Voyeur (after Mary Ruefle)

I have become an orca
washed up like a salty white bitch.

Mammaries,
how do they make them now...
so squeezable–

in this life, I'm already so wasted,

and still spewing
Miracle Whip

~ Merely Ruffles

b. 1952 

I'm Free!

The Norton Got it Wrong

I am glad to be included in the new Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry. I guess I have earned it, having plugged away at this racket for a few decades now? Of course, there are so many others who have as well, and who should be included, but then the book would be even more unmanageably massive than it is now. Poetry has reached a state of uncontainability, and that is an excellent thing.

What is not so excellent, at least from my point of view, is my bio entry in the book.  I suppose they have a good reason for not running these by contributors, and I do recognize the enormity of the task of putting together all the materials. Still, there is at least one bit in mine that is so egregious that I want to go to all my friends’ houses who have the book and black it out with a Sharpie.

Hoover included material from an interview I did with Tom Beckett as a setup for the poems he chose from Swoon, but he rearranged it in a misleading way. He begins by quoting this paragraph:

Gary and I had a crisis, and one of the ways we dealt with it was to write a blog to each other. The material of the blog was therefore ‘natural’ ‘expressive’ language. I used a random poem generator program to generate thirty pages of stuff from the language on that blog.

Now, this blog had NOTHING to do with Swoon, except that it was a (hopeless, it turns out) attempt to recover something like trust in our relationship after his extended clandestine affair with the “poet” Wanda Phipps.  We thought that since we had initially built trust in writing, we might be able to rebuild it.  But the experience of writing that blog was not Swoon. In a way, it was Swoon’s unraveling, an anti-Swoon. Hoover, however, collages the passage in such a way that it seems that Swoon was the blog the passage refers to! I find this vexing, as if someone had misspelled my name on my tombstone.

Beyond this erratum is the problem of the poems he chose to include. The poem of Gary’s that is in the anthology was not written to me, and although it is published in Swoon, it is there as a kind of quotation, not as part of our collaboration.  In fact, Gary wrote it for his first wife.  More disturbing to me is that it hardly represents Gary’s most important contributions to poetry. His bio note mentions the Flarf Klassic “Mm-Hmm,” the poem that launched a thousand Google searches, but does not include it.  This is, to my mind, a grave mistake.  The one that was chosen, “Among the Living,” is a kind of blancmange of a piece that better represents the sort of work coming out of the Bay Area in the early 90s with its shifting pronouns and high, still diction – almost a kind of homage to Michael Palmer – and has nothing to do at all with the mark that Gary made on poetry. If anything, his later poems to me and his Flarf work come out of a reaction against that sort of poetry.

My poem, "Moonscape with Earthlings," in some ways foreshadows my riper poetry: it is playful, Oulipean at moments, sort of macaronic (although in a dumb way; if you understand Japanese you can understand just how dumb, in retrospect), multiform.  I am not entirely embarrassed by it, but it is definitely not my best or my most representative work.

Finally, and I know it is futile to rail against something like this, because it does make some kind of editorial sense, but I can’t STAND that it is a dual entry. I might feel less that way if the poem of Gary’s that had been included was the one to which my poem responded. But the poems don’t read as a collaboration, because strictly speaking, they are not. And beyond that, we each have made contributions to poetry separately that surpass anything we did in Swoon, IM(maybe-not-so)HO. I do think the dual entry is a problem not just because of our vicious divorce, but on historical and feminist grounds as well.  I’m emphatically my own thing, not a Gary thing, even if he was instrumental in helping me get to where I am.

Q & A

A student of Sandra Simond's asked me some questions. Here are some of the answers I sent her:

1.     What influenced you to write poetry?

As a child I learned to talk early and from three or four years old was a voracious reader. I don’t remember so much liking to run around; I liked to read. I read books totally absorbedly over and over and over I suppose there has always been as a result a lot of language in my head. I was the only child of a single mom and entertained myself a lot, writing stories and poems. Writing served (serves) as a refuge from boredom, chaos, and loneliness. At one point – I couldn’t have been very old – maybe 12? – I had a job in a little used bookstore. It may have been there that I picked up a hardback green copy of an anthology titled “Major Poets.” I read this book as I had the books of my earlier childhood, and certain poems really penetrated me:  John Dryden’s “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” D.H. Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians,” Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill.” I liked Shakespeare, Shelley, Plath and cummings – maybe a fairly typical taste-constellation for a young literary aspirant of my generation? Then as now I was drawn to musicality in language, finding music the ultimate “transcendent” art and also interested in how language strains against its limits in poetry, and sometimes breaks through to something like music.

2.     How long have you been writing poetry?

I recall dictating my first poem to my mom when I was about seven.

3.     Are there any poets whom you are heavily influenced by?

I suppose the snowball of influence that encases me is at this point rather heavy, although I’m not sure that naming a few names is a useful exercise here. Because I so often inhabit others’ poems from the inside, and then set about transforming them, it may be more accurate to talk about my outfluences.  I have rewritten poems by many poets: traces of the originals streak the poems themselves.  I like to think of beings and also artworks as porous, leaking into each other in all sorts of ways. In Vile Lilt, for example, I rewrite poems/texts by Marianne Moore, Dana Ward, Havelock Ellis, William Blake, George Herbert, Brian Ang, John Keats, and The Internet. I also rearrange the dictionary a bit.

4.     What is your favorite poem from 'Vile Lilt' and why?

I think I like “Droop Loss Slave” and “Wildcats Can Be Revealed (Vile Lilt)” the best. In these poems the vocabulary is quite various and rich, as are the sources. Many of the words are woven in from online lists of obscure words for spammers hoping to evade detection. I use the words in service of cadence and emotion. At a remove from simple “expression,” they amplify the aesthetic power and complexity of the lines in the way that a wisteria vine climbing over the face of a building makes one more fervently desire to enter or inhabit it. Such baroquerie, to me, redounds upon the quality of the emotion as well, making of the poem a fearfully poignant code.

5.     Any advice on becoming a better writer?

Focus. Trust your impulses. Always have a pencil ready. Try different materials, styles, environments. Have writer friends. Steal and borrow, but always transform. Have a ball. Don’t worry about being “better.”

6.     What is your writing process like?

My process varies according to the piece. I collage a lot, weave things into and around each other. Sometimes I “just write.” I often add and substitute language to existing texts.  I am less likely to subtract (erase) things as this strikes me as the least interesting of procedures, at least according to my “wisteria” aesthetic. I also like to remind myself that nothing is “set in stone,” that I can always bend, twist, modulate, or modify things.  I find myself often gathering language “to use later,” and this is very useful.

7.     What are your goals for the future?

Mainly to write more poetry, as well as other sorts of things, but I am actually superstitious about public enunciations of goals.

8.     What inspired you to write your poem titled 'poetry'? (which is my personal favorite from Vile Lilt)

You may have already guessed that the poem is a rewrite of Marianne Moore’s poem of the same title.  This was actually my contribution to a group “intervention” by the Flarfists. We all wrote poems to submit to Poetry magazine, and each poem had to include a line about a nuthatch perching in a urethra. We all submitted our poems under separate cover; not one was accepted by the magazine.

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

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)

• • 

    Tuesday, April 30, 2013
  • 

    6:00pm until 8:00pm

• 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!

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!

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.

bang!

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

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

I sing it better than Romney