Attention Span 2010 – Suzanne Stein

Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Charlotte Mandell | The Fall of Sleep | Fordham | 2009

“But whatever one’s age, no one enters sleep without some sort of lullaby. No one can do without being led along by a cadence one does not even perceive, since it is precisely the cadence of absence that penetrates presence, sometimes in one single movement—in one single push that suddenly sends the present floating alongside itself—sometimes at several times—in several successive waves, like a tide licking the sand and impregnating it a little further each time, depositing flakes of sleepy foam. Rocking movements put us to sleep because sleep in its essence is itself a rocking, not a stable, motionless state. Lullaby: one charms, one enchants, one puts mistrust to sleep before putting wakefulness itself to sleep, one gently guides to nowhere—”

Kevin Davies | Pause Button | Tsunami | 1992

What would it have been to have been myself and to have already have known this?

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia | The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy | Semiotext(e) | 2009

Bifo prescribes: more time for talking, traveling, reading, thinking, loving, eating, and dreaming, and less time spent killing ourselves and each other with overproduction and that horrible farce of the contemporary age: “connectivity”. Thumbs up.

Dana Ward | Typing “Wild Speech” | Summer BF Press | 2010

the tender way is wilder than

Robert Glück | reading from About Ed (ms) | The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand | October 18, 2009

Audiences never give standing ovations at poetry readings, not in the Bay Area anyway that I’ve ever seen, but on this evening Bob received the energetic equivalent of that just walking up to the mic. He read two pieces from a manuscript in progress, About Ed. The first piece would be very short, he let us know, as the second was to be very long. The short piece was called “Ed’s First Sexual Experience (Not Counting His Dad)”, and it involved Ed, Ed’s older lover, an acid (mushroom?) trip, a tree house, and an unexpected bit of coprophilia. This story from the first line had the crowded room laughing—not a little bit laughing, but kind of convulsively, hysterically laughing, embarrassedly laughing, laughing a lot, sweating with laughter, laughing ourselves to tears. The room felt warm, open, rowdy, and there were so many of us in it. What I recall is that the second part, “The Moon is Brighter than the Sun”, was about the death of Ed, and also about the breakup of Bob and Ed. The detail I remember best is that there’s an apartment that Ed moves in to, in the adjacent-to-Castro area, and Bob describes the location of the apartment extensively, what the neighborhood was like then and what it is like to drive past it now, and in the story he and Ed paint the walls of that apartment together, in the middle of their break-up, and maybe they fought a lot or didn’t fight a lot while doing that? Why do breakups so often also involve extreme acts of domesticity? During the breakup, in the story, we’re also in the middle of Ed’s death, the death which occurs much later, and Bob describes the loss of Ed’s death as also the intolerable revisiting of the loss of breaking up. As giddy as the room was during the first story, it was motionless during the second. That piece did go on a very long time, I remember, there was a part about Bob driving out to the beach in the story, or to the Golden Gate Bridge? to scatter Ed’s ashes? Am I misremembering? I want it to be that Bob drove to the Sutro Baths, where I’ve spent a lot of time living & mourning, but I don’t think that’s what happened. I really want to recount something else here too, and this is the way we, the audience, a community of friends and lovers, exes, enemies, “frenemies”, were held so entirely in the palm of the hand of this story of Bob’s. A lot of us were crying in the room that night. Is that stupid to relate? People I’ve been brutal or bitter enough to think had no capacity left for tears or sorrow were weeping openly. We’ve all lost someone, and reliving that loss, or projecting yourself into the inescapable future and feeling it, fucking awful. But being alive and feeling it while breathing and listening, in a room full of others, to Bob Glück—

Brandon Brown | Tooth Fairy; The Orgy; Your Mom’s a Falconress & Other Poems | all self-published | 2009-2010

Trapped in a humanitarian corridor, ordering
the end of the orgy. Ids in their
ordure. Hair odor in
the hallway. My heart struggles.
It’s big as a chard, but it never learns.
Blood makes us pet in the alley
behind the petting gallery. I love
sleep. I love eat. I love the perpendicular
orgy that makes my fingers (…etc)

Chris Kraus | I LOVE DICK | Semiotext(e) | 1997

“Dear Dick, I’m wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the 70s has been read only as ‘collaborative’ and ‘feminist’. The Zurich Dadaists worked together too but they were geniuses + had names.”

