Third Factory/Notes to Poetry

Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | Subpress | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 3 mentions in Attention Span 2008

Lovely music of what happens, gracefully. (Simon Schuchat)

Transatlantic two-step for treated Bösendorfer. My feet slip over at ends of lines, like when you trip in dreams. Your catching yourself’s the poem. (Rodney Koeneke)

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. (Tom Orange, reviewing this title along with Laura Moriarty’s A Semblance)

Trevor Joyce | What’s in Store | The Gig/New Writers’ Press | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 4 mentions in Attention Span 2008

If verse is a turning, the short poems here have some of the tightest corners on the road. New poems as if carved in stone; old folksongs from Ireland, Hungary and all over the map made new; birdsong collaged. A big book of lyric poetry plus: “not all / plants / are alike // some are / astringent / some are / salty // some sour / some sweet // some men / are short / -lived / some long // some ugly / others fortunate // weak strong / stupid clever / poor rich // was it / brevity / you wanted?” (Keith Tuma)

This year’s discovery. Thanks, Nate. (Mark Truscott)

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.

(John Latta)

Also mentioned by David Dowker.

Mark Scroggins | The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 4 mentions in Attention Span 2008

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

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. (Tim Conley)

Also mentioned by Joel Bettridge and Kit Robinson.

Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 4 mentions in Attention Span 2008

Spahr’s poetic memoir blends the personal and the political in a different way. (Rae Armantrout)

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 quite 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. (Steven Zultanski)

Also mentioned by Megan London and Michael Kelleher.

Jennifer Moxley | The Middle Room | Subpress | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 4 mentions in Attention Span 2008

There’s a quality to the tone of this book, as if Tolstoy were resurrected as a Valley Girl, that is truly charming. It’s also nice to be reminded that, when it comes to literature, “charming” finally does transcend all else. This book succeeds in engrossing me in the details of all sorts of things that I would have thought I had no interest in, as well as being completely (but not at all brutally) honest about the real motivations for writing poetry. (Stan Apps)

The acme of chick-lit. (John Wilkinson)

Also mentioned by Allyssa Wolf and David Dowker.