculous, Gordon can continue producing it without accepting the burden of demonstrating why this particular instance deserves preservation.
The ideological implications of this position become more pronounced in “Complexexity,” where Gordon begins:
not the opposite of simperplicity.
Rather, the opposite of obvivoidousness.
The poem’s invented vocabulary is intended to complicate the very possibility of a stable distinction between simplicity and complexity. Yet the position is less demanding than its typography suggests. A relatively ordinary opposition has been elaborated through morphological interference, and the interference presents itself as intellectual activity. Gordon subsequently mocks the demand for accessible evidence of perception, characterizing the desire for straightforward understanding through a contemptuous account of readers who expect the writer to have looked directly at something. Her suspicion of transparency is not without justification. But the poem supplies no adequate reason to conclude that deliberately complicated expression is more faithful to experience than the clarity it derides. The distortion of language is offered as evidence that language has been critically examined, when it may demonstrate no more than the poet’s willingness to subject words to familiar operations of deformation.
More troublingly, the poem’s conclusion abandons its polemical pressure in favor of an ornamental image:
A brass filigree polygonal lamp into which many glass jewels have been set.
The lamp is an attractive object, but its presence reveals something of Gordon’s argumentative predicament. The poem has moved from an inadequately established distinction among kinds of writing to a decorative object whose intricacy appears intended to vindicate complexity through sensory appeal. The aesthetic example replaces the intellectual demonstration. One is not required to dislike the lamp to question the logic by which its beauty is made to settle the preceding dispute. Gordon repeatedly treats ornamental complexity as though its sheer desirability established the validity of the conceptual claims made on its behalf. The result is less an argument than a series of invitations to admire the poet’s taste.
This habit achieves its fullest expression in “Poetry Is Junk,” the elaborate appropriative manifesto that establishes ornament as both a feminist counterpractice and a model of collective linguistic production. Against the austerities of Adolf Loos, Gordon assembles a luxuriant inventory of fabrics, flowers, bodily secretions, erotic practices, decorative objects, quotations, and verbal extravagances. The poem’s principal defense of appropriation is expressed with disarming simplicity:
Expression irrigates expression.
The formulation is attractive precisely because it replaces the asymmetries of actual cultural exchange with the image of a naturally fertile circulation. But the metaphor accomplishes its work by suppressing distinctions that any serious ethics of appropriation must preserve. The words of other writers, advertisers, anonymous speakers, and historically marginalized subjects do not become ethically equivalent simply because all language participates in inherited systems of expression. Nor does the collective nature of linguistic production abolish the difference between quotation and extraction, dialogue and ventriloquism, transformation and aesthetic consumption.
Gordon’s insistence that “Your own handwriting is collective,” borrowed in turn from Drew Gardner, is a proposition about the social conditions of language, not a comprehensive justification for every act of appropriation. Yet Gordon treats the proposition as an expansive authorization. Her declaration:
I’m all apertures.
appears to dissolve the boundaries of the lyric self while in practice licensing an extraordinary expansion of authorial possession. Everything can enter the poem because everything can be subjected to the recognizable operations of Gordon’s sensibility. The apparent surrender of individuality conceals the consolidation of an intensely proprietary artistic personality. The poet claims not to own the language she uses, but the work’s distinctive identity depends upon transforming the language of others into something unmistakably hers.
The extravagance of the poem’s imagery compounds the problem. When Gordon announces:
I run a mermaid ranch in my
eerie birth canal
the grotesque fusion of bodily interiority and fabulous enterprise is supposed to establish both the comic instability of the lyric subject and the generative freedom of language. Yet the image is characteristic of a procedure that has become largely automatic: an anatomical reference is joined to an incongruous imaginary object, and the resulting collision is presented as evidence of the extraordinary possibilities of artistic consciousness. Its sexual audacity is less significant than its predictability. The reader familiar with Gordon’s work has learned to expect precisely this sort of conjunction. What was once an experiment in decorum has become a decorative convention of its own.
Her defense of appropriation is particularly compromised by the poem’s declaration:
I steal with love and
out of sympathy.