“I realized the only thing I had to offer was my specificity”

Plus, what’s that bit about how can a straight woman achieve every bit of outness as out, articulated gay pride? Thanks to Stephanie Young for running home after the mani/pedi to fetch the book and bring it back to me as a loan. And thanks again to Chris Kraus & I Love Dick for, on top of everything else, the introduction to the artist Hannah Wilke.

Erika Staiti | Erika has title anxiety until finished and these are unfinished writings | 2009-2010

I love a work, a practice, a thought held open as long as possible, and yet patient and persistent, and these atmospheric performative drafts enact that.

T.J. Clark | The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing | Yale | 2006

Clark spent two months at the Getty looking at two works by 17c painter Nicolas Poussin: Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. The subtitle of the book is sort of an egregious caveat: it seems to mean mainly that if you’re a famous art historian you can assert a pass on publishing your diary as crit and your colleagues have to swallow it, but who cares what they think? This was the greatest pleasure of my winter furlough from work, and I was grateful for so attentive a tour of just two paintings. The reproductions are wonderful, and multiple, and the opportunity to listen in on an extended meditation not only on the physical, visual, textual, historic, and metaphoric but also the locally atmospheric and the personally intimate and socially reflective (to the contemporary) felt rare. The writer begins this meditation quoting Poussin: “I who make a profession of mute things”

YouTube | has been | my primary text | of FY10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iF-zSPHwuM

More Suzanne Stein here. Her Attention Span for 2009. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Eric Baus

Fred Moten | B Jenkins | Duke | 2010

“come from some of everywhere, somewhere so deep that some of everywhere come with you. to become for our occult belongings, // worldly in that other way”

Dorothea Lasky | Black Life | Wave | 2010

“You are reading the work of a great poet, possibly one of the greatest ones of your time. If I am standing in from of you right now, you are listening to the voice of one of the greatest poets of your time.”

Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: A Project For Future Children | Kelsey St. | 2009

“I am not interested in animals. Return to the work as memory. Say it is a wolf becoming a girl, the action in reverse.”

Tan Lin | Seven Controlled Vocabularies | Wesleyan | 2010

“People are basically animals that know how to read.”

Steven Zultanski | Pad | Book Thug | 2010

“My dick cannot lift the walls. My dick cannot lift the ceiling. My dick cannot lift the floor.”

Will Alexander | The Sri Lankan Loxodrome | New Directions | 2010

“such swans / staggered by microbial reasoning / their aggressive nests / anatomical with anomaly”

Paul Killebrew | Flowers | Canarium | 2010

“It’s better than Atlanta, where they treat people like cars / in a city that combines the rustic elegance of Newark / with the quiet dignity of a beer bong.”

Edouard Glissant, trans. Nathalie Stephens | Poetic Intention | Nightboat | 2010

“When the poet travels to the ends where there is no country, he opens with the more deserved relation, in that space of an absolute elsewhere in which each can attempt to reach him.”

Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010

“Say I’m a beautiful animal who has mastered laziness / In reddened clearing in the occidental forest / In the album / Purse of goddess clicking / I long to see how it will continue to behave”

Norma Cole | Where Shadows Will | City Lights | 2009

“Here the subject thinks ‘there could be flowers’ or ‘the water was a bit disturbed when the ring fell in.’ All that, painted from said things, pleases it.”

More Eric Baus here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Barbara Jane Reyes

alurista | Tunaluna | Aztlan Libre | 2010
Gizelle Gajelonia | Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Bus | Tinfish | 2010
Kristin Naca | Bird Eating Bird | Harper Perennial | 2009
Michael Luis Medrano | Born in the Cavity of Sunsets | Bilingual | 2009

This is a super masculine, justifiably angry collection of poems about growing up in a culture of institutional violence. Medrano shines when he allows his poetic speaker even the slightest bit of vulnerability, where his words and tone become personal and tender. It’s when he strips the poems of their tough guy posturing that we can really appreciate his music.

J. Michael Martinez | Heredities: Poems | Louisiana State UP | 2010

This book is challenging the way I think of writing histories of conquest and imperialism (both of which are staples in my own work) in poetry. Martinez balances “experimentalism” and Latinidad without objectifying either, which proves to me that we can still be “ethnic” poets writing about our grandmothers without falling victim to trope.

John Murillo | Up Jump the Boogie | Cypher | 2010

I appreciate Murillo committing to a tradition of Hip-hop, and expanding that tradition to include poetic formalism. “Ode to the Crossfader,” on the page communicates what I’ve heard in live reading, and/or in live reading really communicates what is on the page, clipped lines, caesurae and all. It appropriately opens Up Jump the Boogie; it is an invocation to the poet’s muse, and his ars poetica. Yes, let Hip-hop poetics also call upon its classical muses; think of this poetry as accomplishing what visual artist Kehinda Wiley does on canvas. You can call it much needed appropriation, or even reappropriation of the “master’s tools.” I think of it simply as remix.

Rachel McKibbens | Pink Elephant | Cypher | 2009

Another fantastic offering from Cypher Books, which has fast become one of my favorite indie poetry publishers. I can only hope to see more and more new titles from them. What I enjoy about Rachel McKibbens is the well-crafted, no holds barred fierceness of her confessions, catharses, and epiphanies. McKibbens’s lovely and serrated debut collection, Pink Elephant, reminds us why poetry as testimony is so necessary. The ex-punk rock chola and mother of five, 2009 Women’s Individual World Poetry Slam champion writes about abandonment and abuse in stark, startling language and well-wrought fable, delivered in well-paced lines, laying bare the history of a woman who’s “fed [her] body to the hungry for years.”

Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor | Pause Mid-Flight | Surrounding Sky Studio | 2010

Storyteller and poet Mabanglo-Mayor’s collection contains a chapbook and CD. Her poems are incantation and spellcasting, a nice synthesis of memory, body politics, Philippine and Pacific Northwest geography and mythology.

Joseph Bruchac | Above the Line | West End | 2003

One of the more memorable poems in this collection is the one in which Bruchac references that X-Files episode—an Area 51 experiment causes a US Air Force pilot and an old Hopi woman to switch bodies, and the front half of a gila monster to be encased in a stone. This poem verges on rant (he almost loses his cool and poetic poise), and so I mention it here, so that we can think of one aspect of Bruchac’s work, his writing against and pointedly calling out USA mainstream pop culture use of Native Americans. We still equate the people with scenery and wildlife.

Manuel Maples Arce | City: A Bolshevik Superpoem in 5 Cantos | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2010

Reading Arce’s City: Bolshevik Superpoem in 5 Cantos, I can’t help but think Whitman, and Ginsberg, though I understand this poem was originally published in 1924, so it predates Ginsberg. Of course, I also think of Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, obviously because Arce wrote the poem in Spanish, but mostly for the kind of surreal bustling and teeming masses (though not so much vomitous masses). Still, I think of the poet (Arce, Lorca, Whitman, Ginsberg) holding his gaze primarily at (literal and figurative) ground level, an expansive, panoramic gaze in terms of who inhabits the city’s streets, who makes the city work.

Reginald Dwayne Betts | Shahid Reads His Own Palm | Alice James | 2010

Just read this book in one sitting. These are poems from the point of view of an incarcerated African American man, the monotony and despair of passing time, an elaboration of the culture of the “inside,” of survival, negotiation, regret, contrition. This book confirms for me that it is possible for poetry to be masculine and even muscular, but not fall into the territory of machismo. The poems are honest and heavy without being heavy-handed and dramatic. The “I” of these poems I appreciate for his emotionally balanced tone, so as not to fetishize (glorify or denigrate) the incarcerated, or give us spectacle and sentimentality. The words which compose these lines are well-considered. The lines which compose these poems are clean, even lithe. They give space, or open themselves up to the reader without pandering or relying on cliché.

I realize that it becomes easy to enter any poem or body of poems about subject matter with which I am unfamiliar, when the poems open themselves, give us readers space to actually read them.

I was just talking the other day about poetry collections that suffocate, as if I am trapped in a too-warm, unventilated room, and someone’s perfume is so strong it’s weighing down my lungs with its fragrance. It’s too much, and if I were elsewhere, a ventilated or open air space, I could appreciate how lovely the fragrance is.

I bring this up now just to say that Dwayne’s collection is the opposite of this. Perhaps that’s ironic, given the potential suffocation of the jail cell which I think he conveys well throughout the collection. Still, there’s that infernally slow passage of time, which I think necessitates the precision of word choice, punctuation, and line break, and which I think are very well-handled.

