Third Factory/Notes to Poetry

Edward Foster, ed. | Postmodern Poetry: The Talisman Interviews | Talisman | 1994

Gertrude Stein | Stanzas in Meditation | Sun & Moon | 1994

Nathaniel Mackey | Splay Anthem | New Directions | 2006

George Oppen | Selected Poems | New Directions | 2003

Albert Glover, ed. | Charles Olson: Letters for Origin | Cape Goliard | 1970

Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007

James Howard Kunstler | The Long Emergency | Grove | 2005

Ben Belitt, trans. | Federico Garcia Lorca: Poet in New York | Grove | 1955

David Gershator, trans. | Federico Garcia Lorca: Selected Letters | New Directions | 1983

Anthony Storr | Music and the Mind | HarperCollins | 1997

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More Megan London here.

Rod Smith | Deed | Iowa | 2007

“The Good House” is a poem that is never less than itself, continually reinventing the topos of dwelling through the tropos of surprise.

Marjorie Welish | Isle of Signatories | Coffee House | 2008

Every sign is always already a form of annotation.

Joshua Clover | The Totality for Kids | California | 2006

The Romantic crisis poem cold-filtered for your drinking pleasure through the radical tradition of the Denkbild. Dude, it will make you weep.

Andrew Joron | The Cry at Zero| Counterpath | 2007

Who, if they cried, would utter zero, hallowed, forever?

Hank Lazer | The New Spirit | Singing Horse | 2005
Hank Lazer | Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays, 1996-2008 | Omnidawn | 2008

The letter liveth so that the spirit might too.

Richard Deming | Let’s Not Call It Consequence | Shearsman | 2008

Incommensurate space between the verb and the noun. Whatever we dream, whatever we group by words.

Ed Barrett | Bosston | Pressed Wafer | 2008

The radioactive ghosts of Yeats and Whitey Bulger clash by night in the abandoned remnants of Scolley Square.

Amy Catanzano |  iEpiphany | Erudite Fangs | 2008

Cellular constellations, bright with fractal intelligence.

Julie Carr | Equivocal | Alice James | 2007

The work of the work of mourning in “Iliadic.” Stop this endless war.

Jay Wright | The Presentable Art of Reading Absence | Dalkey Archive | 2008

Intelligence as a dying art. Promise of the garden and the smoke that is sweetness.

Philip Lamantia | Tau | City Lights | 2008

Vatic American nerve tree.

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More Patrick Pritchett here.

(symmetry, reciprocal community)

Jed Birmingham & Kyle Schlesinger, eds. | Mimeo Mimeo vol. 1 | Brooklyn, NY | 2008

Saddle-stapled, glossy covers, 8 by 11, with essays by Christopher Harter (mimeo history) and Jed Birmingham (Burroughs and My Own Mag), an interview conducted by Kyle Schlesinger with Alistair Johnston, and a hybrid piece by Stephen Vincent reading Jack Spicer. Harter notes the importance of locale, community, and affordable technology; Birmingham’s essay details the potential for author-editor relationships in the small press world, and Schlesinger’s Johnston interview is incredible at once for the gossip, the shop talk, and the lesson in how much energy it really takes to make something great. And if you’re looking to map the field, the dozen or so pages of ads in the back are a great place to start.

Kyle Schlesinger | The Pink | Kenning Editions (ed. Patrick Durgin) | Chicago, IL | 2008

Ten poems in a variety of registers, from manipulations and repetitions in the mode of a poet like Ted Greenwald to poems that demonstrate a belief that a poem might be a place where we can find each other. But this is also a bookmaker’s book, full of “the serif[s] in / the surf’s curl,” and here it’s important to point to Quemadura’s book-making and design-work. The Pink is saddle-stapled and bound in what feels like a shirt cardboard, with titling running from back to front in what appears to be a thin plastic appliqué on the rough cover. With the poems printed on a marled, cream-colored stock, the page is completely opaque—the poems are really there. I’m unsure to what degree Schlesinger was involved in the design, but I can’t imagine any poet any less than completely thrilled to find their work in a container so perfect. It feels like opening a box in which the poems were shipped.

David Hadbawnik, ed. | kadar koli 1.2 | San Marcos, TX | 2007

“kadar koli” = “kuhdur coly” = “whenever.” Rumor is, this magazine used to be produced after-hours on borrowed copier time, and slipped into the mail bin when no one was looking. Featuring Mary Burger, Marcus Civin, Tom Clark, Nick Courtright, Lauren Dixon, Amy King, C.J. Martin, Andrew Neuendorf, Rich Owens, Tom Peters, John Phillips, Micah Robbins, Marcia Roberts, Elizabeth Robinson, Kyle Schlesinger, and Mathew Timmons, the magazine is notable at once for the range of emerging and established writers, the number of contributors who are literary publishers or promoters, and the range of formal-generic experiment across the contributions. Recently relocated from San Marcos, Texas, to Buffalo, hopefully “whenever” now means “more often” and “under less duress.”

David Hadbawnik | Ovid in Exile | Interbirth Books (ed. Micah Robbins) | Austin, TX | 2007

I picked this up at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair this year. Rich Owens had raved about the book, and there’d also been a review here and there. Forty-four pages of incredible poetry blending over half a dozen personae and collapsing two millennia into a multiply inflected palimpsest that most registers the erotic charge of time laying on time, persona on persona: “That awkward dance / is a kind of looking / that takes place / at the end of the smile / gradually takes the place / of it caries the I / back into sleep.” And there’s nothing chaste about Robbins’ book design, either. Hand-sewn, five signatures (red thread), wrapped in exquisite boards, and unless I’m mistaken, the pages are deckled by each of them being hand torn. Ovid, priapic, wilts by comparison.

Michael Cross, Michelle Detorie, Johannes Göransson | Dos Press Chapbook, no. 2, ser. 1 (ed. Julia Drescher and C.J. Martin) | San Marcos, TX | 2007

At this point, more people need to know about this series, and more people need to be writing about it. Dos no. 1, ser. 1 was mentioned here last year (featuring Carter Smith, Hoa Nguyen, and Andrea Strudensky), and the project continues—one book, two spines, three authors—as one of the most interesting publication venues for emerging poets. The featured author in no. 2 is Detorie, and her “A Coincidence of Wants” is a twenty or so page collection drenched in assonance and imagery: “…Anyways, it is // us in the underneath aftershock sucking / pink and pretending everything is ours.” Turn the book over, and the Cross/Göransson signature holds Cross’s ten-poem “Throne” and Göransson’s “Majakovskij en tragedy.” Göransson’s piece is devastatingly corporeal: “I repeat with pig meat / I have blond hair blue eyes / and the crackliest carnation / you’ve ever dug a shovel / through I have a ribcage / and a stripped woman I hold / with my fire arm and / a shuddered woman I kiss / with my pet mouth”. And with regard to Cross’s “Throne,” I can only say that in the weeks before he left Buffalo, a reading of this sequence sparked a conversation that left a head-wound in its wake. Which is finally to say, thinking of all three writers here, that Drescher and Martin have put together a beautiful collection of work that names its own stakes. And these stakes are high.

Julia Drescher | Mock Martyrs / Abound | Dancing Girl Press (ed. Kristy Bowen) | Chicago, IL | 2008

Drescher one time told me that the poems she’d given me were designed to make publication problematic. I’m still impressed and bewildered by this, now more so by the fact that I can see nothing compromised in Mock Martyrs / Abound, and yet, here it is. It’s part of an ongoing project that’s thinking really, really hard about how words, even down to the single word, make it onto the page. And once there, if they have the merit to remain. Bowen’s design is right on the mark here: At first, it seems appropriately stark: covers black on charcoal (almost black on black), and the book is small and square when closed. It’s after reading the book, closing it, and regarding the cover again—no images, (no serifs, even), just title in caps, that virgule, and the author’s name—that we see in Bowen’s design an exquisite reading of Drescher’s project: the text becoming, throughout the book, an image of itself and what it’s meant to contain:

knowing in some other darker place this : is what a face looks like
: growing : her hair in her / on her & : using touch to hear (i.e. : her
threads) soft some- : what blind delineations : common enough : some
misplaced private life that is : she builds her wheel between : trees
: though someone is : bound to tangle : through :

C.J. Martin | Lo, Bittern | Atticus/Finch (ed. Michael Cross) | Buffalo, NY | 2008

In the two or so years I’ve been reading Martin, the work has always stunned. It’s generous in that it gives new resource to the lyric, and demanding, as it asks the lyric to earn what he gives it: “This in a cluster cut for you from parcelside: / We were never littles for bigs, / who formerly share- / cropping, monument, for a day’s work / – whose thought alone, who / loved you better”. Here is the gift and the demand—both freight and circumstance declare themselves in the verse, and yet neither the act of carrying, nor what must be carried suffer to each other. This leaves the urge to get behind, into, the work, and Cross’s design—metallic pink covers in cellophane sleeves, titling cut across the signature, and perfect dimensions for these small poems that are only small in size—has done exactly this. If you put your hands on this book, you put your hands on the poems themselves.

