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Have you missed me? Some MoMA pics and event announcements!

Nada Gordon1 Comment
Have you missed my blog posts? I’ve been busy.
Last Saturday I read at MoMA in an orange dress. The first photo is by Toni Simon, who so deftly captured the moment! I did spend a bit of time reading from the floor, yes. MoMAwas a difficult reading environment, with miserable acoustics and shifting audiences, and afterwards I was quite spent, and could only sit on my bed eating blueberries.


Here I stand in front of Donald Judd’s UNTITLED(STACK) 1967…The Museum of Modern Art staged a poetry event entitled Transform The World! Poetry Must Be Made By All! as part of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Poet Laureate program. 4th Floor Painting and Sculpture II. Photo:copyright Lawrence Schwartzwald(No reproduction without express permission) (I obtained express permission) (by the way I don’t think I usually stand like that; Lawrence told me to cross my arms).


BUT IN CASE YOU MISSED THE MoMA festivities, don’t despair! Next week there are two more events at which I shall make appearances.

The first is Monday April 29 at 6:30:

Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology Reading

Wollman Hall (at the New School), 65 W 11th St, (between Fifth and Sixth Aves)


Featuring readings by contributors to the anthology “Postmodern American Poetry,” 2nd edition (W. W. Norton, 2013), edited by Paul Hoover, including Charles Bernstein, Katie Degentesh, Elaine Equi, Drew Gardner, Peter Gizzi, Nada Gordon, Lisa Jarnot, Caroline Knox, Noelle Kocot, Tan Lin, Steve McCaffery, Eileen Myles, Sharon Mesmer, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, Cole Swensen, Edwin Torres, Marjorie Welish, Susan Wheeler and John Yau.

I’m cutting and pasting, and too lazy to mess with the HTML. Can you tell?
(I can’t resist an internal rhyme, either.)

AND THEN:  A BOOK PARTY for my own Vile Lilt and Michael Gottlieb’s Dear All!

(c & p’d from fb)

  		•

    Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St
  		• Come celebrate the publication of Gordon’s _VILE LILT_ and Gottlieb’s _Dear All_ with special guest Drew Gardner
    Please come!!!

THE NEXT BIG THING: VILE LILT!

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I was tagged on facebook by Susana Gardner to create this auto-interview about my forthcoming opus, Vile Lilt.

What is the working title of the book?

Vile Lilt is the title, no longer the working title, but I hope the title works. I’m interested in the fact that people keep mishearing/misreading it as Vile Lit.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

It came floating down the stream hidden in a giant peach, donburako, donburako, making that sound as it went…(una grossa pesca galleggiava!).

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry, plays, benshi scores.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

For some reason the vision of Ruby Keeler’s face, multiplied, floats up before me, as in this scene from Dames (1934) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXMPXo8Epn8. I suppose she would be the guiding persona, the stand-in for my “authorial” presence in the work? Since it is “lyric” poetry, I would hope also to be played by Young Werther, Miss Havisham, and of course Meena Kumari.  Mahipal and Sandhya are already present in the Navrang benshi piece, as are Eriko Hatsune and Fhi Fan in the Uzumaki piece. I would hope that Cynthia, Maureen, Jane, and Patti would play themselves in the play, “Beatles’ Ex-Wives’ Reunion.”  I would need to hold auditions for people to play the parts of Dana Ward, Brandon Brown, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, William Blake, Havelock Ellis, Dr. Zizmor, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky, Ezra Pound, Dante Alighieri, Sylvia Plath, Guillaume Apollinaire, Joe Brainard, Oscar Wilde, Lew Welch, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jack Spicer, and any other sundry characters. I guess it will have to be directed by the Quay Brothers.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Girl loses boy, writes poems, in full costume.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

From January 14, 1964 until now.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Some kind of helpless compulsion or itch or voices in the head: a vile lilt.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

There are many words in the book you will not know. Examples: preponed, pedunculate, banausic, tolazoline, enfoldion, phenolic, desmid, hybriddy, stuckly, kumkum, ptyalize, viridity, prognathous, runch, chicot, sandilands, Bobis, guggling, megachiropterae, viridine, dhobis,

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

What means this…”agency”? It will be published this spring by Roof Books!

What is it that you want of a book?

