Author: Nada Gordon

“The identity cetificate is invalid” [in nyah nyah nyah nyah voice]

Remember “LOVE IS…”?

Love is, among other things, mundane.

Send me your “love is” statements and I’ll post them here.

Subjective formalism is, admittedly, onanism. But so?

The onanism of another can be plenty stimulating.

Then again, it can also be disgusting.

Form! Context! Paradigm!

Kasey writes:

I want to join Nada’s speculations on a “formalism of the emotions” with Ron’s concept of the poetic exploration of natural forms, but I don’t know how.

I think it’s because, KSM, that they are entirely alien concepts. Ron’s poetic exploration of natural forms, at least as it’s played out in his work, is more aligned to mathematics — i.e. copping for a poem the structure of a nautilus as it is based on the Fibonacci sequence. The result is structural containers to be filled.

I have almost never been able to work that way, except when, like a hermit crab, I steal someone else’s structure wholly and inhabit it with my own body. For me this is also a way of stealing someone’s syntax that I covet.

The “poetic exploration of natural forms” seems to me to have some age-of-reason-y, empiricist overtones. Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s entirely different from my way of working and also of just being in the world. I don’t trust empirical observation at all, although I know nothing could be more logical. Maybe that’s why I don’t trust it.

“The boundary of blur” indeed…

A formalism of the emotions would be very difficult, maybe impossible, to describe empirically, because each subjectivity brings with it its own set of memories, associations, and interpretations.

So maybe it’s a SUBJECTIVE formalism. Is that even possible?

I know that certain kinds of utterances, certain grammatical arrangements, certain words and even phonemes, tend to produce in me corresponding feelings. Those feelings are what I exploit/explore in the acts of writing and reading. Don’t know how likely the same items and combinations might be to produce similar reactions in another.

Gotta go outside — more on this later.

SUNNY DAY, EVERYTHING’S A-OK…

Very liking Stephanie’s #18 poem up today. Link to left please (too lazy to href)…

Of course I agree that the existential reductio-ad-absurdum is great…

Bragging!

Hey people! Today I’m famous! Check this out!

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

“In an exposed position with little chance/ of retreat, the ponies’ best defense is nakedness and lightsome lyric,” writes Gordon in “Paeonies,” a spirited, strident paean to being spirited and strident. With her “balladry/ for the stubbornly liminal” and goof-grinned reaching for high-sounding diction, Gordon’s vatic speaker can take in parables (the foreword is titled “The End of Greed, Imperialism, Opportunism and Terrorism”), language salads that urge readers to “rise up and abandon the spurious contrivance,” and satirically theorized self-deprecatory incantations: “come here, i want// to alienate you. dyssemia / the volatile prosody i auto-eroticize…” If the existential reductio-ad-absurdum can grate, the sincerity of Gordon’s never-quite-named frustrations comes through in her cries of a bodily, even orgiastic, poetry, reading at times like the Beckett of “Whoroscope” on a day trip to the Haight-Ashbury of yore: “Sure, all’s dire, / but look! What comes out! Dark as grapes / but sounding, hot-hot-persisting in wanting / to be wanted. Then I get so enlarged-/ with the writing: it is wrong. So but anyway/ the moment is red duress in bad fire.” The result is outrageously ludic, like Elizabeth Taylor lurching through a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf monologue loaded with sheer energy and disappointment. When she’s on, this punk priestess travels through a gaudy, impish, vampy, very important hyperreality.

Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

O man behind the curtain (you know who you are), thank you for this.

Validation-happiness!

Just received an e-mail entitled “Nada Eliminate Ringing and Buzzing in the Ears.”

Nota bene: an emotional formalism. A poem may be a body but it is also a machine made of tropes and codes and connotations. As a human body(psyche) is a machine made of tropes and codes and connotations.

A journal of emotional sensation is usually too discursive or denotative to be interesting as a poem, whatever other uses it might serve.

Why all the Victorian phrasings, relative clauses and wordiness, in my long post of today?

I have trouble with prose, or at any rate with my prose-persona, sometimes.