Noah Eli Gordon (1975-July 10, 2022)

Like so many, I’m stunned to hear of the death of American poet Noah Eli Gordon, author of over a dozen poetry books over the past two decades, including The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003), The Area of Sound Called The Subtone (Ahsahta Press 2004), INBOX (BlazeVOX, 2006), Figures for a Darkroom Voice (with Joshua Marie Wilkinson; Tarpaulin Sky, 2007), A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007), Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007), The Source (Futurepoem Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], The Year of the Rooster (Ahsahta Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (Solid Objects, 2018) [see my review of such here] and The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom (Brooklyn NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015) [see my review of such here], as well as numerous chapbooks. He was a prolific reviewer and critic (I think he even reviewed the Kate Greenstreet above/ground press chapbook for Rain Taxi), the editor/publisher of Letter Machine Editions and most likely a whole slew of other things I either can’t recall or don’t know, as well as a singular presence on the literary scene. His was stoic and solid confidence across uncertain terrain, composing thoughtful poems that went to the most unexpected places, and rocked the foundations of what made poems possible, and confused those who wished for more straightforward or flashy language.

I first encountered a selection of Gordon’s work (I can’t recall if I caught a stray poem or two in a journal, prior to this) through the since-late Peter Ganick being good enough to mail me, circa January 2006, a copy of a chapbook of Gordon’s he’d produced, twenty ruptured paragraphs from a perfectly functional book [see my review of such here]. It was Gordon’s subsequent chapbook, winner of the 2007-2008 Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Award, Acoustic Experience (Pavement Saw Press, 2008) [see my review of such here], that really struck my attention, and prompted me to take his work far more seriously. The chapbook included a piece that stayed with me for years, the tone and structure of which I attempted to replicate repeatedly, without luck:

An Old Poem Embedded In A Final Thought on the Airplane

About five years ago, I wrote a short poem called "Yesterday I Named a Dead Bird Rebecca". The title came to me while in Florida visiting family. Going for a short walk, I passed the carcass of a crow swarming with small flies. There was something so repugnant about this particular dead animal that, although oddly aware of its lack of any sort of odor, I was, nonetheless, overcome by a strong, debilitating nausea, one which I suspect arose simply from the smell I imagined the bird to have. The poem reads:

were a defused heart
wintering the clock

time kept
by counting birds

I'd call flight
a half-belief in air

a venomous lack
when the ticking is less so

What could be more obvious than that this poem transposes its prepositional way of understanding gravity into the structure of its own identity? Something that lies beyond its lone sentence speaks to me now as the kind of nostalgia one feels upon watching an airplane pass overhead. It means making distance disappear.

Gordon and I interacted occasionally over the years, whether his ’12 or 20 questions’ interview in 2007, or through above/ground producing a chapbook of his (with accompanying artwork by Sommer Browning) a few years later. I admired the seriousness of his approach through lyric play, including his experiments through repetition, composing entire manuscripts of poems that each held the same title; it’s a bold experiment if it doesn’t work, and through Gordon, it provided some incredible possibilities. If you don’t know his work, I would recommend seeking it out, especially some of those last few titles. His absence will leave a considerable space, and I am sad for it, especially knowing he leaves a young daughter. I can’t imagine much worse.

There is currently a space for donations to offer support Sommer Browning and their daughter Georgia. Please help if you are able.

Sommer Browning, Good Actors

 

In Alice Notley’s Waltzing Matilda the narrator reads a friend’s poems, contends with the ambivalence of marriage, tends to sick children, gets hammered, makes an ass of herself, worries about making an ass of herself, reads the news, frets about money. Good god, am I describing my life or a book of poems? This book was published in 1981. I was published in 1976. (“Denver is Home to the World’s First Quiznos”)

