Archive for September 2011
Attention Span 2011 | Robin F. Brox
David Hadbawnik | Field Work: notes, songs, poems 1997-2010 | BlazeVOX | 2011
At times like being a voyeur behind the book’s eyes, sweet, honest, uncomfortable, surprising, moving between modes and geography and relationships, moving through time, a book to enjoy reading.
Italo Calvino, trans. Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, William Weaver | The Complete Cosmicomics | Penguin | 2002
Delightfully strange and oddly comforting, a yogic stretch for the imagination.
Tony Lopez | Only More So | Uno | 2011
As dense and challenging as ever, Lopez’s most recent work sustains itself longer, thick stripes of word culled from an intricate lace of sources, transmuted by a skilful, subtle hand.
JodiAnn Stevenson | The Procedure | March Street | 2006
The languages of legality and failed romance intermingle in this collection of hauntingly-worded pieces, heartstrings unraveling through divorce proceedings, bittersweet freedom of a particular failure.
Mark Rothko, ed. Miguel López-Remiro | Writings on Art | Yale | 2006
One of the most astonishing collections of critical statements about art I’ve ever encountered. “Address to Pratt Institute, 1958” is of particular note.
Audre Lorde | The Black Unicorn | Norton | 1978
It was time to reread Lorde: “I leave poems behind me / dropping them like dark seeds that / I will never harvest / that I will never mourn / if they are destroyed / they pay for a gift / I have not accepted.”—from “Touring”
D.H. Lawrence | The Plumed Serpent | Martin Secker | 1928
Perfectly brutal.
Gina Myers | A Model Year | Coconut | 2009
Compelling and without pretension, intelligent poems born from paying attention to one’s world and life.
Virginia Woolf | Mrs. Dalloway | Harcourt Brace | 1990
Energetic, human, as fresh as the flowers given Clarissa, time had come to revisit this text.
Herman Melville | Moby-Dick or The Whale | Penguin Classics | 1992
Gloriously tragic and often downright funny, it had been too long since I’d read what I most enjoy from Melville, better this fourth time through than I had dared hope!
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Robin F. Brox is the founder of Saucebox, a small feminist press & occasional performance series. Actor & technical director for Buffalo Poets Theater, recent work includes “When In Doubt, Cowboy Out,” from her process-derived poem A. Concoct Key Gush Run, available from Binge Press (2011), & Sure Thing, a full length collection of poems from BlazeVOX [books] (2011).
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Attention Span 2011 | Stacy Szymaszek
Etel Adnan | The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay | dOCUMENTA (13) | Hatje Cantz | 2011
Pier Paolo Pasolini, trans. Norman MacAfee & Craig Owens | “Observations on the Long Take” | October 13 | 1980
Robert Kelly | Uncertainties | Station Hill | 2011
George Albon | Ryman Room | Albion | 2011
Anne Waldman | The Iovis Trilogy | Coffee House | 2011
Roberto Bolano | Antwerp | New Directions | 2010
Gail Scott | The Obituary | Coach House | 2010
Donna J. Haraway | When Species Meet | U of Minnesota P | 2008
Edric Mesmer, ed. | Yellowfield Issues 1 & 2
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Stacy Szymaszek is Artistic Director at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. She is the author of Emptied of All Ships and Hyperglossia (both with Litmus Press). She is the editor of Gam, coeditor of Instance Press, and was one of the editors of the “Queering Language” issue of EOAGH.
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Attention Span 2011 | Kevin Killian
Martine Bellen | Ghosts! | Spuyten Duyvil | 2011
Martine Bellen is one of the poets I most often wish I had met; when I read her work I feel the thrill of making a new friend, someone just for me. Her new book Ghosts! begins with a sensational, almost flip title and never looks back. Sketched within three series of poems, a woman’s story reflects and refracts through the brackets of life and death, and the “story,” as I have called it, never manages to dry into any flat sort of wholeness. How to see her? It would be like defining what Ingrid Bergman was like through the six films she made with Rossellini. What happens in Ghosts! is, on the other hand, strikingly similar to what happens to Ingrid in Europa 51 and that one with George Sanders—we change, change utterly as the words mount up to our waists like dry leaves in a red country.
Gregg Biglieri | Little Richard the Second | Ugly Duckling | 2011
Ugly Duckling puts out some striking books and this one, without a spine or really much of anything holding it together except for a length of brown string and a trio of tiny bored holes, is one of the fairest. Biglieri’s poem is pretty short and is printed I think all on one side of a length of paper with two dozen folds in it. Every time you turn a page you’re conscious of the pages as uncut; squeeze them between your fingers and they balloon out, revealing blank folds underneath. The writing produces an uncanny, And Then There Were None feel of words eating themselves, disappearing before one’s eyes, often enough through a puns and anagrams approach Mel Taub himself might envy. Or “Captain Mnemo,” Biglieri’s mascot. “Hurt his iris/Hiss her ear.” Yes, it’s a short book, but humankind cannot stand much reality.