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The goal was to think reciprocally, working the space between poet-publishers, and this list could just as easily have been a list of Birmingham, Durgin, Robbins, and Bowen. One of the joys that is also one of the risks of community is that there’s always another formulation of it.

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More Andrew Rippeon here.

Nico Vassilakis | Text Loses Time | ManyPenny Press | 2007

Nico’s book of books. VisPo & NicoPo, side by side.

“In the beginning was a texture. Historically, alphabets are for advertising. And so the world entertains by involving everything.”

Mary Rose Larkin (Holidays) | Nita Hill (Paintings) | Whimsy Day Book 2007: A Calendar of Imaginary Holidays | Flash + Card Press | 2006

“Tuesday May 8     Puppies vs. Kittens 2:05pm”
“Monday July 30     Diet-Jell-O Biafra Invented”
“December 21        Sun Enters the Sign of the Semicolon”

Nita’s abstract big color / bigger sun paintings are a wonderful complement.

Susan Landers | Covers | O Books | 2007

Dante! Now! & B-Sides : “My leader lobs fistfuls of muck down his throat to appease him.”

James Dickey | Self-Interviews | Doubleday | 1970

“The poetic process with me is something that simply goes on all the time, even when I’m sleeping. I write all night when I’m sleeping. It never stops. In dreams most of the time I’m writing, or I’m dreaming about something and trying to write about it at the same time in the dream. And when I’m up, I’m never far from a notebook; I’ve always got something to write on. Poetry, instead of being reserved for a a special time of day, goes on continually.”

Homer Wheelon M.D. | Rabbit No. 202 Illusions and Conclusions “Case History No. 22712 Test No. 67; Rabbit No. 202, Virgin Female, Age 120 Days. April 15, 1933” | Self Published | 1940

In 1933, after observing a rabbit being used in a pregnancy test, Homer Wheelon began to work on writing and illustrating his epic Rabbit No. 202. Doctor, scientist, painter, humanist, and poet, Wheelon filled Rabbit 202 with his diverse interests and beliefs. His Blake inspired pen and ink drawings are particularly weird. A PDF with more information about Homer Wheelon here.

“Air gulping fish,
Lung fish squirmed out of the sea
On land-going fins.
Land-going fins evolved into limbs
Limbs developed to reach the sea
Crawl back to the open sea
Receding waters forced fins into limbs
Droughts, mud, and slimy morasses
Forced life to search for the sea.
Stranded life,
Terrestrial life
Life lost to the sea.”

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Sung Po-Jen trans. Red Pine | Guide to Capturing the Plum Blossom | Mercury House | 1995

Published in 1261AD, this collection of 100 poems and woodblocks was so influential at the time that artists wishing to paint plum blossoms were encouraged to paint from what they found in this book rather than from the blossom itself.

“Sung’s book is also significant because it attempts to fathom the essence of a material object through detailed, empirical examination and uses the results of that examination to form the basis for that object’s deconstruction and reconstruction on a different plane. Once the reader has the flower’s 100 stages memorized, he has the key to the plum flower and the key to Nature as well. With this key he can create his own plum flower universe without having to observe Nature at all.” from the introduction by Lo Ch’ing.

Robert B. Textor | Roster of the Gods: An Ethnography of the Supernatural in a Thai Village | Human Relations Area Files, Inc | 1973

“The tester goes to visit Betsy while she is pounding some pepper sauce (nam phrik) in a mortar. The tester or somebody else somehow manages to put some lime juice into the mortar. If, after a few minutes, maggots somehow begin to appear in the mortar, this is positive proof that Betsy is a host. The rationale for the test is that maggots, like Filth Ghost, enjoy eating feces.”

Boredoms (Yamatsuka Eye, Yoshimi P-We, Yojiro, and Muneomi Senju) | Live Performance March 21,, 2008 | Neumos Seattle, WA

Psychedelic-Tribal-Punk-Electronic-Beatdown-Woosh from Osaka Japan! 4 drummers and stacks of electronics. A Seventar—a taller-than-human 7 necked guitar —played by beating it with a big baton. Once Eye starts up his sun-sound-machine there is no stopping it. The end effect is the compression of epic natural forces into punch/beat/scream/star-fuzz that brings light to the entire body via sound.

