Third Factory/Notes to Poetry

James Baldwin | “Going to Meet the Man” | Going to Meet the Man | Dial 1965

Henry Dumas | Echo Tree | Coffee House | 2003

Shulamith Firestone | The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution  (1970) | Farrar | 2003

Gay Left: A Socialist Journal Produced By Gay Men, 1975-1980 | Gay Left Collective | 1975-1980 | http://www.gayleft1970s.org/issues/issue10.asp

Lawrence Giffin | Sorties | Tea Party Republicans | 2011

Langston Hughes | The Ways of White Folks (1934) | Vintage | 1990

Meridel Le Sueur | The Girl | Women’s Press | 1978

Dusan Makavejev, writer and director | W. R.: Mysteries of the Organism | 1971

Vincenzo Natali, dir. | Splice | 2009

Alli Warren | Acting Out | Louis Wain | 2010

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More Marie Buck here.

Buck’s Attention Span for 2008. Back to 2011 directory.

Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat | 2011

The title poem is Bergvall’s brilliantly satiric version of Chaucer, anatomizing the current socio-cultural scene, but this rich collection also includes the experimental verse of “Goan Atom,” and (my favorite) “Cropper,” Bergvall’s multilingual exploration of sedimentation—of “borders, rules, boundaries, edges, limbos at historical breaches.”

Craig Dworkin | Motes | Roof | 2011

Minimalist procedural lyrics that uncover the secrets within given words and morphemes. Dworkin’s version of Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise, it’s a totally delightful and pleasurable but also intellectually rigorous book.

Peter Gizzi | Threshold Songs | Wesleyan | 2011

This may be Gizzi’s best book to date: the mood is elegiac (the poet’s brother Michael had just died) but also jaunty: whenever the darkness becomes too hard to bear, a colloquial—even funnynote brings us back to the everyday world: “Don’t back away. Turtle into it / with your little force.”

Christian Hawkey | Ventrakl | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Hawkey’s surreal lyric sequence, prompted by the life and work of Georg Trakl. Using a great variety of verse forms and prose interludes, Hawkey produces a terrifying and moving poem about legacy, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves so as to avoid self-recognition.

Heinrich Heine, trans. into Portuguese and with an introd. by André Vallias | Heine, hein? – Poeta dos contrários | Sao Paulo: Perspectiva | 2011

Heine, one of the great lyric poets of all time, is still very little known in the US and translations have been partial and problematic. But Vallias, himself a fine poet, has produced an amazing book, including all the major poems as well as essays, letters, and bibliographical material. My Portuguese is very rudimentary but I marvel at what can—and is being—done elsewhere to bring one nation’s poetry into the present of another’s.

Christian Marclay, dir. | The Clock | a film | 2010

To my mind, the finest conceptual work ever produced: this 24-hour montage of film clips played in real time (featuring an infinite variety of clocks, watches, and verbal signals indicating that exact time in each shot) is endlessly enchanting—a Waiting for Godot for the 21^st Century where we are always waiting—for the event that never happens and which is immediately eclipsed and displaced by another event. Can life be this dramatic? The Clock is nerve-wracking, funny, moving: and when you come out of the gallery (I saw about 8 hours worth at LACMA) you think you’re still in the picture, about to witness the bank robbery or the wake-up call, even as the music bleeds unaccountably from one scene into the next.

Vanessa Place | Tragodía: 1: Statement of Facts | Blanc | 2010

This compendium of court testimonies and police reports—all of them taken from Place’s own files (she is an appellate criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles) has raised enormous controversy: Place has been accused of being soft on rapists. But the fact of this Statement of Facts is that she has simply arranged her material so as to tell it like it is—no sides taken, no points made, and yet an unforgettable image of how events in the contemporary city play themselves out. The book reads like a Henry James novel: what, we ask at every turn, really happened?

Srikanth Reddy | Voyager | California | 2011

Reddy’s writing-through of Kurt Waldheim’s memoir (3 times in 3 different ways) is a devastating exposé of political mendacity and maudlin self-justification. It’s a brilliantly rendered work that literally “speaks for itself.”

Jonathan Stalling | Yingelishi | Counterpath | 2011

Yingelishi (pronounced yeen guh lee shr) sounds like an accented pronunciation of the word “English,” even as, for the Chinese reader, its characters spell out “chanted songs, beautiful poetry.” Spalding combines homophonic translatation, with the dictionary meaning of the different phrases as well as their Chinese characters so as to demonstrate what the new language of some 350 million people looks and feels like. Comes with a website so that we can hear these sounds spoken and chanted. It’s a brilliant tour de force.

Uljana Wolf, trans. Susan Bernofsky | False Friends | Ugly Duckling | 2011

These DICHTionary poems are based on so-called “false friends” in German and English—words that look and/or sound familiar in both languages but differ in meaning.  The comedy that results is full of surprises—a lovely sequence for our multilingual moment. And Ugly Duckling’s production is, as always, a pleasure.

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Susan Howe | THAT THIS | New Directions | 2010

I list this last and separately because Howe’s very important book won the Bollingen Prize and I was one of three judges so my comment on it is a part of the award citation.

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Marjorie Perloff‘s most recent book is Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Her Wittgenstein’s Ladder has just been translated into Spanish and is soon coming out in French. She is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.

Perloff’s Attention Span for 2006, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.