The statement is revealing because it offers intention as the ethical guarantee of an act whose consequences are not thereby established. Love may motivate appropriation; it does not settle its legitimacy. Sympathy may inform the transformation of another person’s language; it does not establish that the transformation preserves, acknowledges, or adequately interrogates the circumstances of its source. Gordon’s insistence upon the affectionate character of her borrowing risks becoming a refined version of the familiar assumption that benevolent intentions place aesthetic conduct beyond ethical scrutiny. Her work does not consistently examine what its appropriations cost, what they obscure, or what relations of power they reproduce. The pleasure of incorporation is too readily mistaken for evidence of generosity.
“Coney Island Avenue” presents the problem in a more socially consequential form. The poem’s energetic catalogue of the immigrant and religious cultures encountered along a Brooklyn bus route has frequently been admired as a celebration of urban multiplicity. Gordon notices shops, advertisements, clothing, food, signs, bodies, and fragments of language with remarkable enthusiasm. But enthusiasm is not synonymous with attention, and attention is not automatically an ethical virtue. The catalogue’s accumulation of culturally specific surfaces repeatedly threatens to convert the neighborhood’s inhabitants into materials for a mobile observer’s aesthetic performance. The institutions and businesses possess names and histories that matter within the lives of the people who sustain them; within the poem, they become available principally as stimuli to association.
Gordon briefly acknowledges the possible historical violence of such spectatorship:
Who is “they”? The Westerners, of course
Yet the acknowledgment is characteristic of the poem’s larger evasions. The possibility of imperial or appropriative looking is identified, incorporated into the verbal movement, and displaced before it can impose any decisive limitation upon the poet’s appetite. Recognition becomes another form of permission. The speaker’s apparent susceptibility to the visual and cultural world is therefore inseparable from an extraordinarily assertive power to reorganize that world as a sequence of verbal pleasures.
The poem’s conclusion is still more revealing:
And then the paralyzing rush of emotion:
grace infuses whirling faces
with a dissonant gaiety.
This apparent lyric culmination is constructed through the transformation of language from Frank O’Hara’s Second Avenue, including his reference to Grace Hartigan. The proper name becomes an abstract principle; O’Hara’s language of artistic disturbance is reorganized into an experience of transcendent urban perception. The transformation is ingenious, but its ingenuity should not obscure the aesthetic convenience of the procedure. At the very moment when Gordon’s extended catalogue requires some principle of conclusion, another poet’s language arrives to supply the appearance of emotional revelation. The poem has not simply borrowed vocabulary. It has borrowed an already constituted structure of lyric intensity.
One could argue that such appropriation demonstrates the genuinely collective nature of poetic feeling. But the argument overlooks the distinction between the shared historical availability of language and the particular formal obligation to make that language consequential within a new work. Gordon’s transformation may produce beauty, but it does so through an imported authority whose presence complicates the claim that the preceding accumulation has generated the revelation organically. The borrowed lines are less the inevitable culmination of the poem than an exceptionally elegant means of ending it.
The rejection of sincerity, one of the more persistent theoretical commitments of Gordon’s work, operates through a comparable confusion. It is reasonable to recognize that emotional expression is mediated by rhetoric, cultural convention, and the instability of the speaking subject. It is considerably less reasonable to conclude that sincerity therefore constitutes an intellectually discredited aspiration. Gordon’s poems repeatedly convert emotional vulnerability into rhetorical performance, as though the awareness that feeling is constructed required its immediate contamination by irony. The result is a lyric practice capable of extraordinary emotional intensity but frequently unwilling to endure that intensity without protective qualification.
“Dismay” demonstrates the distinction with unusual clarity. After an opening of characteristic lexical complication, the speaker asks whether imitation of a rival might provide access to the beloved’s emotional world. The poem then abandons its elaborate abstractions:
I can’t
get her haircut: I don’t
have that kind of hair.
