“[B]alancing the affordances, entailments, and opacities of four languages at once is liable to nudge the gland: surprise, which is to feel something that could not previously be expected.” Above: detail from page 90 of ‘Uxudo.’
Surprises are adrenalizing. Likewise obsession, movement, risk. I suppose, running the parahermeneutic gamut of the poem, one dilates or, basically, one is asleep.
Uxudo, written by Anne Tardos in English, French, Hungarian, and German in 1999, plainly disincentivizes napping. To the contrary, balancing the affordances, entailments, and opacities of four languages at once is liable to nudge the gland: surprise, which is to feel something that could not previously be expected.
Photo of Anne Tardos (right) at the Kelly Writers House, March 15, 2016, taken by Writers House staff.
It’s exhilarating to say things. Giddy and strange to put things in the air nobody has heard. Exultant and juicy to make proposals at the interphase between language and reality. I feel these things keenly reading Anne Tardos. “It must be crisp not cryptic, if you want to write,” reads the first line of “Gentle Deer On 10th Avenue,” “There is this come-and-go of ideas, impressions, fears, uncertainties.”[1]
Al Filreis was joined by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ariel Resnikoff, and Stephen Ross to talk about five sections — or pages or passages — from a book called Uxudo by Anne Tardos. Only one of the five has a title (the first of our selections, called “She Put It Mildly”). Those who have access to the Tuumba Press/O Books edition of the book can follow along: our five sections, in the order in which we hear Tardos perform them, can be found on pages 55, 19, 31, 43, and 53. On PennSound’s Anne Tardos author page, one can find all five of these sections, and others, in the recording made of her performance at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, in 1999, at an event sponsored by “After-Englishes.”
Uxudo is Anne Tardos’s interlingualist book of 1999 (Tuumba Books/O Books). At an “After-Englishes” event in Manoa, Hawaii, that same year, Tardos gave an introduction to the Uxudo project. She then read passages from the book. Here is a sampling of five poems/sections:
“She Put It Mildly,” p. 55 [audio segment here; audio recording starts at 00:00 here]. Click on the image above for a larger view of the text.
Anne Tardos created a poem that consists (mostly) of lists of adjectives and adjectival phrases that she'd "picked up" from a reading given by Lytle Shaw in the Segue series. In December 2002 she gave her own reading in The Line Reading Series, where Lytle Shaw introduced her, and so she began with the aforementioned poem, "For Lytle Shaw." Here is the recording. And here is the link to PennSound's Anne Tardos page.
Anne Tardos, five from 'Uxudo'
Uxudo is Anne Tardos’s interlingualist book of 1999 (Tuumba Books/O Books). At an “After-Englishes” event in Manoa, Hawaii, that same year, Tardos gave an introduction to the Uxudo project. She then read passages from the book. Here is a sampling of five poems/sections:
“She Put It Mildly,” p. 55 [audio segment here; audio recording starts at 00:00 here]. Click on the image above for a larger view of the text.