Author: Nada Gordon

I lost eighteen pounds this year (from marshmallow to cheesecake?).

December 17, 2008

December 17, 2009

answer to December 14: no, I don’t think so, though some would disagree with me

response to December 15 (you have no comments field :-(): yes, I just read this book too, Sunday, to be exact, and I identified too, and I have the same question, “what do we do with confessionalism right now?” Indeed.

Chris Kraus, in an interview in Tarpaulin Sky:

I’ve never seen compassion as an abstract noun. If you accept that we’re all composed largely of other people we’ve known, then compassion becomes a form of self-love. Compassion, composition. Awkwardness and grace live side by side.

napkin sketch by Gary Sullivan

Lines from some recent readings that make me grateful to be on the planet:

Cori Copp

I’m a beloved toucan

but I want night, deep ambrosial night, with one face

essay pants

intensify your scared mumble

art history, blood, lentils

Ariana Reines

sir, this pale milk of light I am pouring over you now

the man comes to me with a brown owl

the moist fur at the center of the earth

the perfect navel of my artifice

looking at haunches, I have a source of light

Eugene Ostashevsky

the admittedly metaphorical organ of memory

between the starry sky and the categorical imperative

shiver me timbers what am I doing in the sea anyway

MacGregor Card

le soleil and le police dog

Easier said than done when someone puts the dogface on your buddy

our teeth soak on their own

The habitat’s a fine place to be

Danny Snelson

I’m not going to do anything with the wagon

I’m not going to do anything with the wagon

I’m not going to do anything with the wagon

I’m not going to do anything with the wagon

I’m not going to do anything with the wagon

I’m not going to do anything with the wagon

I’m not going to do anything with the wagon

I’m not going to do anything with the wagon

I’m not going to do anything with the wagon

I’m not going to do anything with the wagon

I’m not going to do anything with the wagon

(cont.)

Alan Bernheimer

I never know what to do in the presence of heartbreak

the hegemony of baritones

melancholy is the new irony

sleep depravity or political prawns

every queen loves a lobster with the nerve to kill time

with Henry in her mouth

Pierre Joris asks: Keats – killed by a review?

So it seems that during my horrible “forlorn pause” of last week, in which I nearly “went foetal,” and hardly occupied this space at all, I got at least a little bit more famous, or in a couple of cases, anonymously notorious.

My video that Ron posted of Drew’s conduction of the Femmes de Flarf has had 750 views, although, ha!, there were only seven or so people in the audience. What strange new world is this?

I made the Huffington Post today in this article by Travis Nichols:

Nada Gordon’s poem “Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwahs” from Poetry Magazine’s Flarf and Conceptual Poetry sampler[…]is obscure.

People who talk about poetry have been talking about this kind of poem as a problem–if not the problem–of contemporary poetry for years. It’s obscure. It’s not accessible. It’s no help. Which is why no one reads it. But what if–as Daniel Tiffany argues in his new book, Infidel Poetics–it’s not a problem at all. What if this very obscurity is what makes poetry poetry?

Then this bit appeared on one of Anselm Berrigan’s posts at the Harriet blog:

a friend of mine was on the subway recently reading a book of poems by a contemporary poet. Subway crowded, book close to the face of a seated passenger, friend standing. He feels a tap on the book, lowers it, and this person says, as the train begins to pull into a station, “the problem with that poet is she wanted to revive the lyric and did it from completely the wrong angle,” then gets up and gets off the train.

I was the book-tapper on the L train. I won’t reveal what book it was, but I was alerted to my presence in the post by the guy whose book I tapped. He came up and introduced himself last Sunday at the Zinc Bar at MacGregor Card & Eugene Ostashevsky’s great reading.

I also made a nameless appearance on Bookslut:

There is a poetry shoving match going on at Jezebel of all the damn places. One of the writers, who writes a long prelude about how she can’t like poetry because of college “I don’t get it, blah blah blah,” then tells us she went to a poetry reading. One of the readers, Ariana Reines, read a poem responding to pornography. There was some laughter. A woman in the audience complained about the laughter, and now there is a big to-do about it, with Eileen Myles even responding in the comments, using the phrase “gross dominating laughter.”

I was the woman who “complained about the laughter,” although that’s a misrepresentation, as is the characterization of the incident on the Jezebel blog.

The recording of the problematic Q and A session is on the blog, if anyone is curious. On facebook today, someone asked if that was indeed me. I responded:

Yeah, that was me. I felt that the work was rich and interesting and not merely satire, and that the nervous macho laughter after each “dirty word” was distracting and incongruous. Jezebel totally misrepresents both what I said in the article and how I said it. I don’t talk like a valley girl. I am hardly a prude. I am known as something of a humorist. There was something about that laughter, though, that made me feel almost violent. When Ariana opened the floor, I just wanted to remark on that. It was not judgmental so much as an emotional, visceral observation on my part. I didn’t want to censor the laughers at all, but I did want to tell them that I resented their laughter and was annoyed by it.

Someone else asked whether the woman’s laughter also seemed macho to me:

Yeah, her laughter felt macho to me, too, like it was piercing the text in a really interruptive and egotistical way. I don’t know how she could have been sensitive to the irony and wit when she didn’t give the words enough time to sink in and resound in all their polysemic possibilities. That section Ariana was reading seemed to me very much coming from a place of abjection, and while abjection CAN be funny (I’m thinking of Chaplin, or certain smushy-faced small dogs), to me, in that piece, it wasn’t. I don’t know. Maybe I was totally off base in making what I called that “intervention,” but as I have pointed out Ariana did open the floor. I love it when poets do that and I wanted to make sure someone took advantage of the opportunity. I didn’t give them a withering look, and even if I had, how would they have seen, since their backs were to me and it was pretty dark in there? Anyway, let the record speak. I thought it was a very interesting moment, overall.

Oh, and plus David Wolach engages (at length!) me, my work, and my comments on docu-po here and here. In recent days I’ve been too freaked out by unexpected vicissitudes to respond to his posts, but I mean to soon.

In any case, you see, it really pays off to make trouble sometimes. Thank you, universe.:-)

after Alli Warren

I kind of feel sorry
for the future of everything:
it isn’t easy to shrug
with no shoulders. In the
universe we all feel like
outsiders, all computers
have had sex changes and
the vibrations of sub-atomic
particles are stretched out
sweaty spandex (the fabric of
space-time), by which I mean
it’s just something I made
up as a joke. I’m so sorry
I’m just really upset
I can’t find out what
the universe is… the
leopard universe’s infinite
morbidity of the future
of everything. An alien bug
may or may not be benevolent
and the shape of the universe
is my horrible secret. That’s why
I’m such a stud, considering
relative perspective to reduce
the margin of possible error.
Wow… more sex drama. Ooo.
It Means the World. I kind of
feel sorry for the future
of everything. I’m sorry,
but I’m really going to have to
kill you now.
I hope you don’t mind.

Everyone wants everything to be nice but nothing will ever stay in place. None of our lives occurs two or three times in the restful way they should, like national holidays. We are filled with this longing larger than a goal or object. What if we said in unison, “Oh I miss you and am lonely for you,” with the understanding that no one knows who the you is. The world wants to intrude. A forlorn pause.

from Robert Glück’s Elements of a Coffee Service

CAPRICORN December 21-January 19
Injured pride—on both sides—lies at the root of a disagreement. Someone needs to be the designated bigger person and reach out. That someone is you.