I want them to be (like) dioramas I can enter and get lost in.

Tagged: Adeena Karasick, Sharon Mesmer, Lynn Nino, Thoe Htane, Yi Ywel Yway

Please come to my reading 2/9 at the Zinc Bar!

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It just so happens that I will be giving a reading at Segue, not this Saturday, when the sublime Dana Ward will be reading, but the next, February 9th, with Dia Felix.

FEBRUARY 9 at the Zinc Bary

82 WEST 3rd STREET, BETWEEN THOMPSON AND SULLIVAN STS.
…
SATURDAYS FROM 4:30 – 6:30 PM

$5 admission goes to support the readers

NADA GORDON & DIA FELIX

Nada Gordon is the author of Vile Lilt (forthcoming), Scented Rushes (Roof, 2010), Folly (Roof, 2007), V. Imp (Faux Press, 2002), foriegnn bodie (Detour Press, 2001) and Swoon (Granary, 2001). She blogs at ululate.blogspot.com, the initiatory sentence of which reads: “The impulse to decorate is, as always, very strong.”

Dia Felix is an interdisciplinary artist whose areas of concern include romantic disaster, spiritual totality and celebrity obsession. Her first novel, Nochita, is forthcoming from City Lights/Sister Spit. She lives and works in New York City.

A Life Decision, more Baroqueify, Recent Diversions, Vaccinations, and a Visit from the Ghost of Oscar Wilde, among other things…

Nada Gordon1 Comment

I am well aware that I am behind on blogging Baroqueify assignments, and everything else, but haven’t you heard? Facebook killed the blogstar, more or less, although I don’t intend to officially stop ululating until December 22, so as to make it to ten years even. Technically, on that day, though, I will be here (and I’m not sure what internet access will be like):

Life got a little intense for a while, with Sandy blowing through more or less simultaneously with  a very tempting job offer in Tokyo that I opted not to take. The decision was not an easy one, but finally Pratt did the right thing and improved my conditions, and I decided to stay for these reasons (pasted from my FB post soon after my decision):

1) an improved schedule at Pratt, so I can have more freedom
2) better pedagogical conditions here by far
3) the quality of conversation & community in NY
4) not wanting the reified isolation of being a gaijin again
5) love for and responsibility to for those here (BF, cats, friends, parents, poets)
6) the job in Tokyo was only a five-year fixed term contract, after which I’d be gypsified again whether I wanted to be or not
7) this city is not the most beautiful, but there’s something about its semitic/expressive character that suits me and my writing
8) I’ll be able now to spend totally appreciative time in Japan without giving up all that I have here, including an office window that looks out on a sculpture garden! I just feel really lucky. Going would have been truly wrenching, and I’ve had enough of that sort of thing over the past couple of years.

Oh, right, and we had an election.  There was that, too: “Ann Romney cried softly.”
And lots of other things have happened, jeez… I went to the thought-provoking Poetics of Kitsch panel at Poets House, I helped host an amazing event to celebrate 35 years of Roof Books, I went to MoMA to look at Japanese avant-garde stuff, saw Sally Silvers’ incredible Bonobo Milkshake (tonight is the last night I think. GO!! GO!! SO GOOD!), and I got a bunch of shots for the Burma trip, for which I depart in just twelve more days!! The injections made me feel rather wretched, but I suppose they beat perishing of some awful disease.
Something is weird with my memory, though, and I can’t remember what happened three Baroqueifies ago…
I know that we read Lynn Behrendt’s “Luminous Flux,” and the assignment was something like, write something LUSH and INTENSE that doesn’t censor out raw emotion.  What else did we read that day? What were the specifics of the assignment? I can’t remember but am hoping the attendees can help me with this aporia.
Then OK, the session before last we read an excerpt from David Batchelor’s Chromophobia and some poems from Kim Lyons’ Abracadabra. The focus was on color.  I also led attendees with a guided visualization that I hoped would take them to baroque inner spaces and visions but oddly enough most of them found themselves in white rooms.  What was up with that? Here was the assignment:

1)   Write something: don’t worry about line breaks.
2)   Include lists of objects
3)   Include some impressions of that hypnotic interior space
4)   focus on colorful language, however you might interpret that

