Noah Eli Gordon

The Area of Sound Called the Subtone

Ahsahta Press

2005

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Reviewed by Thomas Fink

Noah Eli Gordon’s second full-length collection, The Area of Sound Called the Subtone, was chosen by Claudia Rankine for the 2004 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Coming slightly over a year after the long prose-poem, The Frequencies, the new book also features sizeable, ambitious texts.

This time, each of the three sections is a long poem or poetic sequence, and each includes a different formal structure. For example, the title-poem comprises fourteen sonnet-like fourteen-line poems. Often featuring an iambic feel, but without the pentameter, these poems, full of allusions from such figures as W.C. Williams, Stein, Rimbaud, Celan, Marianne Moore, and Roethke, have no Petrarchan or Elizabethan schemes but substitute intriguing patterns of repetition. The seventh line of the first poem is the same as the seventh line of the fourteenth, and the second and thirteenth poems, third and twelfth, etc. have the same relationship. Also, the last line of one poem is approximated in the first line of the next. Poem ii ends, “so put up the scythe: they’re splitting the atom” (98), while iii begins, “Adam’s split. Psych! The imput they’ve/ put in was all wrong” (99). Gordon’s interest in the music of homophonic translation, not from a foreign language to English, as in several earlier poets, but from English to English, is an instance of overall pleasure taken and opportunity found in language’s material music.

“What Ever Belongs in the Circle,” which opens the volume, consists of single-lined stanzas of generally long lines without capitalization or punctuation. Enjambment may dominate, but one has the suspicion that it is not always intended when it could be. The reader does not quite know whether the circle of a phrase, line, or succession of lines will allow a single concept, image cluster, or brief narrative development to belong within it. A disjunction may occur within a single line or between lines or after a short run of apparent continuity. Sometimes one is not sure whether or not a line is reflecting its predecessors’ preoccupations. And so the circle, no longer taken as a classic trope of eternal continuity, perfect unity, and stasis, is ever expanding or contracting. Here is a fairly typical ten-line passage:

running bareback without a horse

& chalking up inevitability obvious

or oblivious an avalanche

then recount the lives of your siblings

say my sister for whom a house is stability

& layering on poker face sole soliloquy

buried how long the carpet’ll stay clean

when it’s click click there’s a ghost in the dust

overly self-aware of collecting from each

sliver a thing to call its own owning a future or not . (4-5)

Running through language entails vulnerability for the bareback, horseless poet who inevitably accumulates a multiplicity of images and tropes. Some of these are obvious quotidian details and others show how the writer is oblivious to the use of devices that would stabilize the perceptual circle. Gordon’s scrambled or scrambling reference and fried plot contrasts with the sister’s quest for a domestic stability depending, not only on a degree of affluence, but on a deliberate layering (no avalanche) of studied neutral attitudes over violate emotions. This draining of affect from the Shakespearian soliloquy, coupled with insistence upon emotional and household hygiene, is but a temporary fix: in the line, “buried how long the carpet’ll stay clean,” the first three words can refer to emotions held in check by the prior line’s “poker face,” and yet the second and third might be tied to anxiety about clean furnishings. “How long” is readable as an assertion and as a nagging question.

Next, the trope of the ghost, which recurs several more times in the poem, along with numerous references to “shade” and “shadow,” suggests a return of the repressed lurking in the proliferation of the most ordinary household annoyance. The gerund-driven lines that follow give reason to doubt that the obsessive act of collection—practiced by the ghost or, punningly, “the dust” itself, but also attributable to the sister or speaker (whoever that might be)—will obtain the goal of continuity through ownership. The adjective “own,” indicating a state of possession affirmed by naming, plays against the precarious process implied in possibilities of “owning . . . or not.” Actually, a future resists current owning; one’s own property functions to anticipate a future stability that may not be achieved. In this poem, any effort “to narrate panaceas”(5) is spooked by “inhospitable vacuum” (9) or “breastfed dystopia” (11).

“Jaywalking the Is,” the massive center of Gordon’s book, features eight unindented prose-paragraphs, then eight sections including a numbered “Dream” in italicized verse followed by eight paragraphs each, except for the eighth “Dream,” which has five paragraphs. Therefore, there are a total of eight verse units and 69 paragraphs. Verse-lineation provides a gentle, evenly paced, meditative counterpoint to the speed and density of the prose. Like the volume’s opening poem, this is, in part, a text conveying “sensory overload,” as though the poet is “trying to embrace the pond by falling in” (18), and yet self-questioning and questioning in general ubiquitously counters this tendency: “I suppose I could ask questions all afternoon”—and he can—“but who among the is would hear?” (32).

