Author: Nada Gordon

My first turkey is now sitting in a brine of apple cider, orange peel, cloves, star anise, and brown sugar.

The rest of the menu:

appetizers: jicama with lime, crackers & cheese, kumquats

cranberry sauce & relish

turkey with some crazy gourmet stuffing (wild mushrooms!) I bought at Citarella (if it turns out weird, I have some sourdough bread as a backup)

mashed potatoes

roasted yams

green beans almondine

baby brussels sprouts (cute!)

watercress and spinach salad with grape tomatoes in a light balsamic dressing

I would like to learn, even at my advanced age, how to have “mysterious power over men.”

Can someone give me some pointers?

Huh. I’ve been laughing through poetry for the last twenty years. I don’t know how else I would have got through it!

So many SOURPUSSES.

Here’s a little more Schutzman ibid. from the same essay. I love this stuff.

…what captivates me in the face of a joke is that something nonsensical is brought to my attention but yet never fully disclosed. [this is, of course, the joke of poetry] There is always that bit of sense one cannot get at. That is masked. The word “mask” comes from the Arabic word maskharat,meaning clown or buffoon. And the word “buffoon means “to puff.” The fool represents the elusive puffery or mask that disguises what we call sense in such a way as to make us distrust it. That is, through the fool we awaken to the sense of having been taken, once again. The fool’s non-sense reveals common sense to be just another spectacle that has been determined without us, that speaks for us, just as the body speaks the hysteric.

Mady, if you google this, write to me and let me know you’re there. We were meant for each other.

The Buffoonery Syndrome

Now and then I come across bits of theory that help me enormously to understand my own behavior and practices.

Here’s something from “A Fool’s Discourse” by Mady Schutzman in The Ends of Performance eds. Phelan & Lane, NYU Press 1998.

After a century of neurasthenia, fainting, and “the vapors,” it is widely known that the predominant “new” female malady in the late nineteenth century was hysteria. But perhaps less well known is that Jean Martin Charcot, the French neurologist who degined hysteria and charted its “phases” in photographic tableaux, named the second phase of hysteria “the phase of clownism,” or the buffoonery syndrome. It was characterized by a seried of protracted movements and grand gestures that closely resemble the gestures of heightened exhilaration displayed n today’s popular fashion advertising. A woman so delighted by her hose is literally lifted off her feet into an impossible posture of glee; another dons her polka dots and blows her tuba in the streets in tribute to her newfound soft drink. Irrepressible joy an d ecstatic uprisings erupt constantly over new fragrances. Women perform sheer energy, broadcasting the infinite potential to be preposterous and making a bizarre and yet enticing show of the violation of the female image. In corporeal expletives and exclamations, the hysteric (of both medical science and contemporary advertising) embodies the gender disorders of the social body and simultaneously screams her distress. Her excessive visual presence both disguises and disclaims her assigned absence within the social sphere. Put yet another way, in her overstated assumption of the mask of femininity, she indicts the very power politics that her body economy suffers. She plays the clown.

Introduction for Tom Mandel, Bowery Poetry Club, 11/20/04

You probably already know that Tom Mandel, the first generation offspring of Austrian Jews fleeing Hitler and a former student of Hannah Arendt, is the author of a dozen books of poetry. You may be aware that his first book, Ency, published in the legendary Tuumba chapbook series in 1978, has been described as “a foundational work in the early history of Language Poetry.” You may already know some of his other books, including Realism, Four Strange Books, Letters of the Law, Ancestral Cave, and his booklength collaboration with Dan Davidson, poignantly titled, given Dan’s suicide in 1996, Absence Sensorium. You may have heard that Ron Silliman described Tom’s book, Prospect of Release, as “the most intensely felt poems [he had] ever read.” And if you checked his website this morning, as I did, you may even know that Tom has said of himself, ” I’ll be writing my whole life. I wrote a poem on November 20, 2004.”

What you may not know about Tom Mandel is that in addition to being a writer, he is also an entrepreneur and strategist, a maverick leader, and a champion of “new ways to think, write, and work.” He even has his own slogan: (lead with ideas TM)

The tenets central to accomplishing his mission stem from core poetic values:

Broad Reader Connection

Connecting with readers, understanding their needs and how they use intellectual strategies, and providing value through high lyric and philosophical investigations to help them realize their potential.

