Attention Span 2012 | Matvei Yankelevich
Sergio Chejfec, tr. Margaret Carson | My Two Worlds | Open Letter | 2008
I just found out about Chejfec at the ALTA conference this October, and am very pleased. This is a writer’s writer, translated by a translator’s translator. I strolled through this “novel” as slowly as the novelist recounts his walk, feeling each comma as a cobblestone in the park of prose. It’s a beautiful, understated work; likewise the translation.
Paul Stephens, Jenelle Troxell, Robert Hardwick Weston, eds. | Convolution No. 1 | Fall 2011
This magazine, the magazine of my dreams, situates itself in the trajectory of the Evergreen Review (of the ‘Pataphysics issue), The New Freewoman, and The Little Review. But it’s an update to something modern, beautifully produced, designed to enhance thought. This issue, if you can find it, has weird stuff on Duchamp, a Bob Brown reproduction, a fascinating essay by Nancy Tewksbury on Xu Bing, an interview with Charles Bernstein, a cool manifesto on “Patacriticism by Paul Stephens, and some really cool looking essays and art that I still have to get my head around. The editors have an incredible vision for what a magazine could be. It may be a little too hip in places (slight pieces by Sarah Crowner, Craig Dworkin); but it’s super relevant for the moment and engaging as hell—both conceptually and materially—to sit with and thumb through.
Steven Zultanski | Agony | Book Thug | 2012
This is a long lyric poem, a kind of sur-literal autobiography, from the author of Pad and Cop Kisser. My blurb couldn’t fit on the back of the book, nor even here, so here is just a part of it:
In a manner that parodies and surpasses the lunacy of American pundits, Zultanski leads us on a mathematical journey into the volume of humanity’s tears and saliva exchange in kisses, and the square-footage of breasts and pet-intestines to explore the Markson-esqe, Mobius sociality of the solipsistic self. […] Call it conceptualism, lyricism, the new literality, or agonic financial planning—whatever it is, Agony is not for the faint of heart.
Thom Donovan | The Hole | Displaced | 2012
Through epistolary poems and lots of back-matter (responses, essays, etc.) Donovan engages some current issues raised (very differently) in conceptual works. There’s actual poetry in this, taking up the bulk of it even. I love the whimsy of Michael Cross’s design and the way all the design choices support the process of digging the book as one digs a hole in the ground.
Alan Loney | The Books to Come | Cuneiform | 2012
This is one of the best books I’ve read about books—the reading of books, the making of books, the distribution of books, the hoarding of books, the etc. of books. The writing is precise, modest, laconic, easy. The thoughts are useful, provocative but without pushing any buttons. If you can find the earlier first edition (hard-cover), that’d make it even better.
Fred Moten | Hughson’s Tavern | Leon Works | 2008
This summer, I finally got this book and was very glad I did. Read the music. Note: it’s a thinking music.
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Matvei Yankelevich‘s contributions to Attention Span for 2010 and 2007. Return to 2012 directory.
Attention Span 2012 | Brian Kim Stefans
1. Alain Badiou | The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings | Verso | 2012
2. Perry Anderson | Considerations on Western Marxism | Verso | 1976
3. Ian Bogost | Alien Phenomenology, or What is it Like to be a Thing | Minnesota | 2012
4. George Berkeley | Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous | Hackett | 1979 [1713]
5. James Warren | The Presocratics: Natural Philosophers before Socrates | California | 2007
6. Mikhail Bakunin | Statism and Anarchy | Cambridge | 1990 [1873]
7. Quentin Meillassoux | After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency | Continuum | 2010
8. Tiqqun | Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl | Translator/publisher unknown | 2001 [1999]
9. Ring T. Cardé and Vincent H. Resh, eds. | A World of Insects: The Harvard University Press Reader | 2012
10. Kathy Acker | Blood and Guts in High School | Grove | 1978
11. David Chalmers | The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory | Oxford | 1997
I don’t have time to annotate all of these, but basically I’m just doing a lot of reading in idealist philosophy (inspired by the Speculative Realists’ desire to imagine a metaphysics in a pre-Kantian fashion and Badiou’s call for a controlling “Idea” in future political activism or protest), pre-Marxist (or co-Marxist) political theory, and cognitive theory (including that of animals!) in terms of its possible relationship to Speculative Realism (otherwise known as Object-Oriented Ontology). The Acker book might seem random in that context, but I assigned it for my Experimental Fiction class and haven’t read it yet.
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Brian Kim Stefans’s contribution to Attention Span for 2011 and 2003. Return to 2012 directory.
Attention Span 2012 | Amy Evans
The first section is anthologies, letters and art/performance work. The second is single author poetry (collections and pamphlets).
