az- Swoon Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan to books a ... Granary Books (October 2001)

Response 5: Oct 13 — CLC Plone swooning over swoon - a class? lots respndrs
-poor Gary. Nada tells him he’s not anything like what she looks for. She gives him some spiel about how she only dates dark haired men who are lean.

Jacket 12 - Gary Sullivan - three poems Dear Nada... 1999:
not possible to say I love you without smoking or where’s the hand lotion who was it said we can’t say anything however unexaggerated .. or will our days overexamined be over easywill we repeat everything like a bad poem someonewho wants too badly to write a good poem writes yes sth like that. over-precious. toomuchofyouwordsmyself.
Gary Sullivan Refusal of the Real to item art
>> [Back to readme] issue #1 fall 1999 -sxn for for Daniel Davidson
+ in poetry sxn : Nada Gordon essay *(incl Swoon)
+ Nada Gordon Interviewd by gs

Jacket 23 - Nada Gordon, in conversation with Tom Beckett //and 1 other person
Here I must defer to Edith Piaf: ‘Non... rien de rien/ Non... je ne regrette rien!’ I have *no* second thoughts about having published Swoon or having exposed my most intimate thoughts therein. From a purely literary perspective, and also from a literary-historical perspective, I believe that it is an interesting text worthy of attentiveness, and it *does* read like a novel — even to me. I feel surprisingly objective about it. It stands on its own as a piece in contradiction to current trends in formalism and authorial remove. It is also a model of the positive and tangible possibilities of the absorptive text. Gary and I both craved, well before ever having written each other, a total removal of the cardboard boundary between ‘art’ and ‘life.’ In Swoon we were able to give that to each other. Swoon is absolutely about wishes and, more importantly, wishes coming true. ...
Why keep secrets? I’m not entirely clear on the reasons for the taboo against personal revelation...It strikes me that it is simply not in fashion in iNNovAtive writing... ’Swoon’s innovativeness may be arguable — I don’t know. It does tell a very old story — boy meets girl/ loses girl/ gets girl back/ happily ever after??? — but not, I think, in a way it’s been told before, and definitely not via fiber optic cables running across a continent and under one of the major oceans. It seems to me that it is innovative, though — after all, it’s multiform, it’s transgressive (most notably of personal boundaries), and it enacts some of the wilder aspects of textual theory in a rather uncontrived way. .. Simply put, I love just telling the truth, or at least my feels-true version of experience, because it is disarming
~ too~self (as object) centered? (does not see the story as girl gets boy). as me twd-, ok: 'my girl ego does not like that' (in book)
‘For Gordon, writing each poem differently is “a system of daring”.’ And it’s true, I think that during writing I am constantly asking myself, do I dare to actually say this, can I say this (which, by the way, is a quote from Bernadette Mayer), how about this? and I do, and it gives me a big charge (neurons!). ok right. still: I am this, I am that. You know, ‘there will be eleven stanzas of eleven lines each.’ That’s for WORKSHOPPERS, for HOBBYISTS, for BOYS, for OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVES, but not for me. I’m a bricoleuse to the max.
--form integral: The content of the vessel is the vessel. When there is no content, the vessel has no form.
-- What interests me right now is how I can take the language from somewhere else (this is procedural, but not architectural) (admittedly in a move to process emotions), and my dear readers, who are so invested in ‘reality,’ might assume that whatever is on the page or screen is literally about me or about my situation. Examples of ‘somewhere else’: blogs of strangers, ask-a-psychologist message boards, student papers, films. I’ve recently been Ackeresquely pirating stuff wholesale and putting it up on the web, such as ...
right. so, this touches ~ is like me. careful not to be like what I don't like in her. which is? don't think I am but maybe I touch on it. self-pleased ~ can form be helpful against that? does sadness temper it? and it helps not to talk too much ars poetica. (and that I don't say "here I must defer" I almost certainly wld not say Must).

Kevin Killian Interviewed by gary sullivan in Issue #4 Spring/Summer2001 -last or at least most recent- issue of

Readme -a magazine of poetics ed by gary sullivan. I N T E R V I E W S * R E V I E W S * E S S A Y S

also see The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church ctr for innovative poetry