Anne Tardos

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Anne Tardos, whose poetry & performances have delighted us for several decades now, emerges in her new book as the innovator of a work that incorporates, like the best of our poetry, a full range of thoughts & experiences & makes them stick in mind & memory. The Exploding Nothingness of Never Define is her complex, often surprising meditation on poetry and life that starts with a series of takes on the idea and image of “the poet” and goes on to make something new, which she arranges in a series of nine serial poems, delivered with a true poet’s intelligence, “the pride of lived experience,” she says and wanders, wide awake and dreaming, searching for new/old places/faces to observe and call to life.

– Jerome Rothenberg

In what seems to have been a surge of creative and linguistic energy, Anne Tardos in the space of two years has written nine dazzling poetic sequences. Each sequence speaks with its own authority and from its own imagined life-world, but all of them celebrate the existence of social happiness, love. From the sequence “Words on a Page, ” which opens the book and is a tribute to the author’s sheer love of writing, to “Madagascar Mud,” the paean to the irreverent tumult of the natural world with which the book ends, Tardos establishes love as the foundation for writing On love’s grounds, she explores and invents with the vibrant wit familiar to readers and audiences of her previous work but with less restrained as well as warmer exuberance. The Exploding Nothingness of Never Define will outlast the destruction and triumph over hate. All power to it.

– Lyn Hejinian

This is a work of solid intent. The lines are taut, like the strings of a guitar. Not tight, taut. Tuned. Exquisitely correspondent. As if, by reading, one were to pluck the line & feel its vibration in the mind. The words feel caressed, not chosen so much as savored. This is the energy of consolidation, the harmonic response of image & meaning. The language manages to say very complex & surprising things with an elegant simplicity.

– John Olson

Interestingly, it reads so differently in different parts, sometimes like a provisional script for a performance piece, sometimes as if composed by an AI program, sometimes playful & exuberant (well, often), sometimes oddly penetrative in its obliquity, sometimes a palimpsest sliced from the poet's own reading, sometimes making for prismatic effects, & sometimes much of all that together. An apt answer to this age of misrule.

– Maurice Scully (correspondence)