Third Factory/Notes to Poetry

Anne Boyer | Art Is War | Mitzvah | 2008

I’m not a believer in the Holy Spirit, but the fact that some poets make every sentence flutter with life while others merely kill brain cells does give me pause.

Peter Cole, ed. and trans. | The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 | Princeton | 2007

A half-millennium of poetry sifted with patient labor from the sand of history, then weighed and melted and wrought anew. To appreciate the wonder of this labor, imagine the David Shields anthology listed below rewritten in contemporary idiom, with tonal differences flattened out, but with a corresponding gain of coherence. A book to set beside Pound’s Provencal, which is only fitting since the poets involved were writing at roughly the same time.

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton | New Star | 2008

Momentum, ease, and a gift for gab are never sufficient for a book to be as enjoyable as this one. But when the poet is also a collector and historian of minor experience, these qualities begin to seem pretty foolproof. “A walk / on gilded splinters / in terrycloth / slippers,” with birdsong loud and clear when the TV is turned off.

Tony Harrison | Collected Poems | Penguin | 2007

Modernism scarcely registers here, but in Harrison’s case that’s not a defensive posture. His poems are episodes from a class war in which language is the battlefield: those who know it best are best favored to strike with impunity, and deadly surprise, and live to strike again.

Susan Howe | Souls of the Labadie Tract | New Directions | 2007

She makes other poets sound forced who strive to say one-quarter as much. Her secret? If you work your material until it’s in tatters, until it stains your thoughts and permeates your dreams, any stray word can be Sibylline.

Andrea Lauterwein | Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory | Thames & Hudson | 2007

A handsomely illustrated book about Kiefer, whose encounter with Celan’s work triggered a profound change, but not, it seems, a profound reading. Which makes this a fascinating study of reception, surprisingly close to another book I admired last year—Christoph Irmscher’s Longfellow Redux (U of Illinois P, 2008).

Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo | 2008

It’s impossible to read these poems without wanting to share the lines out loud. Silence is helpless here: even when I’m alone with this book, I break the silence, laughing. Is there anything more poignantly utopian than that? If ideology is the presence of society in our heads, then laughing out loud when we’re alone is the very summoning of that society, an involuntary assertion of communion.

George Oppen | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | ed. Stephen Cope | California | 2008

The pensive poet at his vanity (where beautiful poems were so often made up), appealingly deshabille.

Mark Scroggins | The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofksy | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007

Sometimes, all you need is a firm grip from a friend to make it across slippery ground. With Zukofsky, Scroggins is that friend.

Frank Sherlock and Brett Evans | Ready to Eat Individual | Lavender Ink | 2008

The black bars framing each page reproduce the characteristic look of an empty food pouch, of the sort distributed in New Orleans after Katrina—marking this poem as a kind of shared meal, each portion of which once filled the empty space between need and excrement. Sustenance temporarily, debris for posterity.

David S. Shields, ed. | American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries | Library of America | 2007

The new edition of the Oxford anthology of American verse gives a mere twenty-seven pages to poets born before Emerson—clearly, the earlier years are due for a reappraisal. Here, the editor’s particular interest lies in the emergence of literary culture, so popular culture is actually less evident than in John Hollander’s companion volume of the nineteenth century, which surprised me. Surprising too is the canon that slowly emerges. Measured in pages, the top five poets are all familiar names: Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor, Philip Freneau, Anne Bradstreet, Timothy Dwight. But after Dwight the discoveries come fast and furious, pushing Ebenezer Cook (of “The Sot-Weed Factor”) down to ninth place, and Phillis Wheatley all the way down to fourteenth. Whether these new rankings create new reputations remains to be seen (the Scottish-born West Indian James Grainger is already gaining ground among scholars), but since the test of a book like this one rests ultimately on the poems, one reads more for choice moments than careers. And here I’ve found more than enough to justify a reapportionment of pages in the next Oxford. I’m especially fond of the following lines by Hannah Griffitts:

My Sense, or the Want of it—free you may jest
And censure, despise, or impeach,
But the Happiness center’d within my own Breast,
Is luckily out of your reach.

(From a short poem against marriage, written around the time of the Revolution—found in a commonplace book.)

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More Benjamin Friedlander here.

Daniel Bouchard | The Filaments | Zasterle | 2006

“Life is art” and vice versa. Great book to read with all the noises of the world (including new baby) next to you.

Tisa Bryant | Unexplained Presence | Leon Works | 2008

Unsettling explorations into various Eurocentric films, artworks, and television shows (Regency House Party being one of the most disturbing) that use black characters, often even as compositional elements (Bryant uses illuminating quotes throughout: Zola says of Manet’s Olympia, “You wanted black patches, and you placed a Negress and a cat in a corner. What does that mean? You hardly know, and neither do I.”).

