The Sound Princess: Selected Poems 1985-2015, Nada Gordon
Subpress Collective, 2024
The collection is organized in sections, each of which suggest an excerpt from a manuscript, chapbook, book or anthology: “from lip,” “from foreign bodies,” “from Are Not Our Loving Heifers Sleeker Than / Night-Swollen Mushrooms,” “from V. Imp,” “from Folly,” “from Selected Rushes,” “from Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf” and “from Vile Lilt.” While Wikipedia offers some really fascinating information on Gordon—“Gordon was a precocious poet, exposed to poetry early by parents who both wrote poetry, she remembers dictating poems to her mother at seven. Her junior high school poetry teacher was Cole Swensen. While still in her teens, she taught a poetry workshop at the Berkeley YWCA.”—I can find what I only suspect is a woefully-incomplete list of her published titles-to-date: Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker Than Night-Swollen Mushrooms? (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001), Swoon (Granary) (Granary Books, 2001), Foriegnn Bodie (Detour Press, 2001), V. Imp (Faux Pr, 2002), Folly (Roof Books, 2007), Scented Rushes (Roof Books, 2010) and Vile Lilt (Roof Books, 2013). The Sound Princess offers a curious cohesion of writing through and around collage—including an array of visual collages, such as the cover, by the author herself—repetition, unusual rhythms, swagger, deflection and deliberately mangled speech. Gordon seems very much a poet embracing composition as something intellectual but also joyful, and freeing, akin to what the late Toronto poet bpNichol referred to as “serious play,” and the visual collages that accompany, including that of the cover, provide further illustration of her sense of play, blending elements of high and low art, pop culture and classical portraiture, in unusual ways to see how the unified whole might possibly land.
···“I’m almost grasping that thing…”···
I’m almost grasping that thing. it’s a little too far away.
here’s to languor (that lets the lines appear and dissolve)
a poem at fringe-y
reaches kept melting like alice’s rushes couldn’t catch
anything but the
words WHISTLE and PHILOSOPHY
listening to words and trying to write, no, writing other words.
thinking the words
in sound as I write them, putting them through my ears, it’s
a slower thinking.
syllabic. or in japanese
a MORA. the pause filled with other language
thinking what to
write next.
thought of a shape
of a poem, gnarled, a redwood burl the shape of japan, I
thought I would go
home and write this poem but really I was only thinking of
a shape that there
are no words to fill out.
As New York poet and critic Drew Gardner offers to open his hefty “AFTERWORD” to the collection: “The poems in Nada Gordon’s The Sound Princess were written between 1985 and 2015 in three different coastal cities: the Bay Area (through 1988), Tokyo (1988-1999), and New York (1999 to present). Gordon’s poetry fuses Bay Area L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E +A Poetry with New York School poetry, bringing in a broad range of styles, approaches, and techniques, including various permutations of Dada, Surrealism, and Romanticism. She riffs-switches among these modalities, and her poems range from lyrical to zany to intentionally provocative. Her originality lies in the liveliness of her synthesis: she foregrounds playfulness and unpredictability in her entertaining, demanding and often prickly poetry.” The poems included offer a large range of lyric and dislocation, collision, collusion and placement, providing sound and meaning clangs, clashes and clusters across such a wide canvas. What else is poetry meant for or to do but push against the boundaries of what it should or should not? She pushes the boundaries, even while giving homage to the past, such as the poem “···Asia···,” composed “after William Blake” (the structures of which make me suspect homophonic translation) that includes: “Leonard Nimoy sitting in the front heard them cry! / And his shudd’ring waving hypocritical sousaphone / Went enormous above the red flames / Drawing clouds of flaccidity thro’ the heavens / Of ultrasonic singsong as he went: / And his Books of greasy air & gossip / Melted over the land as he flew, // Heavy-waving, howling, colorizing.” There is such a delight in these works, one that relies quite heavily upon a deep attention to the myriad possibilities of sound. Listen as Gordon composes a piece via deliberately misspelled words and awkward phrases, as the poem “Harmoronity” begins: “If one who control all sound do not accept other people to / making sound, it would be a very boring society. // Do you know some person do not speaking for you or / opposite situation so you are stuff, much more all people / can not speck and make sound. // I believe that it is a very serious problem of society.” Managing a timeless quality that provide a pure immediacy to these works, the poems included here showcase thirty years of joyfully complex composition of performative and gestural works, providing logic out of seeming-nonsense and collage; hers is a clarity and as fresh a sense of the lyric as I’ve see in some time. As Gardner concludes his piece:
The poems in The Sound Princess cover a range of modalities bound together by the adhesive elements of rebelliousness and fun rendered into a poetry of outlandishness, variety and invention. Gordon’s maximalism includes many dramatically engaging elements playing off each other: lyricism, emotional intensity, abstraction, subversion, confession, conflicted eros, conceptualism, narrative, philosophy, N+7 relationship drama, cuteness, anger, bodily functions, cut-ups, surrealism, pastoralism, uncouth psychedelic shifts in setting and thought, bricolage, observation, rudeness, prestidigitation, lucid retrospect, clouded retrospect, chopped and screwed impressionism, allegory, and apostrophe. It’s almost too much, but the final result is a poetry that is challenging, stimulating, and entertaining.
rob mclennan’s short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in August 2024. His next poetry collection is the book of sentences with University of Calgary Press, the second in a suite of collections that began with the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022).