The passage is devastating precisely because the emotional problem has acquired an irreducibly material form. The speaker cannot reproduce the rival’s desirability because she cannot reproduce the rival’s body. Here Gordon’s verbal inventiveness encounters a circumstance it cannot simply transform. The subsequent declaration:
I’m better than she is,
who does not think of you,
just as you do not think
of me.
is equally affecting in its resentful simplicity. But these passages also reveal how much of the surrounding verbal complication may be unnecessary to the poem’s achievement. The intensity arises not from the extravagant proliferation of language but from the temporary suspension of that proliferation. The speaker has ceased to protect herself through invention and has permitted an emotional proposition to remain exposed.
“Mauvais Song,” from Emotional Support Peacock, is similarly instructive. Its opening recollection of a former poetic plenitude possesses genuine lyric force:
Once everything was magnolian
The invented adjective is unusually effective because it does more than advertise lexical ingenuity. It condenses floral exuberance, nostalgia, and a sense of vanished perceptual possibility. The poem then recalls a time when language seemed capable of transforming experience:
I was in love with this garbled feeling.
The admission is unusually suggestive. Gordon’s attachment is not simply to poetry’s representational power but to the very disturbance through which language makes experience available as a source of pleasure. Yet the poem subsequently becomes a lament for the erosion of that capacity. The speaker is distracted by her phone, diminished by contemporary anxieties, and unable to recover an earlier relation to verbal abundance.
At this point, however, the familiar machinery of comic rhyme and self-interruption begins to operate:
I hop on a point,
I skip on a line
The lines are intended to acknowledge the poet’s awareness of her own mannerisms, but their jaunty movement threatens to trivialize the loss the poem has introduced. Later, the speaker confesses:
Busily trying to fill up a page.
One might regard this admission as disarming candor. It is also a remarkably accurate description of a compositional habit whose results Gordon too often treats as valuable simply because they have been produced. The poem’s dissatisfaction with its own procedures becomes another occasion for their repetition.
The subsequent declaration:
I’ve got sand in my thoughts
is more promising because it allows the deterioration of verbal productivity to acquire an image of abrasive material resistance. But Gordon cannot remain with it. The poem resumes its transformations, moving from sand to appetite to the lubricious abundance of consciousness, as though the very recognition that the mechanism is failing could be overcome through renewed operation of the mechanism. The work presents a poet who recognizes that her habitual resources are inadequate to her circumstances, yet appears unwilling to relinquish them.
The problem is not that irony and sincerity are incompatible. It is that Gordon repeatedly invokes their incompatibility as a means of avoiding the responsibility of either. A statement can be offered as emotionally serious until its seriousness becomes embarrassing, at which point it may be reclaimed as comic performance. Conversely, a joke can register a genuine grievance until that grievance becomes vulnerable to objection, at which point the speaker may retreat into the joke’s apparent inconsequence. Such writing possesses an enviable rhetorical flexibility, but the flexibility is purchased through a refusal to specify the conditions under which the poet’s utterances might be held accountable.
“Genius Grant: A Hateful Sestina” demonstrates the procedure at the level of institutional criticism. Its opening assertion:
Any idiot can get a genius grant
establishes the poem’s contempt for the procedures through which literary distinction is distributed. Yet the satire is complicated by the speaker’s unmistakable desire for precisely the forms of recognition she mocks. The sequence of fellowships, residencies, craft talks, and tenure tracks becomes a machinery of resentment whose repetitive structure allows the poet to enjoy both denunciation and longing.
The poem’s transformations of “tenure track” into related sounds are frequently amusing, but their accumulation does not deepen the institutional argument. The sestina’s elaborate formal machinery provides repeated opportunities to perform a settled attitude. The poet knows that her desire for recognition is compromised. She makes that knowledge funny. What she does not do is permit the contradiction to become sufficiently consequential to transform her position. The result is less an investigation of artistic prestige than an exceptionally accomplished form of grievance management.
“Sturm,” Gordon’s extended meditation on the difficulty of writing about Hurricane Sandy, offers the most disturbing instance of this tendency because the work’s evasions take place in relation to actual historical suffering. The speaker acknowledges her lack of direct experience of the catastrophe and considers several possible formal responses. She rejects documentary enumeration, parody, visual arrangement, and various established poetic methods as inadequate to the occasion. Her hesitation is often presented as evidence of ethical seriousness, but ethical seriousness cannot be demonstrated merely through the recognition of ethical difficulty.
