Third Factory/Notes to Poetry

Cedar Sigo | Stranger In Town | City Lights | 2010

Elegant, whimsical. Checked humor. Clear attention to craft. A talented poet.

Christine Hume | Shot | Counterpath | 2010

Slowly building a surreal temple of exquisite disturbances. House Flies, Alaska, now the Night.

David Lespiau, trans. Keith Waldrop | Four Cut-ups, or The Case of the Restored Volume | Burning Deck | 2010

My mini-review here.

Leslie Scalapino | Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows | Starcherone | 2010

High art: imaginative and political. Her understanding of Time-In-The-Sentence is what makes the stories go.

 Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light—Selected Poems 1994-2005 | Station Hill | 2010

Sublime writing. My review.

Jena Osman | The Network | Fence | 2010

Atmospheric realism of uncanny stitching. Surgical.

Eléna Rivera | Remembrance Of Things Plastic | LRLE | 2010

Graceful, ghostly, poetic memoir.

Various authors, ed. Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young | A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism | Chain Links | 2011

My mini-review here.

Nada Gordon | Ululations blog | Blogspot/Google | 2011

The raw, vital poetry.

Alta Ifland | Voice of Ice | Les Figues | 2007

Crystalline, carefully laid, prose poems.

Stephen Ratcliffe | [assorted daily poems] | Facebook | 2010-11

Fugue of viewing / sensing / intellecting.

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James Wagner is the author of the chapbooks Query/Xombies and Geisttraum (Esther Press, 2010), the short-story collection Work Book (Nothing Moments, 2007), and three poetry collections: Trilce (Calamari Press, 2006), After the Giraffes (Blazevox, 2005), and the false sun recordings (3rd bed, 2003). Wagner’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.

In alphabetical order:

Robert Fitterman | Now We Are Friends | Truck | 2010

“The resulting portrait has almost a Cubist diffraction, with some features exaggerated while others go under-emphasized or completely disappear. But such portraits are also over-complete, exceeding the boundaries of momentary self-presentation in a way that can be uncomfortable: high school photos are posted and tagged, those drawings you’d forgotten on DeviantART resurface.”—from editor’s note.

A striking mirror.

Noah Eli Gordon | The Source: an investigation in constrained bibliomancy and ambient research | Futurepoem | 2011

“And now I will show you how it happened to be in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at that time knew nothing. They were like well managed horses, and could tell when to stop or turn. They said things we felt were true, things like: ‘When I came to you out of all that dust and heat and toil, I positively smelt violets.’ They kept up a constant fire of introducing each other. They thought every instrument would perform its work best if it were made to serve not many purposes but one. It was out of this that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for those values.”

A striking mirror, with an honest undertone that tells us what the problems are, how they are antithetical to what may go by truth.

Kirsten Kaschock | A Beautiful Name for a Girl | Ahsahta | 2011

“Airplanes are moveable Babels, and I
know not to reach that way for God, up—
that a god
is a small thing and comes by being quiet.”

The truth of what Kirsten says, the unreliability of birdsong, the irony that falls in and becomes something other than a way of seeing the opposite—beautiful, poignant, mature.

Jacques Lacan, trans. Bruce Fink | On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (Book XX: Encore 1972-1973) | Norton | 1998

“‘Usufruct’ means that you can enjoy (jouir de) your means, but must not waste them. When you have the usufruct of an inheritance, you can enjoy the inheritance (en jouir) as long as you don’t use up too much of it. That is clearly the essence of law—to divide, distribute, or reattribute everything that counts as jouissance.”

A necessary text, one I took a course on in graduate school. Also noted is Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose’s commentary on the seminar, among other readings, Bruce Fink’s included.

Sabrina Orah Mark | The Babies | Saturnalia | 2004

“Can you describe for me Walter B. after the desertion?
Too much architecture, not enough rain.
How do you recognize Walter B. in their abandoned homes?
He is the only one, among drifts of white hair, who knows several things at once.
Why, at the end of the Goat Song, does Walter B. stop feeding the babies?
At the end of the Goat Song, it becomes impossible to grow this old.”

