Novel Pictorial Noise

Noah Eli Gordon

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780061257032
• eBook ISBN: 9780061750939
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Contents

Epigraph

Begin Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Noah Eli Gordon

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five poetry books annually through participating publishers. Publication is funded by the Lannan Foundation; the late James A. Michener and Edward J. Piszek through the Copernicus Society of America; Stephen Graham; International Institute of Modern Letters; Joyce and Seward Johnson Foundation; Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation; and the Tiny Tiger Foundation. This project also is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.

2006 Open Competition Winners

Laynie Browne of Oakland, California, The Scented Fox Chosen by Alice Notley, to be published by Wave Books

Noah Eli Gordon of Denver, Colorado, Novel Pictorial Noise Chosen by John Ashbery, to be published by Harper Perennial

Laurie Clements Lambeth of Houston, Texas, Veil and Burn Chosen by Maxine Kumin, to be published by University of Illinois Press

Martha Ronk of Los Angeles, California, Vertigo Chosen by C. D. Wright, to be published by Coffee House Press

William Stobb of La Crosse, Wisconsin, Nervous Systems Chosen by August Kleinzahler, to be published by Penguin Books

COMES A night-light’s landing beacon leads me to pick villainy from a bouquet of the places I’d left to yesterday’s map of the future, rubbernecking unintentionally oblique articulation. Loosen a rivet from the lapsed mind and out pours the obvious like thick rain. A sterile neighborhood, a standing ovation, centuries of labor congealing into the desk lamp that lets me mold my own two cents from this paper-clip panopticon. I’m not pushing anything here. Power’s got a fulcrum that’s half self-portrait, part handicraft. The lever will pivot regardless of where it’s placed down. It’s the primacy of motion drafts sound.

composition of noise A thought is music is concept

STRIKING AN ORACULAR NOTE to flush out the lazy assumptions lodged within one’s skull won’t offer comment on some recurrent aspect of life, as the world’s not weirder than we think, but weirder than we can think. For example, a yellow moth appears to pass through a blue tire in the painting above my understanding of geometry. The question arises: is this a picture of the distance between yellow and blue, or is it merely a means to ground the figures, a maxim bled of its proverbial exigencies, such that the only relevant plane remaining is constituted entirely by the hue of the grass—the ground over which anyone wishing to approach must pass.

between What draws
equates of

SOMEWHERE, a garage door goes down. Thus, a fiction begins. Clouds gather, disperse. Let this suffice as a working formula for working a formula: what I’m coming to terms with—repetition’s liberating constraint. What occurs in the courtly world has little currency to those taking up arms against it. What I’m coming to terms with builds that which contains the components to construct an evolving sense of entropy. The grand narrative the end of narratives had had had had no grandiose ending. It is as though in removing its mask the landscape shows on its face an expression one recognizes but is unable to immediately place.

as through

between

definitive

WHEN THE ACTUAL IS transformed into its representation, representation becomes actualized, as though a net were cast not to catch whatever punctures its vicinity, but to make transparent the lapse of possession one proffers through the introduction, disappearance, and reappearance of an image whose architecture is such that in setting forth one is simultaneously building a synonym for backtracking, a barrier torn down, erecte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• PRAISE FOR Noah Eli Gordon
• Also by Noah Eli Gordon
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher