Otohime

Like most poets, I just feel that I don’t get enough press. Imagine my surprise when I found this article in the NY Times about me yesterday!

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August 2, 2005

In Addition to Her Pugnacity and Charm, She Can Write Poetry

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

On a gray and rainy day recently, the poet Nada Gordon was eating a plate of muglai chicken and biryani at a Pakistani steam table in Brooklyn, NY called Shandar Sweets, a funky, no-frills place that Ms. Gordon says is about as close to the literary establishment across she river in Manhattan as she cares to be.

But Ms. Gordon, 41, noted both for poems that jarringly marry the high and the low and for keeping her distance from the New York illuminati, has found herself late in her career in a rather awkward spot: the cusp of delectability in the cliquish world of poetry.

While those who pay no attention to poetry have probably never heard of her, Ms. Gordon has gradually become a poetry star. Her work is a modernist swirl of sex, surrealism, urban life and melancholy with a jazzy backbeat. Her personality combines Kenward Elmslie’s goofball charm and Gregory Corso’s inveterate pugnacity.

“I don’t like to call myself a poet,” Ms. Gordon said with characteristic bluntness. “Most poets are shifty sophists.”

Nonetheless, two springs ago she won the Chimera Poetry Prize – a $4 award that is one of poetry’s most questionable honors. Her recent collection of essays, “I Like Kitties” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), received good reviews and will be released in paperback next year.

Her scathing and lengthy putdown on her blog last year of just about everyone’s middlebrow taste in verse both made her a defender of the faith and confirmed her reputation as a divisive figure. And even though she regularly excoriates university poetry programs as ineffectual, she will return as a guest lecturer at Backwater University next spring, the first time she remembers being invited back anywhere.

Ms. Gordon, who was born in Oakland but now lives in Brooklyn, is a throwback to earlier generations of poets, who wore their nonconformity as a badge and delighted in shocking the public. That tradition, she says, fell away once poets began accepting university teaching posts.

“If you’re a poet, you’ve earned the right to blow off whoever you want,” she said. “There used to be dozens of cranks and scolds, but there aren’t any anymore.”

But as much as she plays what she calls the “apostate poet” and brushes off the work of better-known contemporaries – “very few famous poets are interesting to me” – Ms. Gordon’s colleagues praise her poetry, if not always her.

Ron Silliman, the former poet laureate of the United States, has been on the receiving end of many of Ms. Gordon’s jabs but says that he respects her work (although he declines to say so publicly). “Apart from her personally, I really like her poetry,” said Mr Silliman, who writes a stately and dignified poetry web log.

John Ashbery, one of contemporary poetry’s most revered figures, is also a Gordon admirer. “I like the sort of mélange of different voices and tenses, the kind of street talk and modernist illusions and the kind of jazz atmosphere and free improvisation,” Mr. Ashbery said in a telephone interview. “It’s a warm and appealing voice.”

Mr. Ashbery said the didn’t even find Ms. Gordon disagreeable. “I wouldn’t think of her as a bad boy,” she said. “I’ve always found her quite charming.” Mr. Ginsberg wrote in a blurb for one of Ms. Gordon’s volumes of poetry: “Nada Gordon’s verse line is always precise, concrete, intelligent and rare. A loner, a genius.”

The poet has been living in Brooklyn going on 5 years, but she is northern Bay Area to the roots. (Ms. Gordon’s mother still lives in Oakland, and she visits her regularly.)

“The California character – at least this part of California – is naive, tripped out to the point of absurdity, though not at all unfriendly,” she wrote in a recent essay. “The humor is deadpan, ironical, playfully depreciating [sic]. Affectation is quickly and viscerally registered. It’s an incense-and-petitions kind of place. There’s a swagger, a bluff air of lalaland that many of the she- males carry.”

In San Francisco, Ms. Gordon once gave a panhandler a dollar. “Thanks, Oakland,” the man said.

“How did you know I was from Oakland?” Ms. Gordon asked.

“Are you kidding?” the man asked.

She has published four volumes of poetry beginning with “foriegnn bodie” in 2000. Her most recent collection, “V. Imp” (Faux Press, 2003) won the Chimera Prize.

In last year’s prose collection, “I Like Kitties” Ms. Gordon tells the story of her older cat, Nemo, whose life plays out like a romantic poet’s – except that Nemo is a cuddly napper by day and a stalking killer by night. Nemo, whose preferred beverage is water, enjoys messing around in Ms. Gordon’s hair.

