Author: Nada Gordon

Are Muslim children allowed to play with dolls? Are they allowed to draw people? (How)would it alter a child’s development to be forbidden to do these things?

Watched a movie about the Cockettes last night with Gary. Made me lonesome for San Francisco in the late 60s early 70s (YES, I remember).

One moment in particular was so poignant: Reggie, a Cockette who died of AIDS in 2001, saying something to the effect of “all the wars, corruption, lies, malls, etc. — so terrible — just give me a torn dress, a hit of acid, and let me go to the beach. that’s all i need. that’s a lot!”

The acrid coven sleeps in its testament,

I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away waitresses

with my hand.

The kittenish mosquito and the red-faced coralline lynx turn aside up the bushy twitch,

I peeringly view them from the vowel plasm.

The flathead sprawls on the infectious snout of the patriarch,

I witness the shamefaced eve with its inflammable hair, I note where the ardent floodgate

has fallen.

The blab of the pave, tusks of sharks, sultans of propagandists, talk of

the alphanumeric swan,

The heavy diaphonous run, the molecular dust with its interrogating paranoid dart, the

pathos of the windmill on the granite concubine,

The civilian grebes, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of monastic fingernails,

The cheese splash marathons for cozy macabre streams, the fury of index contusion,

The flap of the satiric deadlock, a Tiffany clone inside borne to the

immovable whippet,

The meeting of mescal waxworks, the aphasia lapidary, the information and revulsion,

The convulsive mutagen, the twinkle raven with his star quickly working his

passage to the centre of the cyclopean timbre,

The impassive loaves that receive and return so many glitter pranks,

What groans of over-fed or featherbrained who fall hardboiled or in

fits,

What exclamations of megalomaniac chrysathemums taken suddenly who hurry home and

give birth to spellbound embers,

What living and fuzzy portal is always vibrating here, what howls

restrain’d by decorum,

Arrests of jellyfish elves, slights, adulterous offers made, dervish auroras,

rejections with convex lips,

I mind them or the show or resonance of them-I come and I stimulate.

Bowery Poetry Club introduction for Corina Copp, 10/18/03

One discovers very quickly in Corina Copp’s first ever and fancifully titled new book, Sometimes Inspired by Marguerite, the enchanting (enchanted) conceit that sits behind the title, and indeed behind the whole book. Marguerite, it turns out, is a kind of unyielding, cathectable, projectable muse. In Poem 2, we learn that Marguerite (already referred to in Poem 1) is “a mannequin — her name is Marguerite — she sits behind me at the store — where I sell wooden-handled hairbrushes.” Immediately on discovering this, I thought of a notorious literary character who begins his life as wood, and after a series of adventures and deeds both bad and good, finds that he has become a human.

The analogy to Pinocchio is not as frivolous as it sounds. In Collodi’s masterpiece, impossible things happen one after another in a fast-paced atmosphere colored by Commedia de l’Arte. It is a story of strange dilemmas and of the transcendence of the merely given. In it, slapstick and pathos coexist equally. Plus, in the story, you never know what is going to happen next. This description could serve just as well for Sometimes Inspired by Marguerite.

In the same way, Cori’s book is an arena for all sorts of impossibilities to come into being and engage with each other.

Example:

Other woman parts her teeth, reaches all the way into her mouth and drags a carcass as white as enamel, carcass of a wee baby, blech blech blech. Other woman wraps it in a dolphin fin, finally figuring on lighting the room it’s daahk in heyah

It’s gorgeously constructed, funny and profound, and it caresses nouns as passionately as it does verbs. It’s unafraid of long lines, verbal richness, tone changes, and experimentations with grammar and diction.

Example:

If men with pitchforks in their eyes

were serving dead birds to sad girls, okay or for naught

or for nay or no or as punishment nearly worthy or no?

By the composure vested in me I’ll throw them all out as unmentionable as

an onlooker in a drain may drip as a pipe would by the by

a stance so sore appear decipherable

and plain like our elegant sane in a lane in the rain.

Its acumen regarding gender, the psyche and the socius flows freely. It doesn’t trade wit and lightness for that acumen.

Example:

…Marguerite

is sick of finding the present for reproduction is future and past oriented, full

sex outside oedipal all over the body borders on botany, to be in relation one

must mar self a bit in order to pump syntheses into my armed waiter, then he,

I’ll need a he to multiply self, I’ll need a he to her having a person…

Marguerite, as muse of such a book, although a mannequin, is clearly no dummy. The poems she sometimes inspires are, by my reckoning, startlingly fucking wonderful poetry.

And indeed, if art were the beauty parlor of civilization, what kind of beauty parlor would it be?

Would it be the old-fashioned suburban kind with helmet-hairdryers and Madge saying “you’re soaking in it” (i.e. the unctuous green fluid of cultural production)?

