Author: Nada Gordon

Wishing the best to Krishna, Ron Silliman’s* wife, for her treatment for RSD. I didn’t know that there was a specific hospital procedure for RSD, which I’ve heard is a truly torture-like malady. I hope the treatment is effective and painless.

Speaking of chronic pain, three news items:

Item 1: My actual workers comp trial (as distinct from mere hearings, of which I’ve had several, all a stupendous waste of time) is this afternoon. I’ve been waiting for it since I filed for workers comp in APRIL of 2001. My lawyer is encouraging, as I’ve got several doctors corroborating & supporting my case. Like most judicial fishponds, however, workers comp is well-stocked with Republicans who like to play pocket pool with insurance carriers. Wish me luck!

Item 2: I’ve ordered, but not yet received, a device that sits on top of the computer like a webcam. It picks up the reflections of a little mylar bindi you put on your forehead, and lets you control the cursor with very very subtle movements of the head. To those who would say, “OK, but then wouldn’t you get RSI of the head?”, I’d venture, “perhaps not, as we tend to keep our heads still and locked when we use computers, and that contributes to the problem. Being sure to move our heads might actually be beneficial.” I’ll let everyone know whether this technology works or not.

Item 3: I’ve started drinking yerba mate instead of my beloved black and green teas. I’ve noticed a definite reduction in muscle tension and overall anxiety. Yerba mate seems to give a steadier and calmer sort of high, making me at least as alert as when I drink caffeine (as opposed to “matteine”). Good for digestion too!

*I urge everyone to read Ron’s beautiful erotic poem in the newest Shampoo. Drew Gardner’s poem in the same issue is also a masterpiece and NOT TO BE MISSED.

Fiber Artist Judith Scott

From Caterina’s blog, I followed this link about Judith Scott, “a fifty-five year-old woman with Down’s Syndrome [who] has spent the past ten years producing a series of totally non-functional objects which, to us, appear to be works of sculpture.”

Awe.

THE GENIUS OF PATRIARCHY

A couple of passages from my current reading:

If I had to name one quality as the genius of patriarchy, it would be compartmentalization, the capacity for institutionalizing disconnection. Intellect severed from emotion. Thought separated from action. science split from art. the earth itself divided: national borders. Human beings categorized: by sex, age, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, height, weight, class, religion, physical ability, ad nauseum, The personal isolated from the political. Sex divorced from love. The material ruptured from the spiritual. The past parted from the present disjoined from the future. Law detached from justice. Vision dissociated from reality. We are all affected by, wounded by, this capacity. It’s reinforced by every institution around us each day. (Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover, p. 51)

and from page 328:

But we have seen that revolution is insufficient. Transformation is necessary to save ourselves, sentient life on the planet, the biosphere itself. transformation requires that we recognize out own just anger as being o vast that mere violence could not possibly address it. Transformation requires more than mere seeing; it requires all forms of perception, including remembering, imagining, intuiting hallucination, dreaming, and empathizing.

And transformation requires that we act, that we step off the wheel, outside the prescribed boundaries altogether. Transformation requires that we enter history on our own terms and audaciously place ourselves at the center of it.

Gerda Lerner declares:

The shift in consciousness we must make occurs in two steps: we must, at least for a time, the woman centered. We must, as far as possible, leave patriarchal thought behind.

. . . . As for stepping outside of patriarchal thought:

Being skeptical toward every known system of thought: being critical of all assumptions ordering values and definitions . . . . , developing intellectual courage, . . . . the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most “unfeminine” quality of all-that of intellectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world.

Recent Reading

Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. This book is truly essential reading.

It proves, among other things, that the current state of disaster is all men’s fault.

Also: John Ruskin On the Pathetic Fallacy. According to his analysis, I am a poet of the second order (like Coleridge, Keats, and Tennyson!) and not of the first (like Dante or Homer — as if I didn’t know that!). At least I don’t have to hang out on the lowest rung with A. Pope (against whom I hold no grudge, actually, although it sure seems like Ruskin did).

I take some consolation in my position with these words of Ruskin’s:

The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is, as I said above, that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state, according to the force of the emotion which has induced it. For it is no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them; and it is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly, the intellect, and make it believe what they choose.

So, people, after you go and read Ruskin’s essay, or refer to your prior knowledge of it, tell me, do you or do you not believe that his distinctions, and his hierarchy, are still in place today?