Simon Reynolds | Retromania | Faber | 2011

I’m still halfway through this one. It’s a balm for those of us who have no idea why pop music is so terribly uninteresting today—lots of incredible talent with nothing to say—and a bomb for those who thinks it’s all rosy. I’m having my students read it for my L.A. Post-punk/DIY class (a freshman seminar), along with Lipstick Traces and We Got the Neutron Bomb. Reynolds’ book Rip It Up and Start Again, on English Post-punk, inspired the course. I was happy to discover he’d moved to LA some months ago, and have since met him and his wife, Joy Press, whom some of you might remember from the days of the Voice Literary Supplement—and I thought the name was a pseudonym! I met Billy Idol the day I met Simon Reynolds. Oh, yes, the book. It’s very accessible but dense—allusions to Badiou, Bourdieu, Benjamin, Kittler (I think), the fall of Rome, etc.—and is largely autobiographical as he charts his ineptness with, and reservations about, new technology. I think a lot of you have already bought your copy of this book.

Roberto Bolaño | Nazi Literature in the Americas | New Directions | 2008

The Savage Detectives was the best novel I had read in a long time, at times Dostoyevskian in its grandeur, scope, generosity and addiction to visionary pain, and always threatening to have “magical realist” elements (that might have just been me), but never making good on that threat. It ends with the discovery of a concrete poem—who would have thunk? This collection shows the Borgesian side of Bolaño, though never with that ‘pataphysical hook that makes Borges so addictive. I enjoyed it but read it quickly; it’s actually become the model for my anthology on Los Angeles poetry, as I’m realizing that I should really tell stories, rather than convince with keen analysis, in the volume—people might actually read it. I think the issue of what makes these writers “Nazis” might have more resonance with Latin American readers, as some chapters merely touch on this connection.

Alain Badiou | The Communist Hypothesis | Verso | 2010

This was actually a quick read. Badiou will be spending next year at UCLA doing whatever, and I’ve never gotten around to his headier tomes. Some of it is archival—he includes a longish essay he wrote in the late 60s—and some new. Involves new interpretations of the Paris Commune, Mao’s cultural revolution (which he limits to a very short period early on when theory and action seemed aligned, prior to the descent into chaos) and, of course, Paris ’68. It ends with a light recount of his famous theory of the Event, and has a useful critique of the cult of individualism in the States versus living according to an “Idea.” I don’t want to go into it much deeper, except to note that I’m increasingly (ok, I have been for a while) wary of the fetish about of May ’68. I think we should just give it up, start afresh. It’s an attractive moment, when intellectuals (many of whom were great writers) and labor seemed aligned, and the ensuing chaos—contained, in the end—brought a violent poetic spirit to the everyday—but now it merely survives as a tone, a prose style. Ok, that’s dismissive. I also bought a trio of books edited by Zizek, his “Revolution” series, but have only finished Virtue and Terror on Robespierre (I had seen this in a bookstore in Paris and wanted to buy it then, but I wanted to “live in the present,” not fill the place with the ghosts of Danton and Saint-Just). I’ll leave it at that.

Junot Díaz | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | Riverhead | 2007

I don’t read a lot of fiction. I’m teaching Only Revolutions, by Mark “House of Leaves” Danielewski, in my contemporary American poetry class, so I should probably read House of Leaves. I’m also teaching the first section of the Changing Light at Sandover and Alice in Wonderland (the class is subtitled “The Ludic Turn”). Anyway, this was a beach read; I read my stepmother’s copy while I was visiting them in Long Island. I actually did read some of this on the beach. Díaz is obviously talented and very smart, and it didn’t feel like what it is, Bolaño-lite. There is sex, sexual addiction, political violence, abusive cracked parents, picaresque descriptions of overseas travel, and something like tragedy. The major annoyances were the little eye-wink inclusions of academic jargon (it’s a very “teachable” book in that way) which was couched in a pseudo-hipster Latino American speak, to make it go down easy. It’s meta-identity literature, but not meta enough. He created a pretty interesting synthetic language that could accommodate the various audiences he was trying to reach, and deserves credit. In any case, I enjoyed it pretty much. I’m sure Javier Bardam will have a role in the movie.

McKenzie Wark | The Beach Beneath the Street | Verso | 2011

I read none of this on the beach, unless it was the beach beneath Los Angeles counts. Ken lived two doors down from me in Williamsburg, which I only discovered after I was asked to review a book of poems by this Australian guy for PW, Googled him, and discovered I’d been bumming cigarettes off of his wife for a few years. Wark is an advocate of what he calls “low theory,” which is what he described (somewhere) as theory that you don’t need a Ph.D. to read; his previous two books, both excellent, are written in this style as well, and I admire that effort. The book covers many of the figures of Situationism who are major though overlooked—I especially liked the bits about Jorn’s aesthetic theory and the narrative of Alexander Trocchi, though would have liked to learn more about Alice Becker-Ho. Isidore Isou figures prominently, but there is nothing really new about Debord or Vaneigem here. Of course, the fetish of Paris ’68 rears its weird head, but Wark, unlike some, doesn’t fly off the handle with crypto-Marxist, Debordian rhetoric that is always interesting as a style—I’d love to write that way, at least for a day—but ends up, for me, seeming to advertise its impotence. I think Wark’s struggle for a new language is actually a very interesting project I’d like to write about; his Hacker’s Manifesto went so far as to introduce a new class, the Vectorist Class, though I don’t think anyone’s quite picked up on that, and I don’t know how serious he was about that.

Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. | Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing | Northwestern | 2011

I gave my author’s copy of this as a going away present to an Italian art historian friend who was staying with me for a month earlier this year—she’s stopped returning my emails. I ordered a desk copy, which I then gave to my sister’s boss, thinking he could plumb it for ideas for outdoor text/light installations—my sister was laid off a month later. This is a dangerous book. It ruins lives, but only slowly. That’s why I’m ordering five more as potential gifts for people I would like to quietly run out of my life. Seriously, the brief introductions to the work are great, and I suspect it’s quite economical and “interesting” given the piles of empty text it is attempting to condense. I can’t offer any intelligent commentary until I order a new one.

