Critical Commentary
On Novel Pictorial Noise:
Noah Eli Gordon's poems take the form of jotted notes in an artist's notebook (I was reminded in particular of Odilon Redon's). Each day one begins anew to weave the web, having moved a step forward (or sometimes backward) since yesterday's attempt. Thus each prose bloc, modified or modulated by the ghostly fragments that interleave them, sharpens the focus by which he "attempt[s] via the unknown to give grammar a purpose." The effort in itself is its own reward, and a prodigal one.
--John Ashbery
On A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow:
Such a new century deserves the sexual, the scientific, and the utterly secular pleasure of building a poem with the tectonics of a great bridge. So little pathos and so many paths. Broken like the heteronyms of Pessoa, but filled with multiple lives, Noah Eli Gordon teases all false monumentality yet reserves its rights to memory. To call it witty or wild isn't witty or wild enough and leaves out the cavalier, the paideia, and structural surge. He has the restless tones and narrative density of a septet. His work itself glows green with surprises. He is a painter, of course.
--David Shapiro
You can fairly hear the pinging of the world and all its parts—noises of earth’s objects rubbing against each other and the spheres. In this ebullient music find the translation of colors, shapes, space, speech, integrity, destruction. It’s as if the world’s most believable cape were thrown back and below we found not a sham of seasons but all the body’s most dynamic possibilities.
--Eleni Sikelianos
I am inclined to read Noah Eli Gordon’s new book from the perspective of a thousand years, when nature and artifice will have fused into bird-encircled circuitries of song. In other words, in other worlds, is where this writing’s sand-clock accumulates its evidence. Yet Gordon demonstrates that, even as names fall away from their referents, they also claim the right of return. Here, every word holds its own echo, as if spoken inside a space helmet, and assumes a vexed convexity of mirror that allows the accidental to slide into the essential.
--Andrew Joron
On Inbox:
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 book-length 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
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
On The Area of Sound Called the Subtone:
Gordon’s work fuses the risky linguistics of language poetry with a fresh, lyrical ambience that results in hyper-surrealistic prose poems. Dense, clever, and unpredictable, his paragraphs shape sequences that bend and twist toward a visionary apocalypse, whose music levitates the form and presents new ways of reading it. This young writer has given us a compelling book that should not disappear in the current prosperity of the genre.
--Ray González, The Bloomsbury Review
In the shatter of each successive frame of reference, we hear amassing a sensually pitched cycle of resonances, which enlarge our receptivity to the physical, the phenomenal properties of language, and which engage in relational patterning beyond the confines of logic and the trajectories we expect meaning to follow. Such an “area of sound” tests the mind’s resources, but in so doing enlarges our own adaptive capacity to use language to press the parameters of reality in which we dwell.
--Rusty Morrison, Traffic
These sounds trail us, press up against us and leave us questioning the made world.
--Bookslut
The poems both grapple and blend with the white noise of technology surrounding them, so that you do not read the lines so much as tune in to them.
--NewPages
Gestures of resistance to hegemony in Gordon’s work utilize parody, flirt with aphorism, but richly refuse simple prescription.
--Thomas Fink, Octopus Magazine
On The Frequencies:
…Gordon’s language…is rich and compelling…
--Airen McNally, Rain Taxi
…musical and literary all at once.
--Glen C. Silva, Xantippe
…the delightfully sudden clang of elusive, at times insanely surreal trope-clusters… punctuate[s] many sections of The Frequencies.
--Thomas Fink, Jacket Magazine
…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.
--Tony Tost, Octopus Magazine