Jerry Lee Lewis | Live at the Star Club | Bear Family | 1994

“If you don’t like Jerry Lee’s peaches, honey don’t pull around on my tree.”

Recorded in 1964 at the same club where the Beatles got started. This is Jerry’s last blast before turning country & the oh those poor Nashville Teens (British/German Backing Band) you can hear them sweating trying to keep up with the KILLER. Listen for a mob of Gerrys chanting “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry…” Perhaps the best live rock n’ roll record ever.

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack | Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life | Famous Players-Lasky Corporation | 1925

Merian Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s (King Kong) first film.

“In 1924, pioneering filmmakers Merian Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack documented the punishing annual migration of the nomadic Bakhtiari tribe of Persia (now Iran) as they heroically trekked across harsh terrain to herd their livestock to pasture. With 500,000 animals in tow, the barefoot Bakhtiaris ventured through unforgiving deserts; the icy, half-mile-wide Karun River; and over a 12,000-foot, snowcapped mountain to reach their destination.”  (Netflix film description)

Joe Brainard | The Nancy Book | Siglio | 2008

“I have burned down the sky.”

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More CE Putnam here.

Some of my favorite poetry with a 2007 or 2008 copyright date.

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

O’Hara said that Whitman , Crane and Williams were the only American poets who were better than the movies, but today, in a world with Apocalypto and 3-D Imax Beowulf, only Kevin Davies is better than the movies. Maybe you’re in it for the giddy surprise of a turned phrase. Maybe you’re in it for the zonked formal apparatus (“floaters”?). Maybe you just want to drink a Corona and take pot shots at the government. Anyway you want it, that’s the way I need it. More than one Davies book a decade? Yes, please.

Craig Dworkin | Parse | Atelos | 2008

Like the chase scene in Apocalypto, Parse is a feat of athletic strength and technical virtuosity. And I mean that in the best sense (I’m a Yes fan, after all). This book is proof that conceptual writing deserves to be realized. Sure, the idea of parsing a grammar book by it’s own rules is clever, and many lazy McLazies would leave it at that and call it a piece—but the actual fact of the book goes way deeper than any mere suggestion. This work is ‘pataphysical’ in the truest sense—it appropriates a logic only to drag it to its limits, where the supposed rationality of its system is inverted—university discourse in the service of parody, or truth.

Rob Fitterman and Nayland Blake | The Sun Also Also Rises | No Press | 2008

Mr. Fitterman at his most tender, no kidding. Conceptualism and the lyric do meet, despite hysterical claims otherwise. In what seems at first like a closed system (all of the first person statements from Hemingway’s novel) we find instead a subjective opening: the sentences are so vague and gestural that they cry out to be grafted on to the autobiography of the reader, they serve as little memory-nuggets, each interchangeable and abstract. Which is precisely why the second part, a rewriting using material from the author’s own biography, is so necessary. Fitterman finds the ripples in Hemingway narrative (or, to be more broad, in novelistic conventions of masculinity) and, instead of a destructive gesture which breaks the original, ideologically-encrusted text apart, he adds more ripples, until eventually we can’t see to the bottom of the text. Psst—there is no bottom. Nayland Blake’s terrific minimalist coda sends us off on another open, leaky note, like the closing shot of 3-D Imax Beowulf, in which a computer-enhanced actor gets caught in the freeze-frame, or the fade-out, I don’t remember which.

Peter Gizzi | The Outernationale | Wesleyan | 2007

Peter Gizzi’s cameo in Apocalypto might have increased his star power, but it hasn’t diminished his poetic ability one bit. The opening sequence, “A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me,” is an ambitious serial work that takes Gizzi’s engagement with the complex arragement of image and statement to knottier, stranger territory. The title poem knots statement even tighter by mixing the poetic line with part-words, which can only suggest meanings, and defer the meanings made by the full sentences. This is dense poetry: not in the sense that say, Prynne is dense, nor in the sense that Oppen is dense. Instead of bludgeoning us with experimental vocab or treating us to crafted, meaningful line breaks, Gizzi’s lyric resides in the no man’s land between information management and intimate conversation. His romanticism (and I mean that in the best sense—I’m a Wordsworth fan, after all) is completely contemporary—the language of the present authors the poet. Said language is soaked in both abstract, highly mediated war-time quasi-correspondence, the dailiness of human sociality, and the sensory experience of the distance between those two things—as Gizzi says, bewilderment.