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Peter Hughes, ed.| Sea Pie: A Shearsman Anthology of Oystercatcher Poetry | Shearsman | 2012
Harriet Tarlo, ed. | The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry | Shearsman | 2011
Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin, ed. Lee Bartlett | Selected Letters | Norton | 1991
ifpthenq, illustrated by Simon Taylor of Joy As Tiresome Vandalism | Top Trumps: 34 poet playing cards (“inspired by City Lights edition”) | August 2012
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Robert Duncan | Poems 1952: for Jess [facsimile of a chapbook hand-made by Robert Duncan] | A shuffaloff / Eternal Network Joint (149 copies) | 2012
Robert Duncan, ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman | The H.D. Book | California | 2011
Ana Cavic and Renee O’Drobinak | Myopic Violence: Poetry exchange/intervention between the Ladies of the Press | Pamphlet of faxed drawings and poetry created during lunch breaks at the office, contribution to Maintenant series event at the Rich Mix, Brick Lane, London | March 30, 2012
Richard Parker | The Traveller & The Defence of Heaven | Veer | May 2012
Jeff Hilson | In The Assarts | Veer | July 2010
H.D. | Notes on Thought and Vision & The Wise Sappho | City Lights | 2001
Lisa Robertson | On Physical Real Beginning and What Happens Next | above/ground press | April 2012
Michael McClure | Rain Mirror: New Poems | New Directions | 1999
Michael McClure | Plum Stones | O Books | 2002
Geraldine Monk | Lobe Scarps & Finials | Leafe | 2011
Luke Roberts | False Flags | Mountain | 2011
Marcus Slease | Godzenie | BlazeVOX | 2009
[Justin Katko], Megan Sword, Timpani Skullface | SUPERIOR CITY SONG | Critical Documents (100 copies) | February 2012
Michael Palmer | Thread | New Directions | 2011
Tim Atkins | Petrarch | Crater Press / Crater VI | August 2010
Kenneth Patchen | Selected Poems | New Directions | 1957
Denise Riley | Selected Poems | Reality Street | 2000
Gregory Woods | We Have the Melon | Carcanet, 1992 – and looking forward to reading: An Ordinary Dog | Carcanet | 2011
Timothy Thornton | Jocund Day | Mountain | 2011
Bill Griffiths | Durham & Other Sequences | West House | 2002
Sophie Mayer | Kiss Off | Oystercatcher | 2011
Tom Pickard | Hole in the Wall: New & Selected Poems | Flood | 2002
Tom Pickard | Ballad of Jamie Allan | Flood | 2007
George Oppen, ed. Michael Davidson | New Collected Poems | New Directions | 2002
Lisa Jarnot | Black Dog Songs | Flood | 2003
Ulli Freer | Recovery (Incomplete) | Rot Direkt | 2011
Sean Bonney | Happiness. Poems After Rimbaud | Unkant | 2011
Simon Perril | A Clutch of Odes | Oystercatcher | 2009
Carol Watts | When blue light falls 3 | Oystercatcher | 2012
John James | Cloud Breaking Sun | Oystercatcher | 2012
Tony Lopez | Works on Paper | Crate Press / Crater 15 | 2011
Edith Sitwell | “Some Notes on My Own Poetry” | in Collected Poems | Duckworth Overlook | 2006
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Amy Evans is the co-author of Viersome #01 (Veer, 2012) and the author of Collecting Shells (Oystercatcher, 2011). This year, her work appears in Women’s Studies Quarterly and the following forthcoming anthologies: Dear World & Everyone In It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe); Sea Pie (Shearsman); and In Place of Love and Country: Poetry at the Pound Conference (University of New Orleans Press). She is co-editor with Shamoon Zamir of The Unruly Garden: Robert Duncan and Eric Mottram, Letters & Essays (Peter Lang). She lives in London.
This is Amy Evans’s first contribution to Attention Span. Return to 2012 directory.
Attention Span 2012 | Alan Felsenthal
Lisa Jarnot | Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography | California | 2012
Nate Klug | Consent | Pressed Wafer | 2012
Chris Marker | Letter from Siberia | film | 1957
Thomas Meyer | Kintsugi | Flood | 2011
Amanda Nadelberg | Bright Brave Phenomena | Coffee House | 2012
Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel | The Essential Peirce vol. 1 | Indiana UP | 1992
Ariana Reines | Mercury | Fence | 2011
Mary Ruefle | Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures | Wave | 2012
Rusty Morrison | After Urgency | Tupelo | 2012
Louis Simpson | At the End of the Open Road | Wesleyan | 1963
David Foster Wallace | Infinite Jest | Little, Brown | 1996
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Alan Felsenthal edits The Song Cave with Ben Estes. They have edited the forthcoming A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton.
This is Alan Felsenthal’s first contribution to Attention Span. Return to 2012 directory.
