Attention Span 2011 | Benjamin Friedlander

Rose Ausländer | Gesamtwerk in Einzelbänden | 16 vols. | Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag | 1992-1995

My German, never good to begin with, has been slipping away from lack of use, and I’ve no longer got my father to call for help when the grammar tricks me up—a stroke took away all his answers. A month before the stroke he and I were in Berlin and I bought a few of these volumes; I’ve acquired the others since, reading aloud at the nursing home, where my father’s silence becomes part of the effect. It’s the late work in particular that moves me, written after Ausländer turned seventy: a metaphysical imagism, fluid as Matisse’s cutouts, cutting as a northern wind, though at whisper strength. Or seemingly at whisper strength: the late work fills nine of these volumes.

Bureau of American Ethnology | Annual Reports and Bulletins | Government Printing Office | 1879-1967

Of the 200 bulletins and 48 annual reports with papers, only a few contain material that one might call literary, but these are precious: a treasury of Native American texts in the original languages, with dictionaries and translations. It’s incredible that these are available online, and incredible to scroll through them, if a little bewildering—they encompass a wide range of philosophies and projects, and their credibility is uneven. Racism is pervasive, so suspicion is required, but it’s hard not to get excited by the material: a ghost story in which a bird puts adult skulls on child bodies, which topple over; a song with the refrain, “the entire world weeps for me”; a prayer to the sun that includes the unexpected hope, “Perhaps if we are lucky / … / A floor of ice will spread over the world, / the forests …  / … will break beneath the weight of snow.” The highlight for me is The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, published only a few years after the events described, containing a number of the songs that accompanied the dance. (The translator, James Mooney, reports that they were composed in a trance, one after the other, 20 or 30 at a time). Just as interesting, and more influential as poetry: Frances Densmore’s various collections of Indian song, widely read by the moderns—just this week I found a citation by Basil Bunting.

List of BAE publications
Annual Reports
Bulletins 1-24
Bulletins 25-200

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

Argument by citation, juxtaposition, repurposing—a Talmudic strategy, though based on a very different principle. Not the authority of a sacred text, but a library where authority is dispersed—where the sacred, like the untranslatable, is yet to be grasped. Making this a musical book in Cole’s sense (formulated for Robert Browning): “In the time of imagination, prosody becomes the reference system, the set of locating coordinates.”

Ann Cotten & Kerstin Cmelka | I, Coleoptile | Broken Dimanche P | 2010

Consulting a dictionary every other word impedes the reading of some poets more than others, and Cotten, alas, is one for whom speed matters. This is ironic, since her Fremdwörterbuchsonette (Suhrkamp, 2007) includes the word “dictionary” in its title. A dictionary of loan words, for Cotten—American—has borrowed her German, while incorporating an English borrowed for her readers. Wit is required to keep up, and I’m just too slow in German. Probably, I’m too slow for this English text as well—a prose-poetry hybrid with photographs—but here at least I can pretend to understand. And pretending is precisely the point. The photos (by Cmelka) reproduce stills from a film starring Mayakovsky, with Cotten in Mayakovsky’s role, while the narrative is given under the sign of a disguise: the “coleoptile” is a vegetable sheath, the covering of a shoot, hence a figure for becoming. “I am a woman as yet / in a cocoon. I am embarrassed / that one has caught me as I unfold / my first wing, still in the ‘real,-’ bag.” In context, “real” suggests “reel,” just as shoot invokes photography, so it’s fair to surmise that the metamorphosis unfolds in the manner of a film, the projection of something already been (or “bean,” as the opening discourse punningly puts it). Like a loan word transposed into poetry, it slips by too fast to be savored—or is savored at narrative’s expense.