Renee Gladman | Newcomer Can’t Swim | Kelsey Street | 2007

Gladman’s writing so successfully carries the illusion of transparency that sometimes it seems like there’s not much there, in any particular sentence. But the accumulation of sentences, and especially the sense of narrative blows back that very transparency to create an effect that is more crystalline than glass-like. Identity is refracted – not invisible but manifold. The narrators of these fictions, or these poems, or whatever, are not lacking identities but exposing them, not as frauds but as real structures, and as real feelings. The sentences, likewise, are not frauds in their simplicity, in their transparency. They are part of a complex and many-sided form, somewhat akin to 3-D Imax Beowulf.

Kenneth Goldsmith | Traffic | Make Now | 2007
Kenneth Goldsmith | Sports | Make Now | 2008

Goldsmith’s “American Trilogy” is the Apocalypto of poetry—one long chase scene, the spectacularization of suffering, and a relationship to history that makes accuracy an irrelevant question. Of course, the big difference is that Mel Gibson is an anti-semite, and Goldsmith is a Jew. They would probably not get along.

Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008

Quoth Patrick Lovelace: “The fundamental question of writing is: after you write a word, do you repeat the word that you’ve just written, or do you choose another?” Quoth Beowulf: “The sea is my mother! She would never take me back to her murky womb!” Ted Greenwald has been grappling with just this problem for decades. 3 is one of my favs by him, especially the standout first poem, “Going Into School That Day,” a long poem on love and memory, in which the next word is either a new word, or the previous word, or the previous word in a new place.

Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007
Juliana Spahr | Intricate Systems | The Press Gang | 2008

The Transformation may be, by the author’s account, a novel. I’m not sure. If so it’s a little out of place on this here poetry list, but who cares? The disregard for genre is part of its charm. Spahr’s increasingly intensive connective writing brings as many things into relation that can fit into a linguistic scene. Actually that’s not quote true – the relationships she builds are precise ones, with particular contemporary and political resonances. For instance, the migration from Hawaii to NYC narrated in The Transformation brings us from a colonial scene to it’s obverse: late 2001 America. Within this broader frame, all manner of institutional effects, social contradictions and forms of natural life are brought into conversation. That’s what keeps Spahr’s work from lapsing into a hippie monism or relativism: the politicized frame always reconfigures the disparate material into a specific critique. And Apocalypto.

Kevin Thurston and Lauren Bender | Boys are Retards | Produce | 2007

Kevin Thurston answers all the questions from a Cosmo Girl quiz-book, and he answers them truthfully. Is this because Thurston is a Cosmo Girl at heart? Or is it because he has a non-patronizing relationship to mass culture which allows him to engage with it formally, in a way which respects the sincerity of feeling structured by ideology? See, Thurston’s feelings are also ideological, he doesn’t pretend not to be cry during 3-D Imax Beowulf, he doesn’t pretend to be outside. Instead of a condescending attitude, instead of mocking forms of entertainment which swell legitimate emotion in legitimate humans, Thurston offers a skeptical but honest response to manipulative ad-affects. A single tear runs down his cheek.

Rod Smith | Deed | University of Iowa | 2007

There’s a part in 3-D Imax Beowulf where Beowulf jumps out of the eye of a seamonster, presumably killing the beast. How he got into the eye remains unclear. Deed is better than that scene, and Rod Smith is more heroic than Beowulf, by far.

Rachel Zolf | Human Resources | Coach House | 2007

Like spam but better, Human Resources reworks the junk language of the internet to bring to the surface it’s conflicted relationship to desire. On the one hand, spam is work written by a bot. On the other hand, spam is work written to be an intrusion in lives of people who are not bots: to spark the reader’s interest with its outrageous subject-heading or its surprising collage of often-sexualized language. Zolf uses this language to write a book not written by a bot, a book about desire as articulated by a person who speaks the language of spam, a language which is not necessarily rational, but which as immediate as a Jaguar eating a man’s face (as seen in Apocalypto). This book is spazzy, surprising and over-the-top. Since I only like things that are over-the-top, I like this book.