Brandon Brown | The Persians by Aeschylus | Displaced | 2011
Displaced Press from Michigan has put forward an awesome initiative, printing the first books of a handful of young American poets I’ve been following for some time. One of them is Brandon Brown, a figure on the San Francisco poetry scene whom I first met some years ago when I enlisted him to help me and Peter Gizzi and our work on collecting Jack Spicer’s poetry. Brown is a classicist and it shows up in his work to an almost irksome degree, but his book is a rousing reminder, not perhaps of the relevance of ancient Greek drama, but of the ways in which change is forever written into all things, a golden thread amid the dreck. I remember hearing about the poets’ production of The Persians, held outdoors at the Presidio, and I was actually present for a scene or two Brown delivered onstage at Timken Hall, where the parallels between the Persians of Aeschylus’ days, and the Iranians of ours, were made very clear through deft riffs of stagecraft, declamation, and an Olsonian take on the function of the city in poetry.
Stacy Doris| The Cake Part | Publication Studio | 2011
People know so little about the French revolution, but they do remember the cake part. Publication Studio is a sort of “print on demand” company based in Portland (Oregon) that can take on the most innovative and complicated sort of project, and has made a perfect match with Stacy Doris’ unique text application. Part found poem, part manifesto, part investigative poetry, and sometimes as silly as Ronald Firbank. In recent months she asked a whole bunch of poets and other friends to make little videos based on assigned parts of her book, so I got to know “mine” pretty well, and to launch the book she posted them all on her own Vimeo channel which please check out. This sort of history lesson is infectious, like a show and tell lesson combined with a trip in the Wayback Machine—there can be nothing, literally, more outlandish.
Jennifer Natalya Fink | Thirteen Fugues | Dark Coast | 2011
Fink is the veteran author of several books, but she keeps surprising the attentive reader. Her stories share textual strategies with prose poetry, woven together out of myriad weaves and looms, tying themselves together in what I, if I knew more about music, would ascribe to some sort of fugal structure. Here the stories slash prose passages accrete into what could almost be a novel in the hands of a lesser writer, and sometimes prose itself breaks down into the stronger and harsher mode of poetry itself, line breaks and all, when “Tanya,” Fink’s appealing and yet scary heroine, decides to stop making sense and to give her soul a little room to breathe. Fink ignores also the conventional geographies of writing, and her book transports itself with abandon from South America, to Canada, to the US suburbs of her deep affection.
Colleen Lookingbill | A Forgetting Of | Lyric& | 2011
Did you ever write something, almost a book’s worth of it, and then you put it away for one reason or another? Perhaps life intervened, perhaps something more interesting than life. In the gritty and determined world of A Forgetting Of, Colleen Lookingbill performs a complex and dangerous operation, that of reviving a forgotten body of poems. She had made a wonderful debut in the 1990s with her first book, Incognita, and then nothing. So much talent and grace, however, coupled with a health scare while she was still young, could not let the matter rest. From somewhere deep within, and accompanied by a suite of full color paintings very much in the Romantic vein of the poems, a book came to life, and a family of fans, at last, finds entertainment.
Deborah Meadows | Saccade Patterns | BlazeVOX | 2011
She has published ten books of poetry since 2003, and here comes an eleventh. I’m sure that, like Leslie Scalapino used to, she will forgive you if you haven’t read all of her oeuvre. (RIP Leslie!) Saccade Patterns are apparently the movements of your eyeballs in your heads, back and forth, up and down, the rotations eyes make continually until pattern recognition momentarily soothes that restless urge to know. Meadows has been good at evoking patterns (of loss, of recognition, of right and wrong) for a decade, and here she steps back from the powers of her own sight and applies what she’s learned to the social and political problems that engorge our times.
Jennifer Moxley | Coastal | The Song Cave | 2011
Steve, you thought you could box in Jennifer by referring to her then-ongoing long poem “Coastal” as “your 9/11 poem”? Ha ha, she responds with a quick twist of her poniard. But I sympathize with you because to all intents and purposes I agree a little. “Coastal” is a continuous unfolding of a book that contrasts the southern Maine of Moxley’s present surround, with the Southern California in which she grew up, and in the telling, Maine comes to stand in synecdochically for middle age itself, San Diego for youth. And the poem organizes itself along these lines (there’s also a James Schuyler/Rae Armantrout dialectic) until the artist reveals that despite obvious differences, the similarities that link worlds together—poetry and painting—the East and the West—the heterosexual and the lesbian—the past and the present—are more provocative, more enigmatic. I’m sure you were just testing this theory when you made your now famous faux pas.