Nuggets of lively self-referentiality in “Jaywalking the Is” let us in on Gordon’s aesthetic and social intentions. Probably referring to Kurosawa’s eight-section “Dreams,” the fertilely unstable “I” announces: “I was in a movie about movies, working the laugh track backwards, . . .” (19). This could be amended to read “poem about poems,” if only intermittently, or “text about textualities.” While much is humorous in this poem and in the book, the humor is never socially reassuring—i.e. insiders mocking outsiders—but most often a gesture that tracks laughter and perception in a defamiliarizing way.

When told, “I’m never as aphoristic as I seem, and all the shiny magazines make it all the more unmanageable” (37), I find that it applies to Gordon, whose aphorisms challenge the classic aphoristic pretension to truth while he is enacting it: “Although every bank teller has a face, some hide their hands more easily” (30). Troping on the notion of the faceless (anonymous, impersonal) company man/woman in relation to facts, so common as to be unrecognized, about how caged tellers literally appear to the public, the poet strangely suggests that hands, responsible for doling out or collecting cash, are more of a barometer of trustworthiness/duplicity in this context than the face, which includes the alleged “windows to the soul.” This aphorism is conjecturally accurate about possibilities of hidden-ness, something to which there is no end: “There’s an awful omen in every animal’s entrails, & to tell the truth I’d open myself expeditiously” (76). Gordon gives us poetry with a lot of “I” but no confessional disclosure. Instead, there is exposure of structures of concealment’s interplay with motion reflecting desire for proximity: “bolted door left open” (22).

Another reference to a bank teller provides a typical lengthy Gordonian (Gordian?) prose-sentence that draws causal relations from elements seeming far afield from one another: “The teller at the bank is one way to say line up your amenities before the bullet-spark finds my favorite coat draped over my favorite chair in the worst place one would want to live” (36). Protocols for negotiating the fundamentals of capitalist exchange, articulated by the mediating teller, are supposed to be the buffer against poverty and violence that could find an individual as easily as his favorite coat.

However, since the poet has “got to believe in something other than absolutes or intellectual abstractions” (47), he must entertain a distrust of protocols and pragmatism: “What’s a practical dream anyway?” (68). There may be an unfortunate (not merely auditory) kinship between “coffer” and “coffin” (23). Thus, a “jaywalker” of “Being” and a proponent of openness to the unassimilable must embrace ontological insecurity: “Rain on the sidewalk is rain on the ceiling & my suit is just right for the job” (18). The multiple pun on “suit” tells us that not only about the subjection of clothing to stronger forces but about the wearer’s status as a petitioner for openness to the elements and even a protestor against the false strictures of “cognition folders” (63) and against concepts of unproblematic referentiality,“ when language is the worst kind of equal sign to set sail under” (38).

In adopting such an experimental project, the poet knows that the gamble in the name of “harvesting potentiality” (66), including those of the fragmentation of self and surreal imaginative development, could result in reflex action resulting in the inchoate: “Cracks in the oracular self I’m splitting open, splicing states of consciousness onto what? . . . . I’ve got a drawer full of keys that bend by themselves. Magic realism, mute narration or just plain jack-in-the-box psychosis?” (21). The notion of mimed psychosis, of course, is a canny nod to Jameson’s famed critique of Language Poetry, which, like various other twentieth century innovative movements, has given Gordon sustenance for his experimentation.

Among the bizarrely flexible keys of “Jaywalking the Is,” the recurrent intervention of politicized voices, whether funny or sobering or both, leaves a mark of sanity. Commodity culture is one target, ironically stared down: “Every shirt in the shop is for sale, even the one the owner’s got on” (20). A paragraph seemingly about a love relationship and aesthetic strategies ends with a terse ecological imperative: “The forest is there. Let’s keep it that way” (31). Gestures of resistance to hegemony in Gordon’s work utilize parody, flirt with aphorism, but richly refuse simple prescription:

A firm persuasion can remove mountains & redundancy makes for efficient advertising. Here money fish, how ‘bout a harness? I hadn’t given much Thought to the framework of morpheme thinking. Tick, tick, goes the mouse. Tick, tick, goes the house. Although it’s enough to crack manifest destiny’s guardrail, the coastline couldn’t stop us from swerving into such an untranslatable world. & we’re under water anyway. (56)

What would it mean to remove mountains? To make them disappear? In The Area of Sound Called the Subtone, Gordon’s manifestation of textural and semiotic density, neither translatable into efficient advertising nor quite as untranslatable as the world, cogently joins the framework-cracking efforts of poets who intend, in part, to make mountains and valleys much less hospitable to new incarnations of manifest destiny.