Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1975, Noah Eli Gordon is the author of the book-length poem The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003), a collection of three long poems The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta, forthcoming December of 2004), an e-book notes toward the spectacle and chapbooks from Margin to Margin and Anchorite Press. His poetry has appeared widely, including online at the 2004 DC Poetry Anthology and Can We Have Our Ball Back?, and his reviews have appeared in Boston Review, Rain Taxi, Jacket, Octopus and elsewhere. He publishes the Braincase chapbook series from his current home base in Northampton, Massachusetts. Buy his book here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? “True Story,” by Shel Silverstein. I memorized the poem when I was in 4th grade, so, although it might not be the most literate of bedrocks upon which to build one’s personal pantheon of influence, it has had, now that I think about it, a deep impact on my writing. I mean this with all seriousness. The poem is a playful, near-tumultuous cascade of experience narrated with the breathless energy of a child unable to finish one thought before beginning another. Its engine is basically the run-on sentence, which I happen to harbor a huge liking for. Sometime around junior high I got into Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” although it was more a case of me being drawn toward it because of the band Iron Maiden than anything the poem actually did. I tried to memorize that one too, but had to stop after a few dozen lines; there were too many words I couldn’t then figure out how to pronounce. In college I read Eliot’s Prufrock & that pretty much did me in. I think it was the whole disillusionment thing. I cashed in my punk points & took up poetry with a fury. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? Hmmm…my inability to immediately answer this makes me think it might be time to recalibrate my reading machine, although it might just be a matter of what one would label as “literary.” I’m pretty sure there’d be nothing surprising on my list. I just finished reading a wonderful book called Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of theCity's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? I wrote something a few years ago for Word For/ Word that deals with this question, so I’ll just refer ya over there: http://wordforword.info/vol2/gordon_essay.htm 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Mostly the French, everything from the surrealist and symbolist poets up through the Violence-of-the-White-Page era folks. I like the combination of an ultra-serious engagement with ideas and the way in which such an engagement often manifests itself in the most wacked-out of aesthetics. It’s pretty amazing that one of the sonnets in Emmanuel Hocquard’s A Test of Solitude is a recipe for clams. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I think I read too much poetry. For a while I was averaging a book or two a day, wanting to know what everyone was doing, and, perhaps more importantly, how they were doing it. There are some books of poetry I’ll read straight through in one sitting, knowing full well I’ll never return to them, while others I’ll read and re-read, noticing something new about the way in which the work is structured, with the hopes that I can take that particular method, however minute it may be, and make it wholly my own, or, at the very least, add it to whatever hybridized writing creature I’ve become. It’s been important for me to have a handle on the folks who’ve come before, on what they’ve already done, so I can figure some way to proceed on my own. Although it’s not just about how the work can serve me. I often feel, and feel sort of silly for feeling, that there’s this ethereal, tangled otherness or outsideness one taps into with poetry, that the tapping is not just a communicative act, rather a communal one. After John Wieners died, there was a huge memorial/celebration reading for him in Boston. It took place in a classroom at MIT, a room packed with poets. Behind the podium, there was a large chalkboard with equations and figures still fresh from some afternoon class. One of the larger & more immediately legible scribblings read: “An infinite plane of current.” The phrase itself seemed to take on a growing importance as I watched poet after poet pay tribute to Wieners. I like to think that’s what we do when we read poetry, tap into that infinite plane of current. I think it fit so well into Spicer’s definition of the tradition: “It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never losing anything.” 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Novels. Plot is boring and better left to the movies. I’m kidding here, but not entirely. In fact, I just read a really amazing novel by Aaron Kunin called The Mandarin. It was so compelling to me because its subtext, and at times not-so-subtext, is pretty much the question of what exactly constitutes a novel. It’s still unpublished, but I hope someone picks it up soon. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I’d say that a poem is when you use language to bring something new into the world, then I’d get out my stuffed-animal ducks, Gecko & Madisonivich a.k.a. the Rat Scallion, & perform a puppet show in which they recite spontaneous poems between song & dance numbers. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? Let me answer this question with the last few lines from a James Laughlin poem called “Dylan,” which deals with going to recover the body of Dylan Thomas from the Medical Examiner’s Morgue: “What was his profession?” she asked I told her he was a poet; she looked perplexed “What’s a poet?” she asked I told her a poet was a person who wrote poems She put that down, and that’s what it says on the form: Dylan Thomas—a poet (he wrote poems). I don’t particularly think it’s a great poem or anything, but I do like how it addresses the question. Not to mention that I’d only read the poem once, about four years ago, and thought of it immediately after reading this question. That said, I do think there is a holistic connection between the act of simply being a poet and the impact such an act has upon both one’s miniature piece of the planet and the larger idea of the rest of the world. Personally, I’d love it if everyone were governed via small egalitarian collective autonomous communities, as long as one’s role in such a process was fully voluntary. If one were to dedicated one’s life to such a goal there are a lot more effective means out there to attain it, and yet—here’s where I’m torn—I can’t help but wander around all day scribbling in a little pocket notebook, hopeful that the scratches are somehow informed by, rather than an recapitulation of, such a desire. And hopeful that the desire itself is able to be made manifest not in the content of the writing but in the act of the writing, the way in which one must reject something of the endless stream of shrink-wrapped “entertainment” in order to jolt the mind elsewhere. There are poets out there who are have been able to combine both their verse & any sort of leaning toward radical dissent—Dennis Brutus comes immediately to mind—but it seems to be effective only under regimes which are bent on silencing verbal dissent instead of trying to sell sneakers with it. Hell, maybe if Bush is reelected we’ll see poets against the war in prison instead of packed into an anthology. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Smell Chiseled**Face I**Think Of**Everything Form**From 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? That’s simple: I am destroying the body in order to bring out the text.