Blogger Laureate


Voting Begins for Blogger Laureate at Billy TBP

When I voted yesterday, Amy King was neck in neck with a blogger I don't know, both with 36 votes.

K Silem Mohammed is running also, but had 8 votes when I voted yesterday.

>>>>>>>>
On My Desk

Noah Eli Gordon, *A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow*, New Issues (Western Michigan U)
Unlike Gordon's other books these are versified poems not prose poems like the poems in The Frequencies.

The section called "Four Allusive Fields" has four poems about Cy Twombly:
with an epgraph by Roland Barthes.

"Cy listens absently to absent Homer
explaining himself away.Boring as a canvas
to a waterfall, as a splotch of red to equations
lifting a helicopter, injured by a display of attentiveness
can you believe the humming, anonymous light."

These four interrelatied poems are pleasingly reminiscent of Berrigan's Sonnet series.


Noah Eli Gordon, *The Area of Sound Called the Subtone*, ahsahta press
(mostly prose poems with a sequence of versified poems including the title poem)

"a bomb?=a word=the truth in things other
than subtones burning a hole in the ozone or passing through
the brain-case & out the ear-hole. the fire has blue legs, shoes
like rain."

**

"if the expressivities of the human face are mirrored
in the eyebrows of dogs, if they learn because we tell them to, if
someone fills out an application in a few minutes, lands a
job, makes dinner, dreams herself an ownership, then are we
stealing from or assembling one another?"

Noah Eli Gordon, *Inbox*, Blaze Vox
(a run-on compilation of 200 emails received from NEG's friends and associates, reprinted anonymously with permission from the writers)

'She later admits that she's out of it because of diaper-changing and also that she doesn't believe in the communities she claims not to know of...So I don't know; you might want to write a letter to her. She may tell you you're too old to fall under the banner of the younger crowd. I mean, you're 28? That's only six years behind Ange."

"Hey, I love the way it moves, Alban Berg-like shifting melodiousness, fired through atonal relay points. I love, too, how Catullus suddenly appears with the beetles (I thought at first "The Beatles"). Nice Job! I'd send it to John Tranter, see if he'll put in the section? I'll bet he would. Shapiro is a poet long past due the praise he IS due. Hey fucker, you're just lucky they let you stay this long! I went in, went $40,000 in debt, and then was given the boot all within two years. So I don't want to hear about leaving the cushy MFAland."