A beautiful book, and one can’t help but wonder about Walter B.[enjamin?’s] appearance. Clearly, we are no longer truly modern.

Ange Mlinko | Starred Wire | Coffee House | 2005

“The syrup’s frozen on the north side.
The bear is not just as scared of us.
Insert the cherries in the earth,
read the manual for escapes,
sunscreen under the pillow,
rain scratching glasses.
Between Sir William Harvey and John Dewey the circulation of books.”

This book is one I have continually returned to since its release several years ago.

Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman | Notes on Conceptualisms | Ugly Duckling | 2009

“Radical mimesis is original sin.”

A primer.

Vanessa Place | Only Yahweh | Ood Press | 2011

“if I’m any judge of the Almighty, the Lord God has seen fit in His Infinite to keep a steady supply of bricks and bracks on Hand, so design, goddishly, of bullfights and god-temples, I forgot gods pare only their nails and forced my creations to contort around what should instead of what would, isn’t it that degree of unfathomability which keeps us smacking of the divine, the dew of divine authority, a future conditional, Lord knows”

Poet be like Vanessa Place.

Mathew Timmons | The New Poetics | Les Figues Press | 2010

“Where are we with the New Birds?”

Poets on Twitter—watch out. Where are we, again?

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Laura Carter lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is recommencing studies toward a PhD in English and literary studies. She earned her M.F.A. in 2007, also in Atlanta. Carter’s Attention Span for 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to 2011 directory.

Raul Zurita, trans. William Rowe | Inri | Marick | 2009

This extraordinary Chilean poet is now more fully available to English language readers.

Raul Zurita, trans. Anna Deeny | Purgatory | California | 2010

Zurita’s poetry is both Orphic and politically powerful at once.

Maged Zaher | Portrait of the Poet As An Engineer | Pressed Wafer | 2009

The contemporary writer the furthest inside and the most outside the English language as we know it….

Gustaf Sobin | Collected Poems | Talisman | 2010

This book brings a life-work together… “A national treasure,” just as Rain Taxi wrote.

Robert Duncan | The H.D. Book | California | 2011

Finally!

Evie Shockley | The New Black | Wesleyan | 2011

These poems prove that poetry can think.

Brenda Iijima, ed. | (Eco (Lang) (Uage (Reader)) | Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs / Nightboat | 2010

This anthology is crucial reading for those seeking out a more complicated relationship to “nature” than “nature poetry” would otherwise offer.

Jonathon Stalling | Grotto Heaven | Chax | 2010

A poetry that works its way into the space between the languages English and Chinese as no one has been able to manage before….

Susan Gevirtz | Aeordome Orion & Starry Messanger | Kelsey Street | 2010

Technique sharpens the imagination into a new relationship to the sky, which is and is not a limit.

John Taggart | Is Music | Copper Canyon | 2010

Taggart’s Selected allows us to listen to this poetry deeply. Does anyone have a better ear than John Taggart?

Kiki Smith and Leslie Scalapino | The Animal Is In The World Like Water In Water | Granary

This exquisitely produced book, a collaboration between artist Smith and poet Scalapino, shocks and delights. Smith’s drawings and Scalapino’s poems from the book are reproduced in part in How Phenomena Appear to Unfold, 2011, from Litmus Press—but the Granary ultra-suede edition is very special and gets you the whole work.

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Leonard Schwartz’s latest book will be At Element, forthcoming in November 2011 from Talisman House. Schwartz’s Attention Span for 2009, 2006. Back to 2011 directory.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Pitch: Drafts 77-95 | Salt | 2010

The penultimate volume to the now rapidly concluding Drafts. The angel of history (AKA midrash) is alive and kicking in these fantastically sculpted and minutely attentive poem-narratives. DuPlessis may have been all along creating a whole new genre here. This angel is the principle of continual poetic revision as intervention. It reads and writes the past not as it was, but as it is found: deeply fractured by contingency, open to an ongoing process of revision. The midrashic angel takes up its task not merely by bearing witness to what it sees, but through actively constructing new alignments of meaning from the scattered wreckage of the debris field. The highlights, for me, are “Draft 87-Trace Element,” and the already legendary “Draft 85-Hard Copy.” For more, see the feature on RBD in Jacket2.

