Attention Span 2010 – Patrick Pritchett

Julie Carr | Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines | Coffee House

Beyond beautiful—a hymn of sorrow and joy and Carr’s most intimate and powerful work yet—deeply touching, and miraculously alive in its invention.

James Belflower | Commuter | Instance

The severe angularity and audacity of postmodernity. Now, would somebody please publish “Friends of Mies van der Rohe” already?

Norma Cole | Where Shadows Will | City Lights

Norma Cole’s work is continually alert to the tiniest nuances and to the possibility for the vastness of inside that moment. The actual turns of thought, a deep thinking into language as event and the world as it seen and felt and registered continually. Objects are not merely named, but multiply-mediated. What calls our attention is seeing: and seeing into and through language. The poem never a comment, but an invitation to become enmeshed with its event; neither reductive nor overpowering, but alive to complexity.

Anne Carson | NOX | New Directions

Elegy as etymology, as colportage. But is the whole less than the sum of its scattered parts?

Ingeborg Bachman, trans. Peter Filkins | Songs in Flight | Marsilio

So I gather the salt
when the sea overcomes us,
and turn back
and lay it on the threshold
and step into the house.

We share bread with the rain;
bread, debt, and a house.

Leslie Scalapino | Considering How Exaggerated Music Is | North Point

What would you glean
mean

the long go-away-from-it plan
at hazard, sheer glass over
water

and the eking out
of syllables

ten cents-a-dozen
no rhymes

///

It would be occasion, return of the others from their something not right
I know, I could see them, moving down the aisle, that there should be
this music

This was the time when the dying brought in their wounded

///

The stippled
branch
of light
tips forward

ghosted
with pollen

and the promises of dust
stare back at us

give evidence of our having lived
the wrong questions
right

Ken Irby | The Intent On | North Atlantic

And for the dreaming, the endless
mode of occurring
as it is, as it could be, as the sleepers
keep murmuring —

for what it means
to stay alive, attuned, a moment
to this otherwise
& the sought-for, disappearing.

Of pure possibility/of the nothing
that may save it
shed of symbol, it staves off
the blighted, and so we go – into night

the blessed, the earthly
what leaks into & wrecks us
is always
never and more singular than loss

across song’s fields, folded. Inside its portals
the old book beckons and we bend
surmised of sorrow, to its rising, it turning.
What dies &

what inherits? What dissipates
and what is remnant?
If the wind is not/if the wind is here and –
its inconstancy, its minglings, its slips of

substance into light and
into beginning
for beginning is always.
Begin again.

More Patrick Pritchett here and here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to directory.