Category: Uncategorized

Love IV

Nada Gordon4 Comments
Love bade me welcome,
adopting a Black Power fist
with terrible conviction:
yet my soul drew back,
a study in trite ballerina glamour,
with fixed smiles and no sense
either of powerful wings or
fingertips that give off sparks,
guilty of dust and sin, trailing pieces
of cardboard and black drawstring bags.
.
But quick-eyed Love, in a blond wig,
with blue false eyelashes attached
to his lower lids, observing me
grow slack in rapid, jerky trajectories
from my first entrance in,
drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
if I lacked anything. Her staccato use
of her head and the mighty wing beats
of her arms gave weight
to the drama.
“A guest,” I answered, “worthy to be here”:
Love said, “You shall morph into a jokey,
sinister figure with slinky, sexualized movements..”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee.” The fur dress
she crawled into, which rattled as she moved
and pulled her off balance, was a marvelous prop.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I? Let’s try
not laughing for a change.”
“Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
go where it doth deserve.” Suggestions of real pain
remained safely hidden in the pop song sentimentality
and running mascara. And when the walnuts inside it
flew out, that was a fine bit of theatrical whimsy!
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
As always, his gawky elegance is entrancing —
giving way to wiggles that crinkles his arms
like a silken accordion.
The palm tree and giant swan,
also cardboard, are slowly wilting,
“My dear, then I will serve.”
The only effrontery left
was the effrontery of dullness.
“You must sit down,” says Love,
donning a mask with red beard
and multicolored afro ,”and taste my meat.”
Then he went into a fervent lap dance
for a blow-up Prince Charming doll
tied to a seat in the front row.
I thought I heard the flapping wings
of the Owl of Minerva, or a
kittenish duet, all wrist flicks
and shoulder rolls. It was like boxing
with the divine.
“Let’s try not laughing for a change.”
            So I did sit and eat.

THE PHONEMES & I’LL DROWN MY BOOK — DOUBLE BOOK LAUNCH (Les Figues Press)

Nada GordonLeave a comment

Two-fisted launch of Frances Richard’s The Phonemes and I’ll Drown My Book, the women’s conceptual writing anthology (co-edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Brown, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place), both by Les Figues Press–fabulous.

Featuring Frances Richard reading as Frances Richard

and contributors to the anthology reading as themselves and others; themselves to include:

Julie Patton
Lee Ann Brown
Monica de la Torre
Katie Degentesh
Marcella Durand
Nada Gordon
Anne Tardos
Rachel Levitsky
Kristen Prevallet
Tracie Morris
Frances Richard
Kim Rosenfield

Hosted by Vanessa Place

Books will be available on site at reasonable launch discount.

*(Kickstarter contributors contact Teresa at info@lesfigues.com to pick up your copy at the event.)

There will be drink. There will be pleasure.

Pierogi Gallery
177 N. 9th Street, Brooklyn, NY
Saturday January 28, 6-9 pm

On "The Men"

Nada Gordon2 Comments

I’m modern, independent, self-determining.  Or am I? Quite often since the breakup I have had keen moments of realizing that I remain imbued with Gary’s tastes and opinions.  We had similar tastes, in many ways, to begin with. We both liked Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge, Arabic music and Indian food even before we met.  And in the marriage our tastes blended into each other more:  he came to like Japanese food and Alan Davies, I to enjoy graphic novels and Jack Smith.  There were divergences.  I would never, for example, really warm up to DA Levy or Paul Blackburn (they were both just too “guy” for me), and he never really got into my predilection for long colorful scarves (which he said made me look like Anne Waldman) or chinoiserie in interior decoration, but still, by the end of the marriage, he was wearing a lot of purple, and in his own way, by the end, he exceeded me even in orientalism.
Not too long ago I finally got around to purging my iTunes library of a ton of music he had put on there that I had never liked – a lot of international rap and hiphop, primarily, and Asian pop sung in tinny little voices – and I felt sort of liberated – but it was interesting to me how much of the music I still like, that I would have chosen “for my own” – the Vietnamese ballads, all the 60s stuff,  just about everything Arabic or Turkish, for example. I do look at his blog. I shouldn’t, but I do. Sometimes I even download the music. Sometimes I can’t fathom why on earth he would enthuse over a particular album or group:  Deerhoof?  Really? But even now I still experience much of the music he promotes as “ours.”  It’s a bittersweet soundtrack for me now, of course, but it’s part of me. He should, I think, write at least a little more deeply and descriptively about the music he posts there. He has the chops – or used to.  He tends instead though  to put up a collocation of an eager adverb and a superlative – “jaw-droppingly great!”, and now and then an anecdote, while sort of dismissively characterizing more analytical approaches by critics as  “socio-semiotic.” Ah, well.