 William Corbett | The Whalen Poem | Hanging Loose | 2010

The maestro at the top of his game, swinging loose and easy—nothing to it. There’s a luxurious liberation coursing through this poem that abounds with grace notes and is overflowing with his customary generosity toward memory and experience, the sweet, raspy pellicles of detail, that is, finally, the history of a life, and of writing a life, inner and outer, moment by moment, and is deeply moving.

Forrest Gander | Core Samples from the World | New Directions | 2011

An itinerary of otherness, strewn with uncanny moments of tenderness and glancing blows that crack the fragility of conscience. The earth’s alien powder is sifted through, poured out, regathered in rich pulses of telluric current from the far side of everywhere. Poem, photo, and prose fold into and out of each other, remapping their own contours. The overlap and feedback amplifies into a kind of 21^st Century global witness that is porous and humbling and weird. I can’t think of another book like it. Utterly extraordinary.

Christian Hawkey | Ventrakl | Ugly Duckling | 2011

Officially a tour de force, this is a magnificent accomplishment, one that completely mesmerized me. Hawkey has reinvented the gorgeous and tortured weirdness of Trakl for the 21^st Century. More than that, he has carried the logic of the translator’s task forward into a region that is all “interpass, penetrate.” The cumulative effect, when read straight through (and it’s that rare book of poetry, almost impossible to put down), is—how to say this without sounding absurd?—one of the most precisely calibrated vulnerability. Reader, I was carried away.

Fanny Howe | Come and See | Greywolf | 2011

These poems are like messages from a skeptical clairvoyant. The sense of recognition here is humbling and amazing, like the call for justice contained in the simple gesture of saying “you are here.” Everything superfluous is stripped away and what’s left is haunting. “A Hymn” seems to sum up all her concerns and convictions. (Harry Lime as a mix of Paul Celan and Oscar Levant?) These poems insist on an order of seeing that is miraculous, like the movies, and where forgiveness is all about how we do the work of looking. Like a form of levitation, they will break your heart with clarity.

Sharon Howell | Girl in Everytime | Pressed Wafer | 2011

There’s a freshness and insouciance to these lyrical forays that balance the prosaic and the ordinary against the privileged and the secret. The effect overall is one of constant surprise and delight. Spicer, a presence here surely, as has been noted. But behind Spicer, Wordsworth—not the bloated, complacent Will.I.Am of the Preludes, but the swift, sharp gleaner of chthonic music and the joyous spookiness of being alive.

Andrew Joron | Trance Archive: Selected and New Poems | City Lights | 2010

Lines decrypted from a dark book, pitched to an arcane thrum, a holy thread of labyrinthine sound that interweaves the soul’s salt with the sugar of the tongue. In this divinatory praxis, Joron capitalizes on the generative slippages which govern the chance combinatory properties of language. Following the logic of paronomasia, the poems here teeter, at times, on the brink of decay, yet what rescues them is the commitment to the sublime yield of phonemic constellation and all the spaces, and nodes, of micrological difference that open up between each slip-gap, each meld-slide, within a horizon of negation and wonder. The gravity well of logos is mitigated only by the poem’s own negentropic counter-thrust.

Peter O’Leary | Luminous Epinoia | Cultural Society | 2010

A book of impossible risk and endless doxology: in the end, they are the same thing. Liturgical datastreams downloaded and uploaded continually, like the angels in Jacob’s Dream. Fervent and unabashedly naked in its declaration of poetic vision. It reduces to so much kitsch the weak ironies of slacker emo-whimsy emanating from Brooklyn or the timid affirmations of bourgeois pathos praised in the Sunday Times, both of which somehow pass for “spirit” in the late imperium. This is a poetics that dares and ratifies the visionary ratios of song. Written out of what Abraham Joshua Heschel called “spiritual audacity,” Luminous Epinoia is a hymn to the theophanic. This is poetry of vatic kerygma—pure proclamation.