Julia Boynton Green | Noonmark | Redlands, California (no publisher listed) | 1936

Green is one of the “lost” Los Angeles poets I’ve been researching for my series of essays, “Chapters in Los Angeles Poetry,” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. She was born in the 1860’s, published two books late in life (her first, This Enchanting Coast, is largely devoted to writing about plants and the landscape, as per the dominant mode at that time in L.A.), and had some excellent anthology appearances. Her satires on technology are quite brilliant, and though quite conservative, she published a lot of poems in Amazing Stories and Weird Tales (which I haven’t seen) probably because of her critical but rich evocations of the promises of science and technology. She’s my great find, but I have no biographical information about her. Nora May French and Olive Percival are the other two poets (can’t find any males that earlier on) of my pre-WWII section.

Walter Benn Michaels | The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality | Metropolitan | 2006

I don’t know anything about Michaels, though he spoke at UCLA last quarter and I had lunch and dinner with him—a very animated guy, I liked him a lot, but suspect that he thinks he’s a bit smarter than he is. (I only say this because he went out on a limb about all sorts of matters regarding contemporary poetry and minority literature, but when pressed, his knowledge of the fields was pretty shallow). The argument in the book is pretty basic: that institutions like universities would be better off aiming for class diversity rather than ethnic diversity if the idea is to truly achieve a more egalitarian society with wealth spread equally across a wider range of people. Americans don’t like to talk about class—we pretend that upward mobility is an actual living promise—and so divert some of these anxieties to discussions of race, which he says doesn’t exist (not in the way culture exists). Of course, I agree, but then again, I don’t think he’s travelled much, at least not as a black or Asian person. As he did in his talk, there is recourse to statics and charts, but very lightly; he is quite frank, in his afterward, that he wrote this book to make money, and it’s clearly aimed at the same class of people who thought The Closing of the American Mind was a serious statement on the decline of American culture. I like his arguments generally, but I think he loses wind when it becomes apparent that he’s probably written this book about fifteen years too late. I don’t think the cult of diversity is quite as strong as it once was.

Doug Aitken and Noel Daniel | Broken Screen: Expanding The Image, Breaking The Narrative | Distributed Art | 2005

This is a fairly light read, just a bunch of interviews with artists and other folk who are dealing with image and narrative, particularly “non-linear” narrative. I discovered a handful of new artists in this one, some I’d never heard of, some whose works I’d seen but simply didn’t know who made them. I can’t find my copy right now, so I can’t tell you who they are—Herzog, Gehry and Baldessari I remember (of course, I’d heard of those guys). Aitken doesn’t ask terribly probing questions—he always brings it back to non-linear narrative, which I don’t think is that interesting, just like I don’t think appropriation is all that interesting these days, but Aitken lives in L.A., as I do, where we are quite oppressed by an obsession with cheese-ball, leaden, over-determined narratives. You know what I mean. He really aims for conversations and shop talk, which is ok but it let some of the artists “phone in” their contributions. The question of the screen—what is happening now with digital technology, how the photograph, the film, the machine and animation are folding into a single genre—is a question I’m probing, and this book doesn’t quite get there. I’m reading a lot about photography: The Photograph as Contemporary Art (World of Art) by Charlotte Cotton and, finally, Susan Sontag, On Photography—I’d always thought this book was quite boring when I tried to read it before, but got through it this time. I have big chunky books about Thomas Ruff and Sam Hsieh on my table right now.

Jacques Brel | Songbooks

I can’t find these either! But I bought them during my three week stay in Paris, which was filled, appropriately, with heartache, desire, elation and lots of walking around penniless (or at least with a credit card howling with pain—food, hotels, telecommunications). I bought a ukulele in Paris also, and recorded a few songs on my iPad, including a version of the Smiths’ “I Won’t Share You.” I made my debut as a pop singer at a small conference on British Poetry—Keston, Emily, John and Sam were there. Harry Mathews was giving a reading a floor below. Prior to going to Paris, I started writing songs again; Brel’s work, along with the Weill/Brecht collaborations (I also bought sheet music for those) are my guides, along with the Smiths and Scott Walker. I was also reading Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire (Howard edition) and the poems of Arthur Rimbaud (Fowlie edition). My French seemed to have gotten worse as the trip went on—starvation for fluid conversation, I believe. It was quite a trip. It rained a lot.

Joan Brossa | Furgó de Cua (1989-1991) | Quarderns Crema | 1993

 I’m not reading Brossa—who writes in Catalan, and is one of the great, largely untranslated Spanish poets of the last century—so much as looking at the language. He was both a concrete poet and creator of text objects and a high formalist—a large part of his oeuvre consists of sestinas and other invented, intricate structures. I’m trying to find someone to help me translate his work. Know anyone? Since I don’t have much to say about this one, I’d like to tack on…

Mark Zuckerberg | Facebook | The Interweb | 2004-2011

Yes, I think he writes all of it. Facebook is the TV of today. Facebook makes nothing happen. It’s all trivial, and makes many of the people I admire appear quite trivial, which of course isn’t their faults. I just don’t need to know what you eat. I like it when people “like” me, which I don’t like. I’m off Facebook. I was reading it too much. I use Twitter.

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Brian Kim Stefans is the author of five books of poems including What is Said the Poet Concerning Flowers (2006) and Kluge: A Meditation (2007), along with Before Starting Over: Essays and Interviews (2008) and Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (2003). He teaches new media and poetry in the English Department of UCLA. Digital works include “The Dreamlife of Letters” and “Kluge: A Meditation.” Recent projects include a column, “Third Hand Plays,” for the SFMoma blog on digital text art, a ten-part column for the Los Angeles Review of Books on the history of L.A. Poetry, and a “freeware” compilation of Los Angeles D.I.Y/Post-punk music.

Back to 2011 directory.

Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman, ed. | Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology | Oxford | 2009

Beautifully polemical anthology that situates Latin American poetry in its complicated historical and cultural matrices. Alongside work by poets we’ve heard of (or should have), represented here are Aztec and Mayan poems addressing the European invasion; astonishing oral poetry, old and new; and a selection of visual and concrete poetry that connects the midcentury concrete poetry revolution to indigenous traditions. The anthology draws attention to the influence of indigenous poets on avant-garde internationalistas: “The poet is a God. Don’t sing about rain, poet. Make it rain!” an Aymara poet told Vicente Huidobro. Many poems here reflect what Vicuña calls “a poetics of resistance.” I was elated by Gabriel Gudding’s translations of the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario, whose poems Englished had never shaken me before.

Christopher Nealon | The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century | Harvard | 2011

Brilliantly makes its case: that contemporary and recent poetry has all along been influenced by and actively investigating the workings of capital. I didn’t agree with every one of Nealon’s interpretations of individual poems, but I rarely find myself reading criticism with this much note-taking gusto. I have been telling everyone about this book.

Srecko Kosovel, tr. from Slovene by Ana Jelnikar and Barbara Siegel Carlson | Look Back, Look Ahead: The Selected Poems of Srecko Kosovel | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Contemporary of Rilke’s. Imagine Rilke with lashings of John Wieners and Khlebnikov.

Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian | The Wide Road | Belladonna | 2011

An enviably intellectually-fecund friendship set itself the important work of trying to think and write sex, collaboratively, as women. I wish I’d had this book years ago. “We eroticize our earthly situations and conditions and likewise they eroticize us…Our vagina accommodates the proverbial railway station it has sometimes been compared to. To be enormous is a wish that comes over us in our hot desperation. Then, miraculously, everything on earth swells to our proportions.” Yup that’s how it works. Crazy smart and crazy sexy.

Dana Ward | The Squeakquel, pt. 1 & pt. 2 | The Song Cave | 2011

In this and in Typing Wild Speech and his newer work Ward is making something new with poetic narrative. Blows forward fast in dawn glow. Bliss to be with.

Ryan Walker | You Will Own It Permanently | regs times | 2010

Charming dorky conversational smart friendly, just adorable; I don’t know how you can get hold of this one, as it’s self-published—try bathybius.com/duh, or Lulu.

Sommer Browning | Either Way I’m Celebrating: Poems and Comics | Birds, LLC | 2011

Again charm, and serious wit, plus arch and goofy drawings. Somebody sent me this and I opened it after a hard day and was lightened. Thanks.

Juliana Spahr | Well Then There Now | Black Sparrow | 2011

Ethical effort is the engine of Spahr’s poems. (I am using an anti-ecological metaphor on purpose, because self-consciousness about the harm a contemporary subject does to the world is central to Spahr’s writing.) Sometimes the effort feels embarrassing, as if the poem’s tires have gone flat because it didn’t want to use up too much air while driving—the effort feels effortful. But then the effortfulness twists before my eyes so that I see that it is part of the poem (it becomes an aesthetic method), and that she is brave for allowing the effort to be part of the poem’s armature, and that an enormous risktaking intelligence is guiding the poem and organizing its anxious pleasures. I like to feel my suspicions of this work, and I like the thinking I have to do when I think about its challenges poetic and extrapoetic.

William Fuller | Hallucination | Flood | 2011

There is something hilarious about the way William Fuller’s profession (chief fiduciary officer at a trust company) is fetishized by his fans, as if he knows something other people don’t—he’s got the secret. Maybe he does. Wry mystical intelligence and pleasure in the word-hoard throughout, and the last poem “The Circuit” is worth the price of the book.

Evie Shockley | The New Black | Wesleyan | 2011

Witty and sharp. Uses many playful forms (often versions of acrostics) to examine the injustices, racist and otherwise, that manifest in the ways we address and describe one other. The formal play means that our attention keeps on being drawn to surface. As the Oulipians saw, surface reconfigured has the potential to disrupt what plays over our thought-screens; these poems are North American instances of Vicuña’s “poetics of resistance.”

Marianne Morris | Commitment | Bad Press & Critical Documents | 2011

Shiny gold-paper-covered chapbook from a younger Canadian poet living in London who grabs all of us, especially the banks, by the hairy scruff and shakes till falling money turns to fumes that light up the shit we’re in. Chris Nealon might want to check it out. A lot of pissed-off marvelously riotous poetry is coming out of the islands off Europe right now. Just got hold of Frances Kruk’s Down We Go chapbook, which is like a cracked white china bowl of shiny nails, and Chris Goode’s new anthology of young (all under 30) English poets, Better than Language: An anthology of new modernist poetries, also worth reading.

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Catherine Wagner teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her latest book is My New Job.

Wagner’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory. 

J. Gordon Faylor | Comments on MGR | self-published | 2010
J. Gordon Faylor | Docking Rust Archon | unpublished manuscript | 2011

Belonging, sharing, having, dying—instant microdeath as character development—, … distribution? Searched (though not ‘for’).

 Lanny Jordan Jackson | Dear Swimmer | unpublished manuscript | 2011

 F SITE.

Leslie Scalapino | R-hu | Atelos | 2000

Maybe Scalapino’s most radically structured work? Single spacing, double spacing, font size; unilaterally ‘as’ the same line/-break(?). Honorable mention: Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows & The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom.

Eddie Hopely | Cannot Contract | self-published | 2010

Scene hair.

Astrid Lorange | Pussy Pussy Pussy What What | Gauss PDF | 2011
Astrid Lorange | Eating and Speaking | Tea Party Republicans | 2011

Objects objects Objects objects objects objects Objects objects.

Jarrod Fowler | http://jarrodfowler.org/idioticon.html | ongoing

Axiomatics of a non-musicological [theoretical?] antipraxis.