Cabinet Magazine

I stay “in touch” with worlds artistic in a pleasantly subversive way with this magazine/journal. Content ranges from Peter Lambourn Wilson on concrete and “viewsheds” to the Chadwicks and their land-use dominions.

Tina Darragh | Opposable Dumbs: A Project Report | Self-Distributed | 2007

Darragh’s invitation to plagiarize is also an invitation to a deep creative reading/writing into issues of anonymity, ownership of language, science and language, morality and science, humanism, disintegration of words, disintegration of morals, disintegration of science, of principles.

Beverly Dahlen | A Reading 18-20 | Instance | 2006

Add to your collection of Dahlen’s faboo A Readings.

Andrew Joron | The Cry at Zero | Counterpath | 2007

Very highly recommended collection of intricate essays on poetics, science, philosophy and how they circle back to that “cry” from nothingness.

Miranda Mellis | Talk on “The Vault” | Naropa Summer Writing Program | June 2008

Allow Mellis to be your guide to the world’s largest seed vault, housed in Norway’s permafrost and counting Du Pont as one of its funders. (Look for her talk to be published—somewhere! Hopefully soon.)

Ousmane Sembene  | God’s Bits of Wood | Heinemann | 1960

I suggest replacing all of Hemingway’s books in school curricula with this unrelenting depiction of the 1947-1948 strike on the Dakar-Niger railway. One of the best novels I’ve ever read. (And while we’re at it, his film “La Noire de…” is also amazing.)

Eleni Sikelianos | The California Poem | Coffeehouse | 2004

Word-constellations fracture beautifully on housing projects and fault-shaped coastlines.

Tyrone Williams | On Spec | Omnidawn | 2008

Massively riveting. A linguistic ultrasound into the innards of language.

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More from Marcella Durand’s library on Goodreads.

Aihwa Ong | Neoliberalism as Exception | Duke | 2006

Ong’s, if only for its wide divergence from common iterations, is a refreshing theoretical reconsideration of the concept of neoliberalism. Instead of as a quasi-form of government, Ong suggests neoliberalism ought to be thought of as a technology of governing that can be used variously by an array of acting powers.  She provocatively claims that neoliberalism’s new configurations of territoriality, nationality, and identity, though motivated by market logics and self-interest, inevitably create new (hopeful) “spaces” from which populations can make claims to citizenship, human rights, benefits, and recognition previously excluded by state power. A take-to-the-beach kind of book.

Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008

Greenwald’s work tends to arrive in waves, but this past year it’s coming in torrents, with 3 being perhaps the most meaty sampling (another Cuneiform Press and a forthcoming BlazeVOX publication flank it). Three separate poems, built out of sonnets, quartets, tercets in series, each creating a centrifugal music by forging the ghosts of common speech out of the chambers of repetitive and modulating line structures. “Day in blue/ Stone in my passway/ Rehumanize/ Day in blue”  This is a much more personal, reflective Greenwald then I think we’re used to. Flawless and resonant, another career achievement in his long history of chart toppers.

Stan Apps | info ration | Make Now | 2007

I fully endorse this totally awesome, gnarly, and radical poetic explosion. All the things you wanted to say about capitalism and American imperialism but were afraid to sound like Keith Olbermann. As the title suggests, Apps dismantles and re-encrusts the critical desire of contemporary infotainment mediaspeak into a stained-glass Voltron of dystopic/ utopic language. “The oppressor was inside everyone/ I was fascinated by the chance to observe.”  Comes with neat Gary Sullivan cover.

John Keene & Christopher Stackhouse | Seismosis | 1913 | 2006

One of those books you keep picking up because new ideas in the interim force you back in. A text-drawing collab between these two artists, it’s the most fascinating argument for a reconsideration of Formalism in recent years, which works against the exploitable grain, from Kant to the New Critics, where the more isolated the presentation of something like ‘pure form,’ the more the mark of its contextual making breaks through. Stackhouse’s hand-drawings, frenzied and organic, are set against Keene’s amazing range of poetic forms, the latter of which concern themselves with the nature of form and abstraction, but restricted to a generally categorical palette of language itself. The result is the long creaking of history, the voice, and communal touching of art production and reception that breaks surface. “Injuring it, when I look./ What am I opening?/ Unlocking or loosing movement, the query of intent./ To enter the fail, the medium falling// in marks and strokes.”