Stephen Crane, ed. Christopher Benfey | Complete Poems | American Poets Project | 2011

In his introduction, Benfey notes that Crane’s most individual qualities have long been ignored, even by sympathetic readers: they admire his starkness of language and modernity of line, but not the compressed, parable-like narratives these serve. Yet the time may have come for reassessment: aligning Crane with a certain vein of writing from the seventies, Benfey sees a ground prepared by the influx of poetry from Eastern Europe, and by the impact of deep image. This made me think a more contemporary ground might lie with the writers of Action Books. Though Crane lacks the grotesqueries they admire, he flirts with kitsch. His angels scoffing at churchgoers, man chasing horizon, split the difference between American Renaissance allegory and New Yorker cartoon; and it’s not surprising to learn that his original publisher, Fred Holland Day, was a mentor of Khalil Ghibran. All that aside—or rather, not aside—Crane’s work is fun to read. It’s nice to have this compact edition.

Donato Mancini | Buffet World | New Star | 2011

A pringle can probably tell us more about our world than a potato: ersatz, weighed down by packaging, more pleasurable than sustaining, the lowly chip—like its lowly consumer—is the material form of a relation (economic, ecological) that stitches reality. These wonderful poems tug at those stitches, making reality dance wonkily, like a puppet show. Fun facts, childish play, damning critique: Capitalism, you are what you eat.

Thomas Mann, trans. John E. Woods | Doctor Faustus | Vintage International | 1999

From the Mann-Adorno correspondence I learn that portions were taken verbatim from source texts—a precedent (yet another) for our contemporary practice. I feel especially close to Mann’s version: plundering one milieu to recreate another, he historicizes the avant-garde while making it the vehicle for a counter-history. In conceptual writing, however, a concept is nothing without execution. Here, as it should be, the devil is in the details.

I poeti della scuola siciliana | Vol. 1: Giacomo da Lentini | Vol. 2: Poeti della corte di Federico II | Vol. 3:  Poeti siculo-toscani | Ed. Roberto Antonelli (vol. 1), Costanzo Di Girolamo (vol. 2), and Rosario Coluccia (vol. 3) | Mondadori | 2008

It’s silly to list these long-coveted volumes when I’ve only managed to make my way through a half dozen poems (under Carla’s tutelage, of course), but because they’ve already sent me on a fruitful detour through Rosetti, I feel, if not justified, then at least honest: my attention is directed where it takes new inspiration, though it can’t go forward on its own.

Laura Riding | Omitted Poems and Superseded Versions, 1927-1938

I spent a fair portion of the year tracking down fugitive publications and original editions by A. R. Ammons, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Laura Riding, with gains in each case. The biggest surprise came with Riding, whose bibliography contains perhaps a hundred pages of uncollected poetry and a wealth of material for a variorum, a companion to First Awakenings (the uncollected work through 1926) and Collected Poems (Riding’s “self-determining canon”). What lies beyond, in the archive, I can’t say, but the unpublished writing strikes me as a separate issue. It’s the successive stages of Riding’s public presentation that interests me—a story well worth preserving.

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

It feels good to be in synch with a friend: little did I know when I took up The Ghost Dance Religion that Andrew was already studying one of its principal languages, Arapaho, an Algonkian tongue that flourished where he now lives. The aim: “to get closer to plant, animal, rock, weather, or hydrological cycles, by way of the Native words that held them.” The resulting work has an objectivist compression, which, despite the economy, finds space for all that the eye can see, or ear hear, all that deepens a day. Living up to the demands of Arapaho as expressed in his book’s epigraph, from Edward Sapir: “Single Algonkian words are like tiny Imagist poems.”

Elisabeth Workman | Maybe Malibu Maybe Beowulf | Dusie Kollectiv | 2011

Through experiments on a rodent (namely myself), I can say that these poems all hit the goody place, the pleasure center of the brain, which laps up the lines like so many pulses: “pink tufa dust / of the Golden Girls,” “Caucasian dawgs,” “a probe, a hole, a ‘Burger King,’” “SpongeBob / ejaculates brief histories of time.” All meaningless, of course, but perfectly directed, electric.