So… one of the things I noticed I have become more and more enamored of as I notice I am becoming more in possession of my own independent opinions is the writing of Lisa Robertson.  It wasn’t really Gary’s thing, and I remember at least one other guy poet I hang out with not really being much into it, either. I suppose they experienced it as too precious, or too mannered, or too impenetrable, or something. I admire all these qualities, and in fact, the first time I met Lisa, I said to her, “I write a little bit like you, but not as well.”  If I hold anything against her writing, it is simply that it is too exquisitely well-done.  I have a fantasy of her sitting at some very perfectly organized writing desk, with an air of profound concentration, perhaps looking out at redwood trees (why, I wonder, redwood trees?), and I can almost imagine her internal thought processes, how gradual and methodical they must be, not like mine that more resemble a frightened sparrow trapped in a padded elevator.  Her writing and person give off an air of being both sublime and logical.  This is of course a total projection, but I admire this construction of My Lisa Robertson as a kind of goal made unreachable by the constraints of my sloppier and more fluttery personality or chemistry.
A couple of months ago, someone (I think it was Arielle Greenberg? or Danielle Pafunda?) posted on facebook a few lines from LR’s book The Men, with a superlative gush about how much she loved it. I loved the excerpt she posted so much that I ordered the book.  It is strange that I didn’t have it.  I had heard her read from it many years ago at a Segue reading, at that same reading where I had made my awkward introduction to her. I had been interested in the poem, but there was something about LR’s elegant and distanced way of reading it aloud that kept it at arms’ length from me.  Interestingly, I wrote my own “the men” poem a couple of years later.  I knew that my poem (“Orgone Gophers,” which appeared in Folly)  owed some debt to hers, but mine was so different, goofily bop-prosodic, neologistically bumbling, that it seemed like quite a different animal:
Orgone Gophers
Cooing pop huckles. Minarlagy of funf. The latter craal-skeevers (anxious like bucket): froos, angle, insecure.
I keen my meringo this hopey day. I murv it. The hopcakes are waiting for the nested parlances, the nested parlances for a 6-month grace period, after which they will expire.
It all comes together as perforations in the ample slough — beastborne, tolerant, mint, and gland-handed.
Where’s my speed, the clock’s a muffle, the clown raises sham hackles, the plain stripes badger the nonplain
stripes as limits to patience.
The men hack outside the door in explicatory gasses. They muddle and wink, halving their trousers. The parts rattle by in pink bones. The men are wuthering. A stag wuthers the hard waiting.
The men lift up the thorny leaves of togetherness. There is a pad there.
Under the pad, another man, horning a thought as a drawing. The pink ones wonder — bastard hardcake? Terrible wuthering intertwining a lumpy duddle.
The plaid couches, pro dusk and anti-dawn, haunched by men and soaky weapons like flags rolled up in glands while the plaid maidens change their lamb sprockets.
Inches and inches and inches of man, boozling and edgily nuzzling. Piranha potatoes! Limbering the cud. Sweat drapes. Miracle sinews absolute the free fibers of a flexibly ordered man, half red and half blue, on a night
watch and skin patrol.
I don’t can’t — can’t can’t — a man. Hip dud. Catafrack. Pone.
My poem is related but different. It has the same quality of affection, I guess.
But I wrote it, you see, without having actually read LR’s entire poem.
And when I did… last week… oh!  The sky opened!
I’d like to note here that others have written on/responded to the book very interestingly. These links are worth reading just on their own merit.