It really is a delight to see a third poetry title by Denver poet, artist and gallery entrepreneur Sommer Browning, her Good Actors (Birds, LLC, 2022), following her collections Backup Singers (Birds, LLC, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Either Way I’m Celebrating (Birds, LLC, 2011) [see my review of such here]. Good Actors is a collection of first-person narratives that work through and around the ways in which we present and perceive ourselves, offering commentary and contusions and confabulations, from the poem “To Drunk To Fuck” (possibly referencing the 1981 single of the same name by the Dead Kennedys), rife with its suggested drunk-level of typos, slurred speech and flailing, to the poem “People I’ve Gone to the Movies With,” a piece simply listing the first names of those she has presumably gone to see movies with. She writes an intimacy, articulating out private moments of connection as well as moments of foolishness, depression, isolation, single parenting and multiple definitions of freedom. She works through pop culture references, from the original Twilight Zone to Alice Notley poems to the documentary Grey Gardens, as she writes to open the brilliant “Into-an-Empty-Swimming-Pool-Diving in Love”:

I think Grey Gardens (1975) is a perfect movie. It also happens to be good. Grey Gardens is a documentary about a mother and a daughter, both defunct relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and their poverty-stricken lives in a run-down mansion called Grey Gardens. They are both named Edith, but the mother is called Big Edie and the daughter, Little Edie. There is no movie more about women than this movie. This movie is about what happens when women are permitted to become feral. What happens when women are permitted to revel in their own psychology and plumb it (plummet), free from some parts of their panopticon. I see in these women my entire life, not the details of course, but a thick layer of it: the worries and obsessions and deep connections and fluctuating esteem.

When Little Edie talks about feeling trapped at Grey Gardens, Big Edie says to her, You can’t get any freedom when you’re being supported.

Little Edie says, I think you’re not free when you’re not being supported.

Then a bit later Little Edie adds: It’s awful both ways.

I think it interesting how, as her narrative progresses, she identifies with both characters, whether in turn or simultaneously, as she does in her poem referencing early Alice Notley poems: seeing herself, at first, in Notley’s narrator, and later, in Notley’s husband, Ted Berrigan (as portrayed in Notley’s poems, at least). These are poems that claw at possibility and salvation, at losses both intimate and isolating, and how love can simultaneously rescue and fail. “I care little / For shame.” she writes, as part of the poem “The American Night is Young,” “You were happy until / You weren’t. // You are / Until you aren’t. // A lover’s mouth in your ear / Isn’t a wet willy, // It’s communication.”

A dark and ridiculous humour reminiscent of that of the work of Vancouver Dina Del Bucchia, Browning’s is a poetic shaped by perseverance and bad jokes, observations and commentary, much of which seem to focus on the simple refusal to be knocked down by anything, even down to the title of her debut. “To me,” she writes, to end the poem “Life: A Draft (Prologue),” “I’m surprised I’m still alive. // An aphorist who hates aphorisms. A self-helper who hates the self. // Every tornado begins as a cartoon dog fight. // The joke is you’re born. // That’s why they call it a delivery. // Numb nuts.” Her poems are scrappy, smart and self-aware. She seems attracted to characters relegated to side or minor characters, even within their own stories; who rebel against their own erosion or erasure, refusing to sit quietly, insisting on fighting, even flailing, against the darkness, or even their own best interests. The poems are both revealing and deflective, and there are moments where it is difficult to know if she is writing from a deeply personal space, or writing the outline around it. As the poem “Anxiety” begins: “If I write the script / You know I’d have you say, Hold these melons / in the produce aisle. // And you also know, one of us will have to / grab your crotch. / Life is like that.” Perhaps, in the end, it is all “good acting,” as the characters she references (including her narrator) are occasionally aware of how they require to present themselves, as though everything is, in fact, not actually crumbling around them.

As well, she offers a thread through the collection of commentary akin to a Greek chorus, every poem followed by another offering of “If you tell me which Twilight Zone episode you remember best, I can tell you what your problem is.” Each of these is followed by a description of another classic episode, as well as her corresponding commentary, offering exactly what the opener describes. One of mine, for example, is offered: “Your problem is: You are in conflict, because you believe in justice, but also think the world is meaningless.” The thread through the collection opens as a sequence of self-contained one-offs, but eventually move into a narrative of its own, with interesting conclusion.

Anne Cecelia Holmes, The Jitters

ODE

None of this concerns you but

sometimes it’s better to pretend closeness

than live in fear of rejection. Things I know:

car sickness, the Mall of America, all-night

murder dreams. Childhood was a joke.

Slinging imaginary rifles over my shoulder,

falling out of trees for negative attention.

Now I talk to you like I have nothing

to lose, no grip whatsoever. I sneak into

the neighbor’s basement just to be the criminal.

