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.

Zachary Schomburg, Pulver Maar: Poems 2014-2018

A MOUNTAIN’S JOB IS

TO JUT

It’s true, I did get fired

from the globe factory.

I put a beach in N.D.

and us on it but then

I put us in the waves

in a bed on the waviness.

It’s best to just put things

where you think you

want them. When I think

of mountains I think

of beer, and how clean

everything can be.

When I think of buoys

I think of the darkness.

but also I think of seals.

An island is the wrong

symbol for loneliness.

I never wanted two cats.

Now I have nothing

in cats.

I’ve been hearing Zachary Schomburg’s name for a while now, reading a poem here and there in a journal or an anthology, but his latest, Pulver Maar: Poems 2014-2018 (Black Ocean, 2019) is the first full-length collection I’ve had the opportunity to go through. The author of the poetry collections The Man Suit (2007), Scary, No Scary (2009), Fjords Vol. 1 (2012) and The Book of Joshua (2014)—all published by Black Ocean—as well as the novel Mammother (Featherproof Books, 2017), Portland, Oregon writer Schomburg’s Pulver Maar: Poems 2014-2018 is an assemblage of multiple sequences, sections and suites of lyrics, accumulated phrases, lyric fragments and prose poems, sitting at more than two hundred pages in total length. Alternating, sometimes at strobe-light quickness, between darkness and light, the press release informs that these are poems that “are playful but not all play; they carry a humanity and an acute awareness of what it is to try to make a life, whether you’re a mountain or dust or just a human.” And then, in the author’s own description of the collection: “[This] is a collection of poems written between 2014 and 2018. Some of the poems are long, and some of them are short.” There is something utterly fascinating in the way Schomburg builds his poems, composed as first-person narratives with layers of surrealism, absurdism, narrative storytelling and theory. These are poems that evoke, twist and loop into and around expectation until there is nothing left but where the poem has set you, there, down. As the fourth poem in the fifty numbered poem sequence “OARS” reads:

I don’t know where I am.

Maybe on the ground in Australia.

Something’s poison tongue licks my eyelash.

I stare back at it with one eye.

It grows even.

I touch a beating in a throat.

A nod hello?

There is heft to this collection, and there are times I’m reminded of the surrealism of Canadian poet Stuart Ross through these poems, and at other times, especially through the section “THE FUTURE / THE BABY”—a suite of poems that hold either the title “THE FUTURE” or “THE BABY”—Boulder, Colorado poet Noah Eli Gordon (both for structure, and for the fact that he often employs this kind of multiple-poem sharing a title format [see my review of his most recent book here]). Each poem in the suite exists almost as a portrait of the moment where something turns, and in the last direction you might have expected. And sometimes the unexpected turn is in the realization we were going in an altogether different direction all along. His collisions, putting one thought or idea against another, are casual, calm and incredibly striking, and often illuminating through just how unsettling and unexpected they are. As he writes in one of the poems titled “THE FUTURE”: “I say I have something / I’m about to say.” As partof a 2018 interview posted at Neon Pajamas, Schomburg speaks to poetry, and the process of putting a manuscript, and then a final book, together:

Part of poem writing for me is to know, upon returning to poems after a while, which need water, which need trimming, which need polish, which need to be buried, and which need to be left alone. Most just need to be buried or left alone. But a books of poems isn't just made of poems—it's made of paper, and design, and artwork. Thinking about how the book is born from the poems into a thing is a really fun part of the process, and something that I get to do with other people. Writing the poems is solo work, but the rest of it comes alive in collaboration. For each Black Ocean book, with Janaka Stucky's blessing, I've been able to collaborate with my long time friend, Dennis Schmickle. Dennis has designed all of my Black Ocean books, and a few Octopus Books too. That process is a rewarding one, and one that takes on nearly as much importance for me as the poems. Often, through design, the poems will change to fit some concept within the design. The poetry can bend to the intention of the book as an object too. I'll change them to fit the page, so to speak, or to fit within the tone of the book that D is creating. The poetry may feel dated to me personally, eventually, but the book never feels dated. The book will bury us.  

Noah Eli Gordon, Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down?

