Attention Span 2010 – Steve Evans

Susan Howe | Souls of the Labadie Track | New Directions | 2007
George Stanley | Vancouver | New Star | 2008
Rae Armantrout | Versed | Wesleyan | 2009
Emmanuel Hocquard | Une Grammaire de Tanger, vols. I-II | cipM | 2007 & 2009

This not altogether arbitrary constellation of texts occupied me so thoroughly in the summer and early fall of 2009 that I abandoned my usual custom of trying to “catch up” with the other books I’d missed during the academic year. Now, if I could only salvage the long essay that grew out of this reading—with excursions into social media, Viktor Shklovsky’s “red elephant,” Roland Barthes’s “neutral,” Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Course of a Particular,” and lots of other odds & ends—I’d feel less like a dope.

Thomas Pynchon | V. | Lippincott | 1961

Not sure why I was so slow in coming to Pynchon. Something about the reputation put me off—as did a certain species of (inevitably male) graduate student whose admiration for him awoke the opposite in me back in the nineties. I waited to tackle Gravity’s Rainbow until the summer and fall of 2006, and then had the good luck to join an Against the Day “deathmarch” that a friend of Rodney Koeneke’s organized in the winter and spring of 2007. Last summer I purchased Inherent Vice on its pub date and read it quickly and easily as August waned in a gesture of “contemporaneity”—I wanted to read a book of his while it was new. V. is, in a way, my “favorite”: lexically, it remains startlingly fresh; the syntax, sentence by sentence, is a little simpler than in Gravity’s Rainbow, but it crackles with ingenious combinations and doesn’t “blur” as often as in that masterpiece; and there’s a levity—not withstanding some very dark subject matter—that charms, even at a distance of nearly fifty years.

Bob Dylan | Chronicles, Volume One | Simon & Schuster | 2004
David Hadju | Positively 4th Street | Farrar | 2001
Martin Scorsese, dir. | No Direction Home | Spitfire Pictures | 2005

Because Richard Farina had been Pynchon’s roommate at Cornell, and because I remember Jennifer liking it back nearer to its release date, I decided to interleave Hadju’s Positively Fourth Street with my first pass through V. The Dylan therein portrayed is hard to like, which I confess suits my state of burn out, not so much with Dylan as with his worshipers, just fine, even if the account of the Farinas struck me as unbalanced in the other direction. Dave van Ronk in the present, the British boo-ers, and the historical footage were what I liked best Scorsese’s fan letter, though its recipient-subject’s spoken timbre was nice, too.

Samuel Beckett, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck | The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940 | Cambridge | 2009

In addition to affording me an unexpected apprenticeship to Beckett’s acute eye for visual art— I took advantage of the meticulous footnotes to track down digital images of many of the paintings he mentions—this volume also taught me a lot about cysts, understatement, and friendship. The last chance trip through Hitler’s Germany is a highlight, as are the letters mentioning Beckett’s fateful psychoanalysis with Bion, about whom I’d like to know more. Along the way, I couldn’t help dipping into More Pricks Than Kicks, Gontaski’s edition of The Complete Short Prose, and the relevant chapters in Knowlson’s Damned to Fame, and I now look forward to rereading Murphy for the first time since 1987, though I cringe in handling the battered and slightly smelly paperback that I evidently paid three dollars for used in some Hillcrest bookshop—may be time to invest in a fresh copy (and anyway, I always underline the same passages, no matter how much time has passed between readings).

Handel, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner | Acis & Galatea (1718) | Deutsche Grammophon | 1979

The exquisite symmetry and line-by-line brilliance of the libretto by Alexander Pope and John Gay combine with Handel’s Stein-like mania for repetition (“da capo”!) to produce the best account of desire’s circuitry to reach my ears of late. Saw the Boston Early Music Festival’s production in the fall & have been wearing out the CD, whose Polyphemus (of the “capacious mouth”) I find more convincing, since.

Jacques Lacan | Le Séminaire, Livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse, 1969-1970 | Seuil | 1991
Jacques Lacan, trans. Russell Grigg | The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis | Norton 2007

Weaving between Grigg’s English and the original text as established by J-A Miller, with plenty of swerves back into Freud (esp. the dream of the butcher’s witty wife and the paper “A Child Is Being Beaten”), and out into the archive of historical unrest just following 1968, I slowly—it took most of a year—made it through this perhaps liveliest and timeliest of Lacan’s many seminars. I adore the seminar form (Barthes on The Neutral, Kojève on Hegel, etc.), and am always astonished by Lacan’s perverse inhabitation of its conventions, which he systematically deranges with all the cunning condensations, displacements, and half-sayings of Freud’s “dreamwork,” supplemented by a humor that is dry and Duchampian one moment, hot and “hysterical” the next.

For a while, I enjoyed the ghostly company of some “slacker Lacanians” who joined a Facebook group (called “Selon Lacan” in homage to the Vancouver-based “Lacan Salon”) with the intention of reading Seminar XVII together. Nearly none of us carried through, but it was an interesting experiment in dispersed intellectual community using a platform otherwise devoted mostly to channel-flooding triviality.

Brian Eno | Another Green World | EG | 1975

David Sheppard’s 2008 biography, On Some Faraway Beach, abused the adjective “bespoke,” the verb “essay,” and several synonyms for premature baldness in the course of 450 dutiful, enthusiastic, and well-informed pages. Geeta Dayal’s contribution to Continuum’s 33 1/3 project— which, judging from several posts to the series’ blog, didn’t come easy—is more modest in scope, and though it mutes the note of “idiot glee” without which Eno comes off as just a pretentious ass, it did lead me into a round of close and repeated listens (to Here Come the Warm Jets, too) that solved nicely the problem of what to do with my ears while driving for more than a month.

Denis Diderot, trans. Jacques Barzun | Rameau’s Nephew | Doubleday | 1956

Myself: Gently, dear fellow. Look and tell me—I shan’t take your uncle as an example. He is a hard man, brutal, inhuman, miserly, a bad father, bad husband, and bad uncle. And it is by no means sure that he is a genius who has advanced his art to such a point that ten years from now we shall still discuss his works. Take Racine instead—there was a genius, and his reputation as a man was none too good. Take Voltaire—

He: Don’t press the point too far: I am a man to argue with you.

Myself: Well, which would you prefer—that he should have been a good soul, at one with his ledger, like Briasson, or with his yardstick, like Barbier; legitimately getting his wife with child annually—a good husband, good father, good uncle, good neighbor, fair trader and nothing more; or that he should have been deceitful, disloyal, ambitious, envious, and mean, but also the creator of Andromaque, Britannicus, Iphigénie, Phèdre, and Athalie?

He: For himself I daresay it would have been better to be the former.

Myself: That is infinitely truer than you think.

He: There you go, you fellows! If we say anything good, it’s like lunatics or people possessed—by accident. It’s only people like you who really know what they’re saying. I tell you, Master Philosopher, I know what I say and know it as well as you know what you say. (13-14).

Another “swerve” out of Lacan’s Seminar XVII, with incentive added by the fascinating role this text—in Goethe’s translation—plays in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Highly recommended.

Matthew Weiner, creator and exec. producer | Mad Men | AMC | 2007-

Conjures the taste of the maraschino cherry from my father’s Manhattan on my childhood tongue and all that it intimated about the catastrophe of masculinity. The casting, costuming, scripting, and small-screen mise-en-scène are frequently faultless—pace, for example, “Guy Walks into an Ad Agency,” from season three—and the glance back at an “adult” world long since extinguished by a youth culture that squeezes even geezers into skinny jeans & hoodies is weirdly entrancing. As Noël Coward presciently asked in 1955, “What’s going to happen to the children / When there aren’t any more grown-ups?” Mad Men is a kind of an answer.

Alice Notley | Reason and Other Women | Chax | 2010
Andrew Joron | Trance Archive | City Lights | 2010
Aaron Kunin | The Sore Throat | Fence | 2010

My quick take on “trance” poetics is here. Even a squib can take months of reading!

Bob Perelman & Michael Golston, organizers | Rethinking Poetics | Columbia & University of Pennsylvania | 2010
Anne Waldman et al., organizers | Summer Writing Program | Naropa | 2010

I went directly from one (Columbia) to the other (Naropa) and so had more poetry-centric personal contact in a ten day stretch in June than I would normally experience in a year. Both spaces were fraught with anxiety, and even antagonism, but I found them exhilarating anyway, especially in the interstices, where kindness, curiosity, and a shared commitment to making language do unexpected things tended to dispel the negativity that the “official proceedings” (especially at Columbia) so often generated. Joanne Kyger’s ability to transform a drab hotel room in Boulder into an oasis of sociability through the deft placement of a very few but beautiful objects holds the place here for all the other pleasures I experienced during those ten days—that and her wonderful advice, frequently sung, “Don’t explain!”

More Steve Evans here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Brent Cunningham

Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009

The title of Nichols’s book, to my ear, indicates a kind of linguistic density that actually the poems inside don’t much have—instead you get poems of such emotional authority and seriousness of purpose that immediately I was ready to go anywhere with them. There’s lightness and levity as well, lots, but it’s in the refreshing context of feeling like the poet really, deeply knows what she’s doing, I mean really. Even the formal moves, the spacing, leaving phrases off in space, composition by field and the like, has a kind of rightness and intentionality to it that I don’t often accept so unquestionly. This is the kind of book I take around with me to remind me how to write as well as how to read. What else can I say? I know it came out last year and was mentioned often then, but I just love this book

Aaron Kunin | The Sore Throat & Other Poems | Fence | 2010

A lot of writers are influnced by philosophy, but Kunin is one of very few living poet I know where I feel like I’m reading someone with truly philosophical sensibilities and skills, i.e. who really lives in a Kantian or maybe in this case more a Spinozian reality. What his work shows, I think, is in part how much feeling there is in thinking, and also how much pleasure there is in the artistic distanciation of self-conciousness

Khaled Mattawa | Tocqueville | New Issues Poetry & Prose | 2010

I’m not entirely persuaded by all the elements of Mattawa’s work, but I like to mention him since I think he’s completely worthwhile yet almost completely off the radar of most self-identified experimental writers. This makes sense if you read his early, more conventional and overly-wringing writing, or if you look at those who blurb his books, etc., but this book is serious and thoughtful about its politics, courageous in its formal experimentation, and fervent in its contempt for false emotion. If you read one book blurbed by Yusef Komunyakaa this year, it should be this one, etc.

Brenda Iijima, ed. | eco language reader | Nightboat | 2010

To the properly sceptical this book probably won’t, and probably shouldn’t, prove there’s a new movement or even a new sensibility afoot, but whatever Iijima’s anthology is or isn’t claiming in those terms it is certainly very well edited, filled with a great group of contributors, and embarrasingly rich with new ideas and new passions.

Laura Moriarty | A Tonalist | Nightboat | 2010

I should perhaps recuse myself here since I’m one of Laura’s “A Tonalists,” but whether the pseudo-movement/anti-movement/non-movement of the title has any reality or not, Moriarty has used the idea of groups and groupings to make a fierce, delicate, layered text that stands as a work, and an art, of its own.

Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | 2009

Rothschild has, basically, a classical sensibility (where “classical” is considered as running the gamut from the unadornedness of certain ancient greek writers to the unadornedness of Ted Berrigan), which is then shot through with a whole lot of eccentric, baroque intelligence. I may have been a little less taken with the long middle section about NYC than some: it’s what seem to be framed as the more “minor” poems that really have stayed with me. And in a way that makes perfect sense because the significance of the minor is what Rothschild himself is so productively interested in.

Tan Lin | Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) | Zasterle | 2009

There’s something fascinating about limit cases, and Lin has been exploring those frontiers for a few books now, but this is the first time I really & completely got it. I like to carry around what I’ll call Heath (the title is a subject of debate by the way) just to show aspiring conceptualists how tepid and obvious their plans often are, by comparison. Really I can’t think of another book that seems to have gone farther off the grid of our presumptions about “the book” and “poetry” than this pleasantly transgressive text. It’s a further mystery that it remains, inexplicably, rather readable (with the right kind of approach). Everything in it—images, computer code, emails, texts—have the feeling of being placed, not overly systematically, but such that they beg for your own thinking to complete them.

Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, Kyle Schlesinger, eds. | ON: Contemporary Practice, Issue #2 | Cuneiform | 2010

Some will say the structure of this magazine, where poets talk about the work of poets, will only add to the feeling that experimental poetry is a small coterie with a secret knock to get in. Others, including me, find ON to be just what was lacking, and will find it far less about in-group backslapping than one might presume (very much like the Attention Span project, which has a lot in common with ON). Coterie is a sword of the two-edged variety, and ON is a much needed venue for poets to not only talk about works by their contemporaries but to fashion a renewed sense of basic, shared critical values.

Yedda Morrison | Girl Scout Nation | Displaced Press | 2008

This is the oldest book on my list but I only just got to read it. I had the pleasure of hearing a lot of the poems in this book for a few years at various readings, but the effect of reading them all together is fierce and splendid and at an entirely other level. Anger and love seem to be Morrison’s twin obsessions here and in other works—the love that both lies and lies in every anger, maybe. These concerns dovetail into her starkly eco/feminist/activist/understandably-pissed-off approach in ways that I find enviously original. She’s doing some great work and to me this book is both sweeping and, despite or because of the intensity, suprisingly personal.

Tyrone Williams | The Hero Project of the Century | The Backwaters Press | 2010

Unlike a decade ago Williams is not a secret anymore, but he’s still one of those poets I always read no matter what. I’d say I liked this book just a sliver less than On Spec, but it’s still terrific. Compared to On Spec it’s driven a bit more by content than form, but regardless TW is always, to me, most compelling in the way he works with linguistic density, counterpunctuating it with sudden moments of simple anger and direct content. I never thought enjambed aesthetic complexity could come across as so persuasive and natural, but it is here.

More Brent Cunningham here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Michael S. Hennessey

CAConrad and Frank Sherlock | The City Real and Imagined: Philadelphia Poems | Factory School | 2010

I make no secret of the fact that I’m more or less constantly homesick for my hometown, and so having that city so faithfully rendered by two of my favorite poets (and two of my favorite people) is a true pleasure. It’s not just the broad vistas, the idiosyncratic details, the full sensory overload that I love here, but also the dialogic texture, the way the grain of each strong voice plays off of one another. I feel a full, Whitmanesque sense of camaraderie in The City Real and Imagined—the strong, time-tested friendship between two great minds—and their shared love for the city they call home.

John Giorno | Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962-2007 | Soft Skull | 2008

For the past year or so I’ve been working on a critical essay on John Giorno (for an anthology Routledge is putting out in early 2011), and while my focus there is primarily on Giorno Poetry Systems’ various technological innovations—from the early Electronic Sensory Poetry Environments through Dial-A-Poem to the record releases (which, obviously, have a great influence on the work I do at PennSound)—I was very happy to reconnect with Giorno’s written work, particularly his stunning early appropriative poetry, which is well represented here. Editor Marcus Boon has done a tremendous job assembling a lengthy and detailed testament to Giorno’s writing life, and his thoughtful biographic introduction gives readers a solid foundation with which to approach the work.

Félix Fénéon, trans. by Luc Sante | Novels in Three Lines | NYRB | 2007

I found this by accident on the clearance shelves, drawn in by the distinctive NYRB design and a description intriguing enough to convince me it was worth two dollars. In this case, two dollars buys you a stunning mosaic of life in France circa 1906 delivered through a thousand or so über-brief news items Fénéon wrote for Le Matin’s “Nouvelles en Trois Lignes” column. Aside from echoes of Reznikoff (Sante cites Testimony in his intro, however his early poems of the street also have a similar resonance), I felt something reminiscent of Joe Brainard’s I Remember or certain catalogue pieces by Perec: a certain pleasant lull as the language rushes over you, counteracted here by the visceral content itself. Life is truly nasty, brutish and short, as evidenced by the constant presence of death (whether murder, suicide, accident or old age) and the living don’t get off much easier: strikers are pummeled, alms stolen, mayors fired for displaying the crucifix. The media-driven fetishization of violence feels downright contemporary, however Fénéon’s deft use of language—building anticipation through fruitful deferral and displaying a wicked sense of humor—keeps the proceedings from becoming a shallow horror show.