Olumide Popoola | This Is Not About Sadness | Unrast Verlag | 2010
The reverberations of African revolution shake up a mixed neighborhood in a working class backwater of London. This is the first full-length book by the Nigerian-German author Olumide Popoola, published in English in Munster. Wait, is that the same as Munich? When “Olu” came to San Francisco recently, introduced to me and Bob Glück by UK novelist Shaun Levin and by Olu’s advisor the poet Tim Atkins, we had the feeling that a necessary voice was being heard, and that the world had expanded from within. “We don’t measure in impossibility/ in anguish or that which sliups/ through our hands,” writes Popoola. Two women, one old, the other young, meet in London—two different Africas in their pasts, and the secrets they have kept begin to break down under London’s weak and tenuous sun.
Jane Sprague, ed. | Imaginary Syllabi! | Palm Press | 2011
This has got to be the funnest book I’ve read in eons. Editor Sprague’s opening statement tells us that she has made up a book by multiple authors “that aims to collect writings which […] essentially challenge pedagogical strategies pursuant to the work of teaching writing and other disciplines.” The book has some utopian syllabi, but not all of them are as imaginary as others, and some have actually been taught in classes in college programs in official “and mongrel” schools. An expansiveness fills the volume, even when the courses offered have a touch of our 21st century despair to them; Sprague must have felt like, oh who was it put out that “curriculum of the soul” and assigned all his favorite poets to writer on all those topics in the 1970s? Anyhow I think you get the gist. OK, not all of the contributions are of equal value, but I can see myself as an eternal student making use of them all for my own edification. And if I ever teach a poetry course I’ll be thinking primarily not of my own students, but of how to make my syllabus thrilling enough to get into Sprague 2.0.
Nicholas James Whittington | Slough | Bird & Beckett | 2010
I read the whole book several times and only now, as I struggle to type out the author’s name and the name of his book for the demanding readers of “Attention Span” have I realized that the book is not called Slouch, but Slough. It is the sort of California-landscape poetry, honed and polished to a few memorable lines per page, that I think of as the province of sloughmaster Joseph Massey of Arcata, but no, in fact it is written by someone totally different, and someone with his own sort of dreamy and visionary consciousness, a man with more air in his slough, with more than a trace of Beat DNA in his blood. And Jabès too. It is a wellshaped book, not quite small enough to fit in your hip pocket, but you could slip it into a trenchcoat pocket without protest and with a certain synchronicity. “Tell me where you live,” Whittington writes, “light’s particles shall settle in/ troughs of your voice.” I’m saying he ain’t no slouch.
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Kevin Killian is a San Francisco writer His books include Bedrooms Have Windows, Shy, Little Men, Arctic Summer, Argento Series, I Cry Like a Baby, and Action Kylie. His new book of stories is called Impossible Princess (from City Lights Books).
Killian’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Paul Stephens
Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. | Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing | Northwestern | 2011
For me this was the year of the conceptual, as the following titles indicate.
Craig Dworkin | The Perverse Library | Information as Material | 2010
Use with caution: if you’re a small press bibliophile, this book may do serious damage to your book budget. This could be the most compelling survey to date of Anglo-American small press poetry publishing since 1970. Even if you don’t necessarily have a specialized interest in knowing precisely what the Constrained Balks Press of Toronto was publishing in 2002, you’ll enjoy The Perverse Library’s truly rad(ical) introduction.
Simon Morris | Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head | Information as Material | 2010
Much more is going on here than may at first appear. Encountering GIJKH sent me into an all-night typing frenzy, during which I wrote a twelve page critical account of the book in relation to the complex textual and legal histories of On the Road. And you thought On the Road was just a bestselling novel about homosocial desire…
Rachel Haidu | The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964-1976 | MIT | 2010
Everyone I know is either overemployed or underemployed, which makes this overview particularly timely. Here you will find an institutional critique of the post-Fordist art economy to last a lifetime.
Tan Lin | Various Cumbersome but Ingenious Titles | Various Presses | 2007-2011
Tan Lin may be our greatest living bard of the infosphere. He is so prodigious and so multimediatic that it would inimical to his project to name a single title. Insomnia and the Aunt (in a handsome chapbook edition) might be the best point of entry for non-professionals, but the many offshoots of the Heath […] and Seven Controlled Vocabularies projects are all worth a skim. If you’re un(der)employed, you might want to download online versions available at lulu.com or at Aphasic Letters.
Rob Fitterman | Now We Are Friends | Truck Books | 2010
So are we going to migrate to Google+? After already having migrated from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook? The coda in particular is an important contribution to the ongoing legacy of creep lit.