Attention Span 2012 | Minal Singh, Kaveh Bassiri, and friends
Jerome Rothenberg | 25 Caprichos a partir de Goya | Calamus Poesia
Mark Liedner| Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me | Factory Hollow
Joshua Edwards and Van Edwards | Campeche: Poems & Photographs | Noemi
Kim Gek Lin Short | China Cowboy | Tarpaulin Sky
Mary Jo Bang, trans. | Dante’s Inferno: A New Translation | Graywolf
Gina Abelkop | Darling Beastlettes | Apostrophe
Sommer Browning | Either Way I’m Celebrating | Birds LLC
Roger Sedarat | Ghazal Games | Ohio
Julian T. Brolaski | gowanus atropolis | Ugly Duckling
Andrea Rexilius | Half of What They Carried Flew Away | Letter Machine
Loren Erdrich and Sierra Nelson | I Take Back the Sponge Cake | Rose Metal
Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place, eds. | I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women | Les Figues
Julia Bloch | Letters to Kelly Clarkson | Sidebrow
Rebecca Lindenberg | Love, An Index | McSweeney’s
Brandon Shimoda | O Bon | Litmus
Tomaz Salamun | On the Tracks of Wild Game | Ugly Duckling
Matthew Henriksen | Ordinary Sun | Black Ocean
Dan Magers | Party Knife | Birds LLC | #
Eric Baus | Scared Text | Center for Literary Publishing
Raúl Zurita | Songs For His Disappeared Love | Action
Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep, eds. | The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral | Ahsahta
Dot Devota | The Eternal Wall | Cannibal
Héctor Viel Temperley, trans. Stuart Krimko | The Last Four Books of Héctor Viel Temperley | Sand Paper
Joyelle McSweeney | The Necropastoral | spork
Frances Richard | The Phonemes | Les Figues
Joseph Harrington | Things Come On: An Amneoir | Wesleyan
Dana Ward | This Can’t Be Life | Edge| $
Farid Matuk | This Isa Nice Neighborhood | Letter Machine
Noel Black Uselysses | Ugly Duckling | *
Anna Moschovakis | You and Three Others are Approaching A Lake | Coffee House
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These titles were selected by
C. Violet Eaton
Chris Martin *
Douglas Hahn #
Jared White
Kaveh Bassiri
Mary Austin Speaker $
Minal Shekhawat
Robert Alan Wendeborn
Carrie Murphy
Rosa Alcala
Russel Swensen
Sara Nicholson
Steven Karl
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* Microreview of Noel Black’s Uselysses (Ugly Duckling) by Chris Martin
A much anticipated full-length debut, Black’s book enfolds libraries within its wings, which flap about on sonar-taut lines. It’s a book of friendship and derangement, hope and domestic adventure. It concludes with the New Narrative’s newest classic, “Prophecies for the Past,” which Kevin Killian called “the sort of reading experience they must have invented poetry for.” And Noel wrote that shit in prose.
Chris Martin is the author of American Music (Copper Canyon 2007) and Becoming Weather (Coffee House 2011).
# Microreview of Dan Magers’ Party Knife (Birds LLC) by Doug Hahn
Party Knife‘s poems are boiling with dark humor, quiet rage, and poignant sadness. They weave the conscious and unconscious with an Ashberian intensity that verges on schadenfreude, but in the end we glimpse the everyday sublime. On the surface level, these poems are very funny and very bizarre, but they are also fine examples of poetic form and do indeed have a profound overall meaning—this is what makes the book special to me: in a world filled with either self-important or glib post-MFA projects, here is a poet who excels at both entertainment and instruction. On a more personal note, I worked and lived as a poet in post-9/11 New York City for many years, and this is a book that embodies the artist’s experience in that horrible and amazing place in American time.
$ Microreview of Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life (Edge) by Mary Austin Speaker
The book that I anticipated most this year is Dana Ward’s This Can’t Be Life, published by Edge Books. Typing Wild Speech, Dana’s excellent chapbook, is included here in full and bowled me over just as much as it did the first time I heard him read from it. To hear Dana read, or to read him on the page, is to hear the unflinching inner monologue of someone who prizes social interaction as much as the drive to make art and is as exploratory in each endeavor. “Take for instance the notion of ‘poet.’ I’ve allowed a lot of myth to hold sway over how I perform that for myself. . . . How to be ‘poet,’ ‘partner,’ ‘good friend,’ on & on. How resolve all this practical alienation,” he writes, fully aware of both the banalities (with which he quickly dispatches) and the moral consequences of asking such a question. It’s brave, totally compelling writing, and beyond that, it is joyful and anxious and stylish and very, very smart.
Mary Austin Speaker is the author of the chapbooks The Bridge (Push Press, 2011) and 20 Love Poems for 10 Months (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling); a collaborative play, I am You This Morning You Are Me Tonight, written with her husband, poet Chris Martin; and the forthcoming full-length collection, Ceremony, due out in 2013 from Slope Editions.
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Return to 2012 directory.
Attention Span 2012 | Benjamin Friedlander
Matthew Cooperman | Still | Counterpath | 2011
This year I began reading Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. In one of them, Landor has Michelangelo say, “In our days, poetry is a vehicle which does not carry much within it, but is top-heavy with what is corded on.” Cooperman’s Still yields a retort: “Counterpoint: never the vessel for what’s inside, it’s tidings of thought and who’s drinking with you.” Which sums Landor’s appeal as well as Cooperman’s own, since the play of voices (or really, pronouncements) in Landor’s prose owes all to its ease and flow, a conviviality of form. Cooperman, for his part, has mastered the secret of the list poem—a cording on of things that drift by. His details are keepsakes, not provisions. There’s no stopping to unpack along the way—interiority is a given, but for ballast alone. Meanwhile, the movement forward is incessant, and speedy when needed, even when the vessel grows top-heavy.
Aris Fioretos, trans. Tomas Tranaeus | Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosis: An Illustrated Biography | Stanford | 2012
Because of her Nobel Prize—and Holocaust connection—Sachs’s first Schocken collection, O the Chimneys, was the only book of poetry in our house when I was growing up, which means I came to her in the order of most readers before 1980: prior to Paul Celan. Since the order of reading is a chemical process, transformative and irreversible, I count myself lucky for finding Sachs first, undimmed by comparison, and then Celan in light of her. That said, my knowledge of Sachs remained pretty thin over the years. This thick description, produced by the editor of the four-volume Werke (which slipped into print in 2011), gives us a poet celebrated and forgotten before we really learned—by way of Celan—how to read her.
Lawrence P. Jackson | The Indignant Generation: A Narrative of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 | Princeton | 2011
As it happens, two of the poets most important to me—Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks—belong to the generation in question, or began there, so I was overjoyed to find a book so rich and readable on those years, which literary histories generally pass over as mere interval. And certainly the Harlem Renaissance and Black Power eras are more exciting. They’re also more copiously understood and documented—or were. I hope Jackson’s sequels and prequels are under contract.
Henry James | William Wetmore Story and His Friends | Grove | 1957, original edition 1904
Written for money, with much complaining, and little respect for its subject, the Storys, whose children urged on the task, this lapidary account of expatriate life in Italy is far more enjoyable—and more peculiar—than its neglect ever led me to expect. If I’d expected anything: I was hunting down a reference and couldn’t stop. The fretful syntax is typical of late James, but how strange, if not comical, to find it in the service of so pedestrian a genre: the two-volume Victorian “Memoir,” told through letters and diaries, with brief stretches of narrative to carry things forward when the documents tucker out. As a rule, these books have an honorable plainness, setting forth the facts to speak for themselves. But how could such an approach do for James? Investing discretion—that most sociable of virtues—with an antisocial charge, he dulls the shock to a stimulating burr, brushing us with the velvet he draped around his kind.
Paul Legault | The Emily Dickinson Reader | McSweeney’s | 2012
Every Emily Dickinson poem reduced to a single line. These are often wisecracks, material for the back of a class (zombies, really?), but the rest has an acuteness that puts scholarship to shame. And the whole has a destructive ambition worthy of its subject—though Dickinson’s ambition was of course trained higher. But she too relied on the reductio ad absurdum, and she too was given to wisecracks (some of which, drum roll, are now recited in class).
Haki R. Madhubuti | YellowBlack: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet’s Life | Third World | 2005
The segregation of taste that our warped institutions promote, with our unthinking help, has kept me for too long from appreciating Madhubuti’s importance. Which is all the more revealing—and mortifying—when I recall my high school enthusiasm for Don L. Lee, as Madhubuti was known before 1975. This book is very much Lee’s story, a tale that rivals Iceberg Slim or Michael Gold in its pulp power. And that would be enough! But it’s also Madhubiti’s tale, which means the story is told with a wisdom pulp only achieves in the hands of a Dostoevsky or Richard Wright—shaped with a gentleness all Madhubuti’s own.
Denise Riley | Time Lived, Without Its Flow | Capsule Editions | 2012
My childhood was a study in parental mourning, with methodical care preferred to expressions of grief, analysis to elegy, perhaps because the quickening of the mind was how grief was let go, temporarily—interest forgetting its struggle with depression. I wouldn’t presume to say the same is true of Riley, only that this remarkable book (not a memoir; a record of interest in one aspect of mourning, its temporality) sustains its care so methodically, grief itself is moved; not to tears, but a clearer perspective.
Lisa Robertson | Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, the Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias | BookThug | 2012
The dependence of sense on the senses has never been more evident to me than in these essays, which let loose the mind in a world of color and perfume, texture and sound, a world so dizzying, only words can comprehend it unstunned. Making comprehension itself a sensual experience, interrupted now and again by a pang: how dull my own words feel in comparison.
George Saintsbury | A History of English Prosody: From the Twelfth Century to the Present Day | 3 vols. | Macmillan | 1906
Marianne Moore gave Saintsbury two places in her ideal library, as many as Coleridge, more than Plato. So why not, I thought, and requested these volumes from storage. Soon enough, the need to mark passages overcame me, and I acquired a set of my own: age-softened library discards, which I can’t take to bed on account of their smell. How pristine, in contrast, the prose. Bright and liquid as a stream, bubbling over the pebbles of opinion. Which do make for a slippery footing. Better, perhaps, to reach down and take away a charm, cutting one’s own path through the history of verse. Returning, of course, when thirsty.
Gertrude Stein, ed. Logan Esdale | Ida A Novel | Yale | 2012
Stein’s fictions are her flyover states, with Ida my preferred hub. This “workshop edition” (a corrected text with drafts, letters, related pieces, and reviews) took me out of the terminal, into the city. A destination after all!
Rachel Zolf | Neighbour Procedure | Coach House | 2010
There is a madness in thinking the problem of Israel and Palestine can be thought through or sorted out, a philosophical conundrum or puzzle of language; and there’s a despair in thinking that reason has lost its right, leaving all to violence. In Neighbour Procedure, Zolf chooses madness, but yields to despair her suspicion that reason never had a right—only a discourse of ruins, monuments and counter-monuments to hope.
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Benjamin Friedlander’s contributions to Attention Span for 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Return to 2012 directory.
Attention Span 2012 | Omar Berrada
Georges Didi-Huberman | Ecorces | Minuit | 2011
A beautiful and moving book, where one discovers that maverick philosopher-art historian Georges Didi-Huberman is also a writer of incomparable acuteness and grace. It is an account of his first visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau—after having written extensively on the pictures taken by members of the Sonderkommando and their value as testimony. This short book is written as a meditation on pictures the author himself took during his visit. In particular pictures of bits of bark he stripped off from birch trees onsite. Fragments from the surface of reality.
