ROB MCLENNAN Reviews
Is That the Sound of a Piano Comingfrom Several Houses Down? by Noah Eli Gordon
(Solid Objects, New York, 2018)
The Problem
Someone
tied to a parking meter the dog that barks every time a woman approaches to
insert a quarter. This makes her the subject. It is a metaphor for the
aristocracy of money. One performer plays both leash and dog. Another stands in
for the meter. I play the woman. Someone appears offstage. It is often
difficult to tell a king from a queen. The problem is no one plays the
difficulty.
Boulder, Colorado poet
Noah Eli Gordon’s latest poetry title is Is
That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (New York NY:
Solid Objects, 2018), a collection I’ve been looking forward to seeing ever
since I first saw selections from it in Ugly Ducking Presse’s 6x6 back in 2012. Similar in structure to his collection The Source (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2011), the poems in this new work all share the same title, “The Problem,”
with the bulk of the collection made up of prose poems, with none longer than a
single page. Unlike The Source, made
up of poems titled “The Source,” his collection of poems each titled “The
Problem” isn’t titled The Problem, or
some otherwise clever wordplay, but (obviously) Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down?. With
the alternate title, it is as though the collection isn’t overcome by the
repetition, and the potential of repeating a structure that had worked in the
past. It would be curious to know if his initial thoughts on the final
publication of The Source was indeed
an influence, as this collection was composed during the period he was most
likely seeing The Source through to
publication, as he writes as part of the acknowledgments: “These problems were
encountered mostly in Brooklyn, NY, in the summer of 2010, lingering on in
Denver, CO, until about February of 2011.”
The Problem
In
order to keep things straight, she tapes a timeline marking the important
events of her novel to the bedroom wall. I think this could be the first
sentence of my novel. The problem is it’s already written.
The poems are incredibly
sharp, and composed as odd narratives, descriptive passages, alternate
perspectives and even hesitant wisdoms, a number of which take their time to
sink in, as any new perspective or wisdom might. The book is dedicated to
American poet Sawako Nakayasu, “in return for the gift of her translation / of
Ayane Kawata’s poem ‘Running Posture’ / in Castles
in the Air,” a poem and book I’d been previously unaware of (although I’m
an admirer of the work I’ve seen of hers). Discovering the poem online on the
publisher’s page for the book (a book I now have to order, clearly), it reads:
I
am being chased and so I run, though the problem lies not in the fact that
someone is chasing me, but in the posture with which I run away.
The problem, Gordon might
suggest, is that I haven’t read exactly all the same works he has, nor he me,
altering the ways in which I might approach such a book as this. While I might
not be aware of that particular translation, my initial take on the collection
compared Gordon’s use of the prose poem, composed as a blend of gestural koan
and short story, to Sarah Manguso’s short story collection, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape
(McSweeney’s, 2007). Manguso’s is a book that heavily influenced my own debut
short story collection, The Uncertainty
Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014), both of which were composed
out of a sequence of untitled and self-contained short, single-paragraph prose
fictions that meet somewhere in the blend of essay, short story and musing (and
a book, it would seem, I began working on during the same period Gordon
composed Is That the Sound of a Piano
Coming from Several Houses Down?). One might argue that all three
collections, Gordon’s included, work from the founding premise that something
is wrong (or at least amiss, or slightly off), and the awareness that there is
always, constantly, something else happening in the poem, just out of view, out
of reach and out of focus. What is curious about Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? is in
seeing the accumulation of poems structured around a similar premise, one that
allows “the problem” to sometimes be the entire point, and other times, the
distraction, and occasionally an idea that steps carefully out of the way of
the poem, even while remaining the engine that drives both the individual
pieces and the book as a whole.
The Problem
He
sends a hurried email to a distant relative detailing the particulars of his
upcoming arrival—dates, places, a somewhat transparent formal tone, and
immediately regrets not having done so in a more intimate fashion, with a
postcard perhaps. Perhaps with this one, the one where the sun is either rising
or setting, flanked by high clouds and flecked with pink, like the meat of a
flower whose name he’s failed to learn. It’s as though he’s realized there was
music playing because there isn’t anymore—the sudden silence of the world as
much an indescribable flower as it is the description of one staring directly
at it. The sun, rising and setting, setting and rising. But not, as we know, in
that exact order.
There is something about
the shift of the title that displays the strength of the collection, and what
might have allowed this book to be as strong as it is, providing an opportunity
for the structure not to overwhelm the work, and the author, perhaps, to
himself step out of the way, and allow the work to shine through. I’ve been an
admirer of Noah Eli Gordon and his work for some time, but this might easily be
his strongest work to date, in part due to the subtlety of the poems, made so
much more clear through the deceptive straightfowardness of the premise: Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from
Several Houses Down? is not, in fact, a book about problems or telling you
what the problem might be. It is a book that focuses on all the small details
that lead up to that point of declaring something, true or otherwise, to be the
actual problem. Does that make sense?
*****
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s
glorious capital city, rob mclennan
currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he
shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of
poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010,
the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted
for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into
the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry
collection A perimeter (New Star
Books, 2016), and the forthcoming How the
alphabet was made (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) and Household items (Salmon Poetry, 2018). An editor and publisher, he
runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Christine McNair), The
Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds:
a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater
(ottawater.com). He is “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, a former contributor to the Ploughshares blog, editor of my (small press) writing day, and an
editor/managing editor of many gendered
mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as
writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews,
essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