http://jacketmagazine.com/33/kennedy-robertson.shtml
http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2006/09/lisa-robertsons-men.html
http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-09-26/books/boys-to-men/
What is remarkable about The Men is the extent to which it expresses the ambivalences of how one feels about men. As LR  writes, “The concept  of the men is elastic.” It is simultaneously adoring and patronizing, intimidated and pitying, critical and indulgent, yearny and austere. Men are clearly The Problem, on both a micro- and a macro- scale, but if you are a heterosexual woman, they seem to be The Problem one always wants more of. I have not even begun to approach a solution to this conundrum, and I expect I will go to my grave with it yet unsolved, since I seem not to be the type of fish that can go for long without a bicycle. 
Close readings, especially of book-length poems, aren’t really good on blogs, so I won’t do that, but here are some things I noticed while reading
~ the first section functions musically as a kind of overture
~a repeated trope is this notion of “falling upward” – both in vertical relation to men’s power and into the exhilaration of desire for them
~there are moments that sound like a Ted Berrigan poem (“It’s 6:45 and I’m 39”)
~there’s a sweet little Proust reference: “Albertine”
~she remarks on the Aspergian qualities of men: “At such times/ in exhaustion/ they show you the liner notes”
~and yet there’s something Aspergian, or more precisely, obsessive, about the poem-project: “I study them more than any other object.” or “I’m making a record of the men as I know them”
~there are what feel to me like Scalapino moments, too: “such as the experience of the lily behind me”
~but the book this book most reminds me of is Alan Davies’ NAME, even in the “handfeel” of it… it is as yearny, and as elegantly paced
~The word “little” appears a lot:  “little teeth”
~”The funny pathos of men –  I salute this”
~”hydromel”!!!!!
~It’s hydromel because in part this book is a song about the deliciousness of men, their palpable heartbreaking sweetness.  These are not the men who charge about so much as “the men who breathe into me, tender, phallic, kimonoed.”  These are the luscious and vulnerable men “both sublime and beautiful, delicate and copious”:  “Nature/ is weak; the men feel pain/ They fear death.”  They are not so much going out to war hairy-legged in togas to come back with their shield or on it, at least not in this book.  These are the men you LONG for: “Trashy sweet brain adoring and adoring them.”
~”Each of us psycho-sexually is a man, dreaming and covulsing, plunged into some false Africa manically like a poet”
I asked my sweetheart to read bits aloud to me from the book, because I wanted to hear it in his hydromel voice.  He read this:
Let the thought here be planted
That the men want to float
Just the pink tip of their
Thing touching the firmament
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. (He doesn’t really get poetry.)
And I just almost swooned.

here’s the new year’s day poem I read at the marathon; Brandon Downing wanted me to call it New Year’s Dayquil, but I just stuck with the title of the poem I mangled in order to construct this poem

Nada Gordon2 Comments

 

