Flarf Orchestra CD release party at Le Poisson Rouge, Fri 1/13, 7:00
Showing posts with label Nada Gordon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nada Gordon. Show all posts
6.08.2011
Nada Gordon, Scented Rushes, Roof Books, 2010Scented Rushes is a series of highly artificed poems of seduction and frustration. It moves from the excited frustration of approach to the bitter frustration of rejection. The book is loosely epistolary, addressed to a distant love object, one who is truly objectified, having little or no presence beyond the engine he creates for the poems. He is a governor in the engine of the book. The poet's obsession is presented as a given, the reader is given no information about what makes this person appealing to the poet. In some respects the book fits the troubadour model of seduction poetry, though gender-inverted. This structure, and the general aura, which feels like Cindy Sherman crossed with Spongebob Squarepants, creates the feeling of a strangely ambiguous musical theatre project.
These are love poems, but they are not erotic in any direct sense. There is very little in the book addressing questions of pleasure or gratification. The dirtiest thing that is said is "I want to see the front matter." These are aggressive romantic provocations launched into deep space. Their drama comes from the poet wrestling against herself.
The undercurrent of playfulness and semi-epistolary orientation call to mind some obvious parallels, Bernadette Mayer for instance. The drama and conviction that fantasies count calls to mind Lady Gaga, and the love of absurdity and considerable energy and liveliness to a perhaps more unlikely parallel, Benjamin Péret.
The style is violently florid, entailing thickets of verbal laciness brought to an aggressive, renaissance festival extreme. The tone sometimes veers into prime mid-70s British prog-rock.
"Just where the snail falls from the eye of the sun"
Gordon's extravagantly flowery style and seemingly intentional abuse of adjectives is counterbalanced by an unwavering, expert feel for the arrangement of language.
The combination of forces that come into play as the poems progress from an agitated kind of hope to disappointment and anger produce some startling moments:
"So the rhapsodies now turn inward, like condoms on ghosts."
or this, from a poem set on a subway:
"Everyone has earbuds -- and was once a tiny zygote with DARK IRISES alone in a liquid place."
There are poems that use flarf methods to engage with vocabularies and subject matter that depart considerably from what one might normally expect in dramatic love poetry. These are some of the strongest moments in the book, where the traditional sealed cosmos of the obsessing poet/lover allows for uncanny intersections with the vastness of social quantity.
7.20.2010
I'll be reading this Thursday in Brooklyn with Shanna Compton, Katie Degentesh, Brandon Downing, Nada Gordon, Sharon Mesmer, and Gary Sullivan.
539 Altantic Ave.
Brooklyn
6:00pm
11.24.2009
7.09.2009
2.21.2009
8.18.2008
From Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise:
Born in 1862, the son of a shopkeeper turned civil servant, he studied at the Paris Conservatory, where he struggled for several years to write a cantata sufficiently dull to win the sinecure of the academically oriented Prix de Rome, He finally succeeded with The Prodigal Son.
Stravinsky ... There was a fling with Coco Chanel....
For Stravinsky, as for many other composers, technology became a new kind of folklore, another infusion of the real.
"Why tonality as such should be thrown out for good, I can't see," Ives once wrote. "Why it should always be present, I can't see."
... by shattering these trite associations into fragments, Ives draws closer to the source.
When Duke Elllington set about making his name, he went for advice to Will Marion Cook.... "I'd sing a melody in its simplest form," Ellington recalled, "and he'd stop me and say, "Reverse you figures..."
...there was an element of nature-mysticism to Webern's method. On a hiking trip in 1930 the composer wrote ecstatically of the experience of being lost in a snowstorm, of walking into a whiteness that was like a "completely undifferentiated screen."
...Ludwig Bauer could have been thinking of The Measures Taken when he lamented that political fanaticism on both the right and the left was devaluing the life of the individual. "The I is disappearing..."
Prokofiev had a gift for what .... Bakhtin called the "carnivalesque" - farce, parody, irresponsible merrymaking, mock grandeur.
"The modern composer must change from a parasite into a fighter."
There was a Communist cell within the Group Theatre, but most members understood the project to in largely aesthetic terms, as a corrective to the intellectual flight from society.
In 1935, through Goldbeck, he met Bertolt Brecht, who challenged him to "write a piece about all kinds of prostitution - the press, the church, the courts, the arts, the whole system."
"I was driven into Paradise"
..."Any composing strategy which is wholly 'rational' is irrational in the extreme."
(Stockhausen) took a particular interest in the semi-independent movement of jazz melodies, the way they floated above the beat in changing values.
he began to look at a orchestra the way a scientist looks at a gas cloud.
"Welcome to the Terrordome" is the Rites of Spring of black America.
When in 1999 (Boulez) was asked why so few major works of the fifties and sixties had become repertory pieces, he blandly relied, "Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener."
Born in 1862, the son of a shopkeeper turned civil servant, he studied at the Paris Conservatory, where he struggled for several years to write a cantata sufficiently dull to win the sinecure of the academically oriented Prix de Rome, He finally succeeded with The Prodigal Son.
Stravinsky ... There was a fling with Coco Chanel....
For Stravinsky, as for many other composers, technology became a new kind of folklore, another infusion of the real.
"Why tonality as such should be thrown out for good, I can't see," Ives once wrote. "Why it should always be present, I can't see."
... by shattering these trite associations into fragments, Ives draws closer to the source.
When Duke Elllington set about making his name, he went for advice to Will Marion Cook.... "I'd sing a melody in its simplest form," Ellington recalled, "and he'd stop me and say, "Reverse you figures..."
...there was an element of nature-mysticism to Webern's method. On a hiking trip in 1930 the composer wrote ecstatically of the experience of being lost in a snowstorm, of walking into a whiteness that was like a "completely undifferentiated screen."
...Ludwig Bauer could have been thinking of The Measures Taken when he lamented that political fanaticism on both the right and the left was devaluing the life of the individual. "The I is disappearing..."
Prokofiev had a gift for what .... Bakhtin called the "carnivalesque" - farce, parody, irresponsible merrymaking, mock grandeur.
"The modern composer must change from a parasite into a fighter."
There was a Communist cell within the Group Theatre, but most members understood the project to in largely aesthetic terms, as a corrective to the intellectual flight from society.
In 1935, through Goldbeck, he met Bertolt Brecht, who challenged him to "write a piece about all kinds of prostitution - the press, the church, the courts, the arts, the whole system."
"I was driven into Paradise"
..."Any composing strategy which is wholly 'rational' is irrational in the extreme."
(Stockhausen) took a particular interest in the semi-independent movement of jazz melodies, the way they floated above the beat in changing values.
he began to look at a orchestra the way a scientist looks at a gas cloud.
"Welcome to the Terrordome" is the Rites of Spring of black America.
When in 1999 (Boulez) was asked why so few major works of the fifties and sixties had become repertory pieces, he blandly relied, "Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener."
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