Nada Gordon lectures in Ottawa at The Factory Lecture Series and reads via “VERSeFest presents” on Sunday, March 29, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.
rob mclennan: There’s a lot of information swirling around this “backwards bio” of yours, from studying with the Language Poets in the Bay Area in the 80s to writing a thesis on Bernadette Mayer’s work to your work as one of the Flarf poets in the 2000s. Can you speak a bit of some of that trajectory? Which Language Poets, and what do you think you learned from them? Or Mayer’s work, also? How did you get from any of there to here?
nada gordon: Ah, you are asking me to speak about causality, which is something we love to find (though we can’t always prove it) retrospectively. I think we need to go back further into the murky past, before these literary coming-of-age experiences, to consider my bildung, a word that reminds me of binturong, a curious animal about which I am curious but have not yet encountered. My bildung may be of interest (to someone, perhaps) mostly insofar as it is a record of countercultural forces: my parents were beatnik-adjacent, and were introduced, I hear, by a bongo player in Berkeley, where my mom studied literature and my father also wrote poetry.
To put a finer point on it, I emerged into an already “alternative” environment that morphed as the culture morphed from beatnik>hippies>punk>avant-garde (langpo, NY School, Flarf). It seemed to me like a quite natural continuum, always wanting to be on some level “disruptive,” but not in the sense that the corporate “creatives” use the word. I didn’t plan out this trajectory so much as follow its drift. Despite my tendency towards transgression, I love a lot of canonical poetry. As a tween, I had a green hardbound anthology: The Major Poets: English and American, edited by Charles M. Coffin. I read it very attentively, since poetry seemed to be something of value that one ought to pay close attention to, and much of what was in it seemed to me to be incredibly weird and mysterious, like these lines from John Dryden’s “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”: The dead shall live, the living die/ and music shall untune the sky. I still have the book, and it still carries for me a feeling of fustiness mixed with fascination.
How I drifted into the heady atmosphere of Language Poetry specifically requires another story. I have to start with seventh grade. I was going to a really normal junior high school where the teachers had a knack for making interesting things like grammar incredibly boring. “The boy threw the ball to me” was the example sentence for teaching us about direct and indirect object. I did not see the point of this banal sentence or this way of teaching, and I felt stifled, alienated, and bullied by the other children. I now see this bullying as fundamentally antisemitic, since they were making fun of my curly hair calling me Brillo Pad–and following me after school: “why do you have such a big butt?”... essentially mocking my Old World body type. Those bitches, with their Charlie’s Angels hair and platform shoes! Thankfully my mom and temporary stepfather took me out of that school and put me in an alternative school, where we had a kind of morning encounter group, did improv, sang in a white-kids-singing-Black-gospel choir, and went hiking together. The school fell apart after a year, sadly, but one teacher, the one who led the choir, volunteered to teach those who wanted to pass the GED. We studied in his living room and backyard. He taught us basic algebra, the roots of the blues, and simple research skills, and somehow, with his signature saying that I had completed eleventh grade work, I passed the exam at age thirteen.
I started college soon after, and I’d go for a semester and then drop out, especially after I was given a Ramones record on my fourteenth birthday and rather suddenly went from flower child to punk rocker. I would spend days Situationistically wandering the streets of SF with my friends, hanging out with all sorts of decadent and bizarre people: junkies, strippers, musicians, fans. The editors of Search and Destroy gave me books, like surrealist poetry, Les Chants de Maldoror and À rebours. I feel I got as good an education during these extracurricular semesters as I did in school, wandering in City Lights.
Although I did have a sort of Plath-imitative period as a young teen (who doesn’t?), I always felt there was something…unsavory…even…icky…about confessional I-centric poetry. Identity poetry also seemed to me to be very corny and limiting. I needed an alternative that was more in line with my countercultural, disruptive experiences and imagination. So when, after my spotty attendance at community colleges, I started at San Francisco State University when I was 18, I was fortunate to have Stephen Rodefer as my first creative writing teacher there.
He was very very handsome, like an old movie star, and as a teacher he was somewhat reserved, which lent him extra mystique. And, as one really ought to in a CW class, we spent much more time reading interesting things and talking about the readings, instead of [shudder] “workshopping.” I remember one activity in particular that turned my world around: he brought in a page of idioms he had photocopied from a dictionary, and had us make a poem from them. Ah, I thought: poetry is construction/reconstruction.
It was the heyday of language writing. The Bay Area writing community was very much involved with SFSU. In Kathleen Fraser’s Writers on Writing course, which consisted entirely of guest speakers, I was exposed to, among many others, Bruce Boone and Bob Gluck, Ron Silliman, Steve Benson, and Carla Harryman, with whom I later worked (as well as Larry Price) at The Poetry Center there. There was a thriving reading series. In my second year at SFSU, as a senior, I took Barrett Watten’s class on Russian formalism, and this was perhaps the most useful to me in helping me to articulate my own developing poetics, and to think about what “poetry” means in the most expansive way possible (that is to say, it is not necessarily to be found within the confines of “verse”).