ASIA
The surly plagiaristic hipsters heard
The putrefacient beep rise up from a rhapsodic melancholiac!
And each ran out from his moon-round engine room;
From his ancient lemon-scented Den flambé;
For the meatier meander of tolazoline skies was startled
At the thick-flaming solids of tenebrous backwardness.
The daily did sing:
Your thought-creating iguanid is my wife!
I’ve been star-gazing!
there’s a dance of saga in the disarray!
I’m wishing! And so am I, hebraical cryogen!
Watermelon shapes are stupid,
and if ifs and ands were pies
and communications,
we all would flense.
Blazon your accompanyists, and ridge your horn!
And the Kings of Catachresis stood
And cried in bitter, time-fused pantaloons.
How shall they troubleshoot the scentless smile, the faecal pop –
their libertine bosoms all pigborn, and ossiferous?
They’ve got so many Hasidim!
How shall the paradisiac, for petulance, eschew the mauve spiritism?
Fecklessly you had a tampon of tsarinas!
Anchor, sapphire puss!
To retrain! to dismay! to spin!
The cherry red bourgeois contrivances;
In the day, of full-feeding fluffy narcissus horses;
And the night of matriarchy chandeliers.
Shall not the Game-Bird tranquilize the oval foxily?
Of syncopation on the laborious watermelon shape?
To fix the clog of Hellenistic tics;
To invent allegoric whiskerless spoons:
And the privy admonishers of slick termagents
mew like light patients
For heaps of perspiring bone,
In the night of veneers & processes
To turn man from his smile tattoos,
To restrain the child from the timidly, velvety-plumaged
if not gray-pink, womb,
To cut off the nympho from the salvo,
That the rebukingly blueberry day may learn to obey.
That the pride of the breeze may fail;
That the lust of the perfumer may be quench’d:
That the ornamental gazelle in its infancy
May be appall’d; and the nostrils open’d way up;
To teach mortal worms the path
That leads from the gates of the tentative hello.
Leonard Nimoy sitting in the front heard them cry!
And his shudd’ring waving hypocritical sousaphone
Went enormous above the red flames
Drawing clouds of flaccidity thro’ the heavens
Of ultrasonic singsong as he went:
And his Books of greasy air & gossip
Melted over the land as he flew,
Heavy-waving, howling, colorizing.
And he stood over his opinions:
And stay’d in his moisty place:
And stretch’d his yellowish-beige clumps over Jerusalem;
For Caruso, a monastic shrimp
Lay bleach’d on a garden of eye makeup;
And Molly Ringwald as white as dental implants
On the mountains of a poesy so serflike
it resists fire.
Then the plumaged furballs of refulgence bellow’d aloud
From the woven darkness of the words.
Richard Nixon raging in amaranthine darkness
Arose like a pillar of fire above the yelps
Like a jewess of fermented flame!
The sullen Earth
Slunk!
Forth from the passably plummy dust rattling breasts to breasts
Join: shaking convuls’d the shivring cicada-like cicada breathes spangled
And all flesh naked stands: Poets and Fiends;
Mothers & Implants; Husbands & Concubines:
The gelatinized twinkler shrieks with delight, & shakes
Her druggy womb, & clasps the solid stem:
Her bosom swells with wild desire:
And theories & blooms & glandular wire.

53% Off Justin Bieber Singing Toothbrushes

Nada Gordon2 Comments

I’m rooted firmly in reality, by which
I mean the G train on 12/21/11. A guy reads