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Special Mention: the comments box on Silliman’s Blog

Day after day, loyal Silliman readers fill up his comments box with: insults and whining?  A terrific and totally baffling phenomenon. The misdirected anger of poets everywhere comes to a head here, in a great wash of complaining and PC finger-wagging. Silliman, to his credit, is graceful – he doesn’t seem to censor the comments, he allows all the regulars their space to be wacky or conservative, and he keeps on blogging on. A toast to Silliman, of course. But a second toast, please, to the folks who transform a poetry blog into a absolutely entertaining parade of off-beat characters.

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More Steven Zultanski here.

Roberto Bolano | The Savage Detectives | FSG | 2007

Anne Boyer | Art is War |  Mitvah Chaps | 2008

Joe Brainard | The Nancy Book | Siglio | 2008

Luc Sante | Kill All Your Darlings | Yeti / Verse Chorus Press | 2007

David Shapiro | New and Selected Poems | Overlook | 2007

Justin Sirois | Secondary Sound | BlazeVOX | 2008

Kevin Thurston | kevin is running late today but will be in (audio cd) | self-published | 2007

Alli Warren | No Can Do | Duration | 2008

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More Gina Myers here.

Jasper Bernes | Starsdown | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2007

A dazzling book of poetry that achieves the experiential inventiveness and elaborative density of a novel without sacrificing its lyric autonomy.

Joe Brainard | The Nancy Book | Siglio | 2008

A much-anticipated event, heightened even further for me by getting to see the exhibit at Colby College, Maine, at which many of these works were on display, earlier this summer.

Jack Collom | Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955–2000 | Tuumba | 2001

I wrote about Collom’s wonderful collaboration with Lyn Hejinian, Situations, Sings (Adventures in Poetry 2008) earlier this year for The Constant Critic. That book could easily have gone on this list as well. But I want to draw attention to this indispensable collection, which I picked up in June at Naropa, where Collom performs poetic miracles on a regular basis.

Patrick Durgin and Jen Hofer | The Route | Atelos | 2008

We’ve had a windfall of engrossing poetic memoirs and epistolary exchanges lately by Jennifer Moxley, Juliana Spahr, Bernadette Mayer and Bill Berkson, and others. Here’s another vibrant chronicle of the contemporary, in which two razor-sharp poets’ minds use each other as theoretical, political, and aesthetic sounding boards, and in so doing reveal the moving, living mechanisms that sustain a deep friendship.

Jennifer Knox | Drunk By Noon | Bloof | 2007

Knox is one of the few poets I can think of who still writes with great success in the familiar mode of the “dramatic monologue”: she makes it work partly by inhabiting its conventions like a kind of squatter and vandalizing them from the inside out, rendering the form unfit for occupancy by anyone else thereafter. Alternately and/or simultaneously sensitive, mean, elegant, smart, stoopid, and most of all, funny.

Jackson Mac Low | Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works | California | 2008

The title says it all.

Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo Books | 2007

This book is like cherry-flavored anthrax in a Pixie Stix straw. Mesmer breaks all the rules of decorum, craft, and form—she even invents some new rules just to break them. I would like to see her and Jennifer Knox have a poetic slapdown in a big hockey arena somewhere. My guess is that it would end in a tie with the audience dead from hemorrhaging.

Sianne Ngai | Ugly Feelings | Harvard UP | 2005

Incisive takes on Melville, Stein, Hitchcock, Bruce Andrews, Nella Larsen, and much more. A key text for entering into many of the most lively and controversial discussions in poetics over the last few years.

Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin |2007

Dark, uncomfortable, haunting dream-speech. Recalls for me Spicer’s medium-like approach in works like Heads of the Town Up to the Ether.

Ara Shirinyan | Your Country Is Great: Afghanistan–Guyana | Futurepoem | 2008

Not Flarf, but that more “conceptual” vein of Google-collage practiced very interestingly in various ways by writers like Linh Dinh, Juliana Spahr, and Rob Fitterman. Shirinyan’s text does court flarfiness, however, with its inclusion of many of the unedited, offensive, and sometimes just silly things that turn up in searches for web text containing the phrase “[name of country] is great” (“Guam is great. really it is / shit, this is the place where i / found myself”). The minimal amount of shaping Shirinyan performs (mostly adding line and stanza breaks, I think) is just enough to induce that uncanny “subjectivity effect” which is one of the things that makes reading the book so compelling.

