Intro for Tenney Nathanson, 3/20 at Zinc Bar

Tenney Nathanson’s poetry contains a secret sublingual ingredient which garrulously and bashfully distributes an insight throughout the body a split second ahead of thought, creating a torqued interstitial space between surprise, pleasure, and delay. There’s a deceptively goofy bumbling around quality here that allows Nathanson to achieve amazing things, like Philip Whalen announcing he is about to do a somersault and then telling us in the next line that he has done it, or like Steve Martin telling us somewhere in the middle of the show “well, we’re about to get started any minute now.” Nathanson takes on more fully than anyone I know the implications of “the kind of poetry being written now that’s not written now.” In a moebius strip, “like a list containing itself as one of its minor items,” Nathanson’s poems continually place us viscerally within the flow of things while also commenting on that flow, utilizing a full tonal palette which includes believably embodied interactions with technology, explosively funny shades of embarrassment: “The spellchecker tried to catch that word but I caught its miserable spellchecking ass.” Another line from his poetry that I’ve mulled over endlessly through the years is “Let me enter the Iraq Body Count website,” which suggests something new about the relationship between the semi-public subvocalizations we do while cruising the internet and their relationship to the body and the politics of the space we find ourselves in online. In addition to being the teacher and critic from whom I’ve learned the most over the years, Nathanson is also one of my favorite poets, one whose quicksilver intellect and affective wisdom I admit to being in awe of, someone of whom I am continually asking, how did he do that, and loving every minute of it. Please welcome Tenney Nathanson