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Beyond these, let me cite without comment two books I blurbed this year: Stan Apps, The World as Phone Bill (Combo Books, 2011), and G. P. Lainsbury, Versions of North (Caitlin Press, forthcoming). Also, two broadsides that gave me great pleasure: Tim Atkins, Pet Soundz (Crater Press, 2011), and Rodney Koeneke, At the Small Bar in the Embassy (Cuneiform Press, 2011).

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More Benjamin Friedlander here.

Friedlander’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span – John Latta

Tim Atkins | Horace | O Books | 2007

Tonal mischief is the thing. “ODES II / 20”:

Although lack of theory prevents me from perceiving
The true nature of my oppression, Maecenas
Women of my age usually put on weight

This is the last time I appear in an avant-garde movie
What I’d really like to do is direct
My hands are shaking and my knees are weak

What, Jerry Lee Lewis meets Frantz Fanon? Atkins makes Horace’s six quatrains revert to six lines—brilliant move. Thus “Women of my age usually put on weight” descends fleetly out of: “Even now the rough skin is settling around / my ankles, and now above them I’ve become / a snow-white swan, and soft feathers are / emerging over my arms and shoulders.” (A. S. Kline’s version.)

Or Atkins Mauberleys up Horace (“Odes II / 28”) with a pinch of Housman: “Owing to a shortage of cocaine, / I turned my back on public life / And live in Market Harborough / With Robert Lowell’s widow, Caroline / / 50 Gauloises after Ezra / A pound of lip up fatty / And an anecdote featuring / Mein Kampf / / . . . / / I joined the school of quietude / & ended up with a beard, / Scones, towelling, and the flying day fixed. / Jeremy we could have done worse.” Smashing.

Stephen Collis | Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism  | ELS Editions | 2006

Put it amongst a select bunch: Zukofsky’s Bottom, Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, Howe’s own My Emily Dickinson, Williams’s In the American Grain, H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, Pound’s Spirit of Romance, and Duncan’s H.D. Book—all “poets’ attempts to write their response to other poets,” all “Janus-faced works—part exegesis, part original expression,” all “singularities”—works writ in a mode of what Collis calls “anarcho-scholasticism,” dabblers and enthusiasts working the archival holes, bridging the rifts. Such writing a kind of writing into the archive, the “world poem,” writing against the archive’s regulated keepers.

Howe, in “Melville’s Marginalia”: “I thought one way to write about a loved author would be to follow what trail he followed through words of others.” Eliding itinerancy (Howe: “I cling to you with all my divided attention. Itinerantly.”) and name dispersal (Collis: “If identity is fixed order can be imposed. Resistance to singleness is a resistance to the enclosure of capital and empire.”) Collis’s terrific phrase: “scattering identity to the four corners of the page”: “We are traveling as relations through words of others to the lost origins of our other selves.”

Collis, on the nefarious “reach” of notions of “enclosure and privatization” of the commons: “To shut up speech. To shut up documents in archive’s exclusion. To shut up land so that it many be ‘improved’ and become profitable. To shut up definition in dictionary versions.”

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton (Hammertown Book 2) | New Star Books | 2008

A poem or series of poems that here, in its second “installment”—the mind behind the writing is too restless and indefatigable and curious for the word—seems suddenly and absolutely capable of most defiantly rippling out through the various juggernauts of the twentieth century’s collapse and into the present to encompass the brute history and giddy trials of a whole finicky continent, and beyond. Culley explores recent (and not-so) American history with the tamp’d down precision of Lorine Niedecker, the rumpled reach of Charles Olson.

. . . where rising fuel costs
temporarily trump
the fear of creosote & coalsmoke

to re-enable the choking fogs
that had disappeared
with the industrial base—

that all of this is safely tracked
from space, indeed,
to be lost is ultimately

economic, those people
under the rubble assumed
their cell phones

would save them, an island
held in place
with mirrors, they

can hear you, they
can see you, they
just can’t help you.

