Third Factory/Notes to Poetry

Thomas Bernhard, trans. Richard and Clara Winston | Gargoyles | Vintage | 2006

A poem/novel that takes it all in: man & nature; man & industry; man & art—generations of the human animal.

Thomas Bernhard, trans. Ewald Osers | Old Masters: a Comedy | Quartet | 1989

This droll piece consists of the narrator’s thoughts as he stands in a particular room in a gallery waiting for his friend, a distinguished music critic, who on a daily basis, likes to come to this room to contemplate the image of a white-bearded old man (like himself it would seem). The museum attendant is the only other character.

Lisa Roberston | R’s Boat | California | 2010

Rousseau’s boat has extended itself, with Robertson’s customary wit and inventiveness, which inevitably turns comfortable subjectivity on its head.

Robert Walser, trans. Susan Bernovsky | The Tanners | New Directions | 2009

An early, autobiographical novel, but then all of his work is autobiographical. Life’s journeys torqued by a deeply feeling and crazily, stubbornly, beautifully resistant mind.

Robert Walser, trans. Susan Bernovsky | Microscripts | New Directions | 2010

At last the microscripted manuscripts (lengthy stories drafted entirely on one side of a post card) are available in English. Even crazier, more deeply feeling, more stubbornly beautifully resistant. We also learn much from the accompanying introduction, such as that Walser wrote out his novels non-stop, without correction, in a matter of six weeks, simply for the pleasure of fine handwriting.

Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | All Souls | HarperCollins | 1992

Set in Oxford and concerning the sojourn of a Marías-like Spanish professor, the tale spins around translation, both linguistic and cultural. His send-up of dining at high table is side-splitting.

Javier Marías, trans. Esther Allen | The Dark Back of Time | New Directions | 2001

In this novel Marías amuses himself by examining the relation between “real” characters and the ones in his novel All Souls. Very witty, post-modern foldings and refoldings.

Javier Marías, trans. Esther Allen | Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico | New Directions Pearl | 2010

Impersonation takes on a whole new meaning in this Elvis encounter.

Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear | New Directions | 2005

Obviously I’m hooked on Marías. This one examines othering—when do we see the other as evil—when do we cross that line?

Kate Eichorn & Heather Milne, eds. | Prismatic Publics | Coach House | 2009

Featuring interviews and work by Nicole Brossard, Margaret Christakos, Susan Holbrook, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Karen Mac Cormack, Daphne Marlatt, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Gail Scott, Nathalie Stephens, Catriona Strang, Rita Wong, Rachel Zolf. In other words, a ground-breaking collection in Canadian letters.

Sina Queryas | Expressway | Coach House | 2009

I read Queryas for her panache, her in-your-faceness, her tightly woven structures.

More Meredith Quartermain here. Quartermain’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.

Tan Lin | Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] | Wesleyan | 2010

I wrote the following blurb for Tan’s metadata event: Tan Lin is the first poetic conceptualist with personality; it is no wonder he has paid scholarly attention to Eliot. But what was tradition has dissipated, as if it so needed, into detritus, and that cultural clog of ingredients are what you find “controlled” in SCV. In my estimation, this is the best book of poetry written yet this century, and precisely because the politics it demands are yet to come, but their context already so familiar.

Christine Wertheim, ed. | Feminaissance | Les Figues | 2010

One of several anthologies that have been useful to me in unexpected ways, the others include The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, and…

Brenda Iijima, ed. | eco language reader | Nightboat | 2010

Several things seem to be coming together lately: ecological thinking, somatics, conceptualism (updated, or exploited, depending), feminism, and it’s all here. What’s great about how this collection is comprised and presented is that it posits a center and clarifies the radius of sources past and present for making a foray—you don’t just sit there and absorb, as we say, “the material.” It invites practical pluralities of response. Praise seems beside the point.

Andrew Levy | Cracking Up | Truck | 2010

An old favorite (of a poet) from a new press. The cover shots of Ann-Margaret doing “Bye Bye Birdie” perfectly illustrate the methodically coagulated spurts of late-capitalist wisdom in these pages.

Hannah Weiner | Page | Roof | 2002

I typeset this book almost a full decade ago. Now I am rereading it for a talk I am preparing to give. I have always thought it deserved as much attention as Clairvoyant Journal. It is a family drama—practically no name-dropping, which might explain why it is overlooked and why, as a new father, I have that much more interest in cracking it.

Ayane Kawata, trans. Sawako Nakayasu | Time of Sky & Castles in the Air | Litmus | 2010

I have nothing but admiration for Nakayasu’s work as writer, translator, and editor. But this one, I wish it’d gotten to me before I ordered the books for my “20th Century Writing by Women: A World View” course. I did manage to fit in Werewere Liking, Mahasweta Devi (though not Breast Stories—why let it go out of print, fools?!), Nicole Brossard, and other old favorites. Kawata is a new favorite, though I have so little context for saying so, or understanding why, exactly, I feel this way. I chalk much of it up to Nakayasu’s skill as a translator, though. After all, I need a translator, thus I have some basis for evaluating it. Maybe Kawata is proto-A Tonalist

Laura Moriarty | A Tonalist | Nightboat | 2010

Unlike Cole Swensen, who blurbs the book, I wouldn’t set Moriarty’s work under the oft-speculated upon third way rubric. She knows her history too well—Laura, I mean. What’s important to me about this book is how the concept unfurls, and what it seems capable of including, e.g. one of the sharpest critical assessments of how aesthetic communities are born, function, and die. So the book is, a lot like Tan Lin’s book in this list, both a joy to read and a compelling challenge to believe. And so it’s sort of what’s missing from conceptual writing in its current phase, as opposed, say, to the half-step between language and “uncreative” writing: Jackson Mac Low or Hannah Weiner. It also manages to be attractive, i.e. that moment you realize you won’t look up from a page you’re reading to see whose face emits that voice you just heard, and, the writing now victorious, the lyric “voice” is decisively overthrown. As for myself being included in an A Tonalist clan, I defer to Brent Cunningham’s remarks on the matter.

