Nine by Anne Tardos

What glee in the Nine, this tour de force of genius trickster complexity, “all about equipping poetry.” And Anne Tardos does this accouterment-ing like a Buddhist deity with many arms and heads. “Rub together two neurons and you have a mind” and play with nines and you have a rich compendium of unsurpassed wild multi-lingual-mental invention and words stomping around as richly palpable (non gendered!) masters of the universe. I got so refreshed by the wit and tenderness I couldn’t stop.

—Anne Waldman

Anne Tardos, whose poetry & performances have enlightened us for several decades now, emerges in Nines as an innovator of new forms as a vehicle for work that incorporates, like all great poetry, the fullest range of thoughts & experiences & makes them stick in mind & memory. I am struck, as rarely happens, by this combination of form & content, each a powerful extension of the other.

—Jerome Rothenberg

Reading Anne Tardos’s Nines feels like living in the middle of everything and anything that is, isn’t, can’t, can, ought to be, needs to be, happening in just this way, right now, in language, sometimes several languages, while accompanied by a dear and reliable friend (once in a while flailing around wildly, though in a controlled way – nine word lines, nine line poems, no matter how improbably) whose sensible voice soothes, jokes, seduces, pokes fun at itself, and now and then a line that astonishingly simply tells you the truth about your life, despite everything. A truly, literally, wonderful book. With an astute and illuminating introduction by Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

—Norman Fischer

Although in compact nine-word/nine-line containers, the poems in Nines are capacious. Formally inventive, philosophical, speech-like, sometimes syntactically tousled, they are as amusing as they are intensely serious. Autobiography, community, love, mortality, dark humor, and whimsy all make appearances in these meticulously timed gems. Genius9.

—Nada Gordon

Anne Tardos, American, is the author of nine books of poetry, and editor of three collections of poetry by Jackson Mac Low. Her work has been 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.

Around 1980, she began performing her own works, and also creating new works with Mac Low. 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 Batie, Geneva; text-ljud Festival, Stockholm; Scene Wien, Vienna; and Zwischentoene, Cologne.

Since moving to New York in 1966, she maintained lifelong friendships with artists Richard Lindner, Saul Steinberg, Sam Francis, Larry Rivers, Vito Acconci, Ay-O, John Cage, Judith Malina, Simone Forti, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, George Maciunas; art dealer Felix Landau, architects Vally and Serge Sabarsky; poets Jackson Mac Low, Jerome Rothenberg, Lyn Hejinian, Anne Waldman, Robert Creeley, and other influential figures of the New York avant-garde.

A Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Tardos lives in New York City with her husband, the composer Michael Byron.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 148 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-226-6

$16

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