Do you agree with them?

Are the distinctions in any way gendered, to your minds?

Or is there any way in which you think that they might reflect some sort of anti-pantheistic paradigm, Homer’s inclusion on the highest rung notwithstanding?

Do you honestly believe in a THING-IN-ITSELF??? or its “direct presentation”???

That’s the key question.

Introduction for Murat Nemet-Nejat, Bowery Poetry Club, 11/1/2003

Poet, translator, and essayist Murat Nemet-Nejat is the author of

The Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies; I, Orhan Veli; The Bridge; State of the Union; and The Peripheral Space of Photography

In his anthology of translations from the Turkish, forthcoming from Talisman, he introduces the concept of eda. Eda is variously defined therein as

a continuum, a psychic essence, a dialectic which is an arabesque

the distance of a translation from its host language

the play of ideas through the body of Turkish

not just the poetics of Turkish poetry in the 20th century, but the extension of the language itself, the flowering of its inherent potentials

the alien other

the trajectory, poetics of a trip on a map

Eda emerges out of the inherent qualities of the Turkish language, which, unlike English, is agglutinative. As Murat writes, Turkish has,

” total syntactical flexibility. Words in a sentence can be arranged in any permutable order, each sounding natural.

The underlying syntactical principle is not logic, but emphasis: a movement of the speaker’s or writer’s affections. Thinking, speaking in Turkish is a peculiarly visceral activity, a record of thought emerging.”

It is only a small leap, then, to see the principle of eda at work not just in Turkish but in innovative English poetries of this century and the last, whether in “spontaneous bop prosody” or “the continuous present,” in the work of poets like Coolidge, MacLow, and Mayer, and probably that of just about everyone in this room.

If Murat is linguistically predisposed to liberate English from its post-enlightenment rationalism and constrictive syntax, it is not only because he is a Turkish speaker, but because the very fact of his identity is eda itself. His essay “Questions of Accent”, which you can find online, is essential reading. In it, he asserts that all poetry written in English is written in a non-native language., because, “The American poem (and poet) is always trapped in the space between words, in the crack between his/her vision and the language he/she is using, in the discontinuity (as opposed to cultural unity) between the self and his/her language.”

The essay opens with this bit of autobiography, or edabiography:

I am not Turkish. I am Jewish. In the fifties most Jews in Turkey were Sephardim and spoke Ladino Spanish. But I am not a Sephardi; I am a Persian Jew. My parents had moved to Istanbul on business, and I was born there in a Jewish neighborhood. But I learnt no Ladino, barely understood it. Jewish kids in the neighborhood thought I was Moslem, an outsider. At home, my parents spoke Persian with each other, which also I barely understood. Brothers among ourselves spoke Turkish. My mother spoke in an immigrant’s broken Turkish to me (my father barely spoke to me at all). Turkish became my mother tongue. I spoke Turkish in the street. I was, linguistically, most comfortable with other Turks, who mostly despised Jews. My speech became almost Turkish. Loving a language not completely my own was my first act as a Jew. And, despite my almost accentless speech, my first act of rebellion was to tell my Turkish friends I was not one of them. I was a Jew.

He goes on to describe his relationship to English as an American immigrant (who has, I hasten to add, lived in this country longer than I have). Lifelong an interstitial dweller (as historically we Jews have always been), he embodies “the distance of an individual speaker from his host language.” In his playful, dramatic, profound writing, we see more evidence of eda: “the play of ideas through the body of the poet,” “the flowering of the possibilities of total syntactical flexibility,” and “the poetics of a trip on a map of consciousness.”

Michael Scharf introduction, Bowery Poetry Club, 11/15

Michael Scharf is a contributing editor at Publishers Weekly and Poets & Writers magazines, and the editor and publisher of Harry Tankoos Books. He is the author of Telemachiad, a Harry Tankoos chapbook. His most recent book, Verite, is available online at Ubu editions.

If Michael Scharf were a kind of tea he would be …CONSTANT CRITIQUE.

If he were an animal he would be a pushmepullyou, one head political, the other personal, creating tension as they pull in opposite directions. His poetic essays and expository poetry constantly illustrate the tensions between human beings as social beings. He writes in his brilliant, uncategorizable thinkpiece, “I Love Systems,” which Drew Gardner has called “perhaps the most original _day my father died_ confessional poem ever written”: “in most climates one cannot live without working or paying or forcing someone else to work, so that capital, an image or expression carried and directed by people, makes use of psychological prejudice as part of its hidden mechanisms for exploiting labor.”