Then last night, as I was walking to the Poetry Project and feeling just so wiped out and sort of uninspired, I walked past the Strand and thought, hey you know what, I’m going to get a bunch of weird dollar books.  I bought six.  One is a present for a friend.  The rest we ripped up.  It was fun to rip up books.
We wrote for about twenty minutes using these texts as sources and springboards.
There was a book about Labrador Retrievers, a book about poetic syntax, a book about psychosurgery, a book called Food Court Druids,Cherohonkees and Other Creatures Unique to the Republic, and a book about the coming apocalypse based on Revelation.
I had asked the participants to bring in examples of texts they thought were baroque, and coincidentally, one of the participants  brought in The King James Bible and read from The Book of Revelation!  I was so thrilled, since I and whatsisface had done our wonderful parody of it years before.  It really is so baroque, and so compelling.
And then the other weird thing that happened was that another participant brought in some poems from Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol… and someone else said, hey, today is the anniversary of his death!  And THEN… you know that chimney in the Parish Hall, that is enclosed in a cabinet? It started like, creaking!  OK, maybe it was drafty, but the doors of the cabinets moved JUST AS WE WERE TALKING ABOUT THIS.

We also read some poems from Bruce Andrews’ I Don’t Have AnyPaper So Shut Up: (or, Social Romanticism) as another example of “colorful language” (although in a much different sense from Kim Lyons’). We paid special attention to how he uses punctuation – often quite unexpectedly – and we focused on dashes ­­– how they telegraph:  jab jab jab: assault and mayhem as critique. God, I fuckinglove his writing, did I mention that? BRUUUUCE!
So, the assignment was this:

1)   Work with The Book of Revelation.
2)   Inject other texts into it…
3)   …with an eye to punctuation used inventively…especially dashes.

OK.  My precious Saturday calls.  I have to get ginger and trashbags and finish packing and finish my book! I have to finish my book!
Out, VILE LILT!  Out!  Out!
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
p.s. just for fun, here are the titles of the poems in Bruce’s book:
All Of My Friends Are Dead
Am I Alive
America Shops
Animal Dicks In Bed
Anti-enlightenment
Are You Tired
As If Science
Autocracy Managed By Midgets
Blab Mind Blab Body
Boil Me, Broil Me
Bomb Then, Bomb Now
Border State Has To Grow Up
Breed Your Followers
Capital Is Not A Quantity Of Money
Cash Managers Pie Their Brute
Cerebellum Replaced With Joy Stick
Civil Tongue
‘communism Is A Morale Problem
Cough Up At Premium
Could Darwin Instruct Those Turtles
Culture Just Reupholsters
Divine Assurance Expires January 1, 1984
Don’t Write Down Your Thoughts
Double Bagging
Education Helps Me Squirt
Everything You Don’t Know Is Wrong
Falsehood
Fertility Is Absolute Altruism
From Their Small Penis
Gestalt Me Out
Grace Hampers Skin
Help Defeat Your Country
How To Attract Love
I Am Your Problem
I Can’t Watch The Freedom
I Like To Watch The Patties Melt
I Lthink
I Need Attention Bad
I Regret Zoology
I Want Educated Oxen
I Who Proud Drugs Be
I’m Too Busy To Compromise
If A Peppermint Patty Could Sing
If It’s A Bomb
If Pods Could Talk
In The Part Mechanmized Heart
Innocent But Not Ambulatory
Is There A Hyphen In Hard-on
Isolate Your Fuse
It’s Time To Stop Glorifying The White Army
Jerk Off In The Breadcrumbs
Jimmies On My Dick
Just Because
Just Let It Burn Itself On The Bulb
Learn To Be Dispensable
Life Is A Scholarship
Make Your Customers Nauseous
Metaphor As Illness
My Ovaries Don’t Have Enough Room
My Roots, No Thanks
Neon Helps Us Stupid
O, My Arms Catch On The Nails
O, Those Happy Happy Dogs
Oh, Glaze Me Big
Only The Ego Can Pick Up A Pencil
Oppression Is Fear
The Past Is Not Interested
Paternalism Causes Cancer
Penis Is Hegemonic
People Are Proud Of Those They Own
People Are So Popular
Pity The Loan Shark
Political Economy Means Red
The Public Doesn’t Exist
Public First, Self Second
Purple People-eaters
Revolution Means Stability
Save He Panda Oil Believes In
Scrape Me Off
Sell Your Friends: Think Rich; Stupider
Semen Donor
Slurpy White Do
Snakes In Heat
Society Starts Walking Again
Species Means Guilt
Stalin’s Genius
Thanks To Hit You
This Unity Sounds Posturepedic To Me
Those Nasty Old Emotions Take Over
Toiling Virgin Midgets
Tuck In Your Chains
We Are Modern
We Are Not A Country
We Confine Ourselves To Other People’s Beds
We Finger To Spurn The Beef
We Own It But They Play It
Who Has The Pliers To Doubt It
Who Is Guilty
You Do Their Own Thing
You Made This World, We Didn’t

