Third Factory/Notes to Poetry

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Archive for the ‘Commented List’ Category

Attention Span – Marie Buck

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Helen Adam, ed. Kristin Prevallet | A Helen Adam Reader | National Poetry Foundation | 2007

Jules Boykoff | The Slow Motion Underneath | The Dusie Kollektiv | 2007

If you can’t buy a hardcopy, you can download Boykoff’s poems here.

Martha Dandridge Custis, Lawrence Giffin, eds. | Comment is Free, Vol. 1: Participatory Politics for a New Age | Lil’ Norton | 2008

Jean Day | Odes & Otium | Adventures in Poetry | 2006

Johanna Drucker | Night Crawlers on the Web | Granary | 2001

Mina Loy, ed. Roger L. Conover | The last lunar Baedeker | Jargon Society | 1982

Make sure to get the 1982 edition, not the more recent (which has the same editor and is titled nearly the same thing). The 1982 edition is considerably bigger, for one. (You may need to go to a really good library to find it.)

K. Silem Mohammad | Breathalyzer | Edge | 2008

Gabriel Pomerand, trans. Michael Kasper and Bhamati Viswanathan | Saint Ghetto of the Loans: Grimoire | Ugly Duckling | 2006

Leslie Scalapino | That They Were at the Beach—Aelotropic Series | North Point | 1985

Rod Smith | Deed | Iowa | 2007

Hannah Weiner, ed. Patrick F. Durgin | Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Kenning | 2006

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More Marie Buck here.

Attention Span – Elizabeth Treadwell

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Sarah Vap | Dummy Fire | Saturnalia | 2007

“Sitting around in paper gowns, in deep study.”

This book twirls faithfully its own slippy vernac.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson | Collected Poems | Shearsman | 2008

“Folded & re/folded the/map of the/town is pass/ed through/our lives/& hands ac/ross the table.”

A conjure board for the recent nearby.

Kim Hyesoon, trans. Don Mee Choi | Mommy Must Be A Fountain of Feathers | Action | 2008

“she hammers away till the keyboard is bloodied”

“I want to shove a finger into the silence and make it vomit.”

Etel Adnan | In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country | City Lights | 2005

“There should be only one school, the one where you learn the future…without even any students. Located in the guts of the species.”

Ines Hernandez-Avila, ed. | Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representations | Altamira | 2005

“This is not a treaty!”

Myung Mi Kim | Under Flag | Kelsey St | 1991

“These men these women chant and chant”

Rereading in anticipation of her new book Penury. As Sarah Anne Cox said to me recently, “it’s hard to find something that truly moves you.”

Diane Glancy | Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears | Harcourt Brace | 1996

Rereading. A recent article in the New Yorker, mired per usual in the vast inaccuracy of the ruling class, jokingly compared a boycott of the Beijing Olympics on account of Tibet to a boycott of those in Salt Lake City on account of the Cherokee. I wish more people would read this luminous, frightening, deeply informative book, which to me has an affinity with Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Christian Wiman, ed. | Poetry: the Translation Issue | Poetry Foundation | April 2008

The first issue I’d read. I liked it.

Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin | 2007

Sarah Anne Cox | Truancy | Dusie | 2007

VA | board books, picture books, & chapter books | various | various

I could live without some of the tropes, others I probably could not.

Caroline Bergvall & C.S. Giscombe | Reading at Small Press Traffic | November 2008

I am eagerly awaiting this event.

Yedda Morrison | girl scout nation| Displaced | 2008

“and yet/a doe”

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More Elizabeth Treadwell here.

Attention Span – Simon Schuchat

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Tony Towle | Winter Journey | Hanging Loose | 2008

The romantic temperment, tempered by time, cool and classical.

James Church | Corpse in the Koryo | St Martins | 2007

North Korean detective Inspector O solves the mysteries of the universe.

Jack Spicer | My Vocabulary Did this to me | Wesleyan | 2008

All of me, why not take all of me!

Paul Clark | The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History | Cambridge | 2008

An account, not of the politics, but of the culture—how those model operas were collectively created, what happened to painting, what about the movies—sympathetic and brilliant.

August Kleinzahler | Sleeping it off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected | FSG | 2008

The tough guy, a guilty pleasure.

Susan Naquin | Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400-1900 | California | 2000

A beautiful, granular history of the celestial capital when it was still itself, from the Yongle Emperor to the Boxers.

Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | Subpress | 2007

Lovely music of what happens, gracefully.

Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin | 2007

The American sound, clear and chill—need I explain?

Stephen Owen | The Late Tang: Poetry of the mid-9th century | Harvard East Asian Monographs | 2007

Belated companion to his high Tang masterwork, fully its equal—what you need on Li Shangyin, Du Mu, Bo Juyi, and the milieu.

Der Nister | The Family Mashber | New York Review Books Classics | 2008

Magic socialist realism in the shetl of Berdichev.

Ron Padgett | How to Be Perfect | Coffee House | 2007

As is.

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More Simon Schuchat here.

Attention Span – Mark Truscott

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Laynie Browne | Daily Sonnets | Counterpath Press | 2007

Courageously and delightfully open.

Donato Mancini | Hell Passport No. 22 | Perro Verlag | 2007

Like much of Mancini’s work, this circuitry of messy tracings forces us to wonder not just how we read but what reading might be.

Carl Andre | Cuts: Texts 1959-2004 | MIT | 2005

I’m not too hot on Andre’s poetry, but I suspect pieces such as “Anaxial Symmetry” and “The Dialectic Between Two States” will keep me going for years.

Aram Saroyan | Collected Minimal Poems | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2007

Not only a music heard, but seen.

Derek Beaulieu | Flatland | Information as Material | 2007

Bullseye.

Jessica Wyman, ed. | Pro Forma: Language/Text/Visual Art | YYZBooks | 2007

Simon Glass’s annotated translation of Genesis 11:1-9 is worth the price of admission on its own.

Jordan Scott | blert | Coach House | 2008

I haven’t actually read this for a little while, but it was finally published in the spring. Go read it.

Trevor Joyce | What’s in Store | NWP & The Gig | 2007

This year’s discovery. Thanks, Nate.

Angela Carr | Ropewalk | Snare | 2006

Reads a bit like a grad school creative thesis, which it is, but glimmers dazzle.

Clint Burnham | Smoke Show | Arsenal Pulp Press | 2005

Holy shit.

Stephen Collis | Phyllis Webb and the Common Good: Poetry/Anarchy/Abstraction | Talonbooks | 2007

An illuminating reaquaintance with an important foremother. I loved The Commons too.

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More Mark Truscott here.

Attention Span – Thomas Devaney

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Dan Machlin | Dear Body | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2007

A book I continue to read and recommend.

George Oppen, ed. Stephen Cope | George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2007

“Lay it on the line—” (page 203).

Bill Berkson & Colter Jacobsen | Bill | Gallery 16 Editions | 2008

Bill feels like a lost classic. Jacobsen’s drawings are beautiful. The book reads like a dream. Berkson culled the text from a juvenile detective novel. From Bill: “War broke out the following day, as agreed.”

Prageeta Sharma | Infamous Landscapes | Fence | 2007

“And I still remain difficult when it is advantageous.” No doubt—Sharma has found her register: it’s daring, brutal, and always, a pleasure. Infamous Landscapes breaks new ground for Sharma and clears the air a bit.

Alan Filreis | Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960 |  North Carolina | 2008

Yes, it’s a serious historical book, a major book, but Filreis’s personal voice and deep connections to mid-century modernism show how many formal concerns of the work were linked to progressive politics; it is an untold history of the so-called language/nature problem (and the reactions to it) that continue into our moment.

Sharon Mesmer | The Virgin Formica | Hanging Loose | 2008

I read Francis Picabia’s I Am a Beautiful Monster (MIT Press, 2007) and Mesmer’s Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2007) during the same one week period. It was an uncanny pairing. Now I’m reading Mesmer’s The Virgin Formica, which is relentless and fearless, and except for Picabia’s book, may be peerless.

Christina Davis | Forth A Raven | Alice James | 2006

These are spare and unsparing poems. Davis writes: “In the history of language/ the first obscenity was silence.” There is a God.

Brandon Downing |  Dark Brandon | Grievous Pictures | 2007

B. Downing’s prowling, humour noir DVD Dark Brandon is not an intervention, but more of a break-in. These deep cultural cullings are an unsettling reflection of Downing’s one way mirror. The mirror is our age’s “own face” as Clark Coolidge might say.

Pierre Reverdy, trans. Ron Padgett | Pierre Reverdy: Prose Poems | Black Square / Brooklyn Rail | 2007

Both Reverdy and Padgett adorn the unadorned. Here is a masterful and open-hearted poet translating a kindred soul. From the poem “Waiting Room” Reverdy writes: “And the trees, telegraph poles, and houses will take on the shape of our age.”

Kevin Killian | Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow | Belladonna 117 | 2008

“Read my lips, ‘I’m into you,’ the virus seems to wriggle / through plate glass.” Is Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow the first chapbook in the Belladonna series written by a man? Bravo to Rachel Levitsky and Erica Kaufman on the series overall, and bravo to Kevin Killian on Wow.

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Noteworthy, other books and poems from the hubbub include: Peter Gizzi’s The Outernationale, anything translated by Sawako Nakayasu; Serge Fauchereau’s Complete Fiction translated by John Ashbery & Ron Padgett; Joseph Massey’s Within Hours; Joel Lewis’s on-the-level every day Learning from New Jersey; Steve Dickinson’s up-tempo Disposed; Jennifer Moxley’s The Line; The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, edited by Michael Rothenberg; David Trinidad’s loving The Late Show. “Some of These Daze” from Charles Bernstein’s Girly Man. The Route, a capacious investigation by Jen Hofer and Patrick Durgin: “We want to say something in another language which is also ours” (page 120).

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More Tom Devaney here.

Attention Span – Philip Metres

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Walt Whitman | Leaves of Grass | Norton Critical Edition | 2002

This summer, I read the 1892 Leaves from cover to cover, and then the 1855 version, and did not want either to end.  Despite its repetitiousness, its occasionally reprehensible poems, and its many awful lines— (“limitless limpid jets of love” being one of the most hilariously bad representations of male orgasm)—I found myself completely in love with Whitman’s project—its grandiosity, its attunement to his time, its largesse.

Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Fady Joudah | The Butterfly’s Burden | Copper Canyon | 2007

A collection of his most recent books translated by Fady Joudah into a supple and lush English — The Stranger’s Bed (1998), A State of Siege (2002), and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done (2003) — aptly represents the range of Darwish’s mature style. From the courtly and ecstatic love lyrics of The Stranger’s Bed, to the diaristic and penetrating political poem of A State of Siege, to the colloquial meditations on mortality, history, and the future in Don’t Apologize, The Butterfly’s Burden bears witness to the generous breadth of Darwish’s poetic and cultural achievement.

Marisol Limon Martinez | After You, Dearest Language | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2005

I can’t shake this book, composed as an index.  Little haunter, dream house, index of night.

C.D. Wright  | One Big Self | Copper Canyon | 2007

Wright culls statements and stories from the poet’s interviews of Louisiana prison inmates, conducted with photographer Deborah Luster (following in the tradition of Muriel Rukeyser’s trip to Gauley Junction with photographer Nancy Naumburg). Wright juggles these voices and images in ways that create “one big self” that contains author, reader, and prisoner.

Michael Magee | My Angie Dickinson | Zasterle | 2006

What happens with Flarf finds/fights traditional form, when Emily meets Angie. Ron Silliman has already called it a classic, but this is no museum piece.

H.L. Hix | God Bless: A Political/Poetic Discourse | Etruscan Press | 2007

God Bless comes almost entirely from speeches made by George Bush and Osama Bin Laden, which Hix transforms into poems in various traditional Western and non-Western forms, from the sestina to the ghazal. It is a fascinating project, demonstrating an aesthetic attention that becomes a kind of ethical and political attention, a close reading of the first order. A document of close listening, God Bless aptly demonstrates the profound lack of listening at the heart of this administration’s decision-making process. Documentary poetry, in Hix’s rendering, becomes a kind of history lesson for the poet and his readers, a way of reading into the archive and thus extending the archive into poetry, poetry as “extending the document.”

