In The Frequencies, Noah Eli Gordon disconnects the flat, utilitarian sentence of normal discourse from any sense of normality - if Google is the new typewriter (that's what my guess is), we need to explore this simultaneously bright and dull instrument, like the Modernists explored the typewriter.  Everything everyone throws into the ether is now getting archived - the collagist can play Cornell or Darger with greater immediate access, cut-and-pasting the linguistics of the market and chatroom and business proposal and USA PATRIOT ACT into his or her oracles.  Gordon is of the first wave of what is sure to be a sea of poets testing the, um, jagged banks of language on the Internet; these banks are evidences of how people actually put their words together.  Gordon is disc jockeying for the Everyman station, where, in classic American fashion, the profane gleefully tangles with the lyrical (which, Gordon reminds us, is just a few dictionary entries away from lynch).

You told me that in the center of every bird there is a tiny radio, but your trying on of different voices won't help the notes exit, & dare I say, you weren't exactly born with wings.  At heart I'm a ham operator, & whether lips make regret & beaks music is irrelevant to a bird's desire to touch.  "I don't understand," you said, "it's easy enough to move on."  I was stuck with fundraising duties, handling the complaint line.  The producer handed me a passage from Moby Dick, made me cross out the word whale, replace it with our call letters & read it over the air.  I was creaking the broadcast, afraid they'd come with torches to oust me from the isolation brought on by excess listening.  I could always mention the albatross, but it'd be the obvious out, besides even a birdsound is a radio sputtering in white noise, enticed more by the bleached pigeon bones on the roof than your lackluster reception.

I haven't met Mr. Gordon, but I'm curious if he has B I R D & R A D I O tattooed on his fingers, "Night of the Hunter" style - the words are repeated obsessively, compulsively, as though they are hardwired into whatever forces conspired to put this collection together.  Telling totems, bird & radio: each could be championed as models for Gordon's book-length poem, which swiftly navigates the currents of now like a bird (skittery, afloat, tuneful) in flight, while also employing poly-vocal harmonies and commentaries, as well as static (like your old boombox).

I latched onto the bird and radio images as insights to the poem's methods.  Some examples I jotted down, culled from throughout the poem/book:

[. . .] the little cities of the radio fold like mountains into the seduction of order

*
There's poignancy in keeping one's mouth shut, in pine needles, which also fade. [. . .]  Some birds flap their wings to keep the air moving, I just stare at the clock radio, wondering why the numbers don't flip.

*
A scratch inside the radio is how many times Rome can catch fire is how many fiddles are hidden along the horizon line.
*
I keep telling myself the more radios I buy, the better my reception.
*
My radio's been walking with a variable foot & maybe I'm projecting here, but I tell it everything.  Everything except I want to be a radio.

Would it be melodramatic to say an angel took herself apart over the airwaves?
*
We were composing the new radio from cut-ups of Edgar Allen Poe's collected prose.

It may be more difficult than ever to talk about poetry and still get laid, if only because it's hard to not sound like an academic, and no one wants to sleep with academics except their students.  To me, to use someone else's language is to signify that you want to sleep with that person.  I personally don't want to sound academic; not because I want to get laid more often, but because I don't want to be somebody's schoolboy. 

Gordon has found a way to talk about poetry in The Frequencies and still sound like a virile adult.  It's not just the use of radio and bird as (possible) stand-ins for poetry.  It's the use of usable, ordinary syntax: "We were getting as close to silence as possible, saturating the space of no thinking, remembering the sound of the radio once removed."  This is almost the self-romanticism and self-deception of memoir writing, but with the abstract presented as the life-hurdle, as the something you can (with courage) get close to, the something that has a space that needs the speaker's attention, the something that produces character-building memories.  One could use the same sentence structure and alter the wording to produce a believable excerpt from a Gulf War memoir, perhaps: "We were getting as close to the enemy as possible, scanning the space of engagement, remembering the sound of battles once fought."  My point is: Gordon is conscious of not only the cliches of poetic imagery and phrasing, but those of rhythm and syntax as well, and doesn't settle for the easy victory of mocking the cliches either (those who can't, subvert).  Instead, he works through to a new space (those who can, resuscitate), saturating it with intelligence, getting as close to poetry as possible, remembering the sounds of poems once believed. 

The Frequencies is at times closer to the emails of a brilliant auto-didactic gas attendant than to anything that announces itself as poetry.  That may be why it feels so alive.  Most of the sparks (there's a lot of sparks) come from watching Gordon work on the border between how poets and actual people write; instead of condescendingly dropping slang words and such into well-worn poetic structures, Gordon commits to the structures of common discourse and finds something human and breathless there.

In Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Peter Gizzi achieves the contemporary dream: he balances accident and precision, shaping trajectories throughout his poems, allowing the vectors and volleys of language to shape him.  It is a book of obstinate lyricism, that accounts for the world as it actually is but still insists on finding a type of beauty, even if it's unfamiliar.  From the title poem:

Not wanting to disturb an ant
I lift my leg to let it carry on
its pursuit of whatnot.
It's impressive - all this matter
crawling, marching, even achieving
an acorn of the instant.
So, this isn't exactly novelty here
babysitting the wood grain, wanting to step up
inside myself.  Courage!, carrots?,
"Charity," the word says in a notebook
--to accept the ink of the possible,
"this proves I have dreamed."

Allen Grossman has developed a beautiful trope for how poems from different stages of a poet's life can interact both with each other and with the poet (in all his guises): in Sweet Youth, he describes the old and young Allen meeting on a stairway, exchanging a kiss.  Gizzi's book performs a similarly passionate, vulnerable and possibly sweetly nostalgic act, but there's a lot on his staircase: the Scottish band Belle & Sebastian, Jim Jarmusch's movie "Dead Man," the history of the lyric, some dust, Wallace Stevens.    The poem "Revival" is like a roll call, a brief history of the human desire to create beauty amidst chaos and death and other violent orders.  Here's a hefty quote, from the poem's beginning:

It's good to be dead in America
with the movies, curtains and drift,
the muzak in the theater.
It's good to be in a theater waiting
for The Best Years of Our Lives to begin.
Our first night back, we're here
entertaining a hunch our plane did crash
somewhere over the Rockies, luggage
and manuscripts scattered, charred fragments
attempting to survive the fatal draft.
To be dead in America at the movies
distracted by preview music in dimming lights.
I never once thought of Alfred Deller
or Kathleen Ferrier singing Kindertotenlieder.
It's good to be lost among pillars of grass.
I never once thought of My Last Duchess
or the Pines of Rome.  Isn't it great here
just now dying along with azaleas, trilliums,
myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox?

The poem has shaken off italics and distancing quotation marks and allows Mahler and Ottorino Respighi (two composers who, in tandem, seem to conjure Ezra Pound) and Browning and Hollywood director William Wyler ("The Best Years of Our Lives" being the years three soldiers and their families lost during World War II) to infect the poem, and thus the speaker, directly.  The list of flowers in the above excerpt can also be found in Wallace Stevens' "The Man on the Dump":

Now, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,
Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),
Between that disgust and this, between the things
That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)
And those that will be (azaleas and so on),
One feels the purifying change.  One rejects
The trash.

Gizzi's technique of allowing Stevens into his poem breathes life into both his poem and Stevens'; one could adopt this as a working role for a poet, walking around and giving soul kisses to every dead and living thing, which is where Gizzi seems to alter from Stevens: by not rejecting the trash. 

One personal riddle I ask myself about a poet's work is: if her poems are a labyrinth, what's the minotaur in the center?   Poet A, I answer, has an actual minotaur.  Poet B has a bunch of mirrors for a minotaur.  Poet C has a picture from childhood, of him embracing his father.  Peter Gizzi, it seems, has a dead or dying person, whom he could have saved, or whom he could still save, or whom he would save if he could, or knew how to save, or even knew the dead or dying person was there.   His poems often seem en route to rescue.  Another personal riddle I make: what kind of world would it be if one used that poet's texts as the blueprint?  All snow and vixen?  Nothing but the poet's backyard?  Gizzi's world would likely look familiar and American in its objects, but would be charged with strange (that is, spiritual) possibilities.  For instance, the possibility of finding the sufficient verb to breathe life into, and to join together, all or many of the poem's nouns.  From "Wind":

Follow the kite tail - its party bows
and ribbons - it will renew your faith

in small things.  A specific word so spoken
will do.  The notes (they are everything)
reconstitute twilight as you enter
the song, the street, the house, the shower.

I think it's the combination of craft and possibility that make's Gizzi's book so full of beautiful writing, like the above.  Gizzi jumps from musician-speak ("The notes (they are everything)/reconstitute twilight as you enter/the song") and extends the line to a discussion of a "you" (the reader feels invited to enter these lines) as the "you" follows a usual routine (coming home, cleaning off) that takes on a spiritual glow, not just from the invocation of song, but by the invitation to enter a vaguely familiar, but strangely valuable, world. 

Stevens once wrote "After the final no there comes a yes/And on that yes the future world depends."  Gizzi appears to have heard the final no and waits the subsequent yes.  He's writing with one foot in the grave and one foot on a stair, in anticipation.   It's an incredible place to be.

--Tony Tost

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