More Barbara Jane Reyes here. Her Attention Span for 2009. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Tara Betts

Jericho Brown | Please | New Issues Poetry & Prose | 2008

Christian A. Campbell | Running the Dusk | Peepal Tree | 2010

Erica Fabri | The Dialect of A Skirt | Hanging Loose | 2010

Ruth Forman | Prayers Like Shoes | Whit | 2009

Aracelis Girmay | Teeth | Curbstone  | 2007

Randall Horton | The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street | Main Street Rag | 2009

Douglas Kearney | The Black Automaton | Fence | 2009

Rachel McKibbens | Pink Elephant | Cypher | 2009

Bianca Spriggs | Kaffir Lily | Wind Publications | 2010

Lyrae Van Clief Stefanon | ]Open Interval[ | U of Pittsburgh P | 2009

Crystal Williams | Tangled Tongues | Lotus | 2009

More Tara Betts here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Pattie McCarthy

Anselm Berrigan | Free Cell | City Lights | 2009

“I do take relentless / as a compliment. All this work / dealing with making it work.”

Allison Cobb | Green-Wood | Factory School | 2010

“But every age has its ghosts, a kind of rage. The language.” “The word ‘forest’ itself forms a fence.”

CA Conrad & Frank Sherlock | The City Real & Imagined | Factory School | 2010

“‘Of / course they talk about genocide. / They’re Polish.’ The show ends. / Everything burns. A new set / is built for tomorrow.”

Sarah Dowling | Security Posture | Snare | 2009

“Makes a movement of hand toward // clothing that intervenes / and conforms exactly.”

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

“Reduplicate the awkwardness. // If given text in a dream, try extra hard to read it.”

Susan Howe | Poems Found in a Pioneer Museum | Coracle | 2009

“It was the only thing she had left / from the journey across.”

Chris McCreary | Undone: a fakebook | furniture | 2010

“You recover / from upside // down & demand a bigger / engine.”

Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey | 2009

“Up nursing       then make tea / the word war is far”

Lisa Robertson | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House | 2009

“And you are a rare modern painting in the grand salon / And you are a wall of earth.”

Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | Tinfish | 2010

“Inexpert, I / investigate // Inexpert, I / walk, and walk.”

Kevin Varrone | g-point almanac: Passyunk Lost | Ugly Duckling | 2010

“she said she grew up // when dodos were ubiquitous, / when snyder avenue was rome”

Karen Weiser | To Light Out | Ugly Duckling | 2010

“the chapel of a bird’s body / is any body / breathing with ink”

More Pattie McCarthy here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Cathy Wagner

Aaron Kunin | The Sore Throat | Fence | 2010

Radical constraint. Self-reflexive to the point of wilderness.

Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey | 2009

Technique!

Laynie Browne | The Desires of Letters | Counterpath | 2010

You don’t go to poetry for wisdom? When it’s funny? And formally brilliant? And aware that tradition will stick its nose in? So it picks that nose and that pocket?

Stephen Rodefer | Call It Thought | Carcanet | 2008

“Then I stand up on my hassock and say sing that, / It is not the business of poetry to be anything.” Astonishing playful poetic know-how flung around as if it might hurt somebody. Call it ambulance.

Andrea Brady | Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination | Krupskaya | 2010

Brave and erudite. Documentary precision, passionate correlation. How do we make war out of ourselves? “What would make you throw yourself out?”

Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008

Iteration strummed to song. Say it again, Ted.

Brenda Iijima | If Not Metamorphic | Ahsahta | 2010

It’s trying to be adequate to the bio-crisis. Formally ambitious, absurdly sane.

Lance Phillips | These Indicium Tales | Ahsahta | 2010

Visceral detail: a phenomenology. “One purses fingers and lips to form a membrane.”

Akilah Oliver | A Toast in the House of Friends | Coffee House | 2009

Everything I want to quote from this book feels irritatingly depressurized when extracted from its spinning, oblique, humorous gravitas, but let’s try “this is a happy story but first i want to tell you about the shape of the incredible sadness. a porn movie you volunteer for. unpaid. untended. the sadness has that shape.”

Ara Shirinyan | Your Country is Great: Afghanistan–Guyana | Futurepoem | 2008

Funny as a crutch. As they say.

Daniel Kane | We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry | Iowa | 2009

Fascinating on visionary consciousness, formal innovation, and the mutually influential connections between Duncan, O’Hara, Ashbery, Ginsberg, others and radical postwar filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Alfred Leslie, Stan Brakhage, others.

More Cathy Wagner here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Rodney Koeneke

Lauren Shufran | The Birds | self-published | 2010

“half Punkish ideology, half ludicrous athleticism,” all sleek Greek comic fronting “During Hella Restless Times.”

Bruce Boone | Century of Clouds | Nightboat Books | 2009

Served up last century, lost through the clouds, spiked in the now for the win.

Dana Ward | Typing Wild Speech | Summer BF Press | 2010

Lazarus reborn on Christmas as Ian Curtis.

Lauren Levin, Catherine Meng & Jared Stanley, eds. | Mrs. Maybe | 2010

What Timberlake did to sexy the Mrs. does maybe to staples.

Anselm Berrigan | Free Cell | City Lights | 2009

The socius blown through poet & getting its rhetoric high.

Ariana Reines going to Haiti | Blog of Ariana Reines | 2010

Poetics rethunk via contrails, tap taps, feet.

Brandon Downing | Lake Antiquity | Fence Books | 2009

History bending its head feelingfully to meticulously whacked lithography.

Sam Lohmann, ed. | Peaches and Bats | 2010

The regional conceived as planisphere.

Brandon Brown | Wondrous Things I Have Seen | Mitzvah Chaps | 2010

Latest stop on BB’s dromedary progress from strength to strength to strength.

Sara Larsen & David Brazil, eds. | Try! | 2010

We’re still having fun, and you’re still the one.

Lindsay Hill | The Empty Quarter | Singing Horse Press | forthcoming

Mauritania’s sand in metaphor creep to everything.

More Rodney Koeneke here.  His Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2006. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Philip Metres

What drives my list this year is a tug between poetic durability and the need for a picture of the contemporary moment; in rare occasions, these two aspects dovetail beautifully.

Pablo Neruda | The Poetry of Pablo Neruda | FSG | 2003

What is there to say, except that I was a little embarrassed to have taken so long to read one of the modern masters, and much relieved to find his voluminous work worth the long haul.

Robert Hass | The Apple Trees at Olema: Selected Poems | Ecco | 2010

Hass remains one of my favorite contemporary poets, partly because his poems are at once approachable and resistant to singular readings. His concerns frequently overlap with the tough thinking of avant-gardists, but his poems have a luxuriousness to them that suggest an epicure with a slightly-guilty conscience. I re-read “Museum,” a prose poem that describes a couple with a sleeping baby sitting in a museum café, surrounded by pictures of suffering by Kathe Kollwitz, in which a kind of symphony of everyday bourgeois life comes into being. Many years ago, the poem inflamed my imagination. Then, years later, when I returned to it, I didn’t feel that it earned its ending. This time, a parent now, I found the poem open itself again to me. His poems have that kind of strange irreducible endurance about them.

VA | Split This Rock Festival | Washington, DC | 2010

Props to Sarah Browning and her Split This Rock crew (of which there are numerous others!) for hosting this conference, which brought together poets involved in social change. Their mission is “to celebrate the poetry of witness and provocation being written, published, and performed in the United States today, and to call poets to a greater role in public life and to equip them with the tools they need to be effective advocates in their communities and in the nation.”  I felt very much at home among these poets, who included: Chris Abani, Lillian Allen, Sinan Antoon, Francisco Aragón, Jan Beatty, Martha Collins, Cornelius Eady, Martín Espada, Andrea Gibson, Allison Hedge Coke, Natalie Illum, Fady Joudah, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Richard McCann, Jeffrey McDaniel, Lenelle Moïse, Nancy Morejón, Mark Nowak, Wang Ping, Patricia Smith, Arthur Sze, Quincy Troupe, and the Busboys and Poets Poets-in-Residence: Holly Bass, Beny Blaq, and Derrick Weston Brown. A pretty big tent.

The Book of Isaiah | Isaiah | various translations | various publication dates

He shall strike the ruthless
With the rod of his mouth
And with the breath of his lips
He shall slay the wicked.

I keep finding myself going back to the Bible as a resource; there’s something about the authority and vision of the prophets, Isaiah in particular, that I miss in contemporary poetry and modern life.

