The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom

by Noah Eli Gordon

Overview

Poetry. A new collection from one of America's most intriguing poets, this is Noah Eli Gordon's heftiest book yet, presenting a decade's worth of honed, tightly-knit lyrics, poetic sequences, and prose experiments. These are beautifully convulsive, boldly contained poems, orchestrating from the musicality of syntax—the underlying allegro and tempo changes in the way we speak, write, and subsequently think—into an enactment, rather than a representation or description, of experience. Operating under Emerson's assertion that "[e]very word was once a poem," THE WORD KINGDOM IN THE WORD KINGDOM argues for the necessity of highlighting artifice even in the face of so-called empiricism. Here a sort of intelligent, discursive speed is harnessed from rhetorical arguments swerving at the last moment from expectation. Whether under the influence of the word or the kingdom, one herein is held captive by the joy of continual surprise.

"Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, and Clark Coolidge were among the poets I looked up to as a youngster. When I think of poets from my generation who bring that same shock of living magic, Noah Eli Gordon tops the list. I'm always excited for his latest book, each a departure for unknown terrain. This is essential poetry, which is an urgent way of saying highly recommended!"—CA Conrad

"I've known Noah ever since he was a flower on fire. This book burns."—Dorothea Lasky

"With humor, anger, intelligence, & wonder, THE WORD KINGDOM IN THE WORD KINGDOM is a quiet masterpiece. NEG writes with such a high level & understanding of craft & technique that you can pick any page at random & spend the rest of your life staring into it like a solar eclipse."—Mathias Svalina

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936767380
Publisher:	Brooklyn Arts Press
Publication date:	04/01/2015
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 7.20(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Noah Eli Gordon is the author of several books, including THE WORD KINGDOM IN THE WORD KINGDOM (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015), THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER (Ahsahta Press, 2013), THE SOURCE (Futurepoem, 2011), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007), which was selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series and subsequently chosen for the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award. He is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program in Creative Writing at The University of Colorado- Boulder, where he currently directs Subito Press.

Read an Excerpt

The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom

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By Noah Eli Gordon

Brooklyn Arts Press

Copyright © 2015 Noah Eli Gordon
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936767-38-0

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CHAPTER 1

    AN EXAMPLE

    A subway car
    passes through the room
    in which I'm discussing
    examples of enjambment
    with several poets. We talk
    about these lines by Schuyler:

    A gray hush
    in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue
    into the sky. They're just
    going over the hill.

    No, it's not a subway
    car. It's simply the windows

    of a subway car, positioned
    precisely where they'd be

    were they
    attached

    to a subway car. I point
    in the direction

    the windows, for all
    we know, are

    still headed, say
    there's
    my example.


    FOR EXPRESSION

    Sing a song of utterance. I mutter to you.
    Sing a song of expression.
    —Gertrude Stein

    For the feel
    in my palm
    of an apple
    fresh from
    the market
    Against the
    viscous
    transparent skin
    of marketing

    For the condition
    of air
    Against air
    conditioning

    For the brightness
    of the room made
    brighter by an
    illuminating act
    of the imagination
    Against ingredients
    and blueprints

    For the continued sweetness
    of chilled plums
    Against plumage

    Against the rifles
    the aggressors
    of elegant discourse
    display as flags
    For riffling elegantly
    through discourse
    to display
    aggression flagging

    For the curve
    of any Adonis's cock
    Against a lecture
    on how to cup
    the sack while stroking

    For the renewal
    of sunsets and moons
    seasons tiny saplings
    soups of all kinds
    Against novelty
    stirring in the wrong direction

    For patronage
    Against patrons

    For music
    Against museums

    For the body
    in its folds
    and dignities
    Against collapsing
    garment factories

    For love
    Against labels

    For workers
    Against force

    For the mask's respect
    of the contours
    of the human face
    Against hanging it
    on a wall
    backwards

    For paintings
    Against frames

    For pleasure
    Against its conscription
    to a purely cerebral
    paradise

    For standing
    however
    you see fit
    Against posturing

    For buildings
    Against scaffolding

    For the suit
    Against the numbers

    For the public
    Against the publicist

    For the sudden sharp beauty
    of seeing anew
    again
    the same
    old world
    Against the art
    of money
    the artifact
    the art of facts
    and administration