Stacy Doris | Fledge—A Phenomenology of Spirit | Nightboat | 2012
“Since I love I fall down / since a ridge is all that / disintegrates so home”. This year’s heartbreak. So many of us have been mourning Stacy’s passing. I have not yet been able to read this book. Only one or two pages now and then. But I have been taking it with me everywhere, this “bunch of love poems of undying love”. “Because we don’t make we’re / kin to permanent what / we touch”.
Forrest Gander | Core Samples from the World | New Directions | 2011
A heady exploration of languages and topographies via interweavings of poems, micro-essays, and photographs. A virtuosic voyage of the imagination. “But under their masks of muteness, the visitors go beyond listening to; they listen into”.
Nathalie Léger | Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden | P.O.L | 2012
A wonderfully insightful and well-written, and partly fictional, and largely personal, investigation into the life and work of Barbara Loden and her film/character Wanda. A meditation on life and words, words and image, actors and characters, description and invention, documentary and autobiography. Including a fantastic few pages featuring Mickey Mantle as reader of Proust.
Philippe-Alain Michaud | Flying Carpets (exhibition) | Villa Medici | 2012
This has to be the most stimulating exhibit I have ever been to. Richness of thought spatially unfolding, in the form of echoes between 16th and 17th century carpets, experimental films, paintings and watercolors, and recent art installations. For years now, Philippe-Alain Michaud (curator of film at the Centre Pompidou in Paris) has been exploring alternative genealogies of film freed from the technical apparatus of projection that the 20th century history of cinema as we know it has locked it into. For him, film is not a medium but a set of properties having to do with movement and framing. The present exhibit convincingly looks at carpets (moving surfaces, metaphors for flight, frames for endless motifs) as repositories of these properties, therefore as loci of a proto-cinema.
José Miguel Puerta Vílchez | Historia del pensamiento estético árabe | Akal | 1997
This is monumental. Because of its size (900 pages) and because of its underlying project: to assume the existence of a tradition of aesthetic thought in Arabic, and to attempt to read it on its own terms (much more rare than you might think) and retrace its history. Two advantages, at least, for the Western (and, to say the truth, the native) reader: studying Arabic civilization through the prism of aesthetics, i.e. away from the usual theological reductions; and discovering alternative conceptualizations of images, of erotics, of beauty or of the sublime.
Equally recommended, in a similar (though less historical and less encyclopedic) vein, Mohammed Hamdouni Alami’s Art and Architecture in the Islamic Tradition—Aesthetics, Politics and Desire in Early Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2011)
Lisa Robertson | Nilling | BookThug | 2012
The essays in this collection are so intelligent and dense that you can spend days with this short book of thrilling definitions and recognitions of the author’s, the reader’s “fall into the luminous secrecy of reading”, where “I am only certain that I think insofar as I read” and “the text I read seeks through me to another text”. “How big is the subject? Quite tiny”, seeing as “contingency is larger than knowledge”. “Why speak of the soul? Capital isn’t secular”, though “time repeatedly donates inexperience to cognition”.
Ryoko Sekiguchi | Ce n’est pas un hasard | P.O.L | 2011
Ryoko Sekiguchi is a Japanese poet living in Paris, who writes both in French and in Japanese. This book is her diary over a period of 7 weeks, starting the day before the Fukushima disaster. “Je le comprends aussi; ce que je suis en train d’écrire, ce n’est pas de la littérature. / C’est un ‘rapport’. / Je dresse un rapport, le plus sincère possible.” Observing Japan from France and France from Japan. Disarming directness and devastating insights.
Truong Tran | dust and conscience | Apogee | 2002
I “discovered” Truong Tran’s work a few months ago, by chance, in a bookstore that had several of his books. I was encouraged by the look of them, and the blurbs, and a few lines read at random. His sentences have a rhythm of their own, with no punctuation or capitalization, or linebreaks for that matter. What they do have is a lot of biographical directness, at the same time as what the french would call “pudeur”, a certain reticence, in accounting for growing up in America with parents who couldn’t speak English. The author/speaker shows a great simultaneous deal of defiance and tenderness with regard to said parents, affirming a life of his own yet preserving their memory through the very syntax and lexicon of his very virtuosic brand of broken English.
Morad Montazami, ed. | Zamân n°5 | Mekic | 2012
This journal is gorgeous. It is also smart and eclectic, claiming a sort of “heretical orientalism”. This new issue, the fifth, has, among other things, poems by Etel Adnan, an essay on Syrian-German painter Marwan with reproductions of many of his works, a study on poems by victims of the Inquisition found on prison walls in Palermo, delicious Iranian recipes, etc. This fifth issue is in fact the third, as the journal is a continuation, thirty years later, of a journal of the same title (Zamân, which in Persian, and in Arabic, means “time”), edited by the current editor’s father and uncle (Iranians in exile in Paris in the late 70s), and which had only two issues back then. The journal is all in French, though there is one place in the US where it can be found (the Saint Marks Bookshop).
Ghassan Zaqtan, trans. Fady Joudah | Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems | Yale | 2012
One of my regrets for 2012 is to not have met Ghassan Zaqtan at the Poetry Center in San Francisco on April 5. He was not granted a visa to go to the USA. Apparently, poet + Palestinian = dangerous. The event still took place, and Steve Dickison, as always, made it a warm occasion. Ghassan gracefully sent a video of his deep raspy voice, and Fady Joudah read from his beautiful translations to a packed room, in the face of “the absence / that never stops”.