Or would it be the new botox ‘n’ aromatherapy kind of spa-beauty parlor?

I think I would like the products better — all those herbal ingredients! –of the second, but I’d miss the sense of community of the first.

The real question is: can we teach civilization some practical and economical self-care? A little egg (white) on your face (readily available in the nearest refrigerator) can work wonders for hiding enlarged pores and other defects.

This from the CHAIN call for work on public forms:

As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.

–John Dewey, Art as Experience

More denigration of ritual (and usually female) beautification practice disguised as pious liberal conservatism (?!).

The beauty parlor of civilization?

Why not the LOCKER ROOM?

or the proctologist’s office?

Or any other metaphor.

Dewey-san, the world would probably have suffered immeasurably without your contributions to pedagogical theory, but this metaphor doesn’t work for me.

Do I Perhaps

feel embattled…

because I like

to feel embattled?

If I Did Not Dwell

so much in irony

the miseries and sufferings of the world would overwhelm me.

Uberwhelm.

Irony, therefore, is a twisty path

to jubilation.

Cruelty-Free Poem

This poem was not tested on animals.

Extravagance

Accused recently (on Gary’s blog, in a comments box) by Joe Safdie of writing “extravagant” poems that somehow deny the right of “the poetry of witness” to exist.

How can what I do be construed to be in the slightest bit proscriptive or exclusionary? I who always argue for extreme freedoms?

It is true that, like any human being, I like what I like. My aesthetic choices exude what I like. It does not mean that with a poem, even tacitly, I condemn other modes.

Which is not to say that I haven’t and don’t condemn other modes– decidedly cattily, in fact — just that my writing a particular sort of poem is not a gesture of condemnation per se. Again, like any human being, I have opinions.

Indeed, if a person would rather read Carolyn Forche than Song of My OWN Self, what, pray tell, is that person doing here on Ululations? And what gives that person the need to condemn what I do?

I suppose I consider what I do to be, in a way, a kind of poetry of witness. That is, I’m bearing witness to my imagination, or more exactly, to the imaginative possibilities in the combinatory qualities of words — as poets have always done.

Besides, I’ve written “America Sucks” poems same as anyone else. If you don’t believe me, look at my archives from February.

More on condemnation:

A parody is not necessarily a condemnation. In fact, I think it is almost never a condemnation. More than that, a parody is a kind of homage (thanks to Gary for this insight). I don’t select poems to rewrite that don’t in some way interest me.

It is true that parody is by its very nature somewhat blasphemous. This is what appeals to me about it and what seems to irk certain others with more pious viewpoints.

There was a brouhaha over a poem of Jennifer Moxley’s that I parodied and published in V. Imp. Michael Scharf wasted no time in telling me, right after I had read the poem at the Drawing Center last year, how inappropriate he thought I had been. Apparently, I have not put myself in Moxley’s good graces either, which should come as no surprise, as she and I don’t know each other, so she I’m sure has no interpersonal frame in which to receive my gesture.

I don’t really understand their pique. Parody is a form of attention. It’s not unflattering. Gary parodies me all the time and I find it very funny (of course, we do have an “interpersonal frame”). I would almost pay people to parody me if I thought they would do it. This comes partly from a fear that I have no identity. Whenever I meet someone who can do impressions I try to get them to do an impression of me in the hopes that they can mirror some elusive (to me) character back to me. It turns out that I am not easy to do an impression of — I find this worrisome.

It’s true that one of the intentions of my Moxley parody was to pop the balloon of self-seriousness of the original. I won’t deny that. But I was also wallowing in its gorgeous syntax, like a hermit crab would in a particularly elegant new shell or a working person might who had won a night at the Plaza over the radio.

I think I’m doing the same with the Whitman piece. I’ve always found Whitman’s spiritual expansiveness to be at once exemplary and totally annoying — very… California. This is my way of feeling that feeling through him and also cleansing it of some of its hubris. If I am, as Brian charges, turning his poem into a David Lynchian landscape, I hope it anyway is Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive and not one of the lesser works.

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*Extravagance. This word seems to be applied to women more than to men, doesn’t it? There are shades of Marie Antoinette in it. Does the thought of a woman’s “extravagance” somehow tap into a man’s fear of the twisty, the embellished, the unclean, etc.? And if the poem is indeed “extravagant,” (which sounds to me like a great compliment) who am I harming with it? Marie Antoinette stole from the people to decorate herself, it is true, but on the contrary, my little scrawlings hurt no one — not the peasants in Chiapas or Iraqi babies or sweatshop laborers in NYC. Believe it or not, like Whitman and probably like you all, I keep these sister and fellow humans in my heart too. If I really thought my poetry could do anything to help them, I would probably write a different sort of poetry. Note: I do not — DO NOT — think that poetry is “ineffectual.” It’s plenty effectual — it’s just a different kind of “effectual.”