I call you in the middle of the night to say

I’m not a ghost yet. It’s funny because

in Chicago I have a real brother but what

a boring story. Things I don’t know:

portion control, easing depression,

the optimal gesture.

Nothing I say will make you love me

and there’s real honor in that.

The author of two poetry chapbooks, Massachusetts poet Anne Cecelia Holmes’ first trade collection is The Jitters (Grand Rapids MI: Horse Less Press, 2015). Built as a collection of compact lyrics, the poems in The Jitters are fearless, vulnerable and razor-sharp. These poems revel in even the smallest miracles, attempt to comprehend the darkness, and take no shit from anyone. As she writes to open the poem “WORLD’S TINEST EARTHQUAKE,” “I’d like to say what’s been said / and say it better. Break // accountability exactly open. / When faced with an ultimatum // I choose the most destructive force, / haul everyone onto the lawn just // to get tough. Please trust me.” These are poems born of a quick, dry wit, composed as a series of observations, critiques and direct statements that take no prisoners. “When nothing changes I finally love myself,” she writes, in the poem “MEMORY BRICKS.”

SOME RELICS

All of this hurts the facial expression.

I’m sick of watching you fall over

the television like you’re the one

inside it, and more than ever

I feel like a tugboat in that scene.

Don’t blame me for your

bad cartography. I can’t be

an acrobat because

my heart isn’t ripe.

You said this trampoline

makes you dream of chairs

but to me the backyard

is a butcher shop.

Bring me a bag of rocks

and I’ll carpet you in them.

I’m going to be

an admiral in all this.

I’ve been increasingly aware over the past few years of a particular strain of American poetry: poets, predominantly female poets, composing very striking lyric poems that combine savage wit, subversion, distraction and use of the straight phrase, blending lightness against dark subject matter. If I were to attempt any kind of list of examples, it would include Matthea Harvey, Natalie Lyalin, Dorothea Lasky, Amy Lawless, Sommer Browning, Emily Pettit, Bianca Stone, Hailey Higdon, Emily Kendal Frey, Anne Boyer and the late Hillary Gravendyk, and now, Anne Cecilia Holmes. What connects the writers on this list is the way they each compose tight lyric bursts that slightly unsettle, managing to utilize both light and dark humour, and push to shake at the core of expectation, discomfort and the otherwise-unspoken. There is something about how each of these authors, including Holmes, have embraced elements of the confessional mode through a compact lyric that can be used to voice flashes of anger, annoyance, frustrations, loneliness and violence, and even conversations on evil, as Holmes writes in the final poem in the collection:

POEM FOR WHAT I’M NOT ALLOWED

Ode to the murderer I imagine

in every band of trees. To

my blood cells, to well-ordered systems,

to my head absolutely thick

with disease. Ode to the dress I slept in

and wore the next day, to the cilantro

I planted in all the wrong weather.

Ode to the fucking cosmos. Ode to my face

against your face, to poems that want to

like us but don’t. Ode to being

the bloodless one, the neurotic one,

the one ignoring your spiritual journey.

To your clothes in my basement

covered in ink. To I wore this when

we first met, to I want to hurt you like this

and then like this. Ode to quitting my job

to stay excited, to exposing myself

to my neighbors, to embedding so many

rocks in my chest. Ode to Tulsa.

Ode to the 900-foot Jesus, to keeping

my hands in my pockets most of the time.

To my brothers and sisters, to all my

enemies, to imagining every way

to die in every possible scenario.

Ode to crying when I can’t find my shoes,

to feeling like god will punish me for

sins I don’t believe in. Ode to taking

pictures in front of strangers’ houses.

Ode to my jacket covered in yellow.

Ode to how I wish you were built

out of wood panels. Ode to staring

out the window in the worst

of the house. Ode to your age,

to my age, to how I react improperly

when reenacting your fate. Ode to

so few phenomenons. Ode to

absolving myself of everything.

To singing what I’m doing, to arguing

what counts as “artifact” and “alive.”

Ode to my wandering pacemaker.

Ode to my big fat heart. Ode to

pretending I’ve never been where

I used to live. Ode to hoping you’re

a goner. Ode to grieving nothing

each time a villain is born.