Rob Halpern | Rumored Place | Krupskaya | 2004

Completely incredible. I almost put the book down by the end of the first section, being generally unenthused. So glad I didn’t. By the end of the second section, my understanding of and attitude toward the first completely pivoted. And then again through the next section, and then again, and again. The book roundelays the desire for collective history with a need for collective space. “Desire is a detour”  A masterful display in five parts of narrative reorienting through poetic mutation to wholly gratifying effect. “These shapes in us, negating figures like ‘future findings’—tracing rents in the general intelligence.”

kari edwards | having been blue for charity | BlazeVox [books] | 2007

This is a very strong, very lush book of resistances of all sorts, and a call to question the forms of resistance as it does so. Though its wild carnival of digital and formal interference will disappoint the avant techno novaphile, edwards explicitly theorizes a retreat away from the periphery of absolute break to address the point behind the lines where recognition and resource are not guaranteed but must be recycled from this behind-space. Too much going on in this book to encapsulate here justly, but certainly a record of and sustained demand for constructive presence. Though her last book, I know I will be rereading having been blue for charity for decades more.

Dudley Randall, ed. | Black Poetry | Broadside | 1969

Its full title is Black Poetry: A Supplement, To Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets, easily the best title of any publication of all time with the exception of Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours. 24 mostly familiar poets spanning two generations, from Hughes to Nikki Giovanni, packed into fewer than 50 pages, all post-war selections, which includes some exceptionally great poems by (then) Leroi Jones, Giovanni (at 25!), Clarence Major, Ahmed Alhamisi, & Sonia Sanchez. Malcolm X, recently assassinated, is taken up as figure and theme in much of the younger works. I’ve lately been looking for some texts with which to seriously yoke the persistent (insistent) critical hoopla around the New American Poetry Anthology, and this seems like a productive book to begin that retelling.

Hannah Weiner, ed. Patrick Durgin  | Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Kenning Editions | 2007

Not much to add to what oft’s been thought and mostly already been said about this needed book. A phenomenal display of Weiner’s talent and capability. Surely everyone should have read this by now, or else you’re the most unhip gluon. Major kudos to Durgin and the press.

Brian Kim Stefans | Before Starting Over | Salt | 2006

I love this book of essays, (digital) poetics, and reviews more than sin itself. A constant reference for what we need to be talking about and how we might go about it, like a poet’s little red book except kind of chunky (350p plus) and yellowish. Highlights include his letters to editors which are magically explosive given their brevity, while his spats with Silliman prove more than just entertaining, they get under the skin as nano-imperatives.  Overall Stefans is furiously scooping up from the vocabulary bin new ideas, concepts, and language and presenting it, however wet and dripping with goop, in the most generous and advanceable manner. The writing is impeccable, piercing, mellifluous, without a pixel of irony. N00bs & neuro-aesthetes take note.

Lesley Yalen | This Elizabeth | minus house | 2007

“At the end, the husband is strictly scientific.// At the end, someone is mopping like a mommy.// At the end, the glaring absences are back.// The background is ground.” Yalen’s  ten-part poem powerfully and uniquely scrutinizes the domestitcat(ed/ing) liberal fantasies of identity by forcing parodying and paradoxical figures upon a shallow stage. Husbands and moms, street people and lawyers, blondes and doctors all bolster the central figure, this Elizabeth, in a backward unpeeling of race and gender codes which the anti-hero of the poem, the Poet, is forced to reckon with, failingly, with all her aesthetic theory. Formally akin to Deborah Richards’ Last One Out, a solid read and an exquisite chapbook production by the press.

Martha Dandridge Custis, Lawrence Giffin (ed.) | Comment is Free, Vol. 2: Imperialism at Home | Lil Norton | 2008

This will be the book to replace Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader for decades to come. The ad copy reads like this: “Taking the government buyout of Bear Stearns, Custis deftly weaves a wondrous tapestry of the abuse of power and the potential for resistance.” The book’s contents read like this: “There is no accountability left in the ‘system’, only the rich and well connected make up the rules and we all slave to their gains.// I don’t understand why ‘we’ are at fault. ‘We’ are powerless to stop anything.” Imagine your entire collegiate graduating class invited to your house to discuss the economy. Better than the movie.

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More Brad Flis here.

Arun Kolatkar | Kala Ghoda Poems | Pras Prakashan | 2004

Two or three things he knows about the capital of Maharashtra.

Barbara Guest | The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest | Wesleyan | 2008

Esp. the hilarious The Countess from Minneapolis and the they-get-better-ever-year Rocks on a Platter and Miniatures.

Brandon Downing | Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics | Grievous Pictures | 2007

Isolates the individual compulsion, or drive, toward forming and maintaining identities from the inherited concepts and media through which one is forced to do it. Separates out the focal power that images draw from their original contexts, and, at 10x and 100x, sets fire to the frog, freeing princess from the chrysalis. Visual intelligence that makes gallery work (like, say, Isaac Julien’s WESTERN UNION: Small Boats) look at once commercial and provincial. A kiss like that.

C.S. Giscombe | Prairie Style | Dalkey Archive | 2008

The phenomenology of driving during adult life.

Gennady Aygi, trans. by Peter France | Field – Russia | New Directions | 2007

Tarkovsky and Sokurov track the same maternal grasses. Stripped down to the wind.