John Paetsch | Crista’s Severance Package xxx | Gauss PDF | 2011
John Paetsch | //only after she mirrored flipt/scripts back into amazing secrets channel did the whole fucking thing become mine// | Gauss PDF | 2011 

[Critique of] Poetry unrecognizable to poetics. Crista got laid off and still got paid.

Vanessa Place | Die Dichtkunst | oodpress | 2011
Vanessa Place | black square | oodpress | 2011

The end of rational ‘Conceptual Poetry’. 

François Laruelle | The Concept of Non-Photography | Urbanomic/Sequence | 2011
François Laruelle | Dictionary of Non-Philosophy | [unoffical English translation] | 1998

A JUDGMENT OF TASTE EXERCISED NOT SO MUCH BY A ‘SUBJECT’ AS BY THE WORLD ITSELF, THE TRUE AGENT OF A UNIVERSAL FRACTAL PLAY.

Craig Dworkin | The Perverse Library | Information as Material | 2010

Non-conceptual appropriation via architecture, olfaction, and mold?

Chris Sylvester | THE REPUBLIC BY CHRIS SYLVESTER | Troll Thread | 2011

The entire game froze, which was already the playing of the game? Ask the mayor (‘his’ syntax).

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Kieran Daly writes and has published books and other media. Some work and contact information may be found at http://karibaily.tumblr.com.

Back to 2011 directory.

Rae Armantrout | Money Shot | Wesleyan | 2011

“Just” another incredible book from Armantrout, maybe even her greatest to date. Her best poems—personal favourites here include “Across,” “Fuel” “Soft Money,” “Exact” & “This Is”—are the best poems being written in America (& in American) right now.

Larry Eigner, ed. Curtis Faville & Robert Grenier | The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner | Stanford | 2010

A whole new way of seeing—& of thinking/feeling/recording what is seen. What more can one ask of a poet? I’m still ploughing through the four volume set, but this already feels like a major event in my reading life. . . .

Graham Foust | To Anacreon in Heaven | Minus A | 2010

Just when Foust’s more usual gallows-humour-driven expressionistic-minimalist style was in danger of edging into shtick, he diversifies—in this & in To Graham Foust on the Morning of His Fortieth Birthday (The Song Cave, 2010)—into sentence-by-sentence prose meditation, retaining his virtues in concision & upset but presenting them on a much bigger canvas. Like a colder Spicer, a more fucked-up Stevens, he rejuvenates the serial-poem-about-poetry-that’s-really-about-life for a more cynical age. Where will he go next?

Mark Ford | Six Children | Faber | 2011

What a strange, troubling & strangely moving volume this is. Ford’s poetry has been described as a cross between Ashbery’s & Larkin’s—fairly accurately, it must be said, although in itself this doesn’t prepare for the absolute oddness of such an amalgam. A deep student of the New York School, & of Ashbery in particular, Ford can’t summon the playfulness, optimism or confidence of his American forebears, replacing them with chilly despair, repressed anxiety & mortal dread. Death pervades—elegies to the poet’s father, a memorial to a friend & fellow poet—along with a new, for Ford, post-colonial nostalgia-slash-guilt. Like the title poem, which thrillingly instills an ambivalent Whitman with appropriate Miltonic splendor, this book works, & is curiously uplifting in its dejection. Also recommended, on a similarly morbid note: Paul Muldoon’s new volume, Maggot (Faber, 2011).

Barbara Guest | Forces of Imagination | Kelsey St. | 2003

Alongside Eigner & Zanzotto (see below), my third big, belated discovery of the year was, courtesy of John Wilkinson’s critical advocacy, Barbara Guest. I’m still working (wandering) through her Collected Poems, but this collection of “essays” and assorted reflections really caught my attention: a more convincing, fluid meeting of “theory” & “poetry” than any “Language” text I’ve ever encountered. True & precious abstraction. . . .

Geoffrey Hill | Clavics | Enitharmon | 2011

Fun to see—in this & in Oraclau | Oracles (Clutag, 2010)—Hill try to shoehorn his late-won, new-found wilder style back into strict forms (and formalists don’t come much stricter than George Herbert, the obvious model here). Clunky in places, outright bad in others, full of infelicities the younger Hill would never have countenanced, this volume is nevertheless full of a poetic liveliness a 79-year old High Anglican Oxford Professor of Poetry has no earthly right to access. Hills’ Oxford lectures have been enjoyable so far too, especially when he called for a crazier “Mad Meg” spirit he felt was lacking from contemporary British poetry. Maybe he should read more Keston Sutherland (see below).

Joseph Massey | At the Point | Shearsman | 2011

Massey’s sophomore effort proves more of less can sometimes be more. In this case, a more structured, leaner, meaner & altogether poised survey of the same Californian territory already addressed in his impressive debut, Areas of Fog. The obvious byproduct & overflow of a long-sustained & concentrated observation, this new book nevertheless seems to be forever gesturing off at something larger, something just out of view. . . .

Jennifer Moxley | Coastal | The Song Cave | 2011

This should be insufferable: a “9/11” poem long on art & artistic survival techniques, short on political comment & commentary. Moxley, however, pulls it off (again). By tackling self-absorption head on, she somehow embodies, ennobles & transcends it all at once, producing a poem both diagnostic & exemplary in the process, something her less explicitly but more intrinsically narcissistic peers would struggle with. (Between this, the Foust text mentioned above & Peter Gizzi’s wonderfully titled Pinocchio’s Gnosis, The Song Cave gets my vote as press-of-the-year.)

J. H. Prynne | Sub Songs | Barque | 2010

After the bleak To Pollen and the (pleasingly) rebarbative Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage ARTESIAN, these nine lyrics seem, presented in an elegant and generous outsize folio as they are, positively relaxed by recent Prynne standards. It’s all relative, of course:

……………………………………………….The place-work of
willed repeats gains a familiar tremor in jointure, we say
sustainable our mouth assents slave dental unbroken torrid reason
will commute previous and lie down. None more credible, mirror
make up flat sat batch pinup gruesome genome. Now get out.

