Author: Nada Gordon

The pain of being dragged into the fray.

But wait, hadn’t I said that I wanted to be in the fray?

Chest open, steaming again in the cold air.

Why does this keep happening?

What was I saying?

Of course it’s a form of cowardice: “this isn’t real.”

A slug in salt.

A feline amorality has taken me this far.

A flower of hilarious gentle nihilism in the midst of a steel ring of ethical imperatives (they look like crystals). Then, the deep grassy pit.

Exquisite coincidence:

Leslie Scalapino reading poems of Michael McClure’s at the Enough reading Saturday, complete with grahhhrrrs, in her smooth whisper.

I don’t like the word “blog”.

Trying to think of some alternatives:

casbah

corner

pocket

pied a terre

pad

lilypad

burrow

hutch

niche

steam room

David Hess (clink link to left) has written a very sweet song for me on his blog. It shows he has been reading the words here very closely. A+, Dave.

(I’m guessing that the pronunciation of Nevada in it should rrrrhyme with my name?)

(I’ve been through Nevada several times. I like that arid sage-y smell.)

Ron gets it absolutely right today, IMHO, with his comments on the intellectual bad faith of the “school of quietude.”

Strange because I was thinking, upon awakening this morning, that one of the problems for me with language poetry, in retrospect, was that it was too cool (in the sense of temperature), not inflammatory enough, with the notable exception of the work of Bruce Andrews. That in fact it often did seem to aim for a kind of cerebral quietude, especially on the West Coast. Lyn Hejinian, Queen of Contemplativeness, seems a paradigm of this mode.

My problem is, how to take those extraordinary formal moves — yes, the range of stylistic devices (Lyn claims in a letter to the Po Proj that LP was not a “style” — which sounds to me like saying that punk is not a style — of course it is! and of course there are any number of variations proposed within that style — but it is a style. And with LP, it’s all about parataxis) and mix them up, MOTIVATE them, with strains of McClure and Corso, as any good New Beat should. Heat it up, mon… ME WANT BIG NOISE NOW!