Various Authors | DRUNK |  ongoing

A lot of the poetry these days that I find the freshest and most full of expressive innovation happens on this blog and its outlying zones. The all-caps convention is really just a surface device that (along with the alcohol, one imagines) enables invention—although the monotone “shouting” effect does convey a sort of defamiliarized emotive urgency.

Esther Leslie | Hollywood Flatlands | Verso | 2004

The cover image of Eisenstein shaking hands with Mickey Mouse sums it up. A smart and sassy book about the brief intersection of European avant-garde art and Tinsel City Toons.

Peter Wollen | Paris Manhattan: Writings on Art | Verso | 2004

The sheer brilliance of each essay overcomes the smorgasbord effect of a collection like this. Try “Tanks,” “Magritte and the Bowler Hat,” “The Myth of the West,” and the somewhat autobiographical “Fridamania.” Intimidatingly sensible.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch | The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century | California | 1986

All the lively anecdotes and tidbits you’d expect on such a subject, but presented with a quizzical intelligence similar to Walter Benjamin.

Roberto Calasso | K. | Knopf | 2005

Like a crosseyed attempt to read both columns of Ashbery’s “Litany” at the same time, this scrupulously informed and highly original foray into Kafka feels like a visionary recital by Ibn’Arabi as examined by Sherlock Holmes.

Kazuo Ishiguro | The Unconsoled | Vintage | 1996

The perfect read is like the proverbial perfect storm, and in this case involves parallel travels: mine to the old Flemish city of Ghent, the protagonist’s to an unnamed but eerily similar place for a piano recital. Harrowing and disorienting in an oneiric sense, it’s also very funny. A sleeper with a kick.

John Banville | The Untouchable | Vintage | 1998

Banville has a penchant for populating several books with the same characters—e.g. Eclipse and Shroud (which, by the way, is a roman à clef based on Paul de Man)—but not here, as The Untouchable is a barely veiled novel about Sir Anthony Blunt, the art historian revealed as a spy for the Soviets. Banville writes such juicy sentences I can’t help reading a lot of them twice in succession, so this 367 page book seemed, in memory, at least 600.

Vladimir Nabokov, read by Jeremy Irons | Lolita | Random House Audio | 2005

I think James Mason made a much better Humbert in Kubrick’s film than Jeremy Irons in the remake—in part because the subject matter helplessly evokes Irons’ creepy gynecologists in Dead Ringers—but as a performer of Nabokov’s full text, he’s really perfect, and perfectly insinuating. This rendering is so intriguing that it’s tempting to recommend it over the “original.”

Leonard Schwartz | A Message Back & Other Furors | Chax | 2008

I find I’ve been reading Schwartz with same rapt attentiveness I associate with reading Oppen back when he was still alive and writing. Both seem to have some preternatural access to words purged of casual or vernacular associations, yet bearing the weight of everyday usage. Accessible and esoteric at once. “Bewilderment / is the only ark.”

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More Jed Rasula here.

Roberto Bolaño | Nazi Literature in the Americas | New Directions | 2008

Andrew Delbanco | Melville: His Life and Work | Knopf | 2005

Emily Dickinson | The Letters of Emily Dickinson | Belknap | 1958

John Godfrey | City of Corners | Wave | 2008

Imre Kertész | Detective Story | Knopf | 2008

Imre Kertész | The Pathseeker: Searching for Traces | Melville | 2008

Nathaniel Mackey | Bass Cathedral | New Directions | 2008

George Oppen | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2008

John Tipton, translator | Ajax | Flood | 2008

Brenda Wineapple | White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson | Knopf | 2008

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More John Palattella here.

Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley | Ficciones | Penguin | 2008

Marcel Proust, trans. Lydia Davis | Swann’s Way | Penguin | 2002

Alejo Carpentier, trans. Harriet De Onis | In the Kingdom of This World | Farrar | 2006

Ned Sublette | The World that Made New Orleans | Lawrence Hill | 2008

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

Lorenzo Thomas | Dancing on Main Street | Coffee House | 2004

Laura Moriarty | A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975-2007 | Omnidawn | 2007

Jean Day | Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium | Adventures in Poetry | 2006

William Fuller | Watchword | Flood | 2006

Rodrigo Toscano | To Leveling Swerve | Krupskaya | 2004

Joanne Kyger | About Now: Collected Poems | National Poetry Foundation | 2007

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More Kit Robinson here.