Keston Sutherland | Stress Position | Barque | 2009

Slow on the uptake here, probably because Sutherland’s previous volume, 2007’s Hot White Andy, scared the hell out of me (blazing as it was). Stress Position is intense too, but in a more diffused manner, making room for a cast of thousands (Ali whoever, Black Beauty, Dot, etc.), a bouncy elastic form (seven line stanzas, roughly seven beat lines, the odd extended prose footnote) & numerous scenic shifts (public toilet-set sexual assault, yacht-based cooking contest, etc.). Like David Cronenberg rewriting The Rape of the Lock, Stress Position evades any pat analogy you can throw at it. My vote for it as poem of the year (2009) elects it king of something or other. The same terrain is roundly abused again in The Stats on Infinity (Crater, 2010) & his prose study Stupefaction (Seagull, forthcoming 2011) looks promising too. Best English-language poet of his generation? Quite possibly.

Christian Wiman | Every Riven Thing | Farrar | 2010

This year’s mainstream-book-I-liked-much-more-than-I-expected-to. A new formalist previously overly interested in narrative (with very mixed results: see the sequence “Being Serious” for serious overwrought bathetic wallowing of the first water), Wiman is here thrown back onto his own story by a cancer diagnosis & its subsequent aftermath, becoming an intense, driven, forceful & skilful religious poet as a result. Everyday epiphanies meet convincingly apocalyptic tinges in a volume that, thankfully, rises above the merely confessional.

“Bubbling Under” (couldn’t resist a second eleven): works by Stephen Collis; Emily Critchley; Roy Fisher; Susan Howe; Paul Muldoon; Wendy Mulford (the Howe & Mulford texts here—That This & The Land Between—are properly, powerfully “adult” responses to grief and morality: an interesting contrast to the sometimes gleeful outlook of Ford & Muldoon); Ezra Pound (ed. Richard Sieburth); Tom Raworth; Rimbaud (trans. John Ashbery); David Foster Wallace (a pure joy—too funny to be the work of a suicide, surely?); Andrea Zanzotto (& Antonio Porta & Franco Buffoni & Milo de Angelis & Valerio Magrelli & Mario Luzi & Patrizia Cavalli—it’s been a very Italian year for me, all-told, reading-wise).

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Rob Stanton was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, UK in 1977, raised outside Birmingham, educated in Cardiff and Leeds and currently lives in Savannah, Georgia, USA with wife, daughter and cats. His first book of poetry, The Method, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2011.

Stanton’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.

Amanda Nadelberg | Bright Brave Phenomena | Coffee House | 2012

It’s been another Year of the Song Cave & it’s hard to believe that Nadelberg’s Building Castles in Spain, Getting Married, the second book in this peerless series, emerged in November 2009. The Age of the Song Cave is too long (it’s ongoing) to properly document here but it seems wrong not to sing some books: Amaranth Borsuk’s Tonal Saw (“tremble | fire | A | kind | of | fire” & “o | o | o | stumble” & “mmandm | Append”), Jane Gregory’s Some Books (“Instead of this book I set out to prove the birdnoise to the bird as my mind was in my office and my office was in my mind.”) Jared Stanley’s How The Desert Did Me In (“Uh! Principia, uh, I’ll think about it.”), Macgregor Card’s The Archers (“There there, manual severity / of being, bonus being, being general / general poet—”), and Graham Foust’s To Graham Foust on the Morning of His Fortieth Birthday (“Tiny hawks of poetry all over you, you sit at screens to punch a book into the world.”), Lisa Jarnot’s Amedillin Cooperative Nosegay (“odyssia’s very original boobs and the warm apt facts of john thaw”) to list just half the 2010 titles. Songcavewise, 2011 has been nonstop, too. To name only the first few (well, half): Andy Fitch’s solo Island, Rod Smith’s whatwow What’s the Deal, Peter Gizzi’s purplegreen Pinnochio’s Gnosis, Jennifer Moxley’s worldly Coastal, and Dana Ward’s doubleheader, The Squeakquel. When I visited the Cincinnati of The Squeakquel, I told Dana that my dad had left Erga kai hemerai in the car back in Kentucky, so he lent me Bill Luoma’s Works and Days (with a graceful note from Michael Gizzi: “Dear Mr. Ward”) which probably would have just been this list if I hadn’t left it in a car bound for Kentucky. One of the greater Song Caves, Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s Hesiod (“All song at once, isn’t this / like balancing the needs of friends?), a working over of Hesiod’s ‘Days,’ is as beautiful as the original chruson genos, the Golden Age. Like Luoma’s, O’Brien’s Works is as ageless as H’s. (And an H is not even an H.) All of this just to say that Amanda Nadelberg is our age’s poet in an Age of Poets. Awaiting Bright Brave Phenomena is like waiting for the things themselves to appear, brighter and braver and phenomenally more than ever before.

Brandon Brown | The Persians by Aeschylus | Displaced
Farrah Field & Jared White | Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Book Shop | Est. 2011

Bookstores need to get brighter and braver in the Post-Border’s Age and Brooklyn is the beacon. Jon Beacham’s Hermitage presses on, as The Brother in Elysium, on Bedford Ave. Around the bend, Book Thug Nation maintains a sill full of Book Thug (no relation). Above all, may Adam Tobin’s unbeatable Unnameable Books, in Prospect Heights, outlast all of us. Into the fray, enter poets Field and White, whose Berl’s, growing so well it may have a roof before Fall. When I made a pilgrimage to their table at the Brooklyn Flea, I found the only thing one can ask, exactly the one book I was looking for in the whole world. No small feat considering they display around 20 books on any given day. Tyrone Williams’ beautiful, everything-breaking elegy, Pink Tie (Hooke Press, 2011). Chapbooks to seek at Berl’s: Wondrous Things I Have Seen (Mitzvah Chaps, 2010) by Herodotus, jk by Brandon Brown (aka Aeschylus aka Catullus) & Preserving The Old Way Of Life (Factory Hollow Press, 2007) by Shannon Burns.