The poem’s documentary passage enumerates the consequences of the hurricane with a directness unusual in Gordon’s work. It includes displaced residents, damaged infrastructure, lost power, and the suffering of people whose circumstances were dramatically unlike the speaker’s. Yet Gordon rapidly dismisses the material:
This isn’t a poem at this point.
It is an article.
The distinction deserves considerably more scrutiny than the speaker allows it. Why should an inventory of damaged lives and institutions be aesthetically deficient merely because it preserves their historical particularity? Why should the poem’s achievement depend upon the conversion of these materials into a formal analogue of meteorological turbulence? The assertion that reportage is insufficiently poetic is not an ethical conclusion but an aesthetic preference, one that becomes suspicious when it permits the poet to abandon the claims of historical specificity in favor of her habitual procedures of verbal invention.
The poem subsequently offers an even more revealing diagnosis of its predicament:
Flarf is too smartass, conceptualism too
cold, docupo too earnest and langpo too dated.
The reductive neatness of these judgments is striking. Each literary practice is dismissed through an exaggerated caricature of its characteristic limitation, and the resulting panorama of inadequacy produces the appearance of comprehensive philosophical skepticism. But the argument is intellectually lazy. To identify a possible weakness within a method is not to demonstrate that every realization of the method is compromised. Gordon’s reductio ad absurdum substitutes the ease of satirical dismissal for the difficulty of discrimination. Once every available practice has been found wanting, the poet’s inability to determine an adequate alternative becomes a principled impasse rather than an avoidable failure of judgment.
The most damaging moment arrives when Gordon acknowledges:
There is no reason for the linebreaks here except to mark it
as a poem
This is not merely a confession of formal uncertainty. It is an admission that a significant element of the work’s presentation lacks a persuasive compositional justification. The poet immediately associates the decision with her payment for the commission, thereby making the poem’s formal inadequacy part of a comic account of artistic labor. But the acknowledgment does not establish the necessity of the line breaks. Their function remains what the speaker has identified it as being: the conventional designation of otherwise prosaic material as poetry. Gordon has discovered a means of making negligence entertaining without demonstrating that negligence has become artistically consequential.
The ensuing passage of lexical turbulence attempts to recover poetry through an extravagant proliferation of unfamiliar words and grotesque associations. But its procedures are virtually indistinguishable from those employed throughout Gordon’s work. The hurricane has supplied an occasion for the performance, not an organizing demand capable of transforming it. The world is again absorbed into the recognizable habits of the poet’s sensibility. What purports to be an encounter with the inadequacy of language becomes a renewed exhibition of linguistic facility.
The poem’s philosophical culmination is perhaps the most explicit statement of Gordon’s governing bad faith. Rewriting Seamus Heaney’s conception of poetic responsibility, she proposes that poetry might make the writer:
a more artificial, tainted,
fragmented creature.
The opposition is rhetorically effective but conceptually evasive. Heaney’s aspirations toward truth and wholeness are dismissed as insufficiently attentive to artifice, while Gordon’s preference for fragmentation acquires the status of a competing ethical ideal. Yet nothing about the mediated nature of language establishes that artificiality is intrinsically more responsible than sincerity, or that fragmentation is more intellectually demanding than the attempt to establish relations among fragments. Gordon has simply reversed a set of values whose authority she refuses to examine. The inversion creates the appearance of philosophical radicalism while preserving the comforting simplicity of the original opposition.
Her subsequent recognition that the poem is not finally about the hurricane but about the wrongness of poetic forms is equally convenient. The catastrophe, having resisted her attempts at representation, becomes the occasion for a self-reflexive meditation on the inadequacy of representation itself. The poet’s failure is redescribed as the discovery of her true subject. This is the central maneuver of Gordon’s aesthetic in its most ethically consequential form: failure becomes not something to be overcome or accepted as failure, but the generative principle through which the work secures its claim to achievement.