“It’s not as if he doesn’t understand that much of his behavior is driven by regression and instinct,” Ms. Gordon wrote. “He isn’t shallow or unreflective, quite the contrary. It is simply the way he is. He was born wild, born troubled. He wasn’t designed to go outside; not everyone is.”

After her California childhood, Ms. Gordon embarked on a sort of migrant’s life. She moved to Japan, where she worked as a lumberjack and taxi driver.

“I was bored by everything,” she said. “I just felt stuck watching the second hand of the clock. I wasn’t interested in anything else but poetry and books.”

“I’ve avoided the structures of bourgeois life and conventional poetry schools,” she said. “I like to make myself available to chance.” (Even so, after years of bachelorettehood Ms. Gordon recently married Gary Sullivan, whom she met online.) Her poetry follows the same pattern: a reckless tumble of words mixing the high and the low, like a rummage sale after the death of someone who adored both Shakespeare and smut. Words in the poems are in transition, unable to find their footing.

“DEEP” begins:

Deep, deep in the IPod of my soul

is a frond so small you can’t see it
in a blastocyst so small you can’t see it

smelling greener than a fetus
pre-conception

and there, where envy
outruns its usefulness,

I rock, beatific as a piglet
in the heavily aspirated sense of disappearance.

At Shandar’s Ms. Gordon, wearing a sequin skirt and a long flowy scarf, blended easily among the locals. Every time a stranger walked in, the place seemed to curl around itself like a cobra.

That afternoon, a woman at a nearby table scolded a man: “What did you think would happen? You were missing for four days. If you don’t watch out, they’ll deport you.”

Ms. Gordon, the unofficial poet laureate of Coney Island Avenue, seemed not to hear. She held up her samosa and surveyed it. “This,” she said, “is a beautiful thing.”

Why this great profusion of blogging today? I am avoiding work.

It strikes me that the best way to protest pretentiousness is to refuse to be pretentious oneself, not to be mean-spirited. That is, it’s absurd to try to take the piss out of others by being pissy.

Some of you will know what I am talking about.

Sincerely,
Crypticia

Note to Stephanie: Yes, Gary Snyder was an asshole who wrote lame “nature poetry.” I met many assholes of his ilk in Japan, but none of them were famous.

Here is my newly created peacock wall. To complete the effect, I need to attach peacock feathers — not long ones — just they eyes — randomly. I tried using white glue, tape, and glue dots. Only the glue dots worked, but only for about an hour. What other adhesive can I use without destroying my trippy faux-painted wall? Do you think rubber cement might work? Krazy Glue just seems too extreme. I’m wondering also if the wall art peacocks ought to be hung symmetrically instead…

It may seem strange that the poetics essay with which I am at the moment most in love is this one by Laura Riding, Poetry and the Good, in that I view her renunciation-of-poetry-in-favor-of-truth to be positively killjoy, and that she makes this admonishing statement in the conclusion of her essay, which would, I’m sure, condemn me to some very low circle of spiritual failure:

Poets (with whom. I think, the responsibility of looking ahead linguistically beyond poetry chiefly lies) will have the special difficulty – where they see hitherto unseen vital flaws in poetry – of resisting that compulsion to rhythmize words dramatically, and make sensuous play with word-sounds, the satisfaction of which comes to seem happiness. (The Laura Riding Jackson Reader, p. 219)

My very soul, which is as deeply ironicized as it is playful, finds her condemnation here a source of amusement.

What interests me is her characterization of poetry as always-already ineffectual. I find her definition liberating, not frustrating.

….The obstacles to effectuality are built into poetry,, for it has evolved as a substitute for the reality, something to be done in token of something expected to remain undone for all practical time: the moral commitment is transformed into an aesthetic commitment having putatively an ideal equivalence to it.

The ineffectuality of poets is the price they pay for membership in a profession in the exercise of which they are morally pledged to work to bring to human experience the finalities of goodness stored in the truth-potential of words, yet obliged to make t their immediate care to ply the pleasure-potential of words, keeping within the bounds of poetic custom, where the shadow of truth, cast from a visionary distance, is professionally sufficient. Poets are too much creatures of poetic custom to be directly aware of the ordinance of failure under which the operate. The sense of success in the ear-charming and min-beguiling artistries dulls their capacity to appreciate the underlying quality of the performance a spiritual speaking, which is always a quality of truth by too much failed-of. They become incapable, almost, of distinguishing between the high élan of the entertainer and the impulsion moving the tongue of the initiate of the Good, spirited with the love of words. (p. 209)

….