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Omar Berrada’s contributions to Attention Span for 2009. Return to 2012 directory.
Attention Span 2012 | Suzanne Stein
Charles Atlas | Hail the New Puritan | Distributed by EAI | 1985-1986
It’s the 80s in post-punk London. This 87-minute “docufantasy” follows the Michael Clark dance company while they’re rehearsing New Puritans—that’s a paraphrase or direct theft of the Wikipedia entry or else the blurb at EAI. The film is a sunrise-to-sunrise day in the life of Michael Clark and company, via a sequence of camp vignettes and staged scenarios—including a space-age crash pad where it seems the Martians are getting ready to go clubbing—interlaced with studio and full-dress rehearsals; a scripted, subtitled interview with Mark E. Smith and Brix Smith; and, as noted by AD Jameson, assless dance pants. Starring and with choreography by Michael Clark; sets and costumes by Leigh Bowery; music by The Fall. Pure Charles Atlas, with signature intercuts, still snaps, cinema vérité views and jumpy mixes. Gorgeous, mesmerizing, and seductive; virtuosity in abandon. I wandered into the media galleries at work for a ten minute break early this summer and emerged an hour and a half later, purified, like I drunk myself sober.
A clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBqi3UvYTcA
The Bhagavad Gita
Yoga is a harmony. Not for her who eats too much, or her who eats too little; not for her who sleeps too little, or for her who sleeps too much. A harmony in eating and resting, in sleeping and keeping awake: a perfection in whatever one does.
Rudyard Kipling | Kim | Doubleday, Page & Company | 1901
Kim’s an orphaned English boy in India raised by a half-caste opium smoker and trained later as a spy, whose job it is to go into rooms and remember everything in them, to be reported upon later. Or that’s how the story was told to me, and how I told it later, although that’s not precisely what happens to Kim. It amused me no end that the story begins when Kim becomes chela (disciple) to his lama outside the gates of the “Wonder-House”—the Lahore Museum. It’s possible to read Kim as more or less a religious text, a propaganda of occult imperialism whose motivating subtext is the occult adventure of the lama on the Path, who after hundreds of pages of Kim’s thrilling pretextual escapades is allowed to tumble finally into the waters of enlightenment—only shortly to be “saved” therein, from drowning, by a Punjabi operative working for the British.
Frances Yates | The Art of Memory | Chicago | 1966
My obsession with my fantasy of the memory theater of Giulio Camillo has lasted nearly twenty years, since borrowing this book from an acquaintance with a strange-sounding name I still suspect was an anagram.
In L’idea del theatro di Giulio Camillo we were able to trace in detail the basis in the Hermetic writings of Camillo’s efforts to construct a memory theater reflecting ‘the world’, to be reflected in ‘the world’ of memory. If man’s mens is divine, then the divine organisation of the universe is within it, and an art which reproduces the divine organisation in memory will tap the powers of the cosmos, which are in man himself.
Bob Flanagan | Slave Sonnets | Cold Calm | 1986
It’s rare, it’s fierce in its abjection, it’s tender; it has a cover by Mike Kelley and I got it free in the Reading Room at the Berkeley Art Museum, in March, because Camille Roy left it there. The cover is black and white, with a herringbone pattern behind an upside-down white heart (ass, balls, whatever), and inside the heart is another heart, one of those Mexican loteria el corazon-style ventricled cartoon hearts, red, skewered from the bottom up by a huge hunting knife, and the word Love written across it in a sort of punk-gothic tattoo script. A month before, a friend—whose life changed almost every aspect of my own life—died, and on the same day, Mike Kelley died. Also that day, the person I was long-distance dating and sort of in love with, who was still sort of in love with an ex-girlfriend, called to tell me his ex-girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend just killed himself, maybe over the girlfriend. Later that afternoon, I discovered that my long-distance boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend WAS Mike Kelley. I googled the girlfriend. She has a Mike Kelley tattoo on her chest that looks a lot like the cover of Bob Flanagan’s Slave Sonnets.
Jalal Toufic | Distracted | Tuumba | 2003
Because it is included in this list, you know that this was one of the nine most important artworks I lived with this year; why now that I am looking inside it again do I feel like I’ve never even laid my eyes on it? The relation to the past has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with telepathy. The only freshness is the untimely. Then I look at it again and find it a little irritating, or, dazzling.
Brandon Brown | The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus | Krupskaya | 2011
#65
The sixty-fifth poem in the corpus of Catullus is addressed to his friend Hortalus.
The poem is in the vocative and is usually read as epistolary, a letter to accompany a translation that Catullus has made of a poem by Callimachus. This work of translation has been incredibly difficult, because there is a crisis in the life of Catullus that has made prosody frustrating.
The crisis in the life of Catullus is that his brother is lying on the beach dead in Troy and a wave licks his little pale foot.
The death of his brother has made it impossible for him to “produce the sweet fruit of the Muses.” As if prosody were a redemptive tactic against the total loss effected by death.
I find it interesting that Catullus, who remains associated with the anachronistic but persistent mode of the lyric, constructs a practice almost always including appropriation. Translation, and certainly as Catullus himself practices it, is an artwork of appropriation. And yet much contemporary translation as much as contemporary works of appropriation purport to cancel the somatic vehicle for lyric material.