Whew. You asked also about Bernadette Mayer. I learned about her when I undertook the reorganization and reshelving of all of the books at the SFSU poetry center. This was also how I discovered Clark Coolidge. These discoveries were electrifying. When I started at Berkeley in the MA program in 1985, I felt that she would be a good subject for my thesis. I didn’t want to write about anyone I knew, because I felt that would be awkward. Her work was expansive, mutable, unusual, and various, so I thought through it chronologically and considered how it developed. The chapters are all online on my mostly defunct blog, except for the chapter on Midwinter Day, which I will happily send a pdf of for anyone who is interested.
I mostly felt, in this group of writers, that I had “found my people,” except that they were all 10-15 years older than me, and most of them were from Ivy League backgrounds that couldn’t have been more different from my peripatetic hippie/punk childhood. Also, there was a palpable male dominance one felt especially in the Q and A sessions after talks that was perhaps not the very best model of group dynamics for a young woman writer. On top of that, the “poetry wars” started to feel very oppressive, so when I was 24, I up and moved to Japan, where I stayed for eleven years.
rm: That does seem quite the response. How did your work respond to leaving that particular landscape, and landing more than a decade in Japan? Were you publishing much by this point?
ng: Nope. Just a couple of little chapbooks. I wrote in notebooks constantly when I was there, though, taught a couple of poetry writing courses, edited a one-issue journal, and participated in the mainly English-language poetry reading scene. That scene was actually great fun, since readings tended to be more like festivals, with musicians, dancers, and performance artists.
Ways my work was transformed by being there for so long:
Asymmetry
Odd numbers (threes/fives)
Desire for things not to sound settled or finished
Piercing responses to and endless craving for total
atmospheric multisensory beauty
Mixed feelings
Just right/just wrong juxtapositions
A wild avant-garde (butoh, Terayama Shuji)
Dislike of clarity and brashness
Nature
Language struggle
Misunderstanding, mishearing, misapprehension
Return of the repressed in the form of melodramatic
extremity
Funny-haha and funny-peculiar
Delicious and smells good
Ancient + modern
Animism
A world of dew…
Etc.
While it was destabilizing to be there, it was also, after the first year and a half of culture shock, calming, and I was grateful to be cushioned against the sturm und drang of the USA, a place I remain decidedly less fond of.
rm: How did you find engaging with the poetry community upon your return to the United States?
ng: It may be hard for others to imagine just how disorienting it was to move from a long time in Tokyo to NYC. I had been to NYC a couple of times in my teens, and had fun in what was then its wildness (now it’s just exhausting, not so wild), but I had no idea what to expect about living here. Was it safe? Could I walk around? Was someone going to squirt pretzel mustard on me as a prelude to a robbery? Would I lose my refinement? Would I get rough around the edges?
I didn’t know the new idioms. Someone would say “don’t go there,” in a kind of intonation I’d never heard, meaning, don’t inquire further. I felt like Rip van Winkle. It was 1999, just the beginning of the popular internet, and I’d been in this incredible delicate straw and paper world for so long. I really missed the smells: dashi at dinnertime, or the smell of tea roasting at a tea shop. NY was mostly odiferous, except for those roasted cashews sold from carts on the street; they smelt better than they tasted.
As far as “the poetry community” goes, there wasn’t really one. There were many: micro-affiliations, chosen lineages, closed clubs, generations, tendencies. It was fascinating to meet people I’d been paying attention to since my teens: Alan Davies, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Abigail Child (whom I had met briefly in the Bay Area years before), and Bernadette Mayer, most of whose oeuvre, of course, I knew from the inside out. That all felt very cool. But it also felt like a renaissance court, and I had to figure out the hierarchies, the norms, and the topics of current conversation.
A friend tells me I seemed insufferable, because I came into this city acting like I knew everything and was self-assured of my talents. I hadn’t “paid my dues” or “put in the work” required to become visible and connected in the poetry world. But, you know, I’d been developing and evolving…just…elsewhere.
rm: Vladislav Davidzon recently referred to you as “Queen of luscious maximalism.” How do you see yourself and your work in terms of that particular title?
ng: As much as I enjoy learning about the dramatic histories of monarchies, I am anti-monarchical except regarding butterflies. It’s true that the title of my Selected Poems is The Sound Princess, but that is a literal translation of the Japanese word otohime, which means the little button one pushes in a toilet stall that makes the sound of flushing so that no one can hear you tinkle. It’s true that my writing often tends to be luscious and maximalist, but that’s a sort of simplistic characterization (sorry, Vlad dear). I can also do acerbic, if not quite shibui, and I’m not a total stranger to poetic compression/condensation, either. I don’t think all dichten=condensare, for sure. I suppose I’m a bit contrarian. If literary fashion leans one way, I will lean the other to balance things out. But when I do do high femme I do it with all my ornamental might; on that you can rely.
Born
in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives
in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with
Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and
non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories
(University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections the book of
sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin
Press, 2026), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of
above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current
Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he
spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the
University of Alberta.