If Michael Scharf were from another planet, he would surely be here as an anthropologist. Perhaps because he loves systems, he has an extraordinary ability to get aesthetic distance between himself and his species, and therefore to describe it (us) systemically as something altogether strange and more than a little problematic.

If he were a mythological figure he might be Atlas. Or a reincarnation of Celan — to whom he pays homage with portmanteauish, not unGermanic neologisms such as carapacesararay and postrestantaurant.

Constant critique. His poems are the keenest coruscations of conscience criticizing cankerous capitalist corruption.

At the same time they are musical entities. They hum with the music of analysis — cantatas of concept, thought sonatas, fugues against the state.

There is a great range in them of stylistic approach, from a straightforward literary/historical/sociological/theoretical statement like this one:

After the nihilism of modernism

that either crashed and burned in

theological or fascist fervor, or into un-

healthy obsessions with the body’s many

manifestations, and after the frustrate ironies,

pop inoculations, bad faith appropriations and scare

quotes that followed in the poetry of Michael Palmer and others,

we are entering a period similar to the Age of Reason, but bereft…

to the odd and whimsical

Bee haven, paeanuts,

excreting hornden,

grand gallumpf.

Let us borrow that grand gallumpf, and welcome….

CUT RIGHT TO THE CHASE

I have wasted my life.

Can you Use the Word Hermaphrodite in a Poem?

Darling Buds

Shall I compare thee to a hermaphrodite (in a poem)?

Thou art as lovely and with as furious a temper.

Rough winds of hate do sometimes shake the darling buds of the real hermaphrodite,

And gender’s leash hath all too tight a hold on all of us.

Thus, sometime too hot the eye of the hermaphrodite shines,

And often is his/her gold complexion dimm’d by persecution ;

And every man from woman, or vice versa, sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing organs untrimm’d (or unaugmented);

But thy eternal gender continuum shall not wither into too-too solid definition

Nor lose possession of that fair undifferentiated zygote thou wast;

Nor shall Death brag (yet) thou wander’st in its androgynous shade,

When in eternal women to men (and vice versa) thou grow’st:

So long as human beings can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this metaphorical hermaphrodite, and this gives life to more metaphorical hermaphrodites, etcetera, etcetera.

Mutual Interview with Marianne Shaneen, Part II

[[Note: We did not have time to actually deliver this exchange at the Zinc Bar. Marianne is in bold below, Nada in plain text. Marianne please post your stuff on your blog…!]]

Q: you emphasize poetry as a form of bodily excrescence, bodily discharge- the role of ‘the body’, your body, etc.- (relates of course to the above ‘hermaphroditism’ and ‘feminine’)- the body as erotic, the source of pleasure and discomfort, your body as site of perception/sensation, conceptualizing and linguistic filtering and creation, the relationship between sexuality and language.

“Writing demands limits (do you know who am paraphrasing?) but that doesn’t mean that I don’t always perceive them as something to push against, needle, expand, stand up on (if they are walls), dismantle, prod, kick at, or huddle up against, sobbing inconsolably. What’s interesting to me about poetic language is the way it naturally fights, insofar as it gets irrational, its own limits.”

To address “body” and “sexuality” and writing, I’m going to read from an interview Tom Beckett did with me that was just published online in Jacket 24. That interview answers the question about limits more fully than I have here.

I have said in other contexts that the definite article preceding “body” [the body] strikes me as quite Cartesianly distancing and non-particularizing. It seems to me more accurate to say “my body” as in my individual Nada-casing, Nada-matter & Nada-sensorium or to simply say “body” as in “the feeling of body-ness.” Maybe what you mean is “sensation” or even… “sensationalism”? Because that’s what a body is in relation to what is not that body — a means of sensing, a great fleshy antenna, a corporeal mind. In carnation — a big red one, smelling slightly cloyingly of cinnamon. The seas incarnadine — of wasted bodies, punctured by ideology. How could body not be present in anyone’s work? Even an ectomorph has a body — and is defined, in some sense, by his body. There are some writers, it is true, who seem to be cut off at the neck, whose oeuvre hatches mainly from the part of their body that is between the temples — is “the” body a temple? — but that nevertheless is body.