George Oppen, ed. Stephen Cope | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2008

“But taking as a whole the phase of the world’s history which we have reached, it has become a commonplace remark to say that we have crossed the threshold of the Apocalypse.”

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008

Lovers of late JA meanderings through pre-code detritus who look to counter other lovers’ complaints about cut & pasteability will find, here, that reading each section ‘in order’, or continuously across the breaks and gaps, makes the book lose part of its meaning. The obsessive superfineries of the arrangement, shorn against undoing, and the intricate intactness of “Lateral Argument” underscore the point perfectly: within a supersaturate, none of the pieces fit. The author also wishes to inform you that Stephane was wrong about the book/bombe; the blank page 68 is a comment on the French.

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Robin S Ngangom, eds. | Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the Northeast | NEHU | 2003

Revised edition due shortly from Penguin. Until then, greetings from Shillong.

Miles Champion | Eventually | The Rest | 2008

Read “Colour in Huysmans” slowly, with the right column as a kind of gloss on or completion of the left, and then see how inadequate that is.

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton | New Star | 2008

Plowing on Sunday. Plowing North America.

Vivek Narayanan | Mr. Subramanian | unpublished ms. | 2008

Stephen Dedalus, in Madras at 35.

Gunnar Olsson | Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason | Chicago | 2007

The map is a territory, just not the territory in question.

Mark Scroggins | The Poem of A Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007

Illuminating and exemplary. To those writers I know who cannot even imagine why one would read a “literary” biography, I say: read this and see.

Daniel Heller-Roazen | The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation | Zone | 2007

This book isn’t just about that itch you’ve always had but could never quite scratch; it is that itch.

Javier Marías | Your Face Tomorrow, Volume One: Fever and Spear | New Directions | 2005

Robert Kelly | Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 | Black Sparrow | 1995

Kelly’s work has been a recent, embarrassingly late, and joyous discovery for me. “Can you forgive us all? We / who were your alphabets.”

Rebecca Solnit | Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics | California | 2007

Clearing the air. A mind to walk with.

Jean-Michel Rabaté | 1913: The Cradle of Modernism | Blackwell | 2007

Let there be more such histories, a discreet span studied from every angle, profound and multifaceted contemplations of a month in Spain, a single day in an African village, a late afternoon shared by the world.

Jonathan Williams | Jubilant Thicket: New and Selected Poems | Copper Canyon | 2005

John Peel and Sheila Ravenscroft | John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes | Chicago Review | 2007

When radio was something you did, an activity for both listener and programmer. Unexpectedly poignant is how Ravenscroft takes over the narrative when her husband dies: this is a memoir in stereo.

David Graeber | Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology | Prickly Paradigm | 2004

Jay Millar | Mycological Studies | Coach House | 2002

One of my students asked me whether this book was “for real.”

*

More Tim Conley here.

Tim Atkins | Horace | O Books | 2007

Tonal mischief is the thing. “ODES II / 20”:

Although lack of theory prevents me from perceiving
The true nature of my oppression, Maecenas
Women of my age usually put on weight

This is the last time I appear in an avant-garde movie
What I’d really like to do is direct
My hands are shaking and my knees are weak

What, Jerry Lee Lewis meets Frantz Fanon? Atkins makes Horace’s six quatrains revert to six lines—brilliant move. Thus “Women of my age usually put on weight” descends fleetly out of: “Even now the rough skin is settling around / my ankles, and now above them I’ve become / a snow-white swan, and soft feathers are / emerging over my arms and shoulders.” (A. S. Kline’s version.)

Or Atkins Mauberleys up Horace (“Odes II / 28”) with a pinch of Housman: “Owing to a shortage of cocaine, / I turned my back on public life / And live in Market Harborough / With Robert Lowell’s widow, Caroline / / 50 Gauloises after Ezra / A pound of lip up fatty / And an anecdote featuring / Mein Kampf / / . . . / / I joined the school of quietude / & ended up with a beard, / Scones, towelling, and the flying day fixed. / Jeremy we could have done worse.” Smashing.

Stephen Collis | Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism  | ELS Editions | 2006

Put it amongst a select bunch: Zukofsky’s Bottom, Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, Howe’s own My Emily Dickinson, Williams’s In the American Grain, H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, Pound’s Spirit of Romance, and Duncan’s H.D. Book—all “poets’ attempts to write their response to other poets,” all “Janus-faced works—part exegesis, part original expression,” all “singularities”—works writ in a mode of what Collis calls “anarcho-scholasticism,” dabblers and enthusiasts working the archival holes, bridging the rifts. Such writing a kind of writing into the archive, the “world poem,” writing against the archive’s regulated keepers.