W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, eds. | Critical Terms for Media Studies | Chicago | 2010
Scholars and non-scholars alike will find this a compelling survey of new media. Don’t be deceived by the prosaic title: this is really a collection of deeply informative essays on all aspects of contemporary new media studies.
Marcus Boon | In Praise of Copying | Harvard | 2010
It’s difficult to keep up with the reams of new criticism devoted to copyright in relation to literature and the arts (Paul K. St. Amour’s exceptional Modernism and Copyright deserves special mention in this category). Boon tackles “the madness of modern, capitalist framings of property” head on. You can procure a free online copy at the Harvard University Press web site (which will look better than the versions you’ll find on library.nu or AAAAARG.org).
Philip E. Aarons and Andrew Roth, eds. | In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 | JRP Ringier | 2010
Literary journals could learn a lot from artists’ journals. This sumptuous collection will make your coffee table proud, as well as provide countless hours of delight and instruction.
M. NourbeSe Philip | Zong! | Wesleyan | 2008
This title briefly went out of print and jumped in price on Amazon, but fortunately it’s been reissued as an affordable paperback. No brief summary will do much to prepare you for this complex multi-generic work, which demonstrates how compelling the new conceptual/archival/procedural poetries can be in terms of content as well as form.
Ian Hamilton Finlay | Selections | California | 2011
Eagerly anticipated. Long overdue. In the meantime, I’m making due with the amazing (but out of print and expensive enough to merit inclusion in the Perverse Library) Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (MIT 1992).
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Paul Stephens‘s recent critical writing has appeared in Social Text, Rethinking Marxism, Open Letter and Postmodern Culture. He has just completed a book manuscript titled The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing. He lives in New York.
Stephens’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Vanessa Place
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Riccardo Boglione | RITMO D feeling the blanks | gegen | 2009
In a work of abstract literature Richard Kostelenatz would surely admire, in Ritmo D. Feeling the Blanks, Riccardo Boglione has stripped away every last bit of text from Giovanni Boccaccio’s contentious 14th-century body of 100 novellas, Decameron. All that remains is the rhythm, spacing and punctuation.
François Fonteneau | L’Ethique du silence. Wittgenstein et Lacan | Seuil | 1999
D’un côté, une éthique indicible (Wittgenstein), de l’autre, une éthique du mi-dire (Lacan). L’expérience éthique serait-elle liée à l’expérience de la limite dont le silence ferait partie ?
Marcel Proust, trans. Mark Treharne | The Guermantes Way | Viking | 2004
After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons.
Edgar Allen Poe | Poetry and Tales (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) | Library of America | 1984
Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym seems to me excellent art criticism and prototype for rigorous “non-site” investigations.
Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin, eds. | Against Expression | Northwestern | 2011
Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing.
Marjorie Perloff | Unoriginal Genius | Chicago | 2011
It is a virtue of Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius that it leaves nothing settled. Rather, it provokes new questions that help to unsettle modernism and its artistic aftermath, and itself performs an important arrière-garde re-animation of neglected or taken-for-granted avant-gardes.
JoAnn Wypijewski | Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art | California | 1998
Wypijewki and Nation art critic Arthur Danto explain well the context of Komar and Melamid’s unique project and chart its odd, zigzag path between comedy and seriousness. . . . An im-portant reference point on the map of late-20th-century taste
Eric Lott | Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class | Oxford | 1995
As readers we come to understand for the first time how blackface performance imagined and addressed a national community and we realize the extent to which we still live with this legacy.
Bruce Fink | The Lacanian Subject | Princeton | 1996
The Lacanian Subject not only provides an excellent introduction into the fundamental coordinates of Jacques Lacan’s conceptual network; it also proposes original solutions to (or at least clarifications of) some of the crucial dilemmas left open by Lacan’s work.
Andrea Fraser | Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser | MIT | 2007
A stunning book—Andrea Fraser turns the art museum inside out, time and again, in her incisive and mercilessly witty deconstructions. A rare combination of committed artistic practice working hand-in-hand with the insights of cultural theory.
Leo Steinberg | The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion | Chicago | 1997
After centuries of repression and censorship, the sexual component in thousands of revered icons of Christ is restored to visibility.
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Kenneth Goldsmith has called Vanessa Place’s work “arguably the most challenging, complex and controversial literature being written today.”
Place’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.
Written by Steve Evans
September 28, 2011 at 11:20 am
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with Andrea Fraser, Bruce Fink, Craig Dworkin, Edgar Allen Poe, Eric Lott, François Fonteneau, JoAnn Wypijewski, Kenneth Goldsmith, Leo Steinberg, Marcel Proust, Marjorie Perloff, Riccardo Boglione, Vanessa Place