Literature: Acoustic Experience by Noah Eli Gordon released by Pavement Saw Press

Denver poet, Noah Eli Gordon, has a new chapbook out, entitled, Acoustic Experience. Gordon is the author of Novel Pictorial Noise (recently chosen by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series), Figures for a Darkroom Voice (in collaboration with Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Noah Saterstrom), and The Frequencies, among other books.

Gordon’s work often takes musical composition as a subject, but I’m always most struck by how image operates in his poetry. It’s as if to study music via language, one must most express the visual aspect of music. “Acoustic Experience” begins with a poem entitled, “Scorched Anecdote,” referencing other poets in the local scene (though recognizing this isn’t necessary to engage with the poem), and slips into a repetition of salvaging selves from their others, or selves from selves, perhaps.

The chapbook moves as a study of moments and meditations on flight, little nuances of histories, linguistic interrogations, scales of time. And Gordon has a satirical streak. He writes, “It’s true you can refute the historic role of a stone by simply kicking it” and “The problem of the airplane is falling.” I won’t give away the ending lines of the collection, but they’re (fabulously) in this same vein. Despite a raised philosophical eyebrow, Gordon expresses a great deal of tenderness for image as well: “…a sun tied to the sky by schematics like a crayon crushed on a blackboard.” Actually, the reworking of the color yellow throughout the piece (while barely ever saying the actual word), is subtle but visually moving, as if an entire oddly-tinted yellow landscape is laying out between the sky of airplanes being taken apart, and leaves of paper rustling on the ground.

Pavement Saw Press, $7, www.pavementsaw.org