A comparable mechanism operates in “A Conversation,” from Folly, where Gordon stages an exchange with an editor who questions the manuscript’s organization. The editor objects to its excessive dependence upon gesture and demands a more propositional account of its intellectual ambitions. Gordon replies by explaining the structure of the book and its relation to Erasmus, while the personified figure of Folly supplies comic interruptions. Eventually the editor announces:
This is still entirely gestural.
His objection has by this point become part of the performance whose adequacy he is attempting to assess. The poet’s inability or unwillingness to provide a satisfactory response has been converted into theatrical material, and the scene’s comic vitality threatens to make the objection seem irrelevant. Yet the editor has not been answered. He has been incorporated.
This is perhaps the clearest demonstration of Gordon’s capacity to transform criticism into an extension of the work’s authority. The objection is acknowledged, dramatized, made amusing, and left without consequence. The work congratulates itself on the honesty of staging its own inadequacies while proceeding exactly as before. Such reflexivity may appear intellectually sophisticated, but it is also an extraordinarily effective means of avoiding revision. The poet’s ability to describe a weakness becomes an argument for preserving it.
Gordon’s later poem “Sabishii” reveals the exhaustion of this procedure in a more melancholy register. Its accumulation of obsolete household objects, damaged toys, unfashionable clothing, discarded decorations, and peculiar consumer products suggests an inquiry into the relationship between language and abandonment. Yet the objects increasingly appear interchangeable within a compositional system whose governing principle is the endless conversion of material particularity into verbal stimulus. The speaker declares:
It is a begging for language.
The formulation is revealing. The poem’s longing is directed less toward the objects themselves than toward the continuation of the linguistic activity they make possible. The discarded materials acquire value because they can be transformed into words, but the transformations seldom establish why these particular objects should matter beyond their contribution to the poet’s associative productivity.
The poem’s repeated insistence upon pleasure becomes increasingly desperate. Its verbal abundance no longer guarantees the emotional satisfaction that originally justified the procedure, yet the procedure continues. Gordon appears to recognize the emptiness of its repetition without being able to abandon it. What might have become a genuinely moving examination of diminished artistic and emotional possibility is repeatedly dispersed through further acts of invention. The poem’s sadness is inseparable from the spectacle of a poet whose accustomed resources have ceased to reassure her, but whose attachment to those resources remains almost compulsive.
One is tempted to describe the resulting aesthetic as nihilistic, though the term requires precision. Gordon is not indifferent to value in any comprehensive philosophical sense. Her poetry remains passionately attached to beauty, pleasure, comedy, erotic experience, and the sensuous properties of language. Its nihilism is selective and opportunistic, emerging at those moments when evaluative distinctions threaten to impose obligations upon the work. If every form is compromised, no specific deficiency requires correction. If all language is already appropriated, no particular appropriation demands justification. If sincerity is necessarily rhetorical, no utterance need remain answerable to its emotional claims. If artistic failure can be transformed into self-reflexive commentary, failure itself loses its capacity to compel revision.
This is nihilism not as a doctrine of meaninglessness but as an instrument for avoiding the consequences of meaning. Gordon’s poems want the pleasures of value without submitting to its restrictions. They want beauty without the necessity of distinguishing beauty from stimulation, critical intelligence without the obligation to accept criticism, and artistic freedom without the discipline of consequential choice.
The contrast with artists such as Agnes Martin and Gerhard Richter is instructive not because they exemplify a simplistic alternative of austerity to Gordon’s abundance, but because their work demonstrates the centrality of discrimination within artistic procedure. Martin’s repetitions derive their force from an exacting attention to differences of interval, pressure, and proportion. Richter’s surfaces are produced through processes of application, revision, obscuration, and erasure that refuse to preserve every successful effect merely because it has occurred. Their practices acknowledge the generative possibilities of accident without confusing generation with achievement.
Gordon, by comparison, often gives the impression of an artist unable to relinquish a phrase once its ingenuity has become apparent. The ornate, obscene, ridiculous, or lexically extravagant effect is preserved because it is pleasurable, while the question of its necessity within the larger composition is displaced by an argument about pleasure’s legitimacy. Yet the legitimacy of pleasure is not in question. What requires examination is the relation between particular pleasures and the form that contains them. Gordon repeatedly answers that question by producing another pleasure.