    For water
    that rises and falls
    the earth
    those on it
    Against the pull
    of the village
    explainer

    For weather
    Against forecasts

    For the cow
    Against the brand

    For Stein and Césaire
    Vallejo
    Sappho Rimbaud
    Against Cage and Warhol
    Google
    Apple
    Monsanto

    For the capacity
    to imagine
    your nakedness

    Against endless images
    of it

    For the thread
    Against the mill

    For the attendant enchantment
    of a phrase
    tuned
    and trued
    Against taking attendance

    For enchantment
    in general
    Against the generals
    of entrenched
    imagination

    For the clit
    Against the clock

    For poles and zones
    Against polling and zoning

    For plasticity
    Against plastic

    For the poets
    grown old
    before us
    Against their mistaking
    admiration
    for eros

    For a wooden door
    painted green
    impervious
    to weather
    Against whether
    or not
    one has
    to open it

    For options
    Against operators

    For photographs
    of flowers
    all over the place
    Against poems
    where people
    aim telephoto lenses
    at one another

    For pushing
    the last bits
    of daylight
    through
    the door locks
    Against polishing
    your crown
    behind the curtains

    For a girl
    floating
    for a few seconds
    across
    the parking lot
    Against what's only
    an ordinary
    skateboard
    underneath her

    For the desire
    to walk around
    and around the block
    like a man who takes
    pleasure
    in circling something
    he knows he won't
    apply for because
    he's certain he'd get it
    Against applications

    For another poem
    textured
    with the sky
    night
    stars
    and the sun
    Against its textual history

    For the messianic
    and
    Against the messianic
    and
    For the freedom to be so
    and
    Against the fastidiousness not to


    HISTORICAL CRITICISM AND
    THE IMAGE OF THE HEART

    Its beating was always allegorical. One hears it
    in a scene where someone crouches
    behind something, or in the subbasement
    of one's own response to what the day, stumbling in
    at an odd hour, strews across the bedroom floor.
    Isn't fashion last year's scandal declawed?
    The books we'd loved best told us on every page
    to wake, whether to hunger, cannon fire,
    or the warmth of another's body. As for painting,
    its greatest achievements, of which you know
    I'm no authority, are replicated in
    wrinkled sheets. By you, I mean the both of us.
    A new focal point brings the promise
    of finally seeing for the first time what we'd been
    looking at all along: sunsets. Then photographs
    of sunsets. Then better photographs of sunsets.
    Then perfect digital copies. Then computerized
    reenactments. Then, simply, ones and zeros.


    ON DISMANTLING
    CLASSICAL VOCABULARY

    Two tragedies occur simultaneously
    A hummingbird coming apart in thin sun
    is neither first nor the second one
    Hear morning recast in sound
    the body's trace symmetry
    When is the age of analysis not upon us
    its orange curtains filtering
    twice the sun & twice
    the sentence from which sun falls
    The difficulty of replicating darkness
    too much blue around the black earth
    too many binaries making uncomfortable beds
    Goodnight air full of astronauts
    There is no tree. There is no modernism


    WHAT DO I KNOW

    for Michael Burkard

    I was going to read your new book tonight going to start
    on the balcony where I go to smoke standing next
    to a square of light let out by the little window there
    which gives enough to see if all the apartment lights are on
    since I still haven't changed the bulb above the porch a waste
    I know I was going to read but the snow was too strong
    it blew right into the first few pages so I closed the book
    and smoked with my back to the wind which felt
    deliberate and defiant at the same time I mean the act
    not the weather although I know either way works really
    ten years ago I wrote "gushing self-pity" next to a poem
    in one of your books I'm sorry ten years ago I thought I knew
    everything about what poems should do now I know I know
    very little and that it's better this way standing here in the dark


