Biographical note: Anne
Tardos is a poet and visual artist. She is
the author of several books of poetry and the
multimedia performance work and radio play
Among Men. A selection of her readings and
performances (many with Jackson Mac Low) can
be heard on the University of Pennsylvania’s
web site PennSound: http://writing.upenn.edu/
pennsound/x/Tardos.html
and her own site is www.annetardos.com
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844714421 ISBN: 9781844714421 Author: Anne
Tardos Title: I
Am You Series: Salt
Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt
Publishing Pub date: 15-Mar-08 Extent: 200pp Height: 216
mm Width: 140
mm Thickness: 12
mm Weight: 300
gms Supplier:Gardners
Books Supplier:Ingram
Book Group Supplier:Inbooks
(James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP
11.99 Price: USD
16.95 Rights: World
Short
description/annotation:I
Am You collects three new poems: “The
Aim of All Nature Is Beauty,” which Tardos
wrote soon after the death or her husband and
frequent collaborator Jackson Mac Low; “Letting
Go,” a 100-page poem which combines memoir
and self-examination in the face of loss, and
the 50-page “The Letter: A Bloodbath.”
Main description:I
Am You collects three new poems: “The
Aim of All Nature Is Beauty,” which
Tardos wrote soon after the death or her
husband and frequent collaborator Jackson
Mac Low; “Letting Go,” a 100-page
poem which combines memoir and self-examination
in the face of loss, and the 50-page “The
Letter: A Bloodbath.” These works deal
frankly with aspects of grief and recovery,
celebration and life building in poems of
haunting, fragmentary beauty, which both
reflect and record anger, hope and love,
and provide us with a testament to a partnership
built around creative compulsion, fun, and
linguistic exultation.
Meet the author
Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction by Marie Buck
The Aim of All Nature Is Beauty
The Nature of This Lecture Is by John Beauty
Fat Accomplice
Letting Go
The Letter: Bloodbath
I’ve always found Anne Tardos’s
work thrilling. While there is much to be fascinated
with, Tardos’s treatment of poetry’s ‘I,’ both
here and in her earlier volumes, is strange,
transformative, completely unnerving. The neologisms
and non-normative syntax of Tardos’s
Uxudo and The Dik-dik’s Solitude ask
me to read without referring to a lyric ‘I’ — without
allowing me to identify with an author-figure
or a character. While I Am You retains some
neologistic and asyntactic elements, it also
introduces meditative and talky speaking subjects
that haven’t appeared in earlier Tardos’s
work. Through these speakers, I Am You both
forefronts subjectivity and picks it apart.
As elegy, this book must necessarily take up
the question of autobiography. And in taking
up autobiography, Tardos uses commonplace phrases
and a flagging of form’s contortions
to move through and rupture those ideas associated
with autobiography: that a person’s life
follows a linear narrative, that a person is
in fact the same person from one moment or
year to the next, that one must “let
go” of people and the past throughout
one’s life. “It should really be
called ‘selves.’ There are so many
of us assembled/here,” writes Tardos,
and I Am You really does feel like an elegy
written by a plurality of subjects.
One of the fixations in the poem “Letting
Go” is monstrosity. If one is not really
the same person from one moment to the next,
there is indeed something monstrous about the
forcing of self into the particular rigid forms
allowed by language. If the narratives by which
an ‘I’ changes are unfamiliar (or
defamiliarized), what might be described in
some contexts as ‘evolution’ or ‘progress,’ instead
appears as monstrosity or distortion. So the ‘I’ becomes
monstrous in the tension of its having the
appearance of a stable, specific subject, and
always being in a state of change. One can
never fit exactly, must always be figured as
outside of the bounds of what’s considered ‘human.’ A
monster, just like the monster of any horror
movie: the changing self in a rage as it realizes
its own ‘disfigurement,’ its inability
to fit into grammatical forms of self and thus
its status as cast out from everyday discourse.
I Am You is chatty and colloquial, frequently
reiterating and altering bits of thought and
conversation. In correspondence about her work,
Tardos wrote that these poems are “pop,” and
these poems’ attention to popular language
brings up questions: how does a reader account
for the monstrosity of language, the misfitting ‘I’ in
her everyday speech? How do you acknowledge
the shifting nature of your self in the loaded
and worn-out language you’re limited
to in describing grief, morphing, alteration?