Michael Palmer | Thread | New Directions | 2011

Simply put, his best work since At Passages. There’s a certain kind of reader who can’t get past Palmer’s apparent break from the heavily encrypted style of his earlier work. Narrow constructionists, they want every book to be Sun or Notes for Echo Lake. But the idiom he has been exactingly developing since 1988, a kind of theater of the neo-allegorical that juxtaposes the driest of satire with a messianic thirst for the impossible ur-sprach, continues what were always his deepest concerns. Here, they are brought to a vivid pitch in this delicate and powerful collection. Flashing with spiked barbs of humor, these poems still inhabit the melancholy landscape where language ratifies itself by signifying its own failure. Written under the sign of Saturn, they are harrowing in their humility and directness. Simplicity here is neither a reduction nor a retreat, but the earned complexity of a late style in a late hour. To call the title sequence a tour de force is to defame it. These “threads” are addresses, colloquies, homages, haunted questions that concentrate Palmer’s concerns for the art as a site for making counter-meanings, the micro-resistances that push back against the crushing sense of fatigue born of suffering and slaughter. This is elegy as crystalline paleography. Every word is merely on loan from the thief’s journal. They haunt the dream of memory with the hope for the Not-Yet.

Andrew Schelling | From the Arapaho Songbook | La Alameda | 2011

This may well be the best thing Schelling’s ever done. Superbly attentive to the discrete seams where language and geography ripple over and through each other, this is an initiation into another world—one that exists side by side with the everyday. These poems track pathways back and forth between the ancient and the contemporary, language and the natural, without ever sliding into the false a-historicism of the romantic. The care with words—guttural, elusive, probing, shamanic—and the handling of the line breaks—is deliciously deft and subtle. A beautifully wrought, intimate book.

Rosmarie Waldrop | Driven to Abstraction | New Directions | 2010

The title sequence is superb. Waldrop’s extraordinary constellation—beginning with “Zero or, the Opening Position”—reads like a history of the metaphysical comedy of negation, its failures and its hopes, as traced through everything from cosmology to monetary exchange. It is a poem about the manifold ways nothing is implicated in everything, whether the via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysus or the khora of Derrida. A recitation of zero and its history as a concept. Of its migration into the West from medieval Arabic mathematics and its subsequent role as a placeholder for the underlying, the foundational that is anti-foundational, “zero, the corrosive number,” as she calls it, without which nothing counts.

Elizabeth Willis | Address | Wesleyan | 2011

I heard Willis read “Blacklist” two years ago at MLA and it fairly took the top of my head off. In this poem, the legacy of the Salem witches is made over as a noble tradition of transgression, a powerful and ongoing voice of resistance to the state, the system, and the boss. Woody Guthrie was a witch! After the headiness of the dazzling Meteoric Flowers, the tune and turn of this collection digs deeper into the marrow of the word, refining down to nubs and particles, a process not to be confused with simplicity. To say the thing austerely turns out to be incredibly complicated.

Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 | Station Hill | 2010

The summa of an extraordinary ambition. If the stutter is the plot, then what to say of the hyphen, the line-break, the neologism reaching after a glimpse of fugitive cognition in a cascade of vowels? The fragment here becomes fragrant, imbued with a fragile knowing. The letter, atomized, becomes the law of spirit—darkened with matter, made radiant by it. It is by such carefully broken apart attentions that these poems stage extravagance as investigation. They generate a singing that both binds and unravels, spelling out a new form of orthography that makes the traces of the invisible not only legible, but achingly near to us.

Andrew Zawacki | Roche Limit | Tir Aux Pigeons | 2011

Laid out in four-line stanzas, each one marked by roughly four beats per line, this short, perfect poem surges forward in a compelling rhythm capable of surprising turns and reverberating with fractal resonances—the complex echo chamber of attractions and resistances as words slide through one another and into their own process of associative elision and repetition, a principle of rime, as Duncan might say, that recalls the innermost linguistic and ontological structures for mapping levels of relation.

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Patrick Pritchett is the author of several books of poems, including Burn, Antiphonal, and Salt, My Love. Recent projects include editing a feature on Rachel Blau DuPlessis for Jacket 2, a talk for MSA on Pound, Sobin, and the ruins of modernism, and a book project on the messianic turn in postwar poetry. He is currently a Lecturer in the History and Literature Program at Harvard University and Visiting Lecturer in Poetry at Amherst College. Pritchett’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008. Back to 2011 directory.