Trevor Joyce | What’s in Store | The Gig / New Writers’ Press | 2007

Reading around in its strange and bold and marvelous pieces, pieces that seemingly sprout out of nowhere, that exhibit incredible variety, that often enough seem spoke by ancient voices up out of the boggy penetrable earth, I think how what one cannot speak of, one calls genius, or quotes too lengthily. Joyce’s range is phenomenal. The book opens with a lovely set of tiny things, the “Folk Songs from the Finno-Ugric and Turkic Languages,” work’d up out some rudimentary literal versions. Here’s one:

A birch tree
bends on the hill.
For a plough, girls chop
a handle.

That moustache,
is it your first?
For caps, girls braid
fine tassels.

Which seems to catch that particular moment of adolescence when the girls’re outstripping the boys and there’s a combo of taunting and impatience and self-reliance going on amongst them. Too, Joyce reworks a series he calls “Love Songs from a Dead Tongue,” out of fifteenth c. (and earlier) Irish originals, and a series of “some of the surviving poems by Juan Chi (pinyin Ruan Ji, 210-263).” The upshot of the threading through of translations and versions is a splendid estrangedness, where the alien flips into customary, and one’s happiest reading the song of a horse:

How happy the life of a horse! Hey!
Till the end when they mock him
and whip him and kick him,
and for Purgatory sell him to gypsies.

Thirty years I served one man,
hauled his harness like a colt,
now I’m old I’m down and done for,
corn-stalks hurt my gums.

Smiths and farriers rot in hell!
Your tackle was the death of me,
they broke my head, they stole my skin,
now sheep dogs sniff my meat.

Caroline Knox | Quaker Guns | Wave | 2008

The temptation to go off into completely giddy self-effacery and nonsense stands down against deeply-soak’d-in and censorious habit (in the case of most of us): Caroline Knox defeats just that with moments of vocalic sprezzatura shying into ur-language, or post-speech, or pre-speech. I suspect that she’ll eventually become a marker of the “era”—she is consistently restless, inventive, unalign’d. Two pieces in a contrapuntal (bilingual) face-off:

DREYKEN

Dreyken fabe, wer ingete dreyken
(dor droy rittavittastee orn canar).
Preb. Refen ingete inget. Preb.

Santona nofa Xeroc;
Ter quittz mivin movip.
Morm faria greel Florida
faria greel pandeck.

BATHROBES

We took our bathrobes ad stuck them in the washer.
(Ritta put hers in the blue laundry machine.)
I said, “Refen ingete inget.”

Nocturnes are hard to Xerox;
birds follow the glare of water.
We prepare tax returns for people in Florida,
People in Florida whom we have never met.

(Translated by the author and Carline Knox)

Carl Martin | Rogue Hemlocks | Fence Books | 2008

My immediate sense is that Martin’s earlier work (Genii Over Salzburg) owes less to Ashbery: immoderate, sui generis, awe-inducing. No matter: there’s plenty of heart-stopping mischief here, effects identifiably Martin’s own. “White Cargo”:

As the adverse account shoos flies
there are still remnants of the dynastic fan.
Golf balls are tinder in the muzzle of art.
Camels like glittering ashtrays in the barber’s mirror
sink to their knees with domino teeth:
an advert for a fleshy deck of cards. Only
a straight razor separates hell from marriage.
And if camels are marriageable they adorn
the stern of this ancient bateau-citerne: The captain
smiling like a mule. How fitting for the French coast!
Noël, old boy, pass the oxygen—would you?

The highly palpable sense that that is verging on a logical (paraphraseable) sense—is not “merely” surreal—puts it into the territory of the uncanny. (Surrealism rarely does so: in the hands of most of its adherents it becomes tedious, mechanical, predictably “zany.”) Look how he rewrites Stevens, comes out looking like the King of the Ghosts!