The Problem

Someone tied to a parking meter the dog that barks every time a woman approaches to insert a quarter. This makes her the subject. It is a metaphor for the aristocracy of money. One performer plays both leash and dog. Another stands in for the meter. I play the woman. Someone appears offstage. It is often difficult to tell a king from a queen. The problem is no one plays the difficulty.

Boulder, Colorado poet Noah Eli Gordon’s latest poetry title is Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2018), a collection I’ve been looking forward to seeing ever since I first saw selections from it in Ugly Ducking Presse’s 6x6 back in 2012 [see my review of such here]. Similar in structure to his collection The Source (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], the poems in this new work all share the same title, “The Problem,” with the bulk of the collection made up of prose poems, with none longer than a single page. Unlike The Source, made up of poems titled “The Source,” his collection of poems each titled “The Problem” isn’t titled The Problem, or some otherwise clever wordplay, but (obviously) Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down?. With the alternate title, it is as though the collection isn’t overcome by the repetition, and the potential of repeating a structure that had worked in the past. It would be curious to know if his initial thoughts on the final publication of The Source was indeed an influence, as this collection was composed during the period he was most likely seeing The Source through to publication, as he writes as part of the acknowledgments: “These problems were encountered mostly in Brooklyn, NY, in the summer of 2010, lingering on in Denver, CO, until about February of 2011.”

The Problem

In order to keep things straight, she tapes a timeline marking the important events of her novel to the bedroom wall. I think this could be the first sentence of my novel. The problem is it’s already written.

The poems are incredibly sharp, and composed as odd narratives, descriptive passages, alternate perspectives and even hesitant wisdoms, a number of which take their time to sink in, as any new perspective or wisdom might. The book is dedicated to American poet Sawako Nakayasu, “in return for the gift of her translation / of Ayane Kawata’s poem ‘Running Posture’ / in Castles in the Air,” a poem and book I’d been previously unaware of (although I’m an admirer of the work I’ve seen of hers). Discovering the poem online on the publisher’s page for the book (a book I now have to order, clearly), it reads:

I am being chased and so I run, though the problem lies not in the fact that someone is chasing me, but in the posture with which I run away.

The problem, Gordon might suggest, is that I haven’t read exactly all the same works he has, nor he me, altering the ways in which I might approach such a book as this. While I might not be aware of that particular translation, my initial take on the collection compared Gordon’s use of the prose poem, composed as a blend of gestural koan and short story, to Sarah Manguso’s short story collection, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney’s, 2007). Manguso’s is a book that heavily influenced my own debut short story collection, The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014), both of which were composed out of a sequence of untitled and self-contained short, single-paragraph prose fictions that meet somewhere in the blend of essay, short story and musing (and a book, it would seem, I began working on during the same period Gordon composed Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down?). One might argue that all three collections, Gordon’s included, work from the founding premise that something is wrong (or at least amiss, or slightly off), and the awareness that there is always, constantly, something else happening in the poem, just out of view, out of reach and out of focus. What is curious about Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? is in seeing the accumulation of poems structured around a similar premise, one that allows “the problem” to sometimes be the entire point, and other times, the distraction, and occasionally an idea that steps carefully out of the way of the poem, even while remaining the engine that drives both the individual pieces and the book as a whole.

The Problem

He sends a hurried email to a distant relative detailing the particulars of his upcoming arrival—dates, places, a somewhat transparent formal tone, and immediately regrets not having done so in a more intimate fashion, with a postcard perhaps. Perhaps with this one, the one where the sun is either rising or setting, flanked by high clouds and flecked with pink, like the meat of a flower whose name he’s failed to learn. It’s as though he’s realized there was music playing because there isn’t anymore—the sudden silence of the world as much an indescribable flower as it is the description of one staring directly at it. The sun, rising and setting, setting and rising. But not, as we know, in that exact order.

There is something about the shift of the title that displays the strength of the collection, and what might have allowed this book to be as strong as it is, providing an opportunity for the structure not to overwhelm the work, and the author, perhaps, to himself step out of the way, and allow the work to shine through. I’ve been an admirer of Noah Eli Gordon and his work for some time, but this might easily be his strongest work to date, in part due to the subtlety of the poems, made so much more clear through the deceptive straightfowardness of the premise: Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? is not, in fact, a book about problems or telling you what the problem might be. It is a book that focuses on all the small details that lead up to that point of declaring something, true or otherwise, to be the actual problem. Does that make sense?