Archive for September 2009
Attention Span 2009 – Jessica Smith
derek beaulieu, ed. | Speechless | 2009
This new magazine of visual poetry features an all-women first issue.
Norman Fischer | Charlotte’s Way | TinFish Press | 2008
Helen White, ed. | Infusoria: an exhibition of visual poetry by women from three continents | krikri | 2009
A DVD showing pieces from the 2009 exhibit Helen curated in Belgium, featuring work from 17 female visual poets.
Jeff Encke | Most Wanted | Last Tangoes | 2004
A deck of cards, each of which is illustrated and imprinted with a poem. Fun to play with and/or read.
Alec Finlay | Mesostic Tea | Slack Buddha Press | 2009
The mesostic, John Cage’s now-neglected form, finds a home in Alec’s guide to tea. I’m not just glad to see the mesostic being used when it seems everyone is keen to write sestinas and pantoums—I like the tension between the Chinese tea names (which comprise the mesostics) and the English descriptions (which run horizontally). The cup ring that decorates the cover is a nice touch, echoing Cage’s stain artwork.
Friedrich Kerksieck | Matchbook | Small Fires Press | 2009
A tiny matchbook-sized magazine, enclosed in an actual matchbook, now on its second issue, featuring poems from a wide aesthetic range and scratch-and-sniff stickers.
Jordi Boldo + Roman Lujan | Aspa Viento | 2003
A beautiful edition featuring Lujan’s artwork and pictures of visual poetry printed on rocks.
kathryn l. pringle | RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY | Factory School / Heretical Texts | 2009
Factory School’s Heretical Texts series is completely trustworthy—every book they publish is a hit. Thus RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY is representative of a larger body of work—the editorial selection that comprises FS’s total run.
Jennifer Scappettone | From Dame Quickly | Litmus | 2009
Litmus did a beautiful job of translating Scappettone’s colorful visual poetry to the mass-produced page.
Sandra Beasley | Theories of Falling | Western Michigan University | 2008
The most traditionally lyric of this group, Sandra’s autobiographical/narrative poems stick with me. There’s still room to say something new in poetry.
More Jessica Smith here.
Attention Span 2009 – Elizabeth Treadwell
Jennifer Firestone & Dana Teen Lomax, eds. | Letters to Poets | Saturnalia | 2008
“I for one don’t care about George Bush, we shouldn’t be disturbed by dogs, or low caste people and the power they have, they are average minds with a lot of power and attention, but for me they are just farts who don’t know the true history of how cultures and science weave. They are always into themselves, they cannot perceive other people or the pain that they are causing them. Obviously you can’t reach them with language.”—Victor Hernandez Cruz, to Brenda Coultas
“Female history is always destabilized by whatever guy is now watching the line of women parading by. It’s maddening but those guys will never change. We have to think differently. ….I think females need to write new fictions to hold their truths….. We have to set each other up better all the time and the terms of the world are always inadequate to women’s true accomplishments…..The feminine line means that above all women mustn’t be contemptuous of themselves. Just when the last thing going on is one’s purported femininity, it erupts like a big bow. We’re just so many things. I distrust my own jargon, my abandoning of the feminine for the female. I guess I was preferring sex over gender, but later thinking how arrogant to pretend not to be feminine. For anyone really. Why is the feminine the thing to hate. Something men, or mothers made to control girls. Surely it can free us too, then in some homeopathic way. I often forget words, that’s why I like holes. All this quiet diving through the dictionary and a bird comes up tweeting.”—Eileen Myles, to Jennifer Firestone
Reid Gomez | K’e/For Future Reference | http://reidgomez.blogspot.com | ongoing
“Food, dolls, stories, baskets, beadwork, silverwork, weavings, hand drums, flutes, songs and dances tell us who we are and teach us how to care for ourselves and our relations. Farmers, artists, wise men and women, weavers, dancers and singers invest their time and money living tradition, making a place for us in the here and now. They invest their resources in us and our future, creating and forging relationships that support us as individuals and as people. When we support them we support ourselves. When we purchase objects or services based in hate and exploitation we are funding hate and exploitation.”
Ann Vickery | Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing | Wesleyan | 2000
Such dear close history, a little surprised I’m just reading it now.
Nate Dorward, ed. | Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada | The Gig | 2008
The Johanson on Annharte and O’Leary on Wolsak were of particular interest to me.
Trevor Joyce | Courts of Air & Earth | Shearsman | 2008
The gorgeous Irish. Love it. Trans from the trad, intro’d by Fanny Howe.
Tim Atkins | Folklore | Salt | 2008
“Milks. Stitched into history.”
A curious pleasure to read this in conjunction with the above.
Andrew Rippeon | Priest | 2008
This little chap just appeared in my box, beautiful work.
Cathy Park Hong, Evie Shockley, &c, eds. | jubilat
Never a dull issue. I especially enjoyed the interview with CB I Hate Perfume in #15.
David Brazil & Sara Larsen, eds. | Try
Again with the never a dull issue, plus highly lovable production values.
Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone | Poems | Green Integer |1999
Keeping this close of late.
More Elizabeth Treadwell here.
Attention Span 2009 – Rae Armantrout
Rachel Loden | Dick of the Dead | Ahsahta | 2009
Lisa Robertson | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House | 2009
Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008
Ben Doller | FAQ | Ahsahta | 2009
Elizabeth Robinson | The Orphan | Fence | 2008
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009
Kit Robinson | The Messianic Trees | Adventures in Poetry | 2009
Joseph Massey | Areas of Fog | Shearsman | 2009
Roberto Bolano | 2666 | Farrar Strauss | 2008
Merlin Donald | A Mind So Rare | Norton | 2001
More Rae Armantrout here.
Attention Span 2009 – Cedar Sigo
John Wieners | The Lanterns Along The Wall | Other Publications | 1972
Suzanne Stein | Hole In Space | OMG | 2009
Sara Larsen and David Brazil, eds. | Try! Magazine (A first year subscription) | 2008-9
Joanne Kyger | Lo & Behold | Voices From The American Land | 2009
Tom Raworth | A Serial Biography | Fulcrum Press | 1969
Kimberly Lyons | Phototherapique | Katalanche and Portable Press At Yo-Yo Labs | 2008
Micah Ballard | Parish Krewes | Bootstrap Press | 2009
Dodie Bellamy | Barf Manifesto | Ugly Duckling | 2008
Rene Daumal, trans. Roger Shattuck | Mount Analogue | Pantheon | 1960
Bill Berkson | Goods and Services | Blue Press | 2008
Filip Marinovich | Zero Readership | Ugly Duckling | 2008
More Cedar Sigo here.
Attention Span 2009 – Allyssa Wolf
Bob Dylan | Saved! The Gospel Speeches of Bob Dylan | Hanuman | 1991
This book is about the size of one’s palm, bright pink, the letters in shiny gold cursive. I looked at it every day for a long time, particularly in October.
David Bret | Joan Crawford: Hollywood Martyr | Da Capo | 2006
My friend Amanda Milius lent this to me. She said she read it every night before bed through a hard time, and I also read it every night through a hard time. For that reason it’s a very important book. It is mostly lies and vicious gossip that is probably all true. It reads like Sade’s Juliette, except instead of having its philosophical tale cut with long, bizarre, mechanical, boring scenes of painful sex, this author pastes in long, bizarre, mechanical, boring scenes from Joan’s films. My first published poem included Joan Crawford as Joan of Arc. Hardcover, black, no dust jacket, crushed spine.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead | The Internet | 1240 BC
I’ve been reading this a lot because I’m writing a version of it for Cannibal.
Various Authors | Rolling Stone 1968-1971 | Unknown
This book is gigantic. I think if you stood it up it would come to almost your knees. It smells like somewhere in the seventies. It weighs like 30 pounds. When I read it it was like having a small person in your lap. A rectangular person—with no head or arms or legs—just all jaw. It’s the original issues, all bound together between heavy black plates. The news in each issue across this time was the unfolding of the Altamont story. Philip Jenks lent it to me.
Vanessa Place | Statement of Facts | Mark (s) | 2009
This is good work. It’s a radical realism extending from the line of Charles Reznikoff. It’s a fierce feminism that can be in this time where supposedly it can’t be—not a fuck-me feminism and not focused at all on the author’s pain or glory. It makes it disgusting to talk about how talented and empathetic the author is, even though this author obviously is. This statement of facts in this class-room is what is often advertised as ‘hardcore-real’ when it’s branded ‘on you,’ and not a lifestyle brand. So this work is at least a breathing close facsimile of something not there in literature supposedly there. Statement of Facts probably wouldn’t be ‘written,’ or not handled with this care and knowledge of its contents, and the people in its contents, if this author wasn’t working outside of academia, as a criminal defense lawyer. Thank you scholars, but to make some ideas apocalypse people need to come from other places and disciplines or this kind of work will never happen in literature, it will just pretend to happen. Anyway, this fucked me up. I know the people here. A lot of people do, or are. I would have liked to have seen this placed in the Pottery issue, although I liked her Gone With The Wind piece in there as well.
Donald Judd | Various Works | Chicago Museum of Modern Art | November 2008
Donald Judd | Complete Writings 1959-1975: Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles, Letters to the Editor, Reports, Statements, Complaints | The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design | 2005
It’s funny maybe and hard to explain to certain someones why Donald Judd is so wildly exciting to me. Probably for some of the same reasons I admire Place’s radical realism, and then on top of that his hysterical high-art aestheticism and emptying logic. This was the first time I’d seen his work in flesh time. I walked back and forth in front of his boxes and cantilevers obsessively looking at angles and shadows from angles.