James Copeland | Fax II | self | 2011
CAConrad | MUGGED Into Poetry | Cannot Exist | 2011.

Copeland knows, and how, his Hölderlin. Does Coolidge (circa THIS 6) know his Copeland, writ large? Fax II exists, tho it doesn’t say so. Andy Gricevich’s Cannot Exist (Issue 7 has Conrad + Coletti, Copp, Hauser, Higdon, Larsen, Ward, &c) exists chapbooks! Besides Conrad’s: Roberto Harrison’s Bridge of the World, Sara Larsen’s The Hallucinated, Jess Mynes’ How’s the Cows. Conrad continues being amazing. His devastating reading of “MUGGED Into Poetry” (written after he was mugged en route to a reading by new CE co-editor Lewis Freedman) at the Supermachine 3 launch awed my mom. Cannot wait to get her A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012). Until then, I got her Heather Christle’s The Trees, The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011).

Tim Dlugos | A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos | Nightboat | 2011
Patrick James Dunagan | A Gustonbook | Post-Apollo Press | 2011

“It’s hard enough to find a parachute / in New York City, I remember thinking, / but finding one the right shade / of canary is the accomplishment / of the sort of citizen with whom / I wish to populate my life.” Dlugos’ “Parachute” (and Conrad’s devastating reading of it) is one of the saddest, and most beautiful, wakes, and makes me cry every time. And “G-9”, with its double wake, is the great elegy of our time. If Steve Carey was the news of 2010, and to me, too, he was, Dlugos is, to me (with Carey, still, too) the news of 2011. Except to me (tho nothing new is in print) the news was, and will be for some time, Peter Seaton, who would not have existed so suddenly and indispensably in my life without Craig Dworkin’s Eclipse. A Book + Craig Dworkin = Eclipse. (Dworkin’s own The Perverse Library, like all of his books, is to be owned.) I’ve only started settling into Dunagan’s There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn’t Talk: A Gustonbook, but already it’s taken its place next to Coolidge’s Guston’s Collected Writings (UC, 2010). Banes’ (copy of) Rodefer’s Four Lectures aside, “Writers paint, they don’t speak.”

Emily Pettit | Goat in the Snow | Birds, LLC | 2012
Ben Estes | Alan Felsenthal | The Song Cave | Sea Ranch

I’ve been in love with Pettit and her poems since I first read three of them, in the second issue of Seth Landman’s Invisible Ear, in October 2008. Her poetry workshop at Flying Object is a laboratory for making poets, and no wonder why: reading her poems taught me how to write. There are so many great Bens (at least ten), and Ben Estes, whose Cymbals (“Like a container for a flower inside of a flower.”) opened The Song Cave, is beyond exception. If Estes’ Lamp Like L’Map (Factory Hollow Press, 2009) is every indication, and it is, his The Strings of Walnetto Arrangements (Flowers and Cream, 2011) will be every sensation.  There are a few Alans, too, but only one this one. The ultimate symmetry would be an ultimate Song Cave; until then, the inaugural Sea Ranch, a split with his co-editor, is the best start imaginable. Long live, Song Cave, up with the Sea Ranch. P.S. Dos-a-dos are the new split 7”s. Flying Object paired James Copeland w/ Alex Phillips. I would like to hear Will Edmiston’s effing great Effie (3 Sad Tigers Press, 2011) b/w Lewis Freedman’s Freedman’s font-glossed Non-Symbolic Non Symbolic Non-Symbolic (for Catherine Malabou)

Renee Gladman | Event Factory | Dorothy, A Publishing Project | 2010
Rachel B. Glaser | Pee on Water | Publishing Genius | 2010

Prose by poets, does saying that make this not bending my own one-from-2011 rules? Whatever, Glaser is killing it in 2011: poems plenty, “Turid,” the soon famous “Ellen” story. Gladman, of course, is one of the Greats, and who wouldn’t have started a press, as Danielle Dutton (whose Sprawl, Siglio, 2010 fits right in here) did, to publish Gladman’s Ravicka trilogy? That the sequel, The Ravickians (Dorothy, 2011), is to be published on the same day as Gary Lutz’s Divorcer (Calamari Press, 2011) will make deciding what two books to read on that day very easy.

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Richard Cándida-Smith | Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, And Politics in California | California | 1996
Jack Spicer | The House That Jack Built: The Selected Lectures of Jack Spicer | Wesleyan | 1998
Josephine Miles | “What We Compose” | College Composition and Communication, Vol. 14, No.3 | 1963
Carl Maas | The Penguin Guide to California | Penguin | 1947
David Zwirner Gallery | Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970

At some point I became super interested in California. Well, actually I was always interested in California but this year I read a lot about it. Utopia and Dissent is a book that I found on a shelf at the library at Mills College: where I went to undergrad. I started reading it beginning with the introduction because I couldn’t understand California art. Why did it all look different than what I saw as a teenager growing up in New York? The Introduction to Utopia and Dissent was/is a good introduction. Cándida-Smith touches on some of the origins of California art: that it developed in isolation from much of the United States, that the art that people made was created for each other—as opposed to being shown in galleries—and the difficulties of bringing a canvas across country in a wagon. This year I read the rest of the book. The chapters on Joan Brown+Jay Defeo, Wallace Berman, and Kenneth Rexroth I particularly loved.

