Nada Gordon’s Interests (Scantily Clad Press, 2009)
My review of Nada Gordon’s e-chapbook Interests (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) is now on-line at The Chapbook Review.
Here’s a chunk from the second paragraph:
…the poetic list-form is the ur-poetic form and some of my favorite poetic lists can be found in the following texts: Jorge Luis Borges’ “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” François Rabelais’ “Anatomy of Fastilent as regards the outward parts,” Andre Breton’s “Freedom of Love” (which is also, coincidentally, one of my favorite love poems), John Yau’s “I Was A Poet In The House of Frankenstein” (also one of my favorite movie poems), Homer’s “Catalogue of Ships” (for purely historical reasons), the “Food” section of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, John Ashbery’s The Vermont Notebook, Christopher Smart’s “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry” (especially the line, “For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command”), the obligatory Whitman passage that begins, “The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,” a Christopher Dewdney poem whose title I’m now forgetting (it’s in the New Long Poem Anthology), Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings, Raymond Queneau’s Elementary Morality, and the bit from Rimbaud’s “Second Delirium: Alchemy of the Word” that ends, “erotic books with bad spelling, novels our grandmothers used to read, fairy-tales, little books for children, old operas, meaningless refrains, crude rhythms.” Now I can add to this unending and idiosyncratic list Nada Gordon’s latest chapbook Interests, which Gordon (who is perhaps best known for being a member of the Flarf Collective) terms a work of “insta-poetry.”
Interests is definitely an entertaining read…I recommend it!
And while you’re on-line, check out my latest news hay(na)ku at 3by3by3.
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