I also love his writings.
More Allyssa Wolf here.
Attention Span 2009 – Meredith Quartermain
Thomas Bernhard | Frost | Vintage | 2008
Translated by Michael Hofmann, this novel, which involves a despairing artist in a gloomy Austrian town, contains some of the most poetic, painterly prose I’ve come across.
Aaron Peck | The Bewilderments of Bernhard Willis | Pedlar | 2008
Pure poetry, even though it’s called a novel.
Lisa Roberston | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House | 2009
Who would not want to be whipped by such a magenta soul?
Margaret Christakos | What Stirs | Coach House | 2008
Christakos’s poetry is one of those best kept secrets I want to tell everyone.
George Stanley | Vancouver: A Poem | New Star | 2008
Stanley’s response to Paterson and Maximus—he never lets you forget how city thoughts are made.
Daphne Marlatt | The Given | McClelland & Stewart | 2008
This is the third novel/poem in Marlatt’s trilogy that began with the groundbreaking Ana Historic. It won the BC Book Award for poetry.
Louis Cabri | —that can’t | Nomados | 2009
Cabri is extremely inventive at recombining clichés, advertising slogans, corporate capitalist blague and popular sentiment so that they deconstruct each other with great humour and irony.
Michael Boughn | Dislocations in Crystal | Coach House | 2003
I read Boughn for, among other things, his syntax.
Michael Boughn | 22 Skidoo | BookThug | 2009
Boughn is to sentence as Miles Davis is to trumpet.
Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs and Stratton | New Star | 2008
One of the subtlest, drollest poets in Canada.
Myung Mi Kim | Commons | U of California | 2002
A very political book without being polemic, which explodes language away from its comfortable links to things and shows how violent it can be.
More Meredith Quartermain here.
Attention Span 2009 – Bill Berkson
Charles M. Joseph | Stravinsky & Balanchine | Yale | 2002
Morton Feldman | Morton Feldman in Middelburg: Words on Music Volumes I & II| MusikTexte 34 | 2008
John Ashbery | Collected Poems 1956-1987 | Library of America | 2008
Pierre Reverdy, trans. Joh Ashbery | Haunted House | Brooklyn Rail & Black Square | 2008
William Kentridge et alia | WK5 | SFMoMA & Yale | 2008
John Godfrey | City of Corners | Wave | 2008
Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008
Kenneth Koch | The Collected Poems | Knopf | 2005
Alex Hamilton | Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art | University of Michigan | 2007
Isaiah Berlin | Russian Thinkers | Penguin | 1977
Duncan McNaughton | Bounce | First Intensity | 2007
Bill Berkson’s recent books are Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems (Coffee House, 2009) and Ted Berrigan (with George Schneeman, Cuneiform, 2009).
Attention Span 2009 – Leonard Schwartz
Joseph Donahue | Terra Lucida | Talisman House | 2009
Donahue’s long running and much awaited serial poem is now gathered in one place. Extraordinary in its richness of thought, perception, imagination…
Jacqueline Risset, trans. Jennifer Moxley | Sleep’s Powers | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2008
This was one of the most engaging books I have read in a long time. In this book of short essays poet and translator Jacqueline Risset asks us to go beyond dream, which is image and narrative, into sleep, which is a different form of thought altogether.
Andrew Zawacki | Petals of Zero, Petals of One | Talisman House| 2008
This philosophically engaging poet follows out both the logic of the arrow and the logic of the arrow’s shadow in this arresting book.
Nathanael (Nathalie Stephens) | Absence Where As: (Claude Cahun And The Unopened Book) | Nightboat Books | 2009
A philosophical prose that suggests the possibility of an autonomous art…
Anne Waldman | Manatee/Humanity | Penguin | 2009
Surely as poets we must strive to speak not only to humanity but to animality and divinity too. Anne Waldman does so…
Brian Henry | The Stripping Point | Counterpath Press | 2007
Brian Henry contributes mightily to a poetics of citationality.
Stacy Szymaszek | Hyperglossia | Litmus Books | 2009
Elizabeth Robinson says it best: “part dissonance, part song.” The fragmented can also bespeak the possibility of continuing.
Rene Char, trans. Gustaf Sobin | The Brittle Age and Returning Upland | Counterpoint Press | 2009
Great to have this translation of the great French poet by the recently passed away great American poet finally in print…
Danill Kharms, trans. Matvei Yankelevich | Today I Wrote Nothing | Overlook | 2007
Matvei Yankelevich has done an extraordinary thing in resucitating in English translation this nearly forgotten Russian absurdist (“Oberiu”) poet (1904-1942).
Barbara Guest | Complete Poems | Wesleyan University Press | 2008
All of Guests’s poems in one big edition…
Caty Sporleder | Flay: a book of mu | Blazevox | 2009
A new writer to watch…
More Leonard Schwartz here.