Joan Didion | Where I Was From | Vintage | 2004
Eileen Myles | Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) | OR | 2010

I read Where I Was From and started crying on the airplane from San Diego to Newark coming home from family vacation. My mom was sitting next to me. I’m surprised that she didn’t say anything but I’m sure that I concealed it fairly well. I’ve had conversations with two different women this year about the relationship between geography and identity and Where I Was From came up both times. (Though one time it was [#oops] invoked by me.) Didion’s a powerhouse—I always use her essay “In Bed” (from The White Album) as an example—that she can write an essay about being stuck in bed with a migraine and still make it interesting. Justin Taylor told me to read Inferno after I had a tough time at a poetry reading. I borrowed his copy and read it on my way to work at Pratt on the G train at the beginning of summer. It ruled.

George Oppen | Of Being Numerous | Complete Reading Broadcast by KPFA | August 22, 1968

George Oppen is another one that I got into in undergrad. I read Of Being Numerous while sitting outside of the music building at Mills. I think I pretty much read it in one sitting and when I finished I thought, “This is my favorite book.” It’s still one of my favorites. Oppen was invoked a lot last summer at Bard—I think that he was on a lot of people’s minds. I love that phrase “the crystal fact.” I wonder why I keep hearing about him. I guess that this happens with lots of writers sometimes. I rode the bus from New York to Boston to crash a wedding with Andrew Kenower in the spring of this year and listened to this recording of Oppen reading Of Being Numerous while staring out the window and when I arrived in Boston Andrew was reading Oppen too.

Steve Dixon | Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation | MIT | 2007
Sally Banes | Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance | Wesleyan | 1987
Sue-Ellen Case | Performing Science and the Virtual | Routledge | 2006
Cecilia Corrigan | Selected YouTube Videos | Philadelphia | —

I became interested in performance. Partly because of my job this past year writing about performance for Peak Performances @Montclair’s outreach blog and partly by my own volition. The Steve Dixon book I’m still working my way through. I’ve been highlighting it like a textbook. Cecilia Corrigan came to read for me and Thom Donovan at Segue last winter and totally rocked the house. Her YouTube videos are smart and poignant: I love em. Her too.

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Sara Wintz is the author of WALKING ACROSS A FIELD WE ARE FOCUSED ON AT THIS TIME NOW (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse). Her work has been published in Jacket, 6×6, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Try!, Openned, HTML Giant, and on Ceptuetics (with Kareem Estefan). She lives in Berkeley.

Back to 2011 directory.

Robert Duncan , ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman | The HD Book | California | 2011

At last! Even if you don’t like Duncan (and quite a few don’t), this is still not to be ignored. Its publication a major event of the year.

Tony Judt | Ill Fares the Land | Penguin | 2010

I lament his death, he’s irreplaceable. Not to heed his work, these essays, would be sheer folly.

Norma Cole | To Be At Music: Essays & Talks | Omnidawn | 2010

Brilliant, pithy, full of news.

George Bowering | My Darling Nelly Gray | Talonbooks | 2010

Bowering in top form.

Robert Pogue Harrison | The Body of Beatrice | Hopkins | 1988

An oldie but goodie, still opening doors.

Meredith Quartermain,  drawings by Susan Bee | Recipes From the Red Planet | Book Thug | 2010

I’m not exactly impartial here, but hey, this is really a very interesting and indeed good book. The publisher calls it fiction; it’s more like poetry to me, and resourceful.

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

Dense, difficult, bracing—can I say these wide-ranging poems are obsessed with words? They’re sure instructive to anyone who cares about them, and really are exhilarating in their astonished thought.

Guy Birchard | Further Than The Blood | Pressed Wafer | 2010

This is Birchard’s sixth or maybe seventh book of poetry, but nobody seems to have noticed. Maybe his poems are too subtle and careful, perhaps the mode at casual glance too familiar, the skill too unobtrusive.

Michael Boughn | Cosmographia: A Post-Lucretian Micro-Epic | Book Thug | 2010

Issued in fascicles over the last few years, and at last collected together. Boughn is a terrific poet, who actually thinks as he writes. He can be very funny; sometimes he’s very angry. He’s always without fail interesting, so long as you’re paying attention.

Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Barbara Johnson | Divagations: The Author’s 1897 Arrangement | Belknap / Harvard | 2007

Delighted to find this still in print.

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Peter Quartermain has just (July 2011) submitted “Poetic Fact,” a collection of his essays, to an interested publisher. His edition of Robert Duncan’s Collected Early and Collected Later Poems and Plays is currently at the U of California P. The introduction to the first volume appeared in The Capilano Review, Fall 2009.

Quartermain’s Attention Span for 2010, 2008, 2006. Back to 2011 directory.

Hans Abbing | Why Are Artists Poor | Amsterdam UP | 2002

Erica Baum | Dog Ear | Ugly Duckling | 2011

Paul Coors/Dana Ward | I want this forever | Perfect Lovers | 2009 

Timothy Donnelly | The Cloud Corporation | Wave | 2010

Roy Fisher | Selected Poems | Flood | 2011

(Despite the exclusion of anything from The Cut Pages, 1970)

Benjamin Friedlander | Citizen Cain | Salt | 2011

Karen MacCormack | Tale Light: New and Selected Poems 1984-2009 | BookThug | 2010

Christopher Nealon | The Matter of Capital | Harvard | 2011

Benjamin Péret, trans. Marc Lowenthal | The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works | Wakefield | 2011

Raymond Queneau, trans. Guy Bennett | For an Ars Poetics | Mindmade | 2010

Leon Stein | The Triangle Fire | Lippincott | 1962

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Franklin Bruno‘s writing appears. So do his recordings. A book of poems, The Accordion Repertoire, is due from Edge in 2012. He lives in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Bruno’s Attention Span for 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.