Synopsis
Anne Tardos, whose poetry & performances have delighted us for several decades now, emerges in her new book as the innovator of a work that incorporates, like the best of our poetry, a full range of thoughts & experiences & makes them stick in mind & memory. The Exploding Nothingness of Never Define is her complex, often surprising meditation on poetry and life that starts with a series of takes on the idea and image of “the poet” and goes on to make something new, which she arranges in a series of nine serial poems, delivered with a true poet’s intelligence, “the pride of lived experience,” she says and wanders, wide awake and dreaming, searching for new/old places/faces to observe and call to life. —Jerome Rothenberg In what seems to have been a surge of creative and linguistic energy, Anne Tardos in the space of two years has written nine dazzling poetic sequences. Each sequence speaks with its own authority and from its own imagined life-world, but all of them celebrate the existence of social happiness, love. From the sequence “Words on a Page,” which opens the book and is a tribute to the author’s sheer love of writing, to “Madagascar Mud,” the paean to the irreverent tumult of the natural world with which the book ends, Tardos establishes love as the foundation for writing On love’s grounds, she explores and invents with the vibrant wit familiar to readers and audiences of her previous work but with less restrained as well as warmer exuberance. The Exploding Nothingness of Never Define will outlast the destruction and triumph over hate. All power to it. —Lyn Hejinian This is a work of solid intent. The lines are taut, like the strings of a guitar. Not tight, taut. Tuned. Exquisitely correspondent. As if, by reading, one were to pluck the line & feel its vibration in the mind. The words feel caressed, not chosen so much as savored. Seasoned here & there with a little twist, a little distortion, a note bent by a semitone. This is the energy of consolidation, the harmonic response of image & meaning. The language manages to say very complex & surprising things with an elegant simplicity & that special kind of reverie that is exercised in singing. —John Olson Anne Tardos is the author of eleven books of poetry, and editor of three posthumous collections of poetry by Jackson Mac Low. Her work has been translated and published in dozens of anthologies and journals around the world. Tardos pioneered a unique multilingual writing style, often complementing her texts with video stills, photographs, and collages. Her writing is renowned for its fluid use of multiple languages and its innovative forms. She has worked in numerous media, creating performance pieces, radio plays, videos, and musical compositions. Her multilingual and multimedia works have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the West German Radio, WDR; the XLIV Venice Biennale; and in many international sound poetry festivals, including Festival La Bâtie, Geneva; text-ljud Festival, Stockholm; Scene Wien, Vienna; and Zwischentoene, Cologne. Among her grants, fellowships, and commissions are The Ford Foundation, Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Emily Harvey Foundation. Her works have been commissioned by baritone Thomas Buckner and the Dominque Lévy Gallery. Tardos lives in New York City with her husband, Michael Byron.
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