Howe, in “Melville’s Marginalia”: “I thought one way to write about a loved author would be to follow what trail he followed through words of others.” Eliding itinerancy (Howe: “I cling to you with all my divided attention. Itinerantly.”) and name dispersal (Collis: “If identity is fixed order can be imposed. Resistance to singleness is a resistance to the enclosure of capital and empire.”) Collis’s terrific phrase: “scattering identity to the four corners of the page”: “We are traveling as relations through words of others to the lost origins of our other selves.”

Collis, on the nefarious “reach” of notions of “enclosure and privatization” of the commons: “To shut up speech. To shut up documents in archive’s exclusion. To shut up land so that it many be ‘improved’ and become profitable. To shut up definition in dictionary versions.”

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton (Hammertown Book 2) | New Star Books | 2008

A poem or series of poems that here, in its second “installment”—the mind behind the writing is too restless and indefatigable and curious for the word—seems suddenly and absolutely capable of most defiantly rippling out through the various juggernauts of the twentieth century’s collapse and into the present to encompass the brute history and giddy trials of a whole finicky continent, and beyond. Culley explores recent (and not-so) American history with the tamp’d down precision of Lorine Niedecker, the rumpled reach of Charles Olson.

. . . where rising fuel costs
temporarily trump
the fear of creosote & coalsmoke

to re-enable the choking fogs
that had disappeared
with the industrial base—

that all of this is safely tracked
from space, indeed,
to be lost is ultimately

economic, those people
under the rubble assumed
their cell phones

would save them, an island
held in place
with mirrors, they

can hear you, they
can see you, they
just can’t help you.

Trevor Joyce | What’s in Store | The Gig / New Writers’ Press | 2007

Reading around in its strange and bold and marvelous pieces, pieces that seemingly sprout out of nowhere, that exhibit incredible variety, that often enough seem spoke by ancient voices up out of the boggy penetrable earth, I think how what one cannot speak of, one calls genius, or quotes too lengthily. Joyce’s range is phenomenal. The book opens with a lovely set of tiny things, the “Folk Songs from the Finno-Ugric and Turkic Languages,” work’d up out some rudimentary literal versions. Here’s one:

A birch tree
bends on the hill.
For a plough, girls chop
a handle.

That moustache,
is it your first?
For caps, girls braid
fine tassels.

Which seems to catch that particular moment of adolescence when the girls’re outstripping the boys and there’s a combo of taunting and impatience and self-reliance going on amongst them. Too, Joyce reworks a series he calls “Love Songs from a Dead Tongue,” out of fifteenth c. (and earlier) Irish originals, and a series of “some of the surviving poems by Juan Chi (pinyin Ruan Ji, 210-263).” The upshot of the threading through of translations and versions is a splendid estrangedness, where the alien flips into customary, and one’s happiest reading the song of a horse:

How happy the life of a horse! Hey!
Till the end when they mock him
and whip him and kick him,
and for Purgatory sell him to gypsies.

Thirty years I served one man,
hauled his harness like a colt,
now I’m old I’m down and done for,
corn-stalks hurt my gums.

Smiths and farriers rot in hell!
Your tackle was the death of me,
they broke my head, they stole my skin,
now sheep dogs sniff my meat.

Caroline Knox | Quaker Guns | Wave | 2008

The temptation to go off into completely giddy self-effacery and nonsense stands down against deeply-soak’d-in and censorious habit (in the case of most of us): Caroline Knox defeats just that with moments of vocalic sprezzatura shying into ur-language, or post-speech, or pre-speech. I suspect that she’ll eventually become a marker of the “era”—she is consistently restless, inventive, unalign’d. Two pieces in a contrapuntal (bilingual) face-off:

DREYKEN

Dreyken fabe, wer ingete dreyken
(dor droy rittavittastee orn canar).
Preb. Refen ingete inget. Preb.

Santona nofa Xeroc;
Ter quittz mivin movip.
Morm faria greel Florida
faria greel pandeck.

BATHROBES

We took our bathrobes ad stuck them in the washer.
(Ritta put hers in the blue laundry machine.)
I said, “Refen ingete inget.”

Nocturnes are hard to Xerox;
birds follow the glare of water.
We prepare tax returns for people in Florida,
People in Florida whom we have never met.

(Translated by the author and Carline Knox)

Carl Martin | Rogue Hemlocks | Fence Books | 2008

My immediate sense is that Martin’s earlier work (Genii Over Salzburg) owes less to Ashbery: immoderate, sui generis, awe-inducing. No matter: there’s plenty of heart-stopping mischief here, effects identifiably Martin’s own. “White Cargo”:

As the adverse account shoos flies
there are still remnants of the dynastic fan.
Golf balls are tinder in the muzzle of art.
Camels like glittering ashtrays in the barber’s mirror
sink to their knees with domino teeth:
an advert for a fleshy deck of cards. Only
a straight razor separates hell from marriage.
And if camels are marriageable they adorn
the stern of this ancient bateau-citerne: The captain
smiling like a mule. How fitting for the French coast!
Noël, old boy, pass the oxygen—would you?