That is, the conventional picture of translation, in which the translator is invisible, which excludes her body from the scene of translation, does not suggest a space in which the translator’s desire—or grief—can find any entry into the imporous mimetic activity they understand as “translation.”
The last ten lines of the Callimachus poem translated by Catullus as the 66th poem in his corpus were missing even when Catullus makes his translation.
Instead of making the loss of the text legible, Catullus inserts a brief catalogue of prayers, more in line with his own, not Callimachus’, aspirations: e.g. for concord in marriage and reciprocity in love.
The word Catullus uses for translation is expressa. An expressor is someone who presses or forces something out of something else. The word, as it pertains to translation, implies both the physical labor of the agent appropriating from the text which precedes the proceeding writing known as translation as well as a directionality characteristic of the epistemic tradition of translation and appropriation. Someone makes something out of something else.
Again, Catullus makes an oath to the negative space once inhabited by his brother, consisting of a promise to always “love” him (in whatever figuration love of negative space can be attained). This love, however, is primarily activated by the promise to constantly write poems morte, or, “about his death.”
About. What’s he going to press out of his experience of being in love with negative space as a demonstration of his enduring love for his brother? It’s hard to say—there’s only one other poem in the whole corpus about his brother and his brother’s death. But like several poems about loathsome politicians.
We can’t know how much of his work might have been translation. We know that Catullus #51 is a translation of a poem by Sappho, and that #66 is a translation of Callimachus. In other poems he makes references to having done translations. In many of his poems something like an appropriative gesture of citation takes place, recuperating tropes from classical Greek and Hellenistic poems in order to “express” an “original” affective sentiment.
This particular translation is accomplished “despite” the fact that Catullus’s mind has been itself appropriated by profound grief.
Lawrence Rinder | Revenge of the Decorated Pigs | Publication Studio | 2009
More eso- and exo- teric sex and (art) worldly intrigue and adventure, with siblings, doubles, or twins (take your pick), disguised identities, mystical revelations, love, hermeticism, earthworks, and Ben & Jerry’s, in this roman à clef-ish tale from curator/museum director Larry Rinder. Kevin stretched and felt his muscles come alive. He wondered why he’d stopped going to yoga. “There’s nothing like getting fucked to remind you that you have a body,” he thought.
Cliff Hengst | Maybe | Live performance (part of Stage Presence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) | Thursday, August 9 – Sunday, August 12, 2012
In fact, all of Stage Presence, both the series of performances curated by Frank Smigiel in the Tucker Nichols-designed media theater, and the exhibition entire (subtitle: Theatricality in Art and Media), curated by Rudolf Frieling, belongs on this list. It would be an endless catalogue to say all that I loved in them, but as a quick gloss: the landscape I found so compelling here is intimate fractured lyric narrative; broken, reconstituted, reinvented identity; and humor and spirituality light and black, all of these things inhabited (or tried on) in the most playful and political possible ways, from Fischli and Weiss’s existentially inflected rat and bear films, Sharon Hayes’s re-performances of the Patty Hearst tapes; Geoffrey Farmer’s exquisite magazine cut-out puppet collages; the aforementioned Charles Atlas; and so much more. Costume, mask, rehearsal, reenactment, reversal, repetition, mirroring, comedy, it’s all there.
The backdrop of the exhibition was the precisely right situation for Cliff Hengst’s reprising of a suite of short works from two decades of performances. Cliff is an artist & longtime star player in Kevin Killian’s troupe of regulars for San Francisco Poets Theater, and so is very familiar to Bay Area poets in his infinite incarnations, in some sort of drag, of hilarious Killian-esque characters (many of them without a doubt written specifically for Cliff). But many of us probably are less familiar with Cliff’s performance works, less even than with his paintings and drawings, which like the live works are also funny, unfathomable spirit-works as much as they are spot-on gestural reflections and appreciations of hi-lo culture. All the Stage Presence iterations were three-show runs; a Thursday evening followed by Saturday and Sunday afternoon performances. Cliff began each of his three shows with Ballimbo (2004): Carrying an uninflated balloon, he approached an audience member at the front of the darkened theater, leaned in close as if to whisper in her ear or kiss him, and then after a few moments stepped back and blew into the balloon a little bit, before proceeding to a next participant. When he stopped with me, I felt he was gathering up a bit of my juju, my essence, and I felt this tenderly, though not everyone seemed so comfy with his approach. When the balloon was fully inflated—with audience spirit, don’t you know—he tied it to the front of the stage and commenced the rest of that day’s performances. On Thursday evening it was Incantation to Destroy a Cultural Institution (2012), which included cow bells shaken at all corners of the stage and other curious ritualistic gestures, along with a spooky live set by Aero Mic’d (Cliff with Scott Hewicker and Wayne Smith). I wasn’t at work on the Friday and missed the Saturday series but when I returned Sunday afternoon my colleagues all said thank god Cliff was going to remove the hex, everything was going crapwire, the museum was surely about to actually collapse. (Had he only but waited another day…). Sunday’s centerpiece, for me, was Maybe (1999)—a lip-synch to The Three Degrees’ cover of the blues classic “Maybe.” The media failed three times during Cliff’s attempt to perform this piece, and with consummate grace under pressure he finally gave it up after the third try—hex incompletely dissipated? In Shout Out to All My Departed Pets (2001) he called for his pets, like anyone calls theirs home (Snooooowwwballll!), followed by the equally drawn out, “I miss you”. (All the departed pets: Porsche, Gingerbear, Snowball, Sylvester, Moses, and Texas.) The afternoon closed with Stink Bomb (2005): the artist sprays himself with a full can of drugstore-issue men’s cologne head to toe til the can is empty. That cleared the theater. Such tenderness and deep deadpan hilarity throughout!—Cliff’s signature style. Waiting for him to clean up for the party, a dozen of us went into the media gallery and sat on beanbags in the dark, watching Hail the New Puritan. And then downstairs, to drink wine and eat Chinese food and celebrate our friend in the catering kitchen after. Other works performed that day: When Life Puts That Juju on Me (2009); You Can If You Think You Can (2012); You (2004).
