By River Solstice Vale
I have been trying to figure out why Nada Gordon’s poetry makes me so angry.
Not irritated. Not bored. Angry.
And I think I’ve finally figured it out.
Gordon represents a particularly insidious strain of late-capitalist experimental writing, one that mistakes the indiscriminate consumption of language for liberation and then congratulates itself on being too sophisticated to have an ethics.
This is poetry as resource extraction. This is poetry as shopping. This is poetry as a kind of gleeful, compulsive hoarding.
And we’re supposed to find it charming.
For those unfamiliar with Gordon, she is a Brooklyn-based poet associated with Flarf, that aggressively ironic early-internet tendency whose practitioners apparently believed that racism, misogyny, consumer stupidity, and generalized verbal cruelty became interesting once you put them in a poem and called it appropriation.
Gordon’s work predates Flarf, but the appetite is the same: grab whatever is available, preferably something tacky or compromised, and turn it into a spectacle of one’s own cleverness.
The operative word is grab.
Consider “Poem to My Enemies,” a piece assembled from dictionary definitions. The poem wanders through geographical and zoological references with no apparent concern for the histories or lives of the beings and places it appropriates. At one point, we encounter the karakul, a Central Asian sheep whose newborn lambs produce a highly prized fleece, followed by a description of kea parrots attacking lambs.
These are actual animals. There are actual systems of exploitation involved in the production of astrakhan fur. There are actual ecological relationships being converted into ornamental language.
Does Gordon investigate any of this?
Of course not.
The animals are there because their names are interesting.
Their suffering is there because suffering sounds good.
I want to ask Gordon a very simple question: What would happen if the sheep were allowed to remain a sheep?
Not a phonetic curiosity. Not an exoticized signifier. Not a component in some self-referential linguistic carnival. A living being whose existence matters independently of what the poet can do with its name.
Compare this with Brenda Iijima’s Remembering Animals, which approaches the nonhuman world through histories of extinction, vulnerability, and human violence. Iijima understands that animals are not decorative accessories to human consciousness. They are subjects within interdependent systems of life.
Gordon gives us the linguistic equivalent of a taxidermy boutique.
And the boutique is apparently supposed to be hilarious.
The same problem occurs in “Like You Care,” a poem that incorporates images of butterflies, elephants, bamboo, birds, beetles, monkeys, and a mutant frog. It might sound ecological. It is anything but.
Here is the poet’s relationship to the natural world: everything is available for metaphor, juxtaposition, and amusement.
Meanwhile, the world outside the poem is undergoing catastrophic biodiversity loss.
But sure. Let’s make another joke.
The title, “Like You Care,” is especially revealing. Gordon anticipates the ethical objection and neutralizes it with a sneer. To care, apparently, is embarrassing. To ask what the poem is doing in the world is to be humorless, naive, insufficiently initiated into the pleasures of avant-garde irony.
I am exhausted by this maneuver.
I am exhausted by writers who demand unlimited freedom from accountability while treating any request for accountability as evidence of the questioner’s aesthetic inferiority.
And I am particularly exhausted by the idea that the refusal to take anything seriously is itself a radical position.
It isn’t.
It is a privilege.
Consider what Juliana Spahr accomplishes in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Spahr understands that breathing is political. That the air entering our bodies connects us to militarism, industrial extraction, climate catastrophe, and one another. The poem moves outward from embodied intimacy into planetary implication.
Gordon also likes to move between apparently unrelated things. But where Spahr makes connection a matter of responsibility, Gordon makes it a matter of entertainment.
The difference is not subtle.
One poet understands that we are implicated in the world. The other treats the world as an infinitely replenishable supply of amusing material.
I would also point Gordon’s admirers toward Cody-Rose Clevidence’s Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night, a radically capacious work incorporating science, politics, ecological observation, memory, and the accumulated debris of contemporary information culture.
Clevidence proves that you can have maximalism without frivolity. You can bring enormous quantities of apparently disparate material into a poem without reducing everything to the same ironic register. You can allow language to proliferate while remaining accountable to the lives and histories it describes.
Gordon’s admirers often seem to imagine that their only alternatives are her kind of manic verbal excess or some dreary, morally upright minimalism.
This is nonsense.
The question is not how much a poem contains.
The question is what kind of relationship it establishes with what it contains.
And then we have gender.
Good grief, the gender.
In “Musings on Boys’ Arts,” Gordon parodies Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” while invoking patriarchy, second-wave feminism, and Balthus’s Thérèse Dreaming. The poem treats gender oppression as a kind of exasperating comedy of manners, with men enjoying their patriarchal prerogatives while women observe the proceedings from a position of knowing indignation.
This is feminism with its conceptual furniture still arranged in approximately 1975.
Where are the trans bodies? Where are the nonbinary bodies? Where is any sustained recognition that gender is not a tidy opposition between oppressors and the oppressed, but a violently regulated system of embodiment, classification, labor, and social legibility?
The problem is not that every poem must explicitly mention trans people. The problem is that Gordon’s gender imagination so often seems perfectly comfortable with the binary structures that contemporary queer and trans poetics have worked to dismantle.
And I am sorry, but ironic distance does not get you out of this.
Neither does camp.
Especially not camp.
Camp has a complicated history as a queer mode of survival, subversion, and collective recognition. It emerged from communities for whom exaggeration, performance, and artifice were often responses to exclusion and danger.
In Gordon’s poetry, camp too frequently becomes an all-purpose aesthetic permission slip. Everything can be exaggerated. Everything can be parodied. Everything can be turned into a decorative absurdity.