The highly palpable sense that that is verging on a logical (paraphraseable) sense—is not “merely” surreal—puts it into the territory of the uncanny. (Surrealism rarely does so: in the hands of most of its adherents it becomes tedious, mechanical, predictably “zany.”) Look how he rewrites Stevens, comes out looking like the King of the Ghosts!

NO SOP, NO POSSUM, NO JIVE

We must pit ourselves brutally,
testing the tar and pitch
of immaculate forefathers. Ditto, etc.
X-temporizing, scrounging luxuriously
as we climb intricate cobs, nipples
and rosy vellums inscribed with an oriole.
I see no further than this, though
I’ve been lower, into hell’s orifice;
popped back in like a rabbit!

Chris Martin | American Music | Copper Canyon Press | 2007

Martin writes: “Words lead double lives: anonymously adrift and tethered to authorship,” admits to how “One of the things that opened the world of American Music to me was plagiarism, ” and provides a splendidly variously listing of some of the “voices in the chorus.” In spite of (or because of) the approach, Martin’s voice is remarkably present, sardonic, toying, sheepish, mischievous, full of exceeding wonder—indeed, the “chorus” barely impinges at all. The poems are models of velocity and containment—they fly short-linedly down the page, they scoop together a whole range of things, worlds of simultaneity.

. . . the way the boy
Impatiently cultivates
His inviolate sheen, combing

The grates with his eyes, his fists
Hidden but surely
Balled, not often am I

Prepared for violence, though I find it
Natural, in me as in
The world, and it remains

Revolting, the brief
Desire to trample something
Living, loving certain

Registers of collapse, tiny pockets
Bereft of grief, it reminds me how Henry
Miller spent three years

Inside a slide
Trombone and I have
Found myself too

Sane, and sullen, and suddenly
I feel just like Bonnie
Raitt on the cover of Streetlights

Her mouth unself-consciously
Open, a little
Question in her

Eyes as if
To say, “I am so
Full of this . . .

This . . . what is this?”

Alessandro Porco | Augustine in Carthage and Other Poems | ECW | 2008

At bottom, a sense of language in excess, skittering (gleefully) out of control, uncontainable, dictating its own terms: manhandling its handler, mocking, fun. Porco’s work isn’t all so neologistically “ripe” as “Tugnutt” is—though the beasts Lewis Carroll (“winkel and wame” bastard son of “gimble in the wabe”), John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, and James Joyce himself do hold heavy sway.

In Boschland
did Tugnutt knock nock,
and in hogeye bacchi
winkel and wame
the quimwig quimbush;
fuzzymuzzy yawns
of the city, world-wary—
too, too much so
to ginch, zither or futz
with any impression of dee-
light: jutsum just some,
I would weary, bid
thingamy, and good-blite!

[. . .]

Down
whelk zouzoune,
the Musée des Poontenanny
schmoya of Goya fl-
unked by
gammon of Lautreamont and
Matisse mapatasi,
twat blivvets—the like
of which dollup off cooch rides
whipped by gimcracks
oosy-doosy
Yum-yum, Pum-pum,
Spadger, and Stinkpot streets.

Elisabeth Workman | Opolis | tÿpøgrafika / Dusie Kollektiv 2007

There’s something otherworldly about it: thinnish canary-yellow paper, imprint’d in green inks, covers of identical stock—it’s audaciously flimsy, an honest pamphlet and shot through (accompanying each of the twenty-six prose-looking texts) with photographs, architectural, signage, Arabic, a Michelangelo David against a brick wall, minaret silhouettes, a Bush-vampire fanging Lady Liberty, pines, debris, print’d every which way, and bleeding spectacular ghost images “behind” each piece. Graphic work and images by Erik Brandt. An slippery (hid) alphabetical scheme to the doings, the pieces chameleon’d, one’s focus going in and out in the reading, emphases shifting. Here’s “Notion of Arts as Frivolity” (01:14):

mercenary, maverick, or missionary—one of the three. Apparently, aside from the alcoholic, oil-eyed narcissist who hasn’t left the sealed villa in three weeks, you should submit to classification. Live on the street with a concrete-slab vista, among amiable guards you always make a point of waving to and the mechanical gushes of water over plastic rocks, marking the entrance. Live as a number under the name, most likely a neologism of capitalist & eastern ideals. There’s the over-chlorinated pool and the water that induces balding. Live a refrigerated existence. On the other side of the walls, the nature of the shifting desert, snakes, and the yellow school bus full of indentured navvies lurk. The nefarious cranking and tapping of industrial machinery define nocturnal white noise. You find yourself wanting to complain about local ways though you’re not really certain how much is local or how much you’ve become a non sequitur

Everywhere in Workman’s piece is uncertainty, failure, blockage, threat. Opolis seems wholly and profoundly of its era (an “era” partially defined by statements like Workman’s “heaven is as hell is a hoax I decide so I make up multiple eras all at once and so overwhelming one wants to explode out of sheer inherited longing”). The unnamed global city consciousness-miasma we imperialists’ve inherited (made) versus the longing for elsewhere. Workman, in a lovely line (there are many): “we dream omnisciently of there, which oscillates between never and now, operatic and open-mouthed.”