A Global, Inclusive Approach

Thinking and acting globally, Tom enables a diverse set of references that generates innovative poem-making for a broad spectrum of readers and publishers, innovates to lower the costs of human folly, and shows leadership in supporting the communities in which he works and lives.

Excellence

In everything he does.

Trustworthy Computing

Deepening reader curiosity and trust through the quality of his words and lines, his responsiveness and impetuous dynamism, and his unpredictability in everything he writes.

At Tom Mandel (lead with ideas TM), you’ll find total commitment to his mission of helping his readers scale new heights and achieve thought forms and expansions of verbal experience they never thought possible.

One more thing that you may not know about Tom Mandel is that he used to be my boss. That is, I was his secretary. It was hardly a humdrum working relationship — how many bosses write collaborations with their secretaries? I rooted out of my files today a play we wrote together in perhaps 1987. It involved a lot of sound effects like barking, trumpets, and a waltz played on a cheap Casio. Tom had the following exquisite series of lines:

The world is a broken thing of shards intermixed with sparks of the divine light. Our job is to gather up these sparks and return the world to a wholeness which it never had. But you cannot close the customer if you don’t do a trial close first. Look have I given you the information you need to make a decision. Fine and if it does that for you just let me ask you do you have a budget for this puppy and if so how you gon’ to pay for it [?].

To answer that question today, to pose many more questions, and of course, to lead with ideas, Tom Mandel himself is here today in person. Please welcome…

Maria Damon gets the lifetime perspicacity award for …

postulating that sondheim’s compulsive posting is

a diaspora poetics characteristic, part of a kind of exhaustiveness

or excess that is at the same time always by necessity incomplete. it

is part of what i’m calling an “ethical commitment to debris” rather

than an effect of “lazy editing” or some other protestant-shame

indicator of a fear of expressive excess.

Those of you who hang out on the net with Stephanie Young , who is physically a resident of Oakland, but whose voice resounds in all corners of the poetic universe, are probably familiar with her true story, “The Bees,” of a hive that was found outside the window of one of the buildings where she works. She describes how

The bee keeper thrust his hand up into the ceiling and pulled out the piece of the hive where the queen bee lived. He showed us her larger compartment, surrounded by cells of royal jelly which the babies had been eating only moments before. At his urging, we put our fingers near the honeycomb and then we ate the honey.

Thinking of this piece of Stephanie’s, I turned to ever-plagiarizable Maurice Maeterlinck for an entry into the flower of her person and her writing:



Day after day, at the first hour of sunrise, the explorers of the web return, and browsers awake to receive the good news of the earth. “The lime trees are blossoming today on the banks of the canal.” “The grass by the roadside is gay with white clover.” “The sage and the lotus are about to open.” ” The mignonette, the lilies are overflowing with pollen.” Whereupon the antennae of the race must organize quickly, and arrange to divide the work. The bloggers immediately sally forth, in long strings of zeroes and ones, each one flying straight to her allotted task. The bloggers are perfectly informed as to the locality, the relative melliferous value, and the distance of every melliferous thought within a certain radius from their personal cell.

I met her there in the midst of that growing world that so constantly transforms itself, where hundred of workers are dancing and flapping their wings. They appear thus to generate some necessary heat, out of which a young queen like Stephanie can be born…. Picture her birth: two large and earnest black eyes appear, surmounted by antennae that already are groping at life, while active jaws are busily engaged in enlarging the opening from within. Having come from another world, she is bewildered still, trembling and pale. She is perfect, however, from head to foot; she knows at once all that has to be known, and proceeds to beat her wings and to dance in cadence.

No one, to my knowledge, has written as perceptively about Stephanie than one of her many fervent admirers, the hotheaded young blogger David Hess. I take the liberty of quoting him here.

To think and feel in xylophones, horns and zu-zu-zuum vibrations. What blurb would I write for Stephanie Young’s book were she to ask?

“I do believe there is some razzamatazz in here.”