The result is a body of work of extraordinary verbal facility and uncertain artistic necessity. Its best passages demonstrate that Gordon possesses the capacity for genuine lyric concentration, but their effectiveness often depends upon the temporary suspension of the procedures most conspicuously identified with her poetics. The bodily specificity of the haircut in “Dismay,” the opening recollection of linguistic plenitude in “Mauvais Song,” and the occasional moments of perceptual precision scattered throughout The Sound Princess reveal an artist capable of allowing an image or emotional relation to impose limits upon verbal invention. But such moments remain vulnerable to the poet’s habitual desire for further elaboration. Her intelligence repeatedly rescues her from the danger of being insufficiently ingenious, while exposing her to the more consequential danger of being ingenious without sufficient cause.
The principal objection to Gordon’s poetry is therefore not that it permits too much, but that it demands too little of what it permits. The work’s celebrated openness conceals a remarkable resistance to being transformed by the materials it receives. The cultural reference, the borrowed line, the emotional confession, the grotesque image, and the objection to the poem’s own procedure are all subjected to an aesthetic system whose principal achievement is the indefinite preservation of its freedom to continue. Nothing can finally interrupt the performance because interruption itself has become one of its most reliable effects.
Gordon’s defenders have frequently mistaken this indefatigability for artistic courage. Yet there is little courage in a poetics that has made itself almost entirely immune to the possibility of recognizable failure. The poet confesses her vanity before vanity can be condemned; acknowledges her sloppiness before sloppiness can be criticized; ridicules her own institutional ambitions before their contradictions can become embarrassing; and explains her appropriations through a theory of collective language that renders the question of their particular consequences conveniently secondary. Every anticipated objection becomes another element of the work’s self-advertisement. The poet can be wrong only in ways that demonstrate how intelligently she understands the possibility of being wrong.
What this aesthetic finally lacks is not sincerity, coherence, seriousness, or restraint in their conventional manifestations. It lacks a sufficiently demanding account of artistic responsibility, one capable of distinguishing the recognition of a problem from the difficult work of responding to it. Gordon’s poetry continually exposes its own limitations while insisting, implicitly or explicitly, that the exposure has transformed those limitations into accomplishments. The claim is untenable. Self-consciousness is not self-criticism, and self-criticism without the possibility of revision is merely another form of self-regard.
The most dispiriting quality of the work is consequently not its extravagance but its atmosphere of perpetual exoneration. Everything has already been excused: the cliché because it is quoted, the obscenity because it is theatrical, the incoherence because it is deliberate, the sentiment because it is mocked, the appropriation because language is collective, the sloppiness because accident is productive, and the failure because the poem has exposed the impossibility of success. Aesthetic freedom has become a comprehensive system of insurance against aesthetic judgment.
Gordon’s considerable talent makes this predicament more rather than less consequential. An artist of lesser intelligence might have remained innocent of the contradictions that characterize her work. Gordon understands them and repeatedly converts that understanding into the means of their preservation. Her poetry has made an extraordinary art of avoiding the last word, but the refusal has itself become an increasingly predictable conclusion.
One begins to suspect that the essential gesture of Gordon’s mature poetics is not the liberation of language from constraint, but the liberation of the poet from the obligation to determine what language has accomplished.
And this, whatever its theoretical elaborations, is not a radical aesthetic achievement. It is an evasion.
Works discussed: Nada Gordon, Folly (Roof Books, 2007); Vile Lilt (Roof Books, 2013); The Sound Princess: Selected Poems 1985–2015 (Subpress Collective, 2024); Emotional Support Peacock (BlazeVOX, 2024); and selected theatrical works.
About the author
Adrian V. Thorne is a fictional literary critic and the author of The Exhaustion of Transgression: Avant-Garde Form After Its Institutional Triumph (2009) and Against the Alibi: Sincerity, Bad Faith, and the Limits of Irony (2018). His current project, The Right to Be Boring: Aesthetics After the Cult of Novelty, remains in preparation.
Editorial note: Adrian V. Thorne is a fictional scholarly persona. This essay was developed through an extended critical dialogue between Nada Gordon and ChatGPT.