The whole meaning-content of poetry is more matter for surmise than for direct apprehension and much more can, thus, seem to be said than in the ordinary way – so much more is left to be surmised.

A stylized failure-of-expression is the verbal heart of poetry’s sacrosanctity. It is around this failure, mystically transubstantiated into success, that the spiritual failure-that-is-success of poetry is built….The linguistic ineffectuality is no mere technically rectifiable frailty of poetry, but an organic component of it …. (p. 211)

The writing of poetry, to me, feels like a loosening, a letting-go into the flux of failure. Even when its composition asks for highly engineered forms, it is still the same experience – perhaps even more so, for one’s labor becomes all the more ridiculous in the face of all that ineffectuality. But rather than thinking of ineffectuality as something to lament, I prefer to acknowledge and even celebrate it. Why else call a book Folly?

I know there are many poets who, to borrow Riding’s term, want to transubstantiate their ardor for the good into their poems. In doing so, they can create interesting effects, because their ardor will fight with their form’s inherent ineffectuality. But “at the end of the day” they are still creating interesting effects.

There is also a connection, to me, between Riding’s condemnation of the sensuous and decorative in poetry with the kind of misogynism you hear issuing forth from the likes of Hamlet (to Ophelia: “the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what
it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness“) – a fundamentalist distrust of artifice which I distrust in turn. I’m sure she (as a maverick feminist thinker) would not have appreciated my making that connection.

Seems to me, that to be poets, we have to learn how to do a (metaphorical) dead-sea float*. Else we’ll be ravaged by the gap between the products of our artifice and our own good intentions.

(*NB: In our poems. I speak not at all of all of the rest of our actions, which I hope are at all times glowingly ethical.)

I have realized I’m conflating two very joyful recent encounters, one with James Davis, with whom we spent Gary’s birthday. Upon receiving a new toy from his generous papa, he jumped up and down, literally, crying, “Rocket balloons! Yay! Rocket balloons!”

The other encounter was with Sparky, our neighbor-down-the-hall’s new Boston Terrier puppy. Sparky and I have a mutual adoration agreement. If Anthony (our neighbor) puts him down at the other end of the hall, Sparky comes running to me in that overzealous, sideways- twisting-sausage way that puppies have. His little claws click on the tiles, and he kisses and teethes on me with totally unabandoned delight. I don’t have a picture of Sparky, but here’s another Boston Terrier pup so you can get the idea:

Then last night I dreamed we got two more cats… what does all this mean? Do I want a puppy? more kitties? a curly-haired son?

Anyway, the small, large-headed living things are very adorable.

Nugatory Wax Milk Goats

for Kasey

It is human nature to stand in the nucleus with a disfigured wax forehead,
mewling and praying in our goathair suits. Paxil
passes into the breast milk, rending law and opinion nugatory.

Glyph, gnarl, gnash, gnaws, gnome, goads:
the magenta waxworks seraphim stick like rapacious leeches,
milking a he-goat into a frenzy.

Nudities, nugatory, nuisance, numbness, numbness, days are numbered:
the children are emanations of their parents, and dependent on milk emanations.
The milk emanations are dependent on the pulsation of caprice.

The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx, inconsequential and unconducive.
A steadied wolf-fish takes out the acrimonious goats’ milk with a slouched shamrock pea,
soft as butter, soft as down, soft as silk, yielding as wax, and tender as chicken.

The crusted wax bean varies the disqualified ball-peen hammer with a leggy hobble skirt.
A nudist’s nudities trek the nugatory flashing discount viagra, and fade breathlessly
while taking another gobble of the randy-cake.

The man raises his head and looks at me with yellow goat eyes:
“you work in the bad old fashioned way of modeling wax dolls – singularly superfluous
with proudleduck contours.”

Glass, wax, silk, wool, hair, feathers, and even wood – each with an emerald
turkey foot at the top, like the milk of our superlative loveliness.

This nugatory acidophilus milk ferret wants out, emitting catcalls in the unerect carnuba wax.
The hyoid Fermi also warbles with dispersive suffixation — comb, trash and dead bees strained out.