Rachel Zolf | Neighbour Procedure | Coach House | 2010

This intriguingly rendered, philosophically challenging book brings investigative poetics to bear on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I first learned of Rachel Zolf from her XCP essay, “A Tenuous We: Writing As Not Knowing,” about learning Arabic and Hebrew—in order to look for convergences in the languages and to speak the Arabic names that comprise one of the pieces of this book. The first section is about the occupation, enacting a grieving over the other, and attacking Zionist privilege and blindness. The title poem is stunning, bringing to bear different voices who play roles in a “neighbour procedure”—that name for the IDF’s use of a neighbor as a human shield or their house to enter another. Later sections show points of contact between Arabic and Hebrew, employ variant translations of Quranic verses, collage various news sources around a target X.

VA | RAWI Conference | University of Michigan | 2010

The Radius of Arab American Writers conference brought together people from around the country and world to Ann Arbor to present and read and dance over the texts that we write and read and write about; my conference began when I carpooled from Ohio with Kazim Ali, the first of a long series of conversations that reminded me how many good writers face the same dilemmas that I face, but each in their own way.

Mark Doty | Fire to Fire: Selected Poems | HarperPerennial | 2008

“What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?”

Khaled Mattawa | Tocqueville | New Issues | 2009

A brilliant book that situates itself on the fault lines of empire, the most experimental of this lyrical poet’s oeuvre; the title poem is a tour de force of collage and testimony.

Tony Barnstone | Tongue of War | BkMk Press | 2009

A strange but compelling book, which attempts to answer in the affirmative: can one write a series of sonnets that illuminates various voices—from p.o.w’s to Hiroshima survivors—in the unspeakable Pacific part of the Second World War?

Elena Fanailova | The Russian Version | Ugly Duckling | 2009

What Sergey Gandlevsky did for Russian poetry in the late 1970s and 1980s, Fanailova does for the 1990s and 2000s; a vigorous, richly allusive, and often raw exploration of Russian life.

More Philip Metres here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Michael Scharf

Adil Jussawalla | New Poems | Almost Island | 2009

“Your future’s got nothing to do with what’s happening to me.”

Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, Barry R. Weingast | Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History | Cambridge | 2009

Reading with this and this, and getting a sinking feeling c. 2000. Waiting for this on inter-library loan. Still haven’t read this.

Jeffrey Jullich | Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis | Litmus | 2010
Stacy Szymaszek | Autoportraits | omg! | 2008
Brandon Downing | Lake Antiquity | Fence | 2009

All consuming likenesses.

Randy Allen Harris | The Linguistics Wars | Oxford | 1995
Geoffrey K. Pullum | “The Evolution of Model-Theoretic Frameworks in Linguistics” | Posted version (pdf) | 2007
Geoffrey K. Pullum | “Computational Linguistics and Generative Linguistics: The Triumph of Hope over Experience” | Posted version (pdf) | 2009

A version of the book could be the basis for the perfect 20^th century American linguistics course, but as is it’s a little too deliciously disinterested. The papers are the ripostal P.S.

Laura Moriarty | A Tonalist | Nightboat | 2010

Summative, and summoning. Ne plus ultra.

Martin Amis | Money: A Suicide Note | Jonathan Cape | 1984
Dennis Johnson | The Stars at Noon | Knopf | 1986

Plus ça change (et je vous remerci Jonny & Joshua).

Rachel Zolf | “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer” | Zinc Bar | 2010

Reveals a ground of contestation, a way in, that was not there before.

Tan Lin | Heath | Zasterle | 2008

A true and beautiful account (sauf le dig à cet endroit là) of recent forms of attention.

More Michael Scharf here. His Attention Span for 2009 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – David Dowker

Will Alexander | The Sri Lankan Loxodrome | New Directions | 2009

Laynie Browne | The Desires of Letters | Counterpath | 2010

Mark Goldstein | Tracelanguage | BookThug | 2010

Karen Mac Cormack | Tale Light | BookThug / West House | 2010

Camille Martin | Sonnets | Shearsman | 2010

Steve McCaffery | Verse and Worse | Wilfrid Laurier University | 2010

Laura Moriarty | A Tonalist | Nightboat | 2010

Alice Notley | Reason and Other Women | Chax | 2010

Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010

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

Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light | Station Hill | 2010

More David Dowker here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to directory.