    GEPPETTO ALSO MADE
    A MOTHER

    for Michael Friedman

    There is nothing imaginary
    about a piece of wood.
    It has its life, like you
    or I, and returns to the ocean.
    Gravity won't allow the wheel to roll
    up a hill. Having no imagination, a piece
    of wood doesn't care
    if it becomes a fan blade,
    a coffee table, or a little wheel
    on a wooden horse. Real marionettes
    have no strings. Real horses, arriving
    at hills, may or may not climb them.
    This has nothing to do
    with free will, an invention
    of purely academic interest.
    The Chinese invented stirrups,
    and their hills have been covered
    with horses ever since.
    On a clear day, the ocean goes on
    forever. Like Oedipus alone
    on a hilltop, this is a literary device
    used to demonstrate the value
    of beachfront property. Italian
    literature has never had room
    for gravity. Like you or I, it has
    its life, returning always to the ocean.
    It doesn't care if it becomes something
    to cover a coffee table.
    Strings pull real wooden horses.
    This is an example of the imposition
    of free will on inanimate objects.
    There is nothing imaginary
    about the historic importance
    of the stirrup's role.
    On a clear day, it is possible
    to see wooden storks
    clouding the air.


    A THEORY OF THE NOVEL

    Something miraculous

    springs from the next sentence, but already
    you'd skimmed to the end.

    * * *

    A boy's attention, corralled
    in sand, pebbles, and the sun's
    slow clockwork, fails

    to take in

    the wreckage, though
    years from now, he'll

    describe it perfectly.

    * * *

    So will you.

    THE WORD KINGDOM
    IN THE WORD KINGDOM

    for Julie Carr & Tim Roberts

    An eleven-year-old's inability to find Eden on a map
    returns the word kingdom to the Word Kingdom, where the end
    of history, with its tail in its mouth, talks back to St. Augustine
    in antiquated sign language. The sign for a second river.
    Instance. Another second river. Sign for a concrete universal
    byproduct, for virtual models of interesting parts
    of the earth. Sign for endangered species, for endemic
    spectacles. Sign for the question: And then who went down
    to the ship? And who stood in the bluest spot of a green field
    in a white shirt and whittled futility at passing airplanes?
    A bad gambler in the abstract makes a good Samaritan
    imprisoned in her own activity. Now, the seven-year-old
    tells her brother the door he's labeled Nowhere can't be there.
    The speaker at the computer isn't silent. It's silence.
    In the Word Kingdom, the sad human you, theoretical
    as money, pushes its toy train in saintly straight lines.
    Pray for an ark full of adverbs dissolving midair and ungoing
    grammar's perennial it leaves tracks. They're yours, your tracks.
    Your causality. Your tautological cabin in the woods
    hermetically aflame with the coldest of fires. The best way
    to describe a forest is to run from it. The best arrows are
    aimless, egolessly yielding to air, bent into age, broken on badges.
    Reject multitudes. Eject pilots. Jettison the cargo bay. There there,
    persistent soliloquy of a present inexorably diffuse. Fox in
    the sewer. Face in wood grain. A fish with a name. A crow's chorus
    of me me me replacing the word kingdom in the Word Kingdom     with ants and their us makes noise in the new realism
    picture a story and point once upon again this time.
    Tell me the once upon a time again—picture of a story
    pointing to the universe. Halfway between halfway between.
    Or picture a story and point. The universe is everywhere
    authoritatively. Each that that that the baby names:
    little embraced idea—our resplendent lacuna grown larger.
    As though nodding in utter agreement udder's bereavement,
    every child falls down a well, father in tow. Same well.
    Same story's indifference. Same day moon in winter sun
    above an island of garbage. Every desire, aiming in the same
    direction. Every direction, aimless. Every aim, directionless.
    Odysseus to Olive Oyl and Popeye to Penelope. Dust to plastic
    and love's digital reenactment. If I think of rain I think of rain,
    but that doesn't mean it does. That that that Word Kingdom wants
    wants us to write a room full of it, umbilically delinquent.
    First, there was a picture without its spectator, then the world
    bursting with spring. Curbstone. Gravestone. A cradle's throne.
    First there were pigeons, then the sky fell. Now, for a dollar
    they'll take your picture on this pony. Or better, for five
    you can ride. Loving names and their lovely arrogance
    mimicked in swaddling clothes. In the Word Kingdom
    the word kingdom can't straddle its horse. It doesn't have one.
    There are no animals there. No currycombs, stirrups, saddles.
    No bridles or yokes. No A for antelope. O for oxen refusing
    to be aimed. Wake to the Word Kingdom sawing its legs
    to fit the iron bed, then look at how light hits this desk perfectly
    and leave it there. It's the only map to Eden, which is only a map.
    Tissue paper to body tissue issuing a bracelet for the wrist
    as a house for the guest is a dead bee in the light bulb dumb as any.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom by Noah Eli Gordon. Copyright © 2015 Noah Eli Gordon. Excerpted by permission of Brooklyn Arts Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