Katie Degentesh | The Anger Scale | Combo Books | 2005

Flarf meets the MMPI, and they have a baby. If lyric tends toward the neurotic, and flarf toward the psychotic, then this book demonstrates a healthy split-personality.

Bob Perelman | Iflife | Roof | 2006

Rangy both formally and tonally, Perelman’s latest is framed by poems that situate us in the War on Terror, this book by a langpo vet moves us through elegies, investigations, re-considerations, muddlings of all sorts. He’s still lost his avant-garde card somewhere in the wash; I hope he never finds it.

Robert Hass | Time and Materials | Ecco | 2007

I’ve always had something of a lover’s quarrel with Hass’ poetry, for the ways in which it occasionally luxuriates in its own pleasures, and veers into the prose of privilege. Yet poems like “Winged and Acid Dark”—among some others here—demonstrate the terrifying limits of poetry in the face of the dark side of human imagination. In the tradition of a narrative lyric poetry conscious of its own imperial leanings.

Hayan Charara, ed. | Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry | U of Arkansas Press | 2008

Charara gathers the new and established voices of Arab American poetry confronting the post-9/11 landscape. Poets like Lawrence Joseph and Fady Joudah shake me to the core; poets like Khaled Mattawa and Naomi Shihab Nye bring me comfort.

Daniil Kharms, ed. and trans. Matvei Yankelevich | Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms | Overlook | 2007

Named by Marjorie Perloff as one of the books of the year in the Times Literary Supplement, reviewed in The New York Times by George Saunders, and with poems published in The New Yorker, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (translated by Matvei Yankelevich) doesn’t need my negligible imprimatur. It is unnecessary for me to say that everyone must own a copy of this book, but I will. You should. An anti-poet of the first order.

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More Philip Metres here.

Attention Span – Kristin Prevallet

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Walter Benjamin, trans. Esther Leslie | Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs | Verso | 2007

This beautifully produced book includes lots of snapshots from Benjamin’s archive, including his wooden toy collection and—my favorite—the log he kept of his child Stefan’s funny expressions as he was learning language.

Anne Tardos | I Am You | Salt | 2008

I saw Tardos give a reading from this book at the Bowery Poetry Club sometime last Fall, and thought, this is “beautiful, sexy, hilarious and smart—and most important, it’s REAL!” I got the book and still think the same thing—Tardos give 100% in this book.

Roberto Tejada, Kristin Dykstra, Gabriel Bernal Granados, eds. | Mandorla Nº 10 | 2007

I was thrilled to see the long awaited Mandorla 10, with such carefully edited selections from a wide variety of writers, many of them bi-lingual or presented in translation. For me, it is an anthology of everything I’ve been missing in poetry in the last five years (in terms of both form and content).

Susan Howe | Souls of the Labadie Tract | New Directions | 2007

I love the “lexical landscape” Howe creates in her books, this one in the time of the language of the Labadists, a 17th century Quietist sect.

with me here between us–of
our being together even in
english half english too late

Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer | The Savage Detectives | Picador | 2007

The tale of two wild poet boys in an On The Road Adventure… at least that’s how the book is characterized by reviewers. It seems to me to be more about the attempt to recover the mythology of poetry and the bohemian ethic of beauty, love, and self-indulgence … remember when we were racy, spontaneous, scandalous, drunk, oversexed, high on ambition, low on productivity? Not me, I came of age in the 90s. But I remember clearly thinking that literature ended with my generation—now that’s youth! Bolaño hits it on the head (sometimes…). In my reading, however, Natasha Wimmer is the true genius here—she’s clearly an amazing writer herself, and the book reads as if it was written in English. Quite a feat, given how raunchy most of the language is.

John Bellamy Foster | Ecology Against Capitalism | Monthly Review | 2002

I caught the tale end of Foster’s talk at a poetry conference at Evergreen College, and was struck by his ecological critique of capitalism, so I bought the book. It has me thinking about how difficult it is to think outside of economic models—Cartesian thinking is economic! Yikes.

Selah Saterstrom | The Pink Institution | Coffee House | 2004

A genre blend of poetry and narrative, the tale comes undone along with all the characters. And the writing is as gorgeous as her voice, reading it.

Rachel Zolf | Human Resources | Coach House | 2007

The back cover suggests reading this book as “the creative potential of salvage” and that’s a pretty good description. This book has a pissed-off ironic tone that reveals how junk-language permeates our everyday life, and there’s no redemption: “Our abstractions stink of pure gibberish.” Ain’t that the truth! This book is definitely not wallowing in abstractions – which is very refreshing. Susquehanna by Dale Smith

Isabelle Garron, trans. Sarah Riggs | Face Before Against | Litmus | 2008

An immersion in language, slow but energetic…. these precise and elegant translations sometimes remind me of Mallarme’s A Tomb for Anatole; others remind me of It Then by Danielle Collobert. Something between elegy and remembrance, body, woman, and thought.

Marina Abramovic | 7 Easy Pieces | Charta | 2007

I paid $60 for this whopper of a book, documenting Abramovic’s reenacted performances by Beuys, Export, Nauman, Pane, Acconci, and Abramovic herself. This woman terrifies me—she builds walls, and then moves through them.

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More Kristin Prevallet here.

Attention Span – Dawn Michelle Baude

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Keston Sutherland | Neutrality | Barque | 2004

Upon returning from 18 years abroad, I asked two poets tens years my junior what book I should buy. They put Neutrality into my grasping hand. Hence I encountered Sutherland’s work for the first time and fell in love, literally, with the whoosh-plop-boom of that verbal cascade. It surges from its source with a delightful rhythm, to the point that  I suspect the layout on the page provides the syllogistic pretext for the argument of the poem without exerting a durable impact on prosody (this bears further consideration). I like the fact that this work doesn’t take itself too seriously, an important consideration when a lot of what’s available to read in the US seems to move from a homogenous, self-congratulatory careerism.

Mel Nichols | The Beginning of Beauty | Edge  | 2007

Nichols is one of my favorite poets and this book is full of what she does best: the insightful quotidian of being human, combined with a wacky, prickly sense of humor and inflected with a staunch political acumen—Kyger and Notley reverberate here, with a little of Hejinian and Darragh in the mix. Nichols is capable of range—The Beginning of Beauty has an acerbic wit that takes a back seat in her “Day Poem” series, where the mood is quieter and engages a flexible, compelling query into the new humanism—I’m a devoted fan of the Day Poems. Beauty is, of course, beautiful—a joy to hold, with its intimate, polysemous blue secret. That tip-in is so erotic.

Robert Creeley | The Niagara Magazine: Robert Creeley—A Dialogue | 1978

Oh Lord—what a gem—everything so deeply, irrevocably Creeley, in conversation with Kevin Power in Buffalo in 1976. If a book had arms, I’d want to crawl into them here. I found this issue which managed, somehow, to survive the pulverizing fists of time at a very cool second-hand bookshop specialized in impossibly hard-to-find poetry publications—Hermitage—in Beacon, Lower Hudson Valley.

Joseph Lease | Broken World | Coffee House | 2007

I’ve carried this book from country to country for the last year and a half, picking it up whenever I need to think—or rather hear—the poem. Lease has something of Palmer in him, something of Creeley, a bit of Spicer. The argument of the book is chilling, and sad, and somehow, redemptive. I’m into reading books where I actually feel a poet on the other side, the flesh & blood one, who knows when to cast identity upon the page like a stone tossed into the lake. I read a book like this and I want to borrow some of his moves and drink a glass of Merlot.

VA | The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography | Mode A | 2006-

Basically anywhere that Barrett Watten’s brain has been I want to check out. It’s like going in for an oil change—are we thinking? Really thinking? As someone who’s had a voyeur’s view of the Language Poets from the get-go, I like to keep an eye on them, all of them. And the Grand Piano series is not a disappointment. If I can recuperate the word “panoptic” to employ in a pre-Foucaultian/Bentham sense, I would. But the quantum viewpoint might be better to describe this document in collective autobiography. At any rate, for a movement that has consistently faced accusations of mannerism (and a lot worse), the embodied narratives of Grand Piano provide the waves that those hard-copy particles need. Give a Language Poet a hug.

Buck Downs | Let It Rip | Washington, DC | 2007

I came across these poems this summer and I had to re-read. Downs’ line is so tight, the torque between words so high, the potential energy would seem a bit dangerous, were it not for lyric commitments. Tenderness, especially. The focus on juxtaposition of grammatical units functions differently from the trajectories we’re accustomed to follow, given the predictable paratactic idioms of our age. You have to read these poems slowly, word by word, as if the conditions of their making required more than a casual performative reconstruction. There’s wit here, in abundance, and keen social commentary, and a kind of revelatory intimacy, too.

Andrew Schelling | Wild Form & Savage Grammar | La Alameda | 2003

I didn’t know the US had any kind o f Ecological movement in poetry until I recently came across this book. The question that Schelling poses—how can we have a writing that also commits to the compelling issues of Ecology—is certainly worth considering, even (or especially) at this belated standpoint. Since Ecology is not, as far as I can ascertain, anywhere near the heart of contemporary poetics, Schelling turns often to Asia for ideas that were waylaid in history, a tendency that endears me to this book since many US poets have truncated their connection to the past as a source of meaningful information and finally end-up looking awfully provincial. Schelling is a good, clear essayist, so he took me places I hadn’t been before.

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008

Sharp, witty, incisive—this book has a lot to keep me busy. The prosody (the driving issue for this reader) catches my eye because Davies has a lot of textured variation. The main thrust, so to speak, of the poet’s concerns is contemporary social commentary, and this commentary is rich and informed. But it’s the reoccurring pig image/references that hooked me! Since I’ve been out of the country for so long, Davies is a wonderful discovery.

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More Dawn Michelle Baude here.

Attention Span – Benjamin Friedlander

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Anne Boyer | Art Is War | Mitzvah | 2008

I’m not a believer in the Holy Spirit, but the fact that some poets make every sentence flutter with life while others merely kill brain cells does give me pause.

Peter Cole, ed. and trans. | The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 | Princeton | 2007

A half-millennium of poetry sifted with patient labor from the sand of history, then weighed and melted and wrought anew. To appreciate the wonder of this labor, imagine the David Shields anthology listed below rewritten in contemporary idiom, with tonal differences flattened out, but with a corresponding gain of coherence. A book to set beside Pound’s Provencal, which is only fitting since the poets involved were writing at roughly the same time.

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton | New Star | 2008

Momentum, ease, and a gift for gab are never sufficient for a book to be as enjoyable as this one. But when the poet is also a collector and historian of minor experience, these qualities begin to seem pretty foolproof. “A walk / on gilded splinters / in terrycloth / slippers,” with birdsong loud and clear when the TV is turned off.

Tony Harrison | Collected Poems | Penguin | 2007

Modernism scarcely registers here, but in Harrison’s case that’s not a defensive posture. His poems are episodes from a class war in which language is the battlefield: those who know it best are best favored to strike with impunity, and deadly surprise, and live to strike again.

Susan Howe | Souls of the Labadie Tract | New Directions | 2007

She makes other poets sound forced who strive to say one-quarter as much. Her secret? If you work your material until it’s in tatters, until it stains your thoughts and permeates your dreams, any stray word can be Sibylline.

Andrea Lauterwein | Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory | Thames & Hudson | 2007

A handsomely illustrated book about Kiefer, whose encounter with Celan’s work triggered a profound change, but not, it seems, a profound reading. Which makes this a fascinating study of reception, surprisingly close to another book I admired last year—Christoph Irmscher’s Longfellow Redux (U of Illinois P, 2008).

Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo | 2008

It’s impossible to read these poems without wanting to share the lines out loud. Silence is helpless here: even when I’m alone with this book, I break the silence, laughing. Is there anything more poignantly utopian than that? If ideology is the presence of society in our heads, then laughing out loud when we’re alone is the very summoning of that society, an involuntary assertion of communion.

George Oppen | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | ed. Stephen Cope | California | 2008

The pensive poet at his vanity (where beautiful poems were so often made up), appealingly deshabille.

Mark Scroggins | The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofksy | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007

Sometimes, all you need is a firm grip from a friend to make it across slippery ground. With Zukofsky, Scroggins is that friend.