I have been digressing for all that. Let us return to our goats – their treacle and their infomotions. Gluten, albumen, milk, cream, protein; treacle; gum, size, glue; wax:

the little capricorns, vascular soothsayers, shoot off their sprouts.

Hanging Things

(for Sei Shonagon)

Encounter with a Crocodile

You may be familiar with this post that appeared on the Poetics List on 7/19:

I am very disappointed in POETICLIST.
I am a poor Korean writer suffering a deadly Korean environment.
After barely solving the translation barrier, I sent the message with
my homepage http://www.xqqqx.com
where my texts are.
But getting no reply makes me so sad.

I just want to communicate with people who love expermental
literature, since there is nobody in Korea.

I went to look at his website, and wrote him back:

Uh Ak, I think you are an AWESOME poet. I’m glad you complained
because otherwise I might not have noticed your poems.

I’m an English teacher and I have a lot of Korean students. They
seem to be having a good time in New York. Why not come and check it
out here if Korea is such a deadly drag?

Kamsamnida,
Nada

What I didn’t add to that email, although I thought to, to show that I am not instantly credulous, was the line, “You write better than Kent Johnson!” Although I may have had some suspicion along those lines, I thought that it would be interesting to play along with an interesting story… and if “Ak-Uh” (my misalignment of whose name BK Stefans didn’t hesitate to mock) were indeed real, that would be an even more interesting story.

Gary, tackling his own suspicions, did some detective work, and found out that 1)Ak-Uh means crocodile in Korean, 2) that the site was indeed maintained by a Korean person and a Korean host. He also found some evidence of the work of another Korean writer whose poems seem to have influenced Ak-Uh’s. Of course, none of this evidence discounts the wily machinations of Kent Johnson, or some other copycat hoaxer.

So… I was delighted to receive this email from Ak-Uh:

Thank you for your reply.
I am really in bad situation.
I am 20 years old boys.
I have been rejected from EVERY college I applied.
I want to know more details about your education.
I really need somewhere to escape.
oooooooooooo sad….
Nada! Nada!

This appealed, of course, to the do-gooder educator in me, and I wrote back to him:

I teach ESL at Pratt Insititute — have you tried applying there? They actually have a writing program that is pretty good. The only problem is that it is quite expensive.

Did you know that some people on the Poetics List think you are a hoax (a fake — not really Korean)? There is a poet named Kent Johnson who writes as poets from different countries. Some people think you are him or that you are trying to do something like him. For example, they are saying your name is strange, and not a real Korean name — that it means “crocodile.”

Why don’t you send me some proof that you are you? Then I can tell everyone that you really exist!

Nada

And he replied (it’s useful to note here that the “time sent” indicator gives evidence of a time-zone with a nine-hour difference):

My real name is Sungyon, Hong ???.
Ak-Uh is my pen name.
It means crocodile as you indicate.
I use Ak-Uh olny because of its sounds.
How can I prove the big theorem that I am the person I am.

It is so weird situation.
I attach some pictures of mine.

And you can read the korean version of my works at www. xqqqx. com.

I don;t have money to study in USA, I really want to.

I prefer writing to other kinds of art, since it can be done without money.
I am in the Peking university preparatory course.
Professors here are disgusting. They have heart-less ideas about art and study.
All I am doing is learning Chinese 25hours a week and exams 3 times a week.
I can’t afford to compose a new poem.
Furthermore, I must join the army as Korean law unless I am in a college.

The most important fact is I am going to be fired from that course.

Best.

This was quickly followed by another email:

I omit something to tell you.
Ak-Uh is not good enough at English to write English mails like this.

I am the best friend of Ak-Uh. But all the messages were Ak-Uh’s. I
traslated them with my poor English. I am a mathematics-major-student
in KAIST(www.kaist.ac.kr)
I attach my picture too for clarifying.

I think Ak-Uh is a gifted artist. He really need some help.
But he doesn’t have money. Ooh, it is a very difficult request…

Anyway I and AKUH are waiting for your explanation to other people
that Ak-Uh is
Ak-Uh. Someone who wants to lie never write this kind of mail asking for help.

(I won’t appear in later mails. You understand that ‘I’ is AKUH.)

I then wrote asking him if he would mind if I posted his pictures and emails on my blog. He happily gave permission. So… here’s the evidence; you can judge for yourself. I also wrote asking him to send his phone number in Korea, where he will return next month. If he’s not real, then I salute the hoaxer for his techno-affective bravado. If he is real, I would like to help him find a way to study in the USA.