Novel Pictorial Noise

by Noah Eli Gordon

Overview

An exciting new collection of prose poetry from an emerging talent, Noah Eli Gordon's Novel Pictorial Noise was a winner of the 2006 National Poetry Series Open Competition, selected by esteemed poet John Ashbery. For over twenty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061257032
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/18/2007
Series:	National Poetry Series
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.29(d)

Read an Excerpt

Novel Pictorial Noise

Chapter One

Comes a night-light's landing beacon leads me to pick villainy from a bouquet of the places I'd left to yesterday's map of the future, rubbernecking unintentionally oblique articulation. Loosen a rivet from the lapsed mind and out pours the obvious like thick rain. A sterile neighborhood, a standing ovation, centuries of labor congealing into the desk lamp that lets me mold my own two cents from this paper-clip panopticon. I'm not pushing anything here. Power's got a fulcrum that's half self-portrait, part handicraft. The lever will pivot regardless of where it's placed down. It's the primacy of motion drafts sound.

Novel Pictorial Noise. Copyright © by Noah Gordon. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

The prolific Gordon here takes his cues from Ashbery-who picked this collection for the National Poetry Series-but also from poets ranging from Rilke to Peter Gizzi. In alternating pages of prose and spare verse lines, he plays freely in the realm between theory and lyric: "Sculpture seeks articulation of the air around it. Thus, a heron thrusting overhead mutes modernism." Each of the 50 one-paragraph prose poems starts with a proposition and then attempts to both follow through on its initial lunge and also force the reader off the most obvious trails of thought, usually by tossing in a few surprises: an Ajax bottle, Alice Neel, a "dab of wisteria" and a strip of duct tape make appearances in two lines of one poem. Gordon closes each poem with an artfully clumsy rhyming couplet-"One packs in what one can, as the real point of art is the subtle reiteration of the is, ain't it? The way I see it, we're all partially tainted"-alternately lending irony and vulnerability. While this is a difficult book steeped in canonical and postmodern poetic traditions-meaning it won't appeal to everyone-it's packed with thrills and discoveries that might engender some discussion. (Sept.)

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