Author: Nada Gordon

I sing therefore I am.

Boundless thanks to Nick for sending in the poem, one of my all-time favorites. I post it here for your delectation:

Grind (Diane Ward, from “Never Without One” (Roof, 1984)

Thin spaced fractions (internal listenings) I thought as much

as numbers, I hear around us inmates of the ears.

Eternal attraction to heroic caginess that touched doubt.

The don’t say that you’re a scant inventor of my own.

This derangement on as it should go on. The picture of

themselves spread over themselves which are barely owned.

On no further than playing intimate figmenteds lended.

Experts now take hurry, but mean calm asylum.

Minor subsistence furthered by amended minds in all-surroundings.

And physical exhausted erroneous respect. We could be already

in end, a better platform to be relieved by all of you

together functioning. By life patterns choice, different

sense of vertical different cultural blood that, by wandering,

induces time’s factor of between. Like authority’s lens

and experience magnified by a giant tear whose modern answers

yes and yes and ok ok. Oh, from eventualities-lower modes’

care extracted. Oh, to link arms, arms formulate, formulating

promises, promise, unleash the absent electric impulses shot

through bodies as exotic blue the hue of distance.

He’s about to lend a problem which his mind has already solved.

Questions remaining as a glaze in his eyes.

Changes made before you.

Por favor!

Would someone in possession of Diane Ward’s book, Never Without One, mind terribly typing up and sending me her poem, “Grind”?

I would be so grateful.

And besides it doesn’t, Jim, come out of nowhere. I had just mentioned Ecstasy and Advil. Advil (and the occasional Tylenol, for variety) being my drug of necessity.

Jim Behrle asked if I was serious or joking about my Berrigan comment, below.

I wrote to him:

I’m serious.

I love the specificity and intimacy of knowing what substances he took to

change his psychic state.

And I do. I meant to cast no snide aspersions on Berrigan’s character, nor to typecast him, as he himself may have done in his poems, as a person defined by his drugs.

I would love just as much to know what someone ate or who someone slept with or what they dreamed the previous night.

Disclosure is adorable. As Jordan said recently, there is no privacy. Or see my comment here not too long ago beginning with “I love someone to the extent that…”

Or as Richard Loranger and I agreed earlier today in a conversation at the Writing Center at Pratt, “there is never too much information.”

Don’t you love knowing which drugs Ted Berrigan took?

Not, as I wrote to Jim, “a bored kid on ecstasy.”

No. I’m an intensely busy middle-aged woman on Advil!

Wooweee!

How many of you have eaten natto?

No interesting sexual fantasies coming up today — oh, except, how about this one?

standing naked but for socks in an empty lot

one tiny metallic-golden baby hanging, sucking off each breast

and another sucking the metallic golden miniature phallus that sprouts out

of my forehead…

Today I want to be:

Lew Welch

Crayon Shin-chan

Ava Gardner