Frank Sherlock and Brett Evans | Ready to Eat Individual | Lavender Ink | 2008

The black bars framing each page reproduce the characteristic look of an empty food pouch, of the sort distributed in New Orleans after Katrina—marking this poem as a kind of shared meal, each portion of which once filled the empty space between need and excrement. Sustenance temporarily, debris for posterity.

David S. Shields, ed. | American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries | Library of America | 2007

The new edition of the Oxford anthology of American verse gives a mere twenty-seven pages to poets born before Emerson—clearly, the earlier years are due for a reappraisal. Here, the editor’s particular interest lies in the emergence of literary culture, so popular culture is actually less evident than in John Hollander’s companion volume of the nineteenth century, which surprised me. Surprising too is the canon that slowly emerges. Measured in pages, the top five poets are all familiar names: Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor, Philip Freneau, Anne Bradstreet, Timothy Dwight. But after Dwight the discoveries come fast and furious, pushing Ebenezer Cook (of “The Sot-Weed Factor”) down to ninth place, and Phillis Wheatley all the way down to fourteenth. Whether these new rankings create new reputations remains to be seen (the Scottish-born West Indian James Grainger is already gaining ground among scholars), but since the test of a book like this one rests ultimately on the poems, one reads more for choice moments than careers. And here I’ve found more than enough to justify a reapportionment of pages in the next Oxford. I’m especially fond of the following lines by Hannah Griffitts:

My Sense, or the Want of it—free you may jest
And censure, despise, or impeach,
But the Happiness center’d within my own Breast,
Is luckily out of your reach.

(From a short poem against marriage, written around the time of the Revolution—found in a commonplace book.)

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More Benjamin Friedlander here.

Attention Span – Marcella Durand

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Daniel Bouchard | The Filaments | Zasterle | 2006

“Life is art” and vice versa. Great book to read with all the noises of the world (including new baby) next to you.

Tisa Bryant | Unexplained Presence | Leon Works | 2008

Unsettling explorations into various Eurocentric films, artworks, and television shows (Regency House Party being one of the most disturbing) that use black characters, often even as compositional elements (Bryant uses illuminating quotes throughout: Zola says of Manet’s Olympia, “You wanted black patches, and you placed a Negress and a cat in a corner. What does that mean? You hardly know, and neither do I.”).

Cabinet Magazine

I stay “in touch” with worlds artistic in a pleasantly subversive way with this magazine/journal. Content ranges from Peter Lambourn Wilson on concrete and “viewsheds” to the Chadwicks and their land-use dominions.

Tina Darragh | Opposable Dumbs: A Project Report | Self-Distributed | 2007

Darragh’s invitation to plagiarize is also an invitation to a deep creative reading/writing into issues of anonymity, ownership of language, science and language, morality and science, humanism, disintegration of words, disintegration of morals, disintegration of science, of principles.

Beverly Dahlen | A Reading 18-20 | Instance | 2006

Add to your collection of Dahlen’s faboo A Readings.

Andrew Joron | The Cry at Zero | Counterpath | 2007

Very highly recommended collection of intricate essays on poetics, science, philosophy and how they circle back to that “cry” from nothingness.

Miranda Mellis | Talk on “The Vault” | Naropa Summer Writing Program | June 2008

Allow Mellis to be your guide to the world’s largest seed vault, housed in Norway’s permafrost and counting Du Pont as one of its funders. (Look for her talk to be published—somewhere! Hopefully soon.)

Ousmane Sembene  | God’s Bits of Wood | Heinemann | 1960

I suggest replacing all of Hemingway’s books in school curricula with this unrelenting depiction of the 1947-1948 strike on the Dakar-Niger railway. One of the best novels I’ve ever read. (And while we’re at it, his film “La Noire de…” is also amazing.)

Eleni Sikelianos | The California Poem | Coffeehouse | 2004

Word-constellations fracture beautifully on housing projects and fault-shaped coastlines.

Tyrone Williams | On Spec | Omnidawn | 2008

Massively riveting. A linguistic ultrasound into the innards of language.

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More from Marcella Durand’s library on Goodreads.