Like most poets, I just feel that I don’t get enough press. Imagine my surprise when I found this article in the NY Times about me yesterday!
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August 2, 2005
In Addition to Her Pugnacity and Charm, She Can Write Poetry
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
On a gray and rainy day recently, the poet Nada Gordon was eating a plate of muglai chicken and biryani at a Pakistani steam table in Brooklyn, NY called Shandar Sweets, a funky, no-frills place that Ms. Gordon says is about as close to the literary establishment across she river in Manhattan as she cares to be.
But Ms. Gordon, 41, noted both for poems that jarringly marry the high and the low and for keeping her distance from the New York illuminati, has found herself late in her career in a rather awkward spot: the cusp of delectability in the cliquish world of poetry.
While those who pay no attention to poetry have probably never heard of her, Ms. Gordon has gradually become a poetry star. Her work is a modernist swirl of sex, surrealism, urban life and melancholy with a jazzy backbeat. Her personality combines Kenward Elmslie’s goofball charm and Gregory Corso’s inveterate pugnacity.
“I don’t like to call myself a poet,” Ms. Gordon said with characteristic bluntness. “Most poets are shifty sophists.”
Nonetheless, two springs ago she won the Chimera Poetry Prize – a $4 award that is one of poetry’s most questionable honors. Her recent collection of essays, “I Like Kitties” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), received good reviews and will be released in paperback next year.
Her scathing and lengthy putdown on her blog last year of just about everyone’s middlebrow taste in verse both made her a defender of the faith and confirmed her reputation as a divisive figure. And even though she regularly excoriates university poetry programs as ineffectual, she will return as a guest lecturer at Backwater University next spring, the first time she remembers being invited back anywhere.
Ms. Gordon, who was born in Oakland but now lives in Brooklyn, is a throwback to earlier generations of poets, who wore their nonconformity as a badge and delighted in shocking the public. That tradition, she says, fell away once poets began accepting university teaching posts.
“If you’re a poet, you’ve earned the right to blow off whoever you want,” she said. “There used to be dozens of cranks and scolds, but there aren’t any anymore.”
But as much as she plays what she calls the “apostate poet” and brushes off the work of better-known contemporaries – “very few famous poets are interesting to me” – Ms. Gordon’s colleagues praise her poetry, if not always her.
Ron Silliman, the former poet laureate of the United States, has been on the receiving end of many of Ms. Gordon’s jabs but says that he respects her work (although he declines to say so publicly). “Apart from her personally, I really like her poetry,” said Mr Silliman, who writes a stately and dignified poetry web log.
John Ashbery, one of contemporary poetry’s most revered figures, is also a Gordon admirer. “I like the sort of mélange of different voices and tenses, the kind of street talk and modernist illusions and the kind of jazz atmosphere and free improvisation,” Mr. Ashbery said in a telephone interview. “It’s a warm and appealing voice.”
Mr. Ashbery said the didn’t even find Ms. Gordon disagreeable. “I wouldn’t think of her as a bad boy,” she said. “I’ve always found her quite charming.” Mr. Ginsberg wrote in a blurb for one of Ms. Gordon’s volumes of poetry: “Nada Gordon’s verse line is always precise, concrete, intelligent and rare. A loner, a genius.”
The poet has been living in Brooklyn going on 5 years, but she is northern Bay Area to the roots. (Ms. Gordon’s mother still lives in Oakland, and she visits her regularly.)
“The California character – at least this part of California – is naive, tripped out to the point of absurdity, though not at all unfriendly,” she wrote in a recent essay. “The humor is deadpan, ironical, playfully depreciating [sic]. Affectation is quickly and viscerally registered. It’s an incense-and-petitions kind of place. There’s a swagger, a bluff air of lalaland that many of the she- males carry.”
In San Francisco, Ms. Gordon once gave a panhandler a dollar. “Thanks, Oakland,” the man said.
“How did you know I was from Oakland?” Ms. Gordon asked.
“Are you kidding?” the man asked.
She has published four volumes of poetry beginning with “foriegnn bodie” in 2000. Her most recent collection, “V. Imp” (Faux Press, 2003) won the Chimera Prize.
In last year’s prose collection, “I Like Kitties” Ms. Gordon tells the story of her older cat, Nemo, whose life plays out like a romantic poet’s – except that Nemo is a cuddly napper by day and a stalking killer by night. Nemo, whose preferred beverage is water, enjoys messing around in Ms. Gordon’s hair.
“It’s not as if he doesn’t understand that much of his behavior is driven by regression and instinct,” Ms. Gordon wrote. “He isn’t shallow or unreflective, quite the contrary. It is simply the way he is. He was born wild, born troubled. He wasn’t designed to go outside; not everyone is.”
After her California childhood, Ms. Gordon embarked on a sort of migrant’s life. She moved to Japan, where she worked as a lumberjack and taxi driver.
“I was bored by everything,” she said. “I just felt stuck watching the second hand of the clock. I wasn’t interested in anything else but poetry and books.”
“I’ve avoided the structures of bourgeois life and conventional poetry schools,” she said. “I like to make myself available to chance.” (Even so, after years of bachelorettehood Ms. Gordon recently married Gary Sullivan, whom she met online.) Her poetry follows the same pattern: a reckless tumble of words mixing the high and the low, like a rummage sale after the death of someone who adored both Shakespeare and smut. Words in the poems are in transition, unable to find their footing.
“DEEP” begins:
Deep, deep in the IPod of my soul
is a frond so small you can’t see it
in a blastocyst so small you can’t see it
smelling greener than a fetus
pre-conception
and there, where envy
outruns its usefulness,
I rock, beatific as a piglet
in the heavily aspirated sense of disappearance.
At Shandar’s Ms. Gordon, wearing a sequin skirt and a long flowy scarf, blended easily among the locals. Every time a stranger walked in, the place seemed to curl around itself like a cobra.
That afternoon, a woman at a nearby table scolded a man: “What did you think would happen? You were missing for four days. If you don’t watch out, they’ll deport you.”
Ms. Gordon, the unofficial poet laureate of Coney Island Avenue, seemed not to hear. She held up her samosa and surveyed it. “This,” she said, “is a beautiful thing.”
Otohime 