Once you recognize the monstrosity of using
a single, static letter ‘I’ to
stand in for such a diversity of versions of
yourself, what might you say? I Am You gives
you characters able to critique the notion
of character, pop phrases used to explain what’s
reductive about pop phrases, elegy attacking
elegiac conventions so that this elegy might
be written.
“The Aim of All Nature Is Beauty” contains
images of Colette and her dog Toby Chien posed
for a photo with similarly dour looks on their
faces. Artistic media can create formal equivalence
where previously there was none?;?just as the
word ‘I’ that I use to identify
myself may refer to a quite different person
from one moment or year to the next, the subject
of a portrait may vary (from dog to human,
for instance) yet retain certain qualities
simply because of the medium or the style.
The animal imagery in I Am You provides both
a backdrop against which the human speaker’s
voice may be read and, through the eerie resemblance
of animal expression to human expression in
Tardos’s work, allows for permeation
between what we normally think of as natural — and
all the strange meanings that accrue to the
word — and what we think of as ‘man-made.’
Such images are similar to the linguistic off-rhymes
and morphings that occur throughout this book.
Such morphings suggest that the way we conceive
of agency, and thus the way we interact socially
and politically, is largely formally determined.
Our interactions are, by Tardos’s account,
a linguistic game, both totally crucial and
comically playful: “I’m easily
moved to tears./I’m tearily moved to
ease./Eerily moved to tease.”
If the phrase “to let go,” to move
on after a trauma, or give up after some sort
of struggle, is a cliche, it is both something
that the voices in these poems critique with
such lines as “How can there be a universe
in an ever-changing truth?” and, quite
literally, the very occasion of these voices’ existence.
The “bloodbath” referred to in “The
Letter: A Bloodbath” must be both the
voices in the poem, as they critique the terms
of their own existence, and a visceral thing. “The
great surgery is underway and the patient is
bleeding profusely,” writes Tardos. The
bleeding patient may be language as it is dismantled,
but the ‘patient’ must also be
people — particularly those who experience
harm as a result of discourses that claim to
help, heal, fix. Whether the president is able
to coherently describe war using the same language
that announcers use to describe baseball games,
or whether we think of “misguided statesmen” or “statespeople” are
questions of language-play with dire and bloody
consequences.
“Letting Go” is dedicated “For
M,” and this dedication points up that
the nature of generosity — of dedicating
one’s time and one’s work — to
a person or cause is circumscribed completely
by the “ForM”: by the formal practices
and habits of one’s speech or writing.
The poems in this book tend to describe their
own forms. One knows from the outset that “Letting
Go” is a poem in 100 parts, and one is
given ahead of time some patterns and themes
to keep in mind. Just as this book describes
itself as it moves along, it bears witness
to your reading paths and habits as well. The
voices in these poems issue their challenges
(“On what terms am I the person I am?”),
and as I read, my own responses seems to be
continually echoed and recorded as the voices
of the poems reflect on themselves. Think of
I Am You as a public challenge to you as a
subject, you as an ‘I’ and as a
constant autobiographer: can ‘I’ conceive
of myself as a monster, shifting and morphing
through poetry, pop, politics, grief?
Marie Buck, Co-Editor, Model Homes
Unpublished
endorsement : A brilliant
and disturbing masterpiece — an unpicking
of elegy and its inevitable entanglements
with ‘autobiography’. Its expression
is supra-active and fast paced. it scans
form and implications of the living and the
dead. it exhumes and lays to rest. it left
me stunned.
John
Kinsella
Previous
review quote: In her marvelous
new collection, Tardos plays with every possible
verbal/visual/musical relationship: she invents
narratives, records ‘real’ events
(as in the case of 9-11 and her recent bout
with surgery), and can work magic with the
relationship of word to image, word to musical
score, with multilingualism, and with the
tension between high art and ‘ordinary’ signage.
Marjorie
Perloff
Previous
review quote: Uxudo, a
gift from technology, illuminated manuscript.
Illuminated not as in ‘illustrated,’ but
luminous, interactive in a sense that Blake
would have understood. Or Zukofsky: that
language is eyes. Ears, echoes. That, in
fact, language itself, in our time certainly,
must always be plural: a system of differences,
midrashim to an Ur-text that never existed
but perpetually surrounds us.
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