Nada Gordon, Emotional Support Peacock

 

Musings on Boys’ Arts

About our lords and masters they were never wrong,
The second wave feminists: how well they understand
Our degraded position: how it takes place
While someone else is making decisions or holding the reins of power or
Just galumphing dully along;
How, when the women are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous equity, there always must be
Men who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On their awesome privilege:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful patriarchy must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the boys go on with their boyish life and the emperor, with remorse
Scratches his balls behind a tree.
In Balthus’ “Thérèse Dreaming” for instance: how she turns away
Quite leisurely from the gazer; her mother may
Have heard nothing, no kind of cry,
But for her it was not an important failure; the dim light shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the white
Panties, and the expressive delicate girl that must have seen
Something amazing: an artist watching her with his eye
Had something to make and painted calmly on.

Further to Oakland-born and Brooklyn-based American Flarf poet Nada Gordon’s recent The Sound Princess: Selected Poems 1985-2015 (Subpress Collective, 2024) [see my review of such here] is Emotional Support Peacock (Buffalo NY: BlazeVOX Books, 2024). Offering her usual flourish and flair of cover design, Emotional Support Peacock furthers Gordon’s exploration of the lyric through gestural collage, although one that deliberately seems to hold echoes of contemporary American politics and shades of certain poets from the New York School. “It’s my lunch hour,” she writes, to open the poem “SIX FEET AWAY FROM THEM,” “so I go / into the kitchen among the Japanese / plates. First, into the refrigerator / to feed my vulnerable / plumpening torso some leftover curry / and kombucha, with my purple leggings / on.” If you don’t believe me, catch the last three lines of the same two-page poem: “A glass of water / and back to looking for work. My heart is in my / throat, it is Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara.” There is a curious way that Gordon engages in the “I did this, I did that” of a poet such as O’Hara, really weaving it in through already-familiar blends of her lyric collage, as opposed to working any kind of replicant or false tribute; this feels more akin to Brooklyn-based Gordon existing in the geographic space of certain of these poets, certain of these poets, and allowing them space in her particular yard.

Emotional Support Peacock seems less constructed in sections than in titled poem-clusters—“PROFESSIONAL POEMS,” “EMOTIONAL SUPPORT PEACOCK,” “THEY DO TORTURE MEANING,” “UNICORN BELIEVERS,” “MASCOT OF THE APOCALYPSE,” “LITTLE BLUE THING” and “STURM”—and one might suggest this a book of responses, including particular riffs on and around and from Mary Ruefle, Frank O’Hara, Wallace Stevens, offering snark and commentary, critique and homolinguistic translation. She offers the poem title “Musings on Boys’ Arts,” and one might suspect a play on Musee de Beaux-Arts, to poems “composed” by heteronyms (in a Fernando Pessoa or Erín Moure/Elisa Sampedrín manner) “Merely Ruffles,” “Wall-ass Semens” and “Very Tolerant.” And, as ever, with an attendant delight to the way sounds move and sway and gyrate, the lyric recombinant (offering echoes of Toronto poet Margaret Christakos’ own play in this particular direction) equivalent of gestural, explosive fireworks.

Eugenic Ether Poi

A flagellated fee rigor woos the murky poi;
Bad deed tenements let out a nifty gut howl.
As addenda, Ed snuffles—oh swirly!—
And a cad, refereeing, oft tempts the ting-glum lox.
If a reevaluated goofing yins two hurts,
And this condescendingly pimping snowsuit is, um, wuss
Then a reappeared fluffier miniskirt mulls in its yolk, and,
ceding to fleetingnesses, houris play with vinyl polyps.
Like animalarial diffident dingy piss,
a piffling baccarat ebbs opium onto you
with a fleetingness like—ow!—myrrh wool poop.

Highlighting the tensions between how things were and how they have become, Gordon engages with the terrain of contemporary America, including the Trump era, repurposing contemporary twists and terrors and looking at earlier moments, Gordon writes masterful and deliberate flailings, every word set in its own right place. “No ideas but in white kittens.” she writes, as part of “Emotional Support Blep,” a poem subtitled “(outtakes and bloopers).” Further in the same piece, writing: “Trump won because poetry is so bad. / I’m so bored with this glittering wail.” Gordon writes of the mutated American culture and of female agency, dismissal; a collection less about play than a darker and more absurd reordering of salvage, through which one might even survive. “She then flies to art,” she writes, as part of “Grandmother’s Hands,” “and puts on a Periwig / valuing herself an unnatural bundle of hairs / all covered with Powder // My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes, / the damp shine of a goat’s new skin / all covered with sharp chips [.]” Or, as Jules Beckman offers in the “FOREWORD” to the collection:

Gordon’s is the Monster Trucks of poetry. It rolls over everything. She feigns playful irreverence but really she’s knitting you a new mind.

If you don’t like surprises, keep your eyes off the page.

She’s making a point. You’re getting tattooed. Meaning: the singular is fractal. And you’re marked for life.