Body in relation to writing. Writing in relation to body. Not such a huge difference to me — organic metaphors, poems as “birth canals, negative vaginal space” or as what is born, coming out coated with meconium — (can you detect my fondness for a certain brand of highly gynecological “chick art” — still totally necessary to combat the centuries’ vestiges of men’s supercilious suppression, condemnation, and envy of women’s “bodiment”?). Bisexual — poem is also phallus springing up out of nowhere very excited, aroused by what’s around. Or let’s get away from the genitals, shall we? Poem is legs, moving around, exploring. Arms & hands, embracing, feeling up, or just working, getting things done. Little navel void hollow, remembrance of connection. That too. Poem is oversensitive nose, limpid eye, tongue for probing and tasting. Poem is labyrinthine ear — duh. Like a body, a body of work — poems — is *in essence* free — of the market system, I mean. Except both of these you have to pay to maintain. Free health care!

87 billion dollars. How to be other than angry? 87 billion. The clenched body in a state of embattledness: clenched energies. Menstrual blood leaks out… shit… urban environment… guy spreading legs too wide on train… touching my leg… ecch… guy talks to himself, bangs umbrella on floor… it’s sweaty… having to coexist among all these other bodies… poets… with their clenchings and muscular memories, all the pain and rage and fear and lasciviousness each of these beings carries at any moment. The body in dreams: dreamed the other night I wanted to have a baby but had to do it covertly, couldn’t ask Gary, so I needed to seek alternative methods — thought to use another poet guy as a donor, someone I’ve been arguing with in “real life”, who recently accused me, not entirely incorrectly, of using him “as a buttress for your own self-identity, as neo-romantic, humanist,”eroticist,” feminist, identifier with “younger writers,” spontaneously creative, whatever suits your fancy because it’s all so terribly inconsistent….” [yeah, well…] then considered a new cloning method that involved implanting whole or partial babies into the uterus… these babies were frozen. I went to get one but it turned out the frozen baby was only a head — someone asked me, after I had tried unsuccessfully to “implant” it, “did you warm it up first?” oh, I thought, and put it in the oven, but left it in too long — the baby head — it came out yellow, dried, with gnarled teeth (teeth?) grotesque as a mummy.

I apologize in advance for the neo-surrealist truism, but indeed, isn’t it true that the more you explore language, bodies, or dreams, the stranger and more complex they become? You begin to realize the connections between language, bodies, and dreams. All or nearly all people dream, and the site of their dreams is their bodies, which twitch in their dreams and even convulse in orgasms because their bodies and dreams and minds are filled with language (and problems), which in their dreams slips around in the murkiest kinds of ways. Only poetry can formally approximate (I say approximate because even though my poems are freaky and filled with wild imagery and combinations they are nowhere near as vivid and disturbing as my dreams) that slippery problematic dream language.

Language is cream.

Language is crisis.

In a poem called “Essay” in Swoon I describe “the gleeful intensity of opening to crisis”. Crisis, in addition to meaning “life-changing difficulty” is one of those weird French euphemisms for “orgasm,” like “petit mort.” When I write, I feel like I am opening to crisis, exactly as I do if I have fallen in love. Suddenly, there’s this whole new territory — terrifying, gleeful, and intense, as the words open out to and attract other words and I find myself somewhere totally unexpected, aiming for a hypnotic state of hilarious abandon.

more from “Essay”… “love is experienced/as among other things/ rubbing”

This is an echo of my poem “Nothing” in Foriegnn Bodie (p. 32), where

I originally said “Irritation is a form of pleasure.”

It’s true of course — think of irritation as simply friction, without which sex as we know it would not exist.

It’s just one step from friction (or conflict, which I say in Swoon is essential to romantic love) to fury. Here’s the whole poem:

Nothing

Nothing is as it was said —

not the man who I was so

beautiful and I said so what

Not the wing just out of the

chrysalis (gold dot), not the plastic

chonmage wig, not even the web

Only love has the fury to make peace

in all the layers of the onion

sprouting in a black palstic box

Cats yowling together make the sun rise

and dogs bark, irritation

is a form of pleasure

Like strong from a yogi’s nose, devotion

doesn’t pour from your ears — or throat —

diamond shapes from a revolving lamp

I’m not really here

except for the glowing red light

under my arm…

Even the quiet little poems I wrote in Japan tend to be furious:

an inky smell

feistiness

feeds on

banging my feet

on mother’s cold stained glass

thinking to break it.