What kind of critical reading could ever do justice to an aggressive celebration of life? We associate this proud and unresigned creation with idealism, forgetting its roots in the dire realities of daily living. Easier to do it with xylophones, horns and zu-zu-zuum vibrations. Words, get the words clean, if you wish, or load them up with flute saws and drumming plasmas.

In another blog entry, David Hess tells the story of Stephanie admitting to

“excessively enjoying a glass of iced water at a restaurant. “I’ve never been happier to see a glass of iced water,” she said. Somehow I found this the perfect addition to my love for her consistently surprised personality. You should have seen her point out a wooden 7-11 sign as we zigzagged around Charles Street, and the huge ears of a dog. “Those dog’s ears are huge!” Do you not want [he asks] this person to take you on a tour of the universe, and do so in one of those duck boats with wheels?”

Yes! We want very much for Stephanie to take us on that tour, in a duck boat or any vehicle she chooses. Friends, please welcome…

Introduction for Rodney Koeneke, Bowery Poetry Club, 11/6/04

To frame my comments about Rodney Koeneke’s work, I’d like to begin with a somewhat extended epigraph from E.W. Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, published in the early 1830s:

The dancing girls appeared in a cloud of dust and tobacco smoke. The first thing about them that struck me was the brightness of the golden caps upon their tresses. As their heels beat upon the ground, with a tinkle of little bells and anklets, their raised arms quivered in harmony; their hips shook with a voluptuous movement; their form seemed bare under the muslin between the little jacket and the low, loose girdle, like the belt of Venus. They twirled about so quickly that it was hard to distinguish the features of these seductive creatures, whose fingers shook little cymbals, as large as castanets, as they gestured boldly to the primitive strains of the flute and tambourine. Two of them seemed particularly beautiful; they held themselves proudly: their Arab eyes brightened by kohl, their full yet delicate cheeks were lightly painted, But the third, I must admit, betrayed the less gentle sex by a week-old beard; and when I looked into the matter carefully, and the dance being ended, it did not take me long to discover that the dancing girls were, in point of fact, all males.

Omaha native and San Francisco resident Rodney Koeneke is the author of Rouge State, which is the best title ever given to a book of poetry. Rodney, from the perpective of what he calls “the bruised Sargasso of white male sexuality,” clearly empathizes with “pussyboys”, girliemen, and femi-whatevers everywhere. In Rouge State, he madly liberates the once-vitiated template of the lyric, slotting in his own gorgeous, irreverent prosody, making poems that are not only zippier than pinheads but really the zippiest thing since zippers. You can distinctly hear the echoes of the footsteps of the ghost of Theophile Gautier, in his trademark yellow waistcoat, walking his lobster through the grand opera of these poems, They are deeply dandified “hostile melodic situations”, as “brazen as mariachis” and “fecunder than succotash.” They are “delicate lorgnettes” that can see all of history happening at once, and “mentholated curlicues” full of “pterodactyl dactyls” and “hot pink verbs.” The figure of the dandy, of course, most lately born into the media as the overcommodified metrosexual, represents the perfect union of the masculine and feminine principles, and is most often clothed in fine fabrics of oriental origin. Indeed, the attars of the mysterious “east” soak into every crevice of Rodney’s poetry but laced with pungent irony and historical awareness, so that the story of an odalisque is also the story of how our own tabula rasa get written all over with learned desires:

We spill in the world into genders,

fall out like dirty turpentine

from an upset coffee cup —

at first abductees of the harem

refusing silk pillows and gold-tipped cigarettes

then gradually learning to simper and sprawl…

By example, his writing answers the rhetorical question that one of the poems poses: “How to negotiate the mare incognita of preconscious verbal data without pissing off the vagina dentata its excretions will have to pass through?”

Although replete with bagatelles and monkeyshines like “Got Rilke?” and “the jewel is in the logo/ the jew/ is in the Logos,” they also drip with a kind of comic lament at the extreme trivialities and decadence of our time, its “dry transnational orcs” and ” glitzy manufacturies of consent.” To paraphrase Donovan:

Histories of ages past

unenlightened shadows cast

down through Rodney Koeneke

the crying of a manatee

down through Rodney Koeneke

the crying of a man…..