NO SOP, NO POSSUM, NO JIVE

We must pit ourselves brutally,
testing the tar and pitch
of immaculate forefathers. Ditto, etc.
X-temporizing, scrounging luxuriously
as we climb intricate cobs, nipples
and rosy vellums inscribed with an oriole.
I see no further than this, though
I’ve been lower, into hell’s orifice;
popped back in like a rabbit!

Chris Martin | American Music | Copper Canyon Press | 2007

Martin writes: “Words lead double lives: anonymously adrift and tethered to authorship,” admits to how “One of the things that opened the world of American Music to me was plagiarism, ” and provides a splendidly variously listing of some of the “voices in the chorus.” In spite of (or because of) the approach, Martin’s voice is remarkably present, sardonic, toying, sheepish, mischievous, full of exceeding wonder—indeed, the “chorus” barely impinges at all. The poems are models of velocity and containment—they fly short-linedly down the page, they scoop together a whole range of things, worlds of simultaneity.

. . . the way the boy
Impatiently cultivates
His inviolate sheen, combing

The grates with his eyes, his fists
Hidden but surely
Balled, not often am I

Prepared for violence, though I find it
Natural, in me as in
The world, and it remains

Revolting, the brief
Desire to trample something
Living, loving certain

Registers of collapse, tiny pockets
Bereft of grief, it reminds me how Henry
Miller spent three years

Inside a slide
Trombone and I have
Found myself too

Sane, and sullen, and suddenly
I feel just like Bonnie
Raitt on the cover of Streetlights

Her mouth unself-consciously
Open, a little
Question in her

Eyes as if
To say, “I am so
Full of this . . .

This . . . what is this?”

Alessandro Porco | Augustine in Carthage and Other Poems | ECW | 2008

At bottom, a sense of language in excess, skittering (gleefully) out of control, uncontainable, dictating its own terms: manhandling its handler, mocking, fun. Porco’s work isn’t all so neologistically “ripe” as “Tugnutt” is—though the beasts Lewis Carroll (“winkel and wame” bastard son of “gimble in the wabe”), John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, and James Joyce himself do hold heavy sway.

In Boschland
did Tugnutt knock nock,
and in hogeye bacchi
winkel and wame
the quimwig quimbush;
fuzzymuzzy yawns
of the city, world-wary—
too, too much so
to ginch, zither or futz
with any impression of dee-
light: jutsum just some,
I would weary, bid
thingamy, and good-blite!

[. . .]

Down
whelk zouzoune,
the Musée des Poontenanny
schmoya of Goya fl-
unked by
gammon of Lautreamont and
Matisse mapatasi,
twat blivvets—the like
of which dollup off cooch rides
whipped by gimcracks
oosy-doosy
Yum-yum, Pum-pum,
Spadger, and Stinkpot streets.

Elisabeth Workman | Opolis | tÿpøgrafika / Dusie Kollektiv 2007

There’s something otherworldly about it: thinnish canary-yellow paper, imprint’d in green inks, covers of identical stock—it’s audaciously flimsy, an honest pamphlet and shot through (accompanying each of the twenty-six prose-looking texts) with photographs, architectural, signage, Arabic, a Michelangelo David against a brick wall, minaret silhouettes, a Bush-vampire fanging Lady Liberty, pines, debris, print’d every which way, and bleeding spectacular ghost images “behind” each piece. Graphic work and images by Erik Brandt. An slippery (hid) alphabetical scheme to the doings, the pieces chameleon’d, one’s focus going in and out in the reading, emphases shifting. Here’s “Notion of Arts as Frivolity” (01:14):

mercenary, maverick, or missionary—one of the three. Apparently, aside from the alcoholic, oil-eyed narcissist who hasn’t left the sealed villa in three weeks, you should submit to classification. Live on the street with a concrete-slab vista, among amiable guards you always make a point of waving to and the mechanical gushes of water over plastic rocks, marking the entrance. Live as a number under the name, most likely a neologism of capitalist & eastern ideals. There’s the over-chlorinated pool and the water that induces balding. Live a refrigerated existence. On the other side of the walls, the nature of the shifting desert, snakes, and the yellow school bus full of indentured navvies lurk. The nefarious cranking and tapping of industrial machinery define nocturnal white noise. You find yourself wanting to complain about local ways though you’re not really certain how much is local or how much you’ve become a non sequitur