Baroqueify! Assignment # 4: Old, New, Borrowed, Blue

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We read poems by K. Silem Mohammad, Julian Brolaski, and Brandon Brown that combine anachronisms with the hyper-contemporary.

The assignment for this week:

~ Merge anachronism of form or vocabulary (possibly using a poem from a bygone era as a “trellis” (Nicole Blackman’s term) or transformation point)with something of-the-moment (such as pop culture or political references). [OLD + NEW]

~ Incorporate at least three words from your “quarry sheet” (each participant had a unique sheet of ornate spam language). [BORROWED]

~ Affect or admit to, at least at moments, an air of melancholy. [BLUE]

Baroqueify Assignment #3: Warp Out

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 In the third meeting of the Baroqueify! workshop, we read and discussed two poems, paying special attention to how syntactical choices create baroque effects.
The two poems we read were John Donne’s “The Extasie” and the first section of Lisa Robertson’s “The Men.” In Donne’s poem we looked at the nestedness of the phrases and the archaic (to our eyes) word order inversions. We lingered a bit also on the bizarre imagery of the poem without actually trying to fully explain it. Reading “The Men,” we noted how it moves through various modes, sometimes vulnerable/expressive, at other times anthropological, sometimes tender, sometimes heady, sometimes mocking. There was some resistance to this poem among the readership, and someone said she felt it was inaccessible. Later that reader compared it to Tender Buttons; I said I saw the influence, but also that words in “The Men” seem less thingified. I suggested that we might think of the poem in a painterly sense.  The words “The Men” are the key color (we decided it was a kind of cobalt) around which all of the other colors arrange themselves, in myriad variations.  I gave the example, as I always do, of the 39-minute Mayada el-Hennawy song that has so inspired me in thinking about poetic structure: “Akher Zaman.” It has a catchy chorus to which it always returns, but only after looping into different stylistic modes – classical Egyptian orchestra, 60s guitar, and so on.
Assignment: Write a poem in which you pay special attention to syntax and punctuation as warping devices, to better serve the baroque.

Baroqueify! Assignment #2: Seed it with Flaws

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Kaffir 
In the last Baroqueify! meeting, we spent a bit of time discussing Adolf Loos’ notorious “Ornament and Crime,” and then set about the task of articulating a working  definition of the baroque.
We brainstormed our own associations with the term.  Mine is transcribed here. It is informed a bit by the background reading I’ve been doing:
lushness
nestedness
intricacy
organic/natural forms
“taste” (highlighted as either “good” or “bad”)
manneredness:  archaisms, coyness:
conceit (concettismo): in particular of love, the boweer, pastorality
meraviglia: the marvelous/horrible
“exotica”
the feminine [although I rethought that, later, in discussion – the baroque is not so simply gendered]
extremes of scale and relative scale
apocalypse
excess (“too many notes”)
flaw/distortion/ the bizarre
rhythm: what do I want to say about rhythm? a sense of abandoning to it – pre-psychedelic – loops, looping, curling, irregularity
grottos and dioramas
trompe l’oeil
labyrinths
complexity of pattern
We looked into Vernon Hyde Minor’s “Baroque & Rococo: Art & Culture, and lingered over some choice passages:
 
I was especially struck by the relationship of baroque-ness to flaw and irregularity.
Here, then, is the second assignment for Baroqueify!:
Take a poem that you have written previously. Seed it with flaws and distortions.
(I didn’t say this in the actual workshop, but I might append to that:  “…to make it, in your mind, even more beautiful [awkward].”)