Customer Reviews

The Area Of Sound Called The Subtone (Sawtooth Poetry Prize Series 2004)

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"Occultists know that somewhere between heaven and hell is the diaspora known as daily life. Others might call it purgatory, but that doesn't come close to describing the many hued weather Gordon inhabits. Remember the toothless man who said that his teeth picked up radio broadcasts, he was Jack Spicer's cousin. Impish and generous, Noah Eli Gordon is a more distant relative, his family tree a new hybrid. He has honed his own very special antennae. It's not that he picks up broadcasts from the living and the dead, and from objects and extraterrestrials, all of which he does, but that he channels the voices of the lost and forgotten, the dedicated gumshoe with a nervous twitch, the last Saxon, the dead civilian, the dirty clown, and the dweller in the dunk tank. Hey Reader, do you ever think about the stragglers, hagglers, wagerers and waggers that Walt Whitman was unable to embrace? Don't despair, they are pilgrims wandering through Gordon's dense, constantly shifting, musical landscape. After depositing their bodies in the wax museum of the everyday, they have (with Gordon's help) become what they always desired-beautifully disturbing music." -John Yau

The Area of Sound Called the Subtone filters the nihilistic aesthetic of DADA, where one might burn the canvas and hang the brush on the museum wall, through a politically charged embrace of gesture and its attendant inevitability of failure, failure to enact experience, essentially inhabiting such a condition, claiming a kinship with the palette, with its unintentional blending of the paints, the remnants of material production rather than the material produced, offering bullets for the epiphany and blossoms for the punctuated world. Mapping a mind at work, and subsequently blurring the outcome, the variously formal and self-imposed restraints of the text allow for the pleasure of numerous, open-ended readings. From a re-working of the double crown of sonnets in the title poem, to the ranging and disparate accrual of pseudo-images (paying homage to Chris Marker's film Sans Soleil-through an enactment of such discursive strategies-as much as it does to Tristan Tzara's L'Homme approximatif ) in the opening poem, "What Ever Belongs in the Circle", through the expansive and strange prose of "Jaywalking the Is" and its eight dreams sequences, scattered throughout, which respond to and were written through the eight sections of Akira Kurosawa's film Dreams, The Area of Sound Called the Subtone is by turns exploratory and exhaustive, attempting to constellate the chaos that constitutes the infinite formlessness one hears as noise into the sound of a tuning fork being struck endlessly, an unending digression into a sort of faux-order, where even melodic dissonance would make sense.

Mr. Gordon has published another book that reads like a stereo manual, dry and ponderous, and somehow lacking at least the instructional value provided by a Sony pamphlet. While I applaud the success of a young poet, I cannot condone the willful dissemination of more boring and self-promoting poetry junk.