1,
AN EXAMPLE, 15,
FOR EXPRESSION, 17,
HISTORICAL CRITICISM AND THE IMAGE OF THE HEART, 26,
ON DISMANTLING CLASSICAL VOCABULARY, 27,
WHAT DO I KNOW, 28,
GEPPETTO ALSO MADE A MOTHER, 29,
A THEORY OF THE NOVEL, 31,
THE WORD KINGDOM IN THE WORD KINGDOM, 32,
BEST AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL POETRY, 36,
POEM FOR NEDA AGHA-SOLTAN, 37,
WHY I AM NOT AN ACADEMIC, 40,
EARTHLY SITUATION, 41,
2,
TEN WAYS TO PUT TOGETHER AN AIRPLANE, 45,
AN EXPERIMENT IN ARTIFICE AND ABJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY, 47,
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY, 58,
TEN WAYS TO TAKE AN AIRPLANE APART, 59,
AN OLD POEM EMBEDDED IN A FINAL THOUGHT ON THE AIRPLANE, 70,
3,
CONTINUED ETHICAL ENGAGEMENT OF THE NARRATIVE TRADITION, 75,
BEST AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL POETRY, 76,
EIGHT MEDITATIONS ON ENORMITY, PETRIFACTION, AND WORK, 77,
THE LAUGHING ALPHABET, 85,
LUGGAGE ARRIVES IN THE WORLD WHERE IT WAITS, 88,
ARS POETICA, 89,
A MIDNIGHT VILLANELLE, 90,
PALATIAL IS THE COMPASS THAT SHALL USHER US IN, 91,
THREE POEMS FOR THE END OF THE EARTH, 92,
ANOTHER COMMENT ON THE TEXT, 95,
AN OLDER VERSION OF EMERGENCE, 96,
AGAINST ERASURE, 101,
4,
SCORCHED ANECDOTE, 105,
PEDAGOGICAL IMPERATIVE, 107,
A NEW KIND OF POEM, 108,
THE LAUGHING ALPHABET, 110,
YAR'S REVENGE, 118,
BEST AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL POETRY, 119,
SUMMER IN WINTER IN SUMMER, 121,
THE JOHNS, 126,
THE COMPASS, 129,
FLAG, 131,
AN ACOUSTIC EXPERIENCE, 133,
5,
THIS, 137,
AFTERWORD, 150,
acknowledgments,

Editorial Reviews

03/16/2015
Gordon (The Year of the Rooster) addresses head-on questions about the possibilities of language, wondering where the distance between a word and its referent is greatest, where it collapses, and how poetry can inhabit those spaces and manipulate them. “In the Word Kingdom/ the word kingdom can’t straddle its horse. It doesn’t have one./ There are no animals there. No currycombs, no stirrups, no saddles.” Through assertion of what is not present or possible, Gordon manifests those very situations and objects, framing them in an argument about the fundamental rifts between what a word is, what a word does, and the material world. This simultaneous evocation and negation is a counterpoint that runs throughout the book. His poem “For Expression” (which was included in Against Expression, a 2011 anthology of conceptual poetry) offers a meditation on polarity in a long sequence of two-part assertions, such as “For the condition/ of air/ Against air/ conditioning,” “For workers/ Against force,” “For the capacity/ to imagine/ your nakedness/ Against the endless/ images of it.” Gordon’s poems can veer into the didactic, even smug, but they also happen to be an admirable call for more inventive and rigorous attention to the complex transactions of word, poem, and life. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly