95.9

 

It could be when you gave me a book of quiet thoughts the moths had already eaten through, the section on the luxury of growing old completely illegible & the purpose of turning a page more umbilical cord than ignition, I should have realized radio was the first form to conceal its function. A crude sort of Hamletism, I know, but there’s a shovelful of fresh dirt under every condemned building & waiting til you’re married to grow a moustache won’t help the hooves parade across the quicksand or the tides to harness anything except how small a boat can make you feel when you’ve lived like a brick-&-mortar neighbor to every nearby enemy. So there’s disservice in reputation, but at the end of the daybreak the radio’s already gone back to its native land.

 

In many markets, certain points on the radio broadcast spectrum are set aside for use by non-profit organizations, NPR, college stations & the like – typical are 88.5, 90.1 & 90.9 FM. Increasingly, the rest of the spectrum is being gobbled up by a handful of large, ideologically driven conglomerates such as Lowry Mays’ ironically named Clear Channel. ‘Tis a far cry from the raucous days of 1949 when a group of anarchists in California around Lew Hill & Kenneth Rexroth set up shop at 94.1 FM, KPFA. A community-based radio station before NPR was a twinkle in a bureaucrat’s eye, the flagship station of Pacifica Radio was a haphazard collaboration among volunteers, one of whom, Jack Spicer, had something akin to a folk music program devoted mostly to local musicians around the UC Berkeley campus. Radio in those days was not yet a 7 by 24 operation and Spicer’s program is said to have “gone dark” when everyone was simply too tired or drunken to do, say or play any more. None of those old shows appear to have been saved – the six Jack Spicer-related programs listed in the online Pacifica archives, one of them a 1972 reading of Language by blogger Gerard Van der Luen, were all broadcast after his death, mostly from tapes made at the Vancouver & Berkeley poetry conferences of 1963 & ‘65. It’s too bad because what we think of now as radio is a very different beast than the medium Spicer himself confronted in the studios upstairs from Edy’s ice cream parlor on Shattuck Avenue in the late 1940s, and yet, for my generation at least, it was Spicer who fixed radio as a primo allegory for the poetic process. In the Spicerean formula, the poet is a radio, a counterpunching radio.

 

So it’s Spicer’s ghost, above all else, that Noah Eli Gordon has to negotiate in his booklength poem The Frequencies. Each section carries as its title a plausible broadcast frequency – there’s always that odd digit in that first decimal place. And the radio appears figuratively on almost every one of the poem’s 74 pages. Yet if there is an influence here – and I’m not sure I’m not hallucinating it onto the text, frankly – it’s not Spicer at all, but Francis Ponge, especially the Ponge of the extended prose poems, Soap or “Fauna & Flora.” One sees an idea develop over time, as if Gordon is turning the concept of the radio over in his mind very deliberately. In fact, I was surprised in the responses to my test of poetry that readers felt some sense of Brenda Iijima’s poem being just a portion of a larger whole, yet made no such comment with regards to Gordon, whose three-sentence piece above strikes me as calling out for the greater context of the whole.

 

There is an awkwardness in these three sentences that I don’t read as a weakness. I think comes precisely from serving two masters – the paragraph at hand & the larger work as a whole, particularly the ongoing interactions between I & you. The tone is more relaxed than Jarnot’s, in part because of the length of these sentences but even more because the rapid shift of reference frames within them results in the lumpy feel of disparate discourses.

 

So if the work is Spicerean, it’s the Spicer not of Language or Book of Magazine Verse, but rather of “Imaginary Elegies” – a text printed in a reduced font in the appendix of the Black Sparrow Collected Books & remembered these days mostly as the source for Spicer’s “Poet, be like God” admonition. Like “Elegies,” The Frequencies is simultaneously a project of extraordinary scope & ambition and still very much an “early” book as well. The give-away is the trope of the radio itself, which isn’t decisive in the development or denouement of I & you in this text (the way, say, Spicer uses baseball as a frame for discussing love). In Spicer’s later work, such forces become primal. Here, they feel like they’re cohabiting.

 

There are so many different ways one can react to a project like this, and at different moments I do respond quite variously. I’m less concerned, I think, that individually these pieces don’t always work, or that maybe the machinery seems a little heavy at moments for the lifting it’s doing – the second sentence above would be a good example. I’m much more interested in seeing just how Gordon attempts to harness this massive talent & ambition as his work evolves. And for that, The Frequencies makes an excellent foundation.