Not necessarily my “favorites” over the past year, but these are the eleven books I spent the most time thinking about, in no particular order:

Peter Larkin | Terrain Seed Scarcity | Salt | 2001

Somehow I missed this when it originally came out. A magisterial anthem and model of challenging ecopoetics, stretching towards the post-human (perhaps) but very, very beautiful. I have been fantasizing about quitting my day job and spending the next six years or so studying this text. (Larkin also has a new collection, Leaves of Field, from Shearsman, but I haven’t read it yet.)

Laynie Browne | Roseate, Points of Gold | Dusie | 2011

The best collection so far by a mid-career poet not enough of my friends and colleagues know about.

Laura Mullen | Dark Archive | California | 2011

Adonis, trans. Khaled Mattawa | Selected Poems | Yale | 2010

John Taggart | Is Music: Selected Poems | Copper Canyon | 2010

I still wonder whether one of Taggart’s earlier single volumes (perhaps When the Saints) isn’t the best introduction to his work, but he is an absolutely essential and underrecognized poet. I’m still hoping this volume will convene a larger audience for his work.

Dana Levin | Sky Burial | Copper Canyon | 2011

Peter O’Leary | Luminous Epinoia | The Cultural Society | 2010

Harriet Tarlo, ed. | The Ground Aslant: Radical Landscape Poetry | Shearsman | 2011

If you’ve been wondering where the interesting contemporary British poetry is hiding, you can find quite a bit of it here (including the abovementioned Peter Larkin and also Elisabeth Bletsoe, whose second collection, Landscape from a Dream [Shearsman, 2008], is worth finding).

Zach Savich | Annulments | UP of Colorado | 2010

Maryrose Larkin | The Name of This Intersection Is Frost | Shearsman | 2010

Jonathan Stalling | Grotto Heaven | Chax | 2010

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Also: Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions, 2011); Dan Beachy-Quick, Circle’s Apprentice (Tupelo, 2011); Jean Valentine, Break the Glass (Copper Canyon, 2010); C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon, 2011); Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010); Melissa Kwasny, The Nine Senses (Milkweed, 2011); Harold Schweizer, On Waiting (Routledge, 2008); Seyhan Erözçelik (trans. Murat Nemet-Nejat), Rosestrikes & Coffee Grinds (Talisman, 2010); Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Fady Joudah), If I Were Another (FSG, 2011); René Char (trans. Mary Ann Caws & Nancy Kline), Furor & Mystery and Other Writings (Black Widow, 2011); John Yau, A Thing among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P., 2008), Shane McCrae, Mule (Cleveland State, 2010).

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G.C. Waldrep’s latest collections are Archicembalo (Tupelo, 2009) and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (in collaboration with John Gallaher; BOA Editions, 2011). Projective Industries just released his chapbook, ‘St. Laszlo Hotel.’ He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and serves as editor-at-large for The Kenyon Review. Waldrep’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2006, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.

Stephen Sondheim | Finishing the Hat | Knopf | 2010

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, ed. Ben Mazer | Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman | Belknap Press of Harvard | 2010

Bishop, Janet, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow, eds. | The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde | San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale | 2011

Jennifer Homans | Apollo’s Angels: A History of the Ballet | Random | 2010

Alvin Levin | Love Is Like Park Avenue | New Directions | 2009

Ron Padgett | How Long | Coffee House | 2011

Tony Judt | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Penguin | 2005

John Keegan | A History of Warfare | Vintage | 1993

Adam Phillips |The Beast in the Nursery | Vintage | 1999

Edwin G. Burrows & Mike Wallace | Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 | Oxford | 1999

Herbert Muschamp | Hearts of the City | Knopf | 2009

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Bill Berkson’s recent books are For the Ordinary Artist: Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces & More (BlazeVOX, 2010); Not an Exit, with drawings by Léonie Guyer (Jungle Garden, 2011); and Darkness and Light (Verna, 2011). Berkson’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.