Everywhere in Workman’s piece is uncertainty, failure, blockage, threat. Opolis seems wholly and profoundly of its era (an “era” partially defined by statements like Workman’s “heaven is as hell is a hoax I decide so I make up multiple eras all at once and so overwhelming one wants to explode out of sheer inherited longing”). The unnamed global city consciousness-miasma we imperialists’ve inherited (made) versus the longing for elsewhere. Workman, in a lovely line (there are many): “we dream omnisciently of there, which oscillates between never and now, operatic and open-mouthed.”

C. D. Wright | Rising, Falling, Hovering | Copper Canyon Press | 2008

A polis norteamericano in crisis, a citizen unmoor’d, a calling out (in two senses—for aid, to accuse). The center of the book is largely split between the terrific title poem and its “Cont.,” its continuation. Essentially a fractured (and gut-wrenching, and maddening) narrative of the immoral and illegal preemptive “excursion” into Iraq, it is itself punctuated by “to be cont.,” by contradictory reversals (“Not so; instead”), by doubts as to the efficacy of writing, period (“Nary a death arrested nor a hair of a harm averted / by any scrawny farrago of letters” and “This is no time for poetry”).

. . . And so I have come to want them—
them being, those people, the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania,
I can’t even bear to say their [expletive] monosyllabic surnames
for dread of it calling up their bland [expletive] faces; yet I have come
to want them, almost obsessively come to want them, to exist in this dread:
for the nondescript car to pull up and disgorge the uniformed men
with their generic words tapped out of their well-drilled heads;
for the blunted bodies of this couple to be riveted to this dread,
for their blunted minds to stick on this expectation as if driven into
their bones of the natural order upended—that their twins are dead. No,
that their twins are blessed to give of themselves so selflessly in this struggle
for our way of life as it is so correctly, so vulgarly called; though I do not want
them to actually receive this news to actually have the twins be dead,
nor for their eyes to be blacked out, nor their earthly functions
be stopped, nor their blood to quit flowing to their temporal lobes,
but I sincerely do want this couple this very couple, the current occupants,
to exist solely, wholly in this dread. Because we do.

An [expletive] lovely and fastidious apery of the lingual buncombe of war and its masters, the “current occupants.” Wright assuming the debased lingo of el otro lado (“the other side,” another recurring phrase) in an attempt to “get through”—though recognizing, too, that any addressee’ll see in “current occupants” a sign of junk mail, and likely toss it. No doubt “Rising, Falling, Hovering” is the most ambitious U.S. anti-war poem of the twenty-first century.

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More John Latta here.

Attention Span – Allyssa Wolf

Alice Notley | In The Pines | Penguin | 2007

Lukas Moodysson | A Hole In My Heart | 2004

Lukas Moodysson | Lilja 4-Ever | 2002

Lukas Moodysson | Together | 2000

Detlev Claussen | Theodore W. Adorno: One Last Genius | Belknap | 2008

Enrique Martínez Celaya | NOMAD Series | Miami Art Museum | December 2007

Jennifer Moxley | The Middle Room | Subpress | 2007

Daniel Feinberg | Fortune Of Reversal | manuscript | 2008

Roberto Bolano | The Savage Detectives | FSG | 2007

Elisabeth Workman | Opolis | tÿpøgrafika | 2007

Nikki Sudden & Rowland S. Howard | “Debutante Blues” on Kiss You Kidnapped Charabanc LP | Creation | 1987

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Allyssa Wolf on Goodreads.