Inasmuch as Noah Eli Gordon plays a kind of sensual archaeologist to the worn-down landscapes of language in his new collection, “A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow,” the title is a gross-fangled reflection of his poetry’s more dainty excavation of the referent. He scratches away at bones, words, colors, and semi-quavers buried beneath the cracked land that obstructs like the dizzying sheen of the systematic modes Benjamin called “language”—the visual arts, mathematics, spoken and written English, etc. Music and meaning surely lie beneath, but (so as not to miss the fib in every “lie”) Gordon is a poet that has little use for old meanings. By design, his verse refuses to recoup anything. Rather, it lays fresh linguistic landscapes to be caressed, gawked at, listened to, or broken down anew. Everything unearthed—like “the timbrel’s return to nowhere” from the eponymous opening poem—has a new song for us, a new color, a new meaning.

To achieve this regenerative state, Gordon employs diction that is at times self-aware of its transformative machinations, its forced commingling of linguistic action. In many cases, common words and phrases—the ossified remains of language resurrected from below—are shot through with prefixes, undone and reimagined, as Gordon might have it. So we have “unwokeness,” “unpunctuated,” and “anti-everything,” among other absences and inversions, which occur on micro (a verb, a noun, an adjective) and macro (a phrase, a line, a verse) levels. The results, put in to context, are at turns playful and willfully clunky, qualities that Fiddle borrows from the music of chance, as here in A New Hymn to the Old Night>

& someone to call the camp fires happiness to cull vapid contingencies from vapid rainfall annulling a vapid image in place of itself replacing vacancy in one’s unwokeness

The book proceeds with a free discharge of similar images, representations and replacements, exalting in the clang of “an empty definition // gathering its discourse” from the touchstone piece of the first section, “An exact comprehension of the composer’s intent.” There is a continual synesthetic interplay and exchange of cross-system homonyms—image and text, color and word—and an alchemy of all into musical verse. A “ring of clarinets…mimic[s] a boat // growing smaller”; “a dance…mim[es] the music / of one digging a ditch”; and the “arrayed core” of “the dead hair of the harpist spread on the lawn…draw[s] a grace note / from the muttering of those exhausted by wild dance.”

We know Gordon privileges repetitive word-altering and -transforming techniques from his Chapbook Corner review of Steven Zultanski’s Homoem, posted on Gordon’s blog. Homoem employs a repetitive use of the “homo” prefix “to make worn out phrases and figures once again intriguingly strange,” Gordon writes. But we don’t have to go trawling through the blogosphere to find evidence of intent and technique in Fiddle, for there is plenty in the book itself, which is continually turning inward and making similar pronouncements in its pages. One of the most cheeky entries, “Postcript: the book of Cain,” discusses the technique, dubbing it, appropriately, “verbify.” There is no more succinct summation of Gordon’s m.o. than what he offers in this poem: “The book explained: to verbify a word is to put it into action, to incinerate its core meaning.” Verbify is a verbified word of course; and fire is a continual and pivotal image throughout Gordon’s poetry, for it is the locus of language-rebirth. In Fiddle, as in the Gospel of St. Matthew, every tree that bears not the good fruit—or, every word left unverbified—is torn down and thrown into the fire, and thereby transformed.

“Figuration in conflict with an afternoon” takes this technique to the level of phrase, line, verse, and poem with its “whose you” mantra. The poem ends with a phrase variation placed to such exact bibliophilic effect that it bears transcribing in total:

whose you is a whisper all verb whose you a child’s hair in flames whose you is replacing a curtain whose you is thickening the mortar whose you imprinting a beating heart whose you aged a flower who found it dried in the center of a book

Fiddle is riddled with symbols of text-artifice like that self-pronouncing “center of a book”; there are “burning dictionaries,” “human nouns,” and other print-oriented remains that might hide what “Urge to call” calls “an idea preceding vocabulary.” Deathly as they are, those symbols are appropriate to the phenomenological, corporeal treatment of language throughout (there is a good deal of integumental imagery and even some blood-letting). And while Gordon clearly takes cues from the aleatory meanderings and form-and-content marriage of automatic music, Fiddle ultimately posits an earnest belief in the transformative and transforming—even rapturous—properties of written language. Books have their place in that belief, even in the reliquaries of its chapels; for, as we are told in an early poem, “language is a translation of grace.” Its at once a religion and a thanatology of text. Consistent with the sonic and poetic world Gordon creates in Fiddle, the literary arts should not regress to the point of noise-nonsense, lest they become “a dead thing full of music.” Rather, the poet should persevere in his scribblings if only to “[die] in a book on the eve of music.”