OBLITERATING HISTORY IN THE PLEASURE OF HOLDING
FORTH
A first line
is reason enough for a second, for a segment, unisexual & solitary as an
organ. Our doctor operates a mechanism & calls it anatomy. Our dancer
operates in music, which is the same. Whorled, lance-shaped leaves smear the
window. Windy instrument, windy agency. Active principles everywhere
charging
inertia. Syntactic propositions rest a harmonious unified totality on a
reupholstered couch. Smash the shell to bits & hear the ocean in this lime.
As the author
tells us in the book’s acknowledgments, the poems in Noah Eli Gordon’s The Year of the Rooster (Boise ID:
Ahsahta Press, 2013) were “composed and revised between 2004 and 2012.”
Composed with bookending prose-poems sections, the core of the collection is the
seventy-one page collage-poem “The Year of the Rooster,” named for the tenth of
a twelve-year cycle of animals in the Chinese zodiac, alongside a shorter
piece, the sprawling twelve-page “The Next Year: Did You Drop This Word.” Through
the four sections, the collection works from precision to collage to excess to
precision.
Merged with a
cycle of five elements, the most recent cycle of the Chinese Year of the
Rooster, February 9, 2005 – January 28, 2006, was known as the “wood rooster.”
Those born during the Year of the Rooster are said to be brave, romantic,
motivated, proud, blunt, resentful and boastful. The title section that centres
Gordon’s newest poetry collection is composed as part dream, part admonition
and part letter, with some sections written as a series of journal entries,
directed at “Roo,” as though attempting a map in which to find direction. Some parts
are even written as a series of chants, citing repeating rhythms and phrases,
making parts of this collection as much for the ear as for the eye. Composed in
so many directions, the title section writes across an enormously large canvas,
one contained only by the bookended prose sections, holding together what
otherwise might be unwieldy.
What a
rooster is
stubborn alienation
fertile
adornment
a common
weather vane’s
most
compatible match
steady indication
of which way
winds are blowing
distinctive
double squawk
muffled wing beats
O my lord, revered priest, devotee
brave shame brooding
all my erect
ones
how many kids
equal a
kingdom
not present
a hen takes the role
stops laying
& begins to crow
O my lord,
revered priest, devotee
what a rooster is
blah, blah,
blah, the body
There are
elements of Gordon’s previous works that explore the emergence of patterns and
repetition, such as his poetry collection The Source (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2011) and current work-in-progress,
“The Problem,” both of which are constructed out of poems each with the same
title. Through the repetitions emerge the small differences, the distinctions
akin to a series of daily photographs taken from the same spot. In The Year of the Rooster, the repetitions
aren’t so obvious, but the poem wraps around a central core, a centre, the
foundational image of the Year, the “Roo,” and the polyphonic nature of
multiple voices, of which the author is but one: “You & Roo’s collaborative
poem / on the ills of capital / You & Roo’s condemnation of nudity / with
all clothes removed // Blah, blah, blah… the body, etcetera” (p 45).
You have
something to say, why not say it?
It’s nothing
They gave me
a trumpet & I think of the movies
&
loneliness like a bottled-up doubt
Ice on the
lake
Did you mean
lacking?
I’m not talking
I am
After
details, everything quaking
A history (if
that’s the word) being opened
You don’t
share a house you share
rooms,
feathers, an even memory’s wake-up call
It’s stagnant
but the
Rooster’s a trope, regal
without
subordination & attendant baggage
Even wasps
have feathers
No, too
skinny
Everything
skinny is ominous
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