Fiona Kumari Campbell | Contours of Ableism | Palgrave Macmillian | 2009

I’m working on a project concerning “post-ableism,” and this is the first book to take on the converse with a satisfying scope. I don’t agree with the entirety of her argument. And it could have used a sustained sitting with a copyeditor before going to print. But it’s a good continuation of what people like Simi Linton, Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers and Michael Davidson have begun.

Eduardo Kac | Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond | MIT | 2007

This takes me from the “post-ableism” project to the next big essay I’m writing, this time on “New Life Writing.” New Life Writing is not bio art, but sometimes it gets awfully close.

Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, eds. | The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future | MIT | 2006

Just when he was getting somewhere with disability by devising a new critical category, “dismodernism,” Lennard Davis organized a highly publicized sidestep to “biocultures,” from which he has never returned. I came to this book initially as part of a disability studies reading group in Chicago, and we read Vivian Sobchack’s essay “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality.” In it, she uses the metaphor/metonymy distinction to say something brilliant (though abrupt) about somatics. Someone ought to link that discussion back to dismodernism, right? I tried, but have since moved on to the other essays, all of which are pretty great.

Marc Bosquet | How the University Works | NYU | 2007

“1. We are not ‘overproducing Ph.D.s’; we are underproducing jobs. 2. Cheap teaching is not a victimless crime. 3. Casualization is an issue of racial, gendered, and class justice. 4. Late capitalism doesn’t just happen to the university; the university makes late capitalism happen.” It is also ruining my life.

More Patrick Durgin here. Durgin’s Attention Span for 2007, 2005. Back to 2010 directory.

Robert Bellah | Imagining Japan | California | 2003

Robert Bellah | The Good Society | Vintage | 1992

Curzio Malaparte | Kaputt | NYRB | 2005

Leonardo Sciascia | The Moro Affair | NYRB | 2004

Frank O’Hara, trans. Olivier Brossard & Ron Padgett | Poèmes Déjeuner | Joca Seria | 2010

Johann Wolfgang Goethe | Conversations with Eckermann | North Point | 1984

Werner Herzog | Conquest of the Useless | Ecco | 2009

T. S. Eliot, Valerie Eliot, ed. | The Wasteland, Facsimile & Transcript | Harcourt | 1971

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha | Exilée | California | 2009

J. Arch Getty & Oleg V. Naumov | The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 | Yale | 1999

Bill Berkson’s recent books are Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems (Coffee House, 2009) and Ted Berrigan (with George Schneeman, Cuneiform, 2009). Berkson’s Attention Span for 2009, 2007, 2006, 2004. Back to 2010 directory

Vine Deloria, Jr. | Spirit & Reason | Fulcrum | 1999

“We should be making a determined effort to move forward in the creation of a continental culture that understands itself as a totality and a novelty whose only concern is developing forms of existence that provide everyone involved with a sense of integrity and identity.”

Stephanie Rioux | My Beautiful Beds | Parrot 1/Insert | 2010

“each eye ajar upon the animalised blot”

Christine Wertheim, ed. | Feminaissance | Les Figues | 2010

“…in the grass green skin of one’s humanness…”
—Caroline Bergvall

Lara Glenum & Arielle Greenberg, eds. | Gurlesque | Saturnalia | 2010

“These boobs are real”—Dorothea Lasky

Carrie Etter, ed. | Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets | Shearsman | 2010

“Yet none have hard real edges, since each one
is rightly spilled over, from the start of her life.”
—Denise Riley

Jane Campion | Bright Star | Pathe International | 2009

Who would not go for sweet skinny Keats all in his word dream? Although I haven’t loved her films equally (“Portrait of a Lady,” “In the Cut”), I am so grateful for Campion’s very particular, and particularly female, comprehension and sensibility. I appreciate the ways she portrays kids and families, and the varied ways my three favorites of hers — “An Angel at My Table” and “Holy Smoke” in addition to this new one — portray young women’s individuality and seeking as very much an outgrowth of and supported, however imperfectly, by family love. Kerry Fox, who once played Janet Frame in “An Angel” is here the mom, which leaves me happily aging.

Sara Larsen | Novus | Earthworm | 2009

In this bright orange chapbook and in the film above, I really appreciated the centrality of a young woman’s brave, pleased, idiosyncratic, non-monetized sexual loving. As we attempt to live despite each day & ages synthetic limitations, we could use a fuck of a lot more of this.

Nella Larsen | Passing | Knopf/Penguin | 1929/2003

10x finer than Melanctha.

Louise Erdrich | Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country | National Geographic | 2003

“Sometimes I look at men, at the way most of them move so freely in the world, without a baby attached, and it seems to me very strange. Sometimes it is enviable. Mostly, it is not. For at night, as she curls up or sprawls next to me and as I fall asleep, I hold onto her foot. This is as much for my comfort as to make sure that she doesn’t fall off the bed. As I’m drifting away, I feel sorry for anyone else who is not falling asleep this way. The world is calm and clear. I wish for nothing. I am not nervous about the future. Her toes curl around my fingers. I could even stop writing books.”

Rebecca Skloot | The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | Crown | 2010

“If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that’s dishonest. It’s taking away their lives, their experiences, and their selves.”
—an unnamed relative of Henrietta Lacks, as quoted by Rebecca Skloot

More Elizabeth Treadwell here. Treadwell’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to 2010 directory