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xmooniex's review against another edition
2.0
Some of these poems really hit the mark, but for the most part, it was just what the title said: 'novel pictorial noise.'
xterminal's review
2.0
Noah Eli Gordon, Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007)
With the way I read (which involves starting numerous books at once, and finishing them at leisure), I often find myself involved in happy accidents that beg comparison. The most recent example: I started Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw and Noah Eli Gordon's Novel Pictorial Noise on the same day without realizing that both were collections of “prose poems” (a term I still despise, even in those rare times when it's accurate) that dabbled both in dadaism and social consciousness. Because of this, I can't help but compare the two. And my comparison came out the same as everyone else's I guess. I saw Angle of Yaw on a lot of best-of-the-decade lists. I didn't see Novel Pictorial Noise on any.
This isn't to say there aren't some great lines in here. (I snagged one for my review of Speed Racer [q.v.:], and my favorite piece of the book, “composition of noise A thought is music is concept”, is eventually going to become an XTerminal track title.) And I am willing to at least consider the idea that I felt about the book the way I did because I'm an utter dolt who is incapable of penetrating the depths of Gordon's thought processes to see what Rae Armantrout does in her blurb (“Gordon's dark portrayal of what we've come to circa 2007”), or Anselm Berrigan in his (“When the poet says, 'perhaps unreliability is the locus of representation,' he's not trying to club you with irony; he's trying to figure out how the whole shebang, the big picture, hangs together.”). But before you clobber me over the head for just simply not getting this, remember that I cut my poetic teeth on the dadas and the surrealists, back in the day. I'm used to reading stuff that sounds like nonsense and having it make connections in my head. I've been doing it since I first read Apollinaire and Reverdy back in the early eighties, and I've done it as recently as Timothy Donnelly's scintillating Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, one of my favorite books of 2005. So, yeah, a lot of the time I do get it. But here? Nope. Not at all. It's clever, and some of it is enjoyable, but I can't find a foundation to it. And Gordon seems to want to substitute wordplay for sound here, which alienates me. I'm a fan of wordplay, but one of the things that separates poetry from (most) prose is that poetry's main feature is to sound good. If it's clever in the process, that's great, but cleverness shouldn't ever be at the forefront as it is here. Sound is left by the wayside.
I know I probably shouldn't compare books when reviewing them, but I can't help it; Angle of Yaw and Novel Pictorial Noise both start out on almost the same footing, and Angle of Yaw wins every head-to-head match-up. I certainly don't regret reading this (as I do, say, Mina's In My Eyes, reviewed last month), but it's not something I'll return to any time soon. **
With the way I read (which involves starting numerous books at once, and finishing them at leisure), I often find myself involved in happy accidents that beg comparison. The most recent example: I started Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw and Noah Eli Gordon's Novel Pictorial Noise on the same day without realizing that both were collections of “prose poems” (a term I still despise, even in those rare times when it's accurate) that dabbled both in dadaism and social consciousness. Because of this, I can't help but compare the two. And my comparison came out the same as everyone else's I guess. I saw Angle of Yaw on a lot of best-of-the-decade lists. I didn't see Novel Pictorial Noise on any.
This isn't to say there aren't some great lines in here. (I snagged one for my review of Speed Racer [q.v.:], and my favorite piece of the book, “composition of noise A thought is music is concept”, is eventually going to become an XTerminal track title.) And I am willing to at least consider the idea that I felt about the book the way I did because I'm an utter dolt who is incapable of penetrating the depths of Gordon's thought processes to see what Rae Armantrout does in her blurb (“Gordon's dark portrayal of what we've come to circa 2007”), or Anselm Berrigan in his (“When the poet says, 'perhaps unreliability is the locus of representation,' he's not trying to club you with irony; he's trying to figure out how the whole shebang, the big picture, hangs together.”). But before you clobber me over the head for just simply not getting this, remember that I cut my poetic teeth on the dadas and the surrealists, back in the day. I'm used to reading stuff that sounds like nonsense and having it make connections in my head. I've been doing it since I first read Apollinaire and Reverdy back in the early eighties, and I've done it as recently as Timothy Donnelly's scintillating Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, one of my favorite books of 2005. So, yeah, a lot of the time I do get it. But here? Nope. Not at all. It's clever, and some of it is enjoyable, but I can't find a foundation to it. And Gordon seems to want to substitute wordplay for sound here, which alienates me. I'm a fan of wordplay, but one of the things that separates poetry from (most) prose is that poetry's main feature is to sound good. If it's clever in the process, that's great, but cleverness shouldn't ever be at the forefront as it is here. Sound is left by the wayside.
I know I probably shouldn't compare books when reviewing them, but I can't help it; Angle of Yaw and Novel Pictorial Noise both start out on almost the same footing, and Angle of Yaw wins every head-to-head match-up. I certainly don't regret reading this (as I do, say, Mina's In My Eyes, reviewed last month), but it's not something I'll return to any time soon. **
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