C. D. Wright | Rising, Falling, Hovering | Copper Canyon Press | 2008

A polis norteamericano in crisis, a citizen unmoor’d, a calling out (in two senses—for aid, to accuse). The center of the book is largely split between the terrific title poem and its “Cont.,” its continuation. Essentially a fractured (and gut-wrenching, and maddening) narrative of the immoral and illegal preemptive “excursion” into Iraq, it is itself punctuated by “to be cont.,” by contradictory reversals (“Not so; instead”), by doubts as to the efficacy of writing, period (“Nary a death arrested nor a hair of a harm averted / by any scrawny farrago of letters” and “This is no time for poetry”).

. . . And so I have come to want them—
them being, those people, the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania,
I can’t even bear to say their [expletive] monosyllabic surnames
for dread of it calling up their bland [expletive] faces; yet I have come
to want them, almost obsessively come to want them, to exist in this dread:
for the nondescript car to pull up and disgorge the uniformed men
with their generic words tapped out of their well-drilled heads;
for the blunted bodies of this couple to be riveted to this dread,
for their blunted minds to stick on this expectation as if driven into
their bones of the natural order upended—that their twins are dead. No,
that their twins are blessed to give of themselves so selflessly in this struggle
for our way of life as it is so correctly, so vulgarly called; though I do not want
them to actually receive this news to actually have the twins be dead,
nor for their eyes to be blacked out, nor their earthly functions
be stopped, nor their blood to quit flowing to their temporal lobes,
but I sincerely do want this couple this very couple, the current occupants,
to exist solely, wholly in this dread. Because we do.

An [expletive] lovely and fastidious apery of the lingual buncombe of war and its masters, the “current occupants.” Wright assuming the debased lingo of el otro lado (“the other side,” another recurring phrase) in an attempt to “get through”—though recognizing, too, that any addressee’ll see in “current occupants” a sign of junk mail, and likely toss it. No doubt “Rising, Falling, Hovering” is the most ambitious U.S. anti-war poem of the twenty-first century.

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More John Latta here.

Once again I am away from my shelves, so render these but demi-impressionistically:

David Buuck | constraint-based board-bearing made-to-order essays | various performances | 2008

Cringing through this with his Catholic aunts enriched the context.

Taylor Brady & Rob Halpern | Snow Sensitive Skin | Atticus/Finch | 2007

Command mouths.

Dolores Dorantes, trans. Jen Hofer | sexoPUROsexoVELOZ | Counterpath and Kenning Editions | 2008

Difficult to choose between this and lip wolf, Hofer’s translation of Laura Solòrzano’s lobo de labio put out by Action Books in 2007. Read the notes as you read the lyrics.

Carla Harryman | direction for Kathy Acker’s Requiem | work toward performance as part of Poet’s Theater Showcase at Links Hall, Chicago | 2008

Rendered “reading” a spatialized & corporeal experience, formosa.

F.T. Marinetti | Venezianella e studentaccio | typescript | 1944

Gothic Baroque Rococo Impressionist Secessionist Futurist Refusturism.

Luigi Nono | Intolleranza 1968 | Sofferte onde serene | Prometeo:  Tragedia dell’ascolto | various years, performances, publications

“To listen to the dark, to listen to how the lights move, how the water emanates light. To listen to the way the sky is a creature of the stones, of the tiles, of the water. To know how to see and hear the invisible and inaudible. To arrive at the lowest grade of audibility, visibility.”

Roberto Rossellini | Paisà | OFI | 1946

Makes “site-specificity” seem trifling. Needs to be issued anew.

Aldo Rossi | A Scientific Autobiography | MIT | 1981

How have I never had this recommended to me? Oh, right. Ditto.

Leslie Scalapino | It’s go in horizontal:  Selected Poems, 1974-2006 | Wesleyan UP | 2008

Anti-citational oppositional time, “entirely from the inside out.”  A clamorous ethics not just a phenomenology: a tall order for poetry, finally gathered here.

Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Ed. Patrick Durgin | Kenning Editions | 2006

Long-awaited.

Haskell Wexler | Medium Cool | H&J | 1969

Time precisely to watch it again.

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More Jennifer Scappettone here.

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space | Palm Press | 2008

The smartest demonstration and open invitation I’ve seen of what a poetics off the page and engaged with the world does, can and might look like.

Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | Subpress | 2007
Laura Moriarty | A Semblance: Selected Poems: 1975-2006 | Omnidawn | 2007

Overviews from two of our most important poets at mid-career, presenting new opportunities to see where they’ve come from and where they’ve now brought us.

David Harvey | A Brief History of Neoliberalism | Oxford University Press | 2007
Naomi Klein | The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | Picador | 2008

Particularly instructive when read together.

Maggie Nelson | Women, The New York School and Other True Abstractions | University of Iowa Press | 2007

It’s about time someone like Nelson has come along to explode the conventional wisdom on these matters! Her refusal to accept the terms of debate on their own terms is utterly refreshing.

Michael Pollan | The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World | Random | 2002
Michael Pollan | The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals | Penguin | 2007

“Everything’s connected” goes the ecological credo, but Pollan’s exemplary studies show that credo operating with new subtleties and depth, a true parti pris des choses that is at once a profoundly important politics and ethics as well as ecology.

Rod Smith | Deed | University of Iowa Press | 2007

What the small press poetry world has known for years now finally garners national attention: this is a poetry to be reckoned with.

Charles Gayle (alto sax), Sirone (bass) & Rashied Ali (drums) | Stadtsaal, Burghausen (Germany) | 8 March 2008 | audience recording circulated via dimeadozen.org

With this formidable rhythm section behind him, Gayle trades in his trademark scorched-earth tenor saxophone for a lighter and sweeter horn. Be assured, his alto tone is still incredibly biting and intense, but it’s somehow more soulful, warmer, more human. He has blended the blusey wail of Ornette Coleman, the flurrious attack of John Coltrane and the ecstatic leaps of Albert Ayler with his own genius to become a true master of the idiom.

Harmony Korine | Mister Lonely | IFC Films | 2008

An expatriate Michael Jackson impersonator alone in Paris finds the company of kindred spirits when he is invited by a Marilyn Monroe to join a commune of other impersonators in the Scottish highlands. The trailer for this film made it look overly sentimental and sappy  — in stark contrast to the shock tactics of Korine’s previous efforts (Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy). To my surprise, however, and with the addition of flying nuns under guidance by Werner Herzog in cameo, Korine has put together a truly touching mediation on freedom, marginalization and utopia, and what it means to discover and be yourself in all its joyous possibilities and painful limitations. Attending the Nashville premier, which featured a special appearance and Q&A session by hometown hero Korine, was an added bonus.

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More Tom Orange here.

Douglas Oliver | Whisper ‘Louise’ | Reality Street | 2005

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008

Bob Perelman | IFLife | Roof | 2007

Ariana Reines | Coeur De Lion | Mal-O-Mar | 2008

Bill Berkson & Bernadette Mayer | What’s Your Idea of a Good Time | Tuumba | 2006

Catherine Wagner | Hole in the Ground | Slack Buddha Press | 2008

Marcella Durand | Area | Belladonna | 2008

Michael Nicoloff & Alli Warren | Bruised Dick | unknown | 2008

Stacy Szymaszek | from ‘Hyperglossia | Hot Whiskey Press | 2008

Rodney Koeneke | Rules for Drinking Forties | Cy Press | 2009

Young Brandon (Brandon Brown) | You Better Ask Somebody | unknown | 2008

Nathalie Stephens | The Sorrow And The Fast Of It | Nightboat | 2008

This Canadian writer is new to me. Andrew Zawacki describes her as “the son-daughter of Helene Cixous and Jean Genet,” and that sounds right. A poem in prose, its sentences echo and refine.

Charles Baudelaire, trans. Keith Waldrop | The Flowers of Evil | Wesleyan | 2007

This is the best translation of Baudelaire I have ever read. Waldrop translates the poems into “versets”, which he defines this way: “a measured prose that allows the sentence to dominate, as in prose, checked by a sense of line that restricts it.”

Rikki Ducornet | Desirous | Pierre Menard Gallery | 2007

Lush images, fictions, essays by and about this luminous writer.

Takashi Hiraide, trans. Sawako Nakayasu | For The Fighting Spirit Of The Walnut | New Directions |  2008

A master of the Japanse prose poem, impeccably translated by Sawako Nakaysu.

Fanny Howe | The Lives of a Spirit / Glasstown | Nightboat | 2008

Nightboat Books has brought these two major texts by Howe back into print.

Francis Ponge, trans. Lee Fahnestock | Mute Objects Of Expression | Archipelago | 2008

From my own blurb for this book: “Ponge’s prose accepts the truth that things themselves defy our language. The writing accepts this, but is not resigned to it….  Being holds out against its every nemesis, and both Being and Non-Being offer themselves to our dream of silence.”

Zhang Er and Chen Dongdong, eds. | Another Kind Of Nation: an Anthology of Contemporary Poetry | Talisman | 2007

A big anthology of a very important contemporary poetry.

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More Leonard Schwartz here.