Introduction for Tenney Nathanson (by Tim Peterson)

What is up with Tenney Nathanson’s poetry? Tenney Nathanson’s poetry is like a bashful sasquatch with hair hanging down into its eyes that has swallowed and digested all of Whitman, Pound, the Frankfurt School, Frederic Jameson, and key zen Buddhist texts! This maximal shaggy beast stretches for miles, evoking a Lacanian bendy body-space that defies the usual laws of the utterance it relies on for its presence! It’s alternately sinister, garrulous, and sheepish, offering a fractured portrait of the speaking-writing subject caught in the gaze: “Mouth? I have no mouth. Leg facing personal name.” Langpo tries to escape the self; zen, the ego. Anyway, so Tenney is an amazing poet, as demonstrated by his two recent books Erased Art from Chax Press and Home on the Range (the Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth) from O Books. He is also one of the sharpest and most insightful critics I know, author of the innovative study Whitman’s Presence from NYU Press. A native New Yorker, he grew up in the New York scene around and after Paul Blackburn and later studied at Columbia with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro, who correctly describes his former student as “impossibly and humorously serious and refined.” It’s true, Nathanson demonstrates how marginalized rhetorical figures such as jokes and mannerist decoration have roles central to metaphor-making and therefore to thinking. O Nathanson’s poetry, he plays up moments of discomfort and embarrassment, showing how these key points figure a whole economy of discourse and its relationship to the body: “Come unto me in garters and old men’s socks.” His favorite tools? Erasure and metonymy. It’s like the story where Kenneth Koch shows a poem to Frank O’Hara beginning “Oh it’s a lovely day in Bergen, Norway,” and O’Hara says it’s pretty good but he would suggest removing the word “in.” Similarly Nathanson, our architect of anamorphoses and ruptures in syntax, multiplies his meanings by erasing, in the process jostling multiple contexts of heteroglossia. But it’s not just a collage, it’s an ideogram! There is a current of “private language” and a whole shorthand history of reading contained in the clusters that make up Nathanson’s long breath lines. This is what Walt Whitman would have sounded like if he’d read Derrida, moved to the southwest, and taught English and Creative Writing at the University of Arizona: “who touches this touches / whang dang doodle.” Please welcome my teacher, mentor, and friend Tenney Nathanson.