Can we, as poets, create texts about how we think and feel by using the language of how others think and feel? Can we compose with the new streams of language flowing in and around us (e.g. the ephemera and minutia of everyday email) to express our own place in the world? In a well-informed gesture beyond Baudrillard’s null set, Noah Eli Gordon’s booklength conceptual poem, INBOX, opens a new chapter of intimacy—his, yours, mine, ours. Welcome to a new subjectivity; welcome to a new way to say from the heart.

—Robert Fitterman



Dear Noah: I am officially lame, have failed to write you a cool and snazzy blurb after all this time, and I give up. I've never written a blurb before, and it's possible that I just suck at it. I gave it a couple of honest tries, but it just didn't sound right to me.

—Sawako Nakayasu

It was the Russian Formalist critics who first noted that one of the historic roles of art – and one of art's inexorable drivers toward incessant, ongoing change – is to incorporate new aspects of society into the art itself. Without which any genre would very quickly lose much of its connectedness with the life of the community from which it springs. Inbox is exactly what its title suggests, a work of art that includes email received by the author, albeit written entirely by his correspondents, over a period of time. Sociologically, Inbox is fascinating. It presents the highest order of conceptual poetics just by being itself.

—Ron Silliman

 

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Noah Eli Gordon’s forthcoming books include: Novel Pictorial Noise (selected by John Ashbery for the 2006 National Poetry Series); A Fiddle Pulled From the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007, winner of the Green Rose Prize); and Inbox (BlazeVOX, 2006). He is the author of The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta Press, 2004, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Sawtooth Prize); and The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003). Ugly Duckling Presse recently published That We Come To A Consensus, a chapbook written in collaboration with Sara Veglahn. His reviews and essays have appeared in dozens of journals, including Boston Review, The Poker, 26, Jacket, and The St. Marks Poetry Project Newsletter. He writes a chapbook review column for Rain Taxi: Review of Books, teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado at Denver, and publishes the Braincase chapbook series.

OF INTEREST:

Rain Taxi interview:
Spring 2007 A prolific younger poet discusses his writing process and the 2007 publication of four collections of poetry.

Interviewed by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
http://raintaxi.com/online/2007spring/gordon.shtml