I’m sure the fury is more primal than anything I can address here without having to pay you $85 for 50 minutes, but it comes from feeling

worthless trivial abandoned unappreciated powerless gratuitous unnecessary disposable ineffectual unappreciated unsupported and betrayed, not to mention in pain

on micro and macro levels. Is there anyone in here who can’t empathize with this? be honest. Sometimes I think my entire oeuvre can be summed up in the howl, “IT’S NOT FAIR>>>>” I don’t mean that in any “merely” personal way.

How to cope with those defeatist emotions? Rage is a survival mechanism, screaming infant big noise red in the face with protest: FEED ME. PAY ATTENTION TO ME. Here’s a poem from 1978, the middle of my adolescence (I was fourteen) which I apparently have not outgrown:

KICKS II

I just quit school

I scarred up my arm

Got too drunk

Lost that charm

The other night we trashed some cars

Set a bin on fire

I ripped up my bellbottoms

And sewed them up with wire

I smoked a cigarette today

Got burnt out on speed

So sick of safety pins

What the hell do I need

No solution

No solution

Here’s a concrete poem also from 1978 that attempts a formal diagramming of extreme forces, positive and negative, positing a kind of equivalence. [sorry folks, I misplaced this one — if I find it I’ll put it up here.] Neither of these poems is very interesting to me, but not because of their concerns, which obviously reverberate throughout my work 25 years later, but because I hadn’t yet learned enough chops. An XBXB rhyme scheme fails to thrill. Now I hope I’ve learned how to make my writing seethe with the tension between its artificed plasticity, its repertoire of disguises, and its primal GRRR (if you’ll permit me a momentary McLurid voicing).

A kind of fury and defiance move through my first collection, “Lip” (1988) as in “Don’t give me none of your lip” — but with much more formal (and therefore emotional) complexity

What life the world hath still

Deliberate verandas, swimming feels

Delight to douse the splendor of the heat

And in the umbrage of your sexuality

I sing a tone, in some sense howl it.

Worst, a small passionate self.

Best, a thinking flower who is a virgin

but a favorite of hell

Delicate viands, swimming feet

Delight to rouse the speaker from his seat

And in the umbrella of your eyelashes

A thing or two can, in some sense, be howled.

Firstly, a cold class-in-itself.

Second, an infant voyeur who is a version

of the sadist as well

I’ll read a little from Vicious Etudes (the angriest poem in V. Imp) and then I’ll stop answering this question.

VICIOUS ETUDES

I have an exaggerated sense of my own unimportance.

–Nada Gordon

i HATE the avuncles

and their stinging

when the fiery concrete tower

rises in the head and

i’m appropo of nothing

standing at the edge

of the hissing stage

and missing far apart

from spiritual dignity.

the narcissi in my arms

smell like rotten breath,

nervous sweat, underwire

undercutting the man in me

with cheap, cloying, adolescent

powder. come here, i want

to alienate you. dyssemia

the volatile prosody i auto-eroticize

with (chick art ) in full view of the panel

of droning authorities in their

“moderation”: they (pea-green)

reduce awareness. stand clear

of the closing mind

of the eternally jerking emotional knee.

the hairshirt pink, frilly, jagged,

dissonant as lava flying up

“more sensitively”

from the dead moon

kissing the white wall

leaving a white (red) stain

and howling inarticulate

into “fabulous opera.”

the “sweetie-pie” flaps

in the detritus (of literature)

like a disjointed secretary

on angeldust.

a deafening chorus

of CLUCKING is heard.

MOON, SWANN, ANGELS,

ROSES – pulverized. ultimately

it doesn’t nausea because

i’m not nausea not a mother

self-effulgent of my own

misguided mother of intention.

the writing falls apart (again…)

when the beautiful boy (me)

gazes into the water

and his phallus becomes

all of him, giant stalk

takes root blooms waxy

veins bursting out and then

there’s me! (again) bursting out and then

again bursting out! my head

the WRITING as two horned

phalluses.

come, come, lunge

at my dungheap.

this is the summer of dissonant

content again, when

all education is

“special” and euphoric

(pulverize) natural (pulverize)

(pulverize)

(pulverize)

IRONY, people. You all remember what that is, right?

I thought Kasey’s blurb for Rodney’s book was super.

I thought Rouge State was a super book.

And I think Rodney should do his reading in drag. As an odalisque.

Kisses to all!