carefully in dove-colored Converse. A small
girl wears a fake amethyst ring, and even the bald
Dravidian man looks ashen in New York
winter subway light. I’m thinking
of the curtain of jerky in Ariana’s poem,
the god of meat, the poem’s peregrinations.
Me I am busy, sometimes I go places I don’t
want to go, the sky’s head is heavy. I can tell
already this will be a “lyric” poem, and
I’m making you think I’m writing it
right now, or all at once.  Ha! Fooled
you!  Now a homeless man with a huge
protruding lower lip and two teeth on the
bottom is singing a détournement of
God Bless America:  “land that I own.”
Ah well. Even those who own things
die.  Trump looks like he is going to
explode. He looks like someone I once
knew. Anyway I put a wild cowrie into
the golden expectations of my physical
nervousness – there a cloudy bank roils
around the hipper convergences – monsters
storm by my side in the form of tiny
husbands – a train caught in  seaweed
belches babydolls singing, “that is a
arrow, yes it is, it’s a triangle, it’s a
arrow.” Babydoll’s purple mylar wings
wither with a kind of half-baked disgust;
maroon swooshes attack the populace
as coded glom, misread signs of Greek
woes. The mayor hits a nerve. I don’t know
what to think.  A crowded poem is no excuse
for an improper touch. What did you say
your name was? Harry?  Jerry? Larry?
I want to play with my rotten head.
Sex is a sport.  She’s the illustration. 
There’s nothing like me in the culture.
Sexy hellcat shows her claws as hubby
looks on.  Everyone is a type. Even
Douglas Rothschild is a type. Flexible
dollars dot my aging hair. There’s a spider
in the next world. Depraved hillbillies
nurse their mighty peccadilloes, but I am not
a drug addict, I love with a fatal
hormone and a brighter agency! Out!
Out, vile lilt – it’s love for every one
of you, those I know and those I don’t
know, those I have not forgotten,
those I object to strenuously, and those
I hanker for in the inevitable diaspora
of molecules.
Bounced and jostled by society’s
clank, we build up job skills. The
security guard leans against the pole
with his hand in his security guard
pockets. I moan a little inside, but from
anxiety, not from lust. Lust itself
is like a free app that when you tap it
turns IMHO into a rubber unicorn,
and I appreciate that because I am
basically a sympathetic person,
left-leaning but cynical, with a
decent-sized collection of mouse
hats – and what did you say your
name was?  Perry? Barry? Mary?
Anyway, I forget, and wax my
moustachios higher in preparation
for the end of the song, its indefinite
searing warble, its cloyingly intimate
swerves. The memory of you is lodged
in my labial folds – like a deer tick.
Not really, but I wanted to write that.
Really, all I need is time.  All anyone
needs… is time.  This drastically
oversimplified theory of survival
leaves out several essential factors,
like tea roses, vegan boyfriends, cool
French theory books, and instant
streaming. Yeah, I guess you could say
this is a kind of instant streaming.
Or instant dreaming.
Oh, the crowded city makes me tense
like a snake.  The police eat our pizza
as I lip the frilly edge of anxious
solitude.  I don’t say that to sound
sexy – I walk into the sun, my sheets
turn over in dismay – I’ve got a vulva
full of rage and fear and I’m not afraid
to use it in the flustered nite, all
ferklempt like a tangerine section
that is really an orphan sunchild’s
disconnected ear found somewhere
on another planet’s slushy frigid moon.
Earth balance. Beans. Well, the mangle is
the message,  and the eagles (and the
eagle-faced people) have some
other – angular – planet, and wind…
will become light. He who rolled
in as internal clench, she who filed her
toenails and told me I needed to “get away
from exotica”  – they will become light,
too.  This peregrination.  The zipper folders
full of DVDs – their sinister prismatic glint.
I need to build more repetition into this poem.
I want to play with my rotten head.
Play, play, play.
Babydoll belches lavender,
belches lavender
belches lavender
belches lavender
belches lavender
belches lavender.
Out, vile lilt.
Out, out, out.

like eating ladyfingers all the time

Nada GordonLeave a comment
 
Got up overly early as punishment for not properly maintaining the balance of daily life, and wanting to be free.  Decided to paint my nails five different colors, which I did.  Nail polish is horrible, it smells like death, I shouldn’t use it, but my fingertips look like jujubees.
Thinking of how extraordinary it was to be sitting next to Madeline Gins at the Skirball Theatre watching a [great!!] klezmer musical, Schlemiel the First, when one of the characters said, “We need to not die!”  I looked at Madeline in wonder.
Afterwards I sent her some links about Molly Picon and The Bagelman Sisters.
My notebooks are a mess, everything is kind of a mess.  The semester ended and I have been cleaning up my office in a kind of exhausted confusion.  What happened to all that activity. I need a VACATION.
I also need once again to be a more focused blogger.  These little witty snippets on facebook, it’s like eating ladyfingers all the time. 
I like old people who like birds.
I like people who like birds.
I’ve been to some readings.
Ariana Reines:
“I’m not good with time.”
“Keats had hair that is also in Italy.”
“You and your firewater
and mild poses.”
She uses a lot of Anglo-Saxon simple words and her work is at once colloquial and mythological.
Dana Ward:
“data pastries”
“our songs taught me, just do what you want to do and don’t worry about it”
“the eyelash piece of fabric I vanquished.”
“mystify the world in order to fortify its / enchantment.”
Stephanie Young:
(referencing  Rodrigo Toscano) “the problem of the person as a treasure map”
“it [Hannah Weiner’s The Fast] is a book about not having a bathtub at a time of extremity”
“water only conducts water from other bodies”
“I was a dog who wanted other dogs.”
I went to a talk about conceptual writing at the white house.
Steve Zultanski quoted Bataille on poetry’s “instrumentality grounded in non-instrumentality.”
Sandra Simonds:  “Work for a poetry that isn’t at home at this white house or any white house.”
Rod Smith:  “the avant-garde is a stance toward reality,” and he paraphrased Deleuze and Guattari:  “the function of art is to create new experiences.”
Reading books flutteringly.

