Idiolexicon

Dandelion (for Keegan)

Clayton Eshelman reads from The Collected Poems of Cesar Vallejo. I went to see him read at Harvard this past week and, connotations aside, Fred Thompson may have to play him in the movie of his life.

Land Park

Summer reruns are ending. New poem tomorrow.

Meanwhile, are you all aware of the UC Press Book Sale? It ends at the end of October, so hurry.

If you liked John Cage on I've Got a Secret, you'll love Salvador Dali on What's my line?.

I don't get it either.

A Day in the Life of Jesus and Mary

Check it out! Annie Christain's "Inside a Hand Basket in the Burlesque Theater" is currently on Indiefeed!

For what it's worth, Idiolexicon sort of turned 1 this week.

It's been a good year; we've gotten to feature some great poems and meet some cool people. We're slowly but surely swinging into a more regular publishing schedule. As always, the best way to make sure you don't miss anything is with our geek feed.

I'm resolving to blog more this year, and maybe someday catch up with Patrick's stream of book reviews.

A brand new poem is going up later tonight, so be on the lookout for that. It's a good'un.

And now, Shostakovich:

A Fiddle Pulled From The Throat Of A Sparrow -- Poems by Noah Eli Gordon

This collection, comprised of several of Gordon's older chapbooks and limited releases, spans the gambit of verse and becomes in a sense an autobiography of voice. The book begins as a subtle scale on a used bass, almost indistinguishable from modern silence, and quickly asserts its own mind.

Gordon's ability to tell an image as rhetoric and assemble narrative as metaphor are on display for all to see here as he moves from style to style. In one case he may interject a line and, in true improvisational jazz fashion, take it away. His unit of measure is not the syllable or the breath but the line itself as an interchangeable bar of language music.

I still believe, in seeing Gordon working his way through each poetic project, that he is a heavily tattooed heir to Berrigan, Moore, and Hejinian left alone at a piano with a hipster sensibility. Actual hipster, by the way, not, say, American Apparel/Urban Outfitters hipster. This collection is a great book of voice and language becoming self aware and stepping on to land and out of the din of poetic mud.

Labels: Recommended Reading