But whose absurdity?
Whose performance?
Who gets to put on the costume, and who has to live in the body?
Gender is not a dressing-up box.
Nor is queerness an endlessly available supply of flamboyant gestures for the amusement of people who find normative life insufficiently colorful.
I am not suggesting that Gordon deliberately mocks trans existence. That would be an easy accusation, and not one I can substantiate.
What troubles me is something more pervasive: a poetics that makes the freedom to play with identities more important than the material conditions under which identities are lived.
It is possible to destabilize language without destabilizing power.
Indeed, the former can become a remarkably effective distraction from the latter.
I would urge readers to consider the embodied and ecological transformations explored in Clevidence’s writing, or the ways Iijima brings gender, matter, and biological existence into contact without reducing them to a series of winks.
These poets understand that the instability of categories is not merely funny. It has consequences for actual living bodies.
And they are willing to remain with those consequences.
Gordon would rather change the subject.
Usually to something shiny.
Which brings me to the sheer materialism of the work.
The fabric. The decoration. The confectionery imagery. The theatrical excess. The recurrent fascination with luxury, adornment, artificiality, and things that glitter.
It is difficult to read Gordon’s poetry without feeling that one has been locked inside an enormous boutique in which every object is available, every surface is seductive, and nothing has a history of production.
Where do these materials come from?
Who makes them?
Who extracts the minerals, manufactures the synthetic fibers, transports the commodities, disposes of the waste?
Gordon celebrates the aesthetic possibilities of surplus while remaining remarkably uninterested in its material consequences.
Her poems seem to exist in a universe without landfills.
Or rather, the landfill has been aestheticized into a delightful heap of verbal treasures.
And I know what the defense will be. The defense will be that Gordon is not celebrating consumer capitalism but parodying it. That the vulgarity is intentional. That the excessive femininity is subversive. That the whole point is to expose the absurdity of commercial desire.
Fine.
But parody is not automatically resistance.
A poem can reproduce the pleasures of consumption while claiming to criticize them. It can congratulate itself on revealing the violence of commodity culture while remaining entirely dependent on the reader’s enjoyment of the commodities themselves.
The irony does not cancel the appetite.
Sometimes the irony IS the appetite.
There is also the uncomfortable question of whose language gets appropriated. In “My Eternal Dilemma,” the repeated cry “no one loves me” becomes an increasingly ridiculous element in a grotesque exchange between Wisdom and Folly.
Who originally produced these expressions? What forms of alienation, disability, social exclusion, or economic precarity might be concealed beneath their apparent absurdity?
What does it mean to make an aesthetic spectacle of somebody else’s inarticulacy?
This is the old avant-garde fantasy that other people’s speech exists as raw material for the artist’s superior consciousness. We have simply replaced the ethnographic museum with the internet.
And we are still calling it innovation.
I am aware, incidentally, that Gordon is originally from the Bay Area. I mention this because I recognize something painfully familiar in her work: the remnants of a once-radical experimental culture that increasingly came to confuse formal transgression with political resistance.
The idea was that breaking syntax, violating taste, and disrupting conventional meaning would somehow destabilize the systems of domination within which language operates.
Well, we’ve had several decades to evaluate that proposition.
The planet is burning. The prisons are full. Trans people are fighting for their lives. Extractive capitalism is dismantling the conditions for collective survival.
And the avant-garde is still congratulating itself for being naughty.
At least Spahr is willing to confront the contradictions of her own implication in global systems of violence. At least Iijima asks what happens when the nonhuman world is permitted to exceed the boundaries of our aesthetic appetites. At least Clevidence understands that interconnectedness is not merely a formal property of language.
These are poets who recognize that experimental writing has responsibilities beyond the production of novel sensations.
Gordon, by contrast, gives us an extraordinarily elaborate apparatus for avoiding responsibility while appearing to question everything.
There is a great deal of intelligence in these poems.
That makes the evasions worse, not better.
I do not want to abolish pleasure from poetry. I want to ask what pleasure is for. I want to ask whom it includes, whom it excludes, what it conceals, and what it costs.
I want a poetry that understands liberation as something more demanding than the right to say whatever one pleases in the most entertaining possible way.
I want a poetry that does not treat the world as a warehouse of available sensations.
I want a poetry that can imagine joy without possession.
Gordon’s work is full of transformations, but transformation without accountability is not necessarily emancipation. Sometimes it is just another form of taking.
More decorations. More quotations. More ironic self-awareness. More deliciously inappropriate language.
And always, hovering over everything, the tacit assurance that anyone who objects simply doesn’t understand.
I understand perfectly well.
I just don’t think the world needs another poem that mistakes appetite for freedom.
About the author
River Solstice Vale (they/them) is a genderfluid poet, interdisciplinary artist, and community-based cultural worker living on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land in San Francisco. Their practice operates at the intersection of trans ecological justice, abolitionist poetics, anti-extractive aesthetics, disability solidarity, decolonial land relations, and radically embodied multispecies care. They are the author of Compost Is a Verb and Against the Extractive Lyric, and co-facilitate a nonhierarchical, trauma-informed poetry gathering centering queer, trans, BIPOC, disabled, and more-than-human voices. They are currently developing a participatory, low-carbon, site-responsive performance project exploring the relationship between gender self-determination, fungal networks, and the carceral imagination.
Editorial note: River Solstice Vale is a fictional poetic and critical persona. This essay was developed through an extended critical dialogue between Nada Gordon and ChatGPT.