Cliff Hengst, Maybe: http://blog.sfmoma.org/2012/08/stage-presence-cliff-hengst/
Maybe, The Three Degrees: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1GHhDJ8uHI
Hail the New Puritan closing sequence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkGO-juzWac
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Suzanne Stein is community producer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the author of Tout Va Bien (Displaced Press, 2012).
Suzanne Stein’s contribution to Attention Span for 2011, 2010, 2009. Return to 2012 directory.
Attention Span 2012 | Corrine Fitzpatrick
Lisa Robertson | Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias | Bookthug | 2012
Evan Kennedy | A Cyclist: Fourteen Stops Toward a San Franciscan Terra Firmament | self-published and live-performed | 2012
Jacqueline Waters | One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t | Ugly Duckling | 2011
Bhanu Kapil | Schizophrene | Nightboat | 2011
Maria Lind | Selected Maria Lind Writing | Sternberg | 2010
Susan Sontag | As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980 | Farrar | 2012
Joan Didion | The White Album | Farrar | 1979
Laurie Weeks | Zippermouth | The Feminist Press | 2011
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi | Girona | New Herring | 2011
Rosi Braidotti | Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. | Columbia | 2011
Ariel Goldberg | The Estrangement Principle | self-published | 2012
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Corrine Fitzpatrick, a poet and an art writer in Brooklyn, NY, will host the 2012-13 Talk Series for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.
This is Corrine Fitzpatrick’s first contribution to Attention Span. Return to 2012 directory.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2012 | Anselm Berrigan
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Dana Ward | This Can’t Be Life | Edge | 2011
Sure it can.
Anne Boyer | My Common Heart | Spooky Girlfriend | 2011
Totally opened up when I read it back to front, which set me up more acutely for the logics of its arrangement. The voicing structures morph under their surfaces in all these odd ways.
Hoa Nguyen | As Long As Trees Last | Wave | 2012
As the dude in Masked & Anonymous said, “sometimes it’s not enough to know what things mean. Sometimes you gotta know what things don’t mean”
Joe Brainard | Collected Writings | Library of America | 2012
“Everything that has ever existed has been reproduced in miniature by someone, at sometime.”
Leslie Scalapino | Way | North Point | 1988
Read this along with The Descent of Alette (A. Notley) and Douglas Oliver’s The Infant & The Pearl in the late fall. All long poems coming out of the $$-bleak mid-late eighties. Major shit. Condescension-free ambition for the work to be large.
Fred Moten | B Jenkins | Duke | 2009
The last time I did one of these lists I put this book on it. But I keep reading it and reading it, probably more than anything else in the past few years, and every time I open it up again, it totally opens up again. So there’s that.
Maged Zaher | Thank You for the Window Office | Ugly Duckling | 2012
The main reason I’m doing this list is because I’m reading this book right now.
Lunar Chandelier Press
Lunar Chandelier has put out books by John Godfrey, Toni Simon, Lynn Behrendt, Vyt Bakaitis, and Joe Elliot since it started up in 2010. High quality reads and objects. No bullshit, no program. You can tell the work is cared for.
Camille Roy | Sherwood Forest | Futurepoem | 2011
Dynamic diction triggering layers of invitation. Makes me want to write.
Mary Burger | Then Go On | Litmus | 2012
Lent this to someone who won’t give it back.
Murat Nemet-Nejat | The Spiritual Life of Replicants | Talisman | 2011
I put down something about this book being a total breakthrough for the present art, on the levels of feeling bringing about events and speculative sensory observation, and that’s the way I feel about it.
Arlo Quint | Death to Explosions | Skysill | forthcoming 2013
Wrote about Quint for the Boston Review not so long ago. Now his first book should be out sometime soon. The thing I’m wanting the most to be in the world. I love listening to Quint’s work.
Michael Robbins | Alien Vs. Predator | Penguin | 2012
The only thing this book is missing is a Tebow moment, and maybe a podcast on betting lines with Cousin Sal.
Corina Copp | Pro Magenta/Be Met | Ugly Duckling | 2011
Fabulous propulsion.
Note: all of Kevin Varrone’s baseball poem Box Score: An Autobiography is amazing. There’s a chapbook, but I can’t find it, because some kid hid it somewhere.
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Anselm Berrigan‘s contributions to Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2007, 2004. Return to 2012 directory.
Written by Steve Evans
December 28, 2012 at 1:00 pm
Posted in Attention Span 2012, Commented List
Tagged with attspan, books, litcrit, literature, poetry