Aaron Kunin | The Sore Throat & Other Poems | Fence | 2010

Sometimes text and setting go together too well. By lucky happenstance, I brought The Sore Throat along as reading material for a dinnertime flight, and the claustrophobic and overheated puddlejumper became the perfect place to read the book cover to cover, its restricted vocabulary and dizzying recursivity greatly augmented by the stale air and a dull headache. It’s hard to imagine reading the book under other circumstances, and I keep my boarding pass tucked tight between its pages as a memento. Kunin finds great emotion in machine language; he draws us in and guides us along, toys with our expectations, surprises us with a simple word’s glittering multiple facets.

David Sheppard | On Some Faraway Beach: the Life and Times of Brian Eno | Orion | 2009

While it’s not likely to dethrone my all-time favorite music bio, David Bowman’s marvelous This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the Twentieth Century (a book that it seems I reread in fits and spurts at least once a year), On Some Faraway Beach shares many of the characteristics that make that volume so appealing: primarily an engaging, novelistic approach to the narrative, a skillful weaving together of myriad voices and sources, and rich contextualization that firmly situates Eno and his work within their historical milieu. Sheppard makes all the right decisions in terms of scope and detail, particularly in regards to including copious technical discussion of Eno’s compositional and production work, and he wisely chooses to speed through the last two decades or so, devoting most of the book to Eno’s collaborations with Roxy Music, Robert Fripp, David Bowie, Devo, Talking Heads, and, of course, his highly-influential early solo output. This book got me through the bleak expanse of early January and I was genuinely disappointed to come to the end.

Ben Lerner | Mean Free Path | Copper Canyon | 2010

Following Ben Lerner’s development over the course of his first three books reminds me of the true joy one feels watching a preternaturally-talented young baseball player—say, for example, Chase Utley—come into his own, and Mean Free Path certainly fulfills the promise of his earlier output. In theory, every book contains instructions for its own consumption, but I’ve rarely been so happily conscious of a text’s gentle nurturing, especially as its dense early obfuscation gives way to an increasing momentum and energy as pages fly by and scattered clues come together. I had the pleasure of teaching this book at the end of the spring term, and watching my students, who’d cut their teeth on Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen, Bill Berkson and Adrienne Rich (among others), work their way through Lerner’s intricate poetic geometry, stitching together storylines and motifs, was a marvelous experience.

Maggie Nelson | Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions | Iowa | 2007 and Bluets | Wave  | 2009

I have Cathy Wagner to thank for my long-overdue introduction to Maggie Nelson: she recommended the poet’s wonderful critical volume on the New York School to my partner at dinner one night, and Jennifer made a Christmas present of it. Through MLA bleakness and tiring holiday travel, it was a charming and insightful companion (and as Cathy promised, much like Sheppard’s Eno bio, it reads like a great novel), and my interest was sufficiently piqued to move on to her poetry. As for Bluets, it’s very likely my favorite book of the year—a breathtakingly ambitious work that crosses genres and disciplines as it explores its enigmatically ambiguous topic, the color blue and all its implications. Flipping what turned out to be the last page and finding nothing else produced a physical sensation of loss, deep in the pit of my stomach, that I’m not soon to forget.

Ara Shirinyan | Your Country Is Great | Futurepoem | 2008

Like any great piece of conceptual art, Your Country Is Great instantly fills you with regret for not having been clever enough to come up with so simple, yet powerful an idea. For all the endearing cosmopolitan heterogeneity here, what surprises me is the somewhat consistent voice that emerges—Shirinyan’s authorial selectivity, perhaps, but it’s also the din of internet chatter that surrounds us constantly, and from which his Google-driven compositions are hewn, warts and all. What I love most, particularly for the way they serve as brief and necessary pauses as the work unfolds, are the Brautigan-esque poems that consist of titles alone, and yet these are also the book’s saddest moments: nobody had anything great to say about Burkina Faso or Equitorial Guinea?

More Michael S. Hennessey here. His Attention Span for 2009. 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.