Jean Luc-Nancy on Listening.
An essay by Jena Osman on Bern Porter.
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl’s Booby Be Quiet.
Anselm Berrigan’s Notes from Irrelevance.
Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life.
A book about The History of Dolls.

[Just sort of read on the train this morning the too too ironically named House Organ, which persists in sending two copies to the apartment. Didn’t he change his address?  The first thing I always notice about it is the numbers trouble.  It’s slightly better this time, 38 penises and 9 vaginas. Anyway, get this, there’s a contributor in there named Heman!  Heman! And all these “yrs” and “&s”…  (one poem reads:  “yr eyes &/ testicles//equally/useless here”… um… my testicles?) … a rather nice poem opening the issue by Joel Lewis, though, (“I’ll give twenty dollars to the person who can pinpoint when the ‘slow clap’ first appeared in a movie.”), and a treasure hidden toward the back by iGloria Frym: “How come it took you so long/ To get it? Oh look, another demand:// Embrace Change.”  That’s so Berkeley!]

I’ve been taking drops of B vitamins; it gives me the most extraordinary feeling.
Each person has the nerve to have a life story, parents, etc., such as the mother who shot herself and her two children because she was denied food stamps.  We must spend so much of life in a scramble for continuance.
I saw Melancholia.  Joyelle McSweeney’s review of it is the best. I had a discussion about it with my friend Peter.  I thought Claire’s desire to watch the apocalypse on the terrace with a glass of wine was totally bourgeois (I agreed with Justine saying that was just shit), perhaps because I don’t have a terrace and I don’t drink wine. I said that the way it ended was right:  in a moment of human contact.  He said I was being quasi religious, judging people’s reactions to extreme situations.  He said something about how Claire “grew.”
And I realized that I don’t care about how characters “grow” in literature.  Such a view of things seems to be predicated on a progress model of life and society, whereas it strikes me that really we are all just hurtling toward decay, and literature is a way of diverting ourselves in the meantime.  It isn’t to “improve” us.  I suppose that notion comes from religion? And is carried over into the post-industrial?
Society, which is supposed to be a “safety net,” strikes me more as a kind of landmine of instability, confusion, and competing self-interests. A bunch of succubi. Am I wrong? Someone tell me I’m wrong?
Foil of restiveness – dry breast – hebdomadic lyric PLOD.
Oligarchy of the stupid. I forget the “t” of “ist”:  socialis, communis.
Poetry as “personal tech.”
Blue panoply. Fitters……..
ffire breasts
nice train
the most uncertain thing I’ve ever seen
cockahooply
pale imitation/pay limitation
I want to be present with people.  I make imaginary structures – world of cute babies – they are hard work, and we are a dopey species, just afterthoughts of microbes.
You (“husbands,” “best friends,” “uncle figures drunk on anger”) aren’t real people, you are asshole people.
Your eyes, assholes.
Your mouths, assholes.
*  *
  *
A half-naked urchin huddles in the doorway.
It doesn’t sound like it, but I’m actually in a pretty good mood.