Posts Tagged ‘Andrew Schelling’
Attention Span 2011 | Benjamin Friedlander
Rose Ausländer | Gesamtwerk in Einzelbänden | 16 vols. | Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag | 1992-1995
My German, never good to begin with, has been slipping away from lack of use, and I’ve no longer got my father to call for help when the grammar tricks me up—a stroke took away all his answers. A month before the stroke he and I were in Berlin and I bought a few of these volumes; I’ve acquired the others since, reading aloud at the nursing home, where my father’s silence becomes part of the effect. It’s the late work in particular that moves me, written after Ausländer turned seventy: a metaphysical imagism, fluid as Matisse’s cutouts, cutting as a northern wind, though at whisper strength. Or seemingly at whisper strength: the late work fills nine of these volumes.
Bureau of American Ethnology | Annual Reports and Bulletins | Government Printing Office | 1879-1967
Of the 200 bulletins and 48 annual reports with papers, only a few contain material that one might call literary, but these are precious: a treasury of Native American texts in the original languages, with dictionaries and translations. It’s incredible that these are available online, and incredible to scroll through them, if a little bewildering—they encompass a wide range of philosophies and projects, and their credibility is uneven. Racism is pervasive, so suspicion is required, but it’s hard not to get excited by the material: a ghost story in which a bird puts adult skulls on child bodies, which topple over; a song with the refrain, “the entire world weeps for me”; a prayer to the sun that includes the unexpected hope, “Perhaps if we are lucky / … / A floor of ice will spread over the world, / the forests … / … will break beneath the weight of snow.” The highlight for me is The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, published only a few years after the events described, containing a number of the songs that accompanied the dance. (The translator, James Mooney, reports that they were composed in a trance, one after the other, 20 or 30 at a time). Just as interesting, and more influential as poetry: Frances Densmore’s various collections of Indian song, widely read by the moderns—just this week I found a citation by Basil Bunting.
List of BAE publications
Annual Reports
Bulletins 1-24
Bulletins 25-200
Norma Cole | To Be at Music: Essays & Talks | Omnidawn | 2010
Argument by citation, juxtaposition, repurposing—a Talmudic strategy, though based on a very different principle. Not the authority of a sacred text, but a library where authority is dispersed—where the sacred, like the untranslatable, is yet to be grasped. Making this a musical book in Cole’s sense (formulated for Robert Browning): “In the time of imagination, prosody becomes the reference system, the set of locating coordinates.”
Ann Cotten & Kerstin Cmelka | I, Coleoptile | Broken Dimanche P | 2010
Consulting a dictionary every other word impedes the reading of some poets more than others, and Cotten, alas, is one for whom speed matters. This is ironic, since her Fremdwörterbuchsonette (Suhrkamp, 2007) includes the word “dictionary” in its title. A dictionary of loan words, for Cotten—American—has borrowed her German, while incorporating an English borrowed for her readers. Wit is required to keep up, and I’m just too slow in German. Probably, I’m too slow for this English text as well—a prose-poetry hybrid with photographs—but here at least I can pretend to understand. And pretending is precisely the point. The photos (by Cmelka) reproduce stills from a film starring Mayakovsky, with Cotten in Mayakovsky’s role, while the narrative is given under the sign of a disguise: the “coleoptile” is a vegetable sheath, the covering of a shoot, hence a figure for becoming. “I am a woman as yet / in a cocoon. I am embarrassed / that one has caught me as I unfold / my first wing, still in the ‘real,-’ bag.” In context, “real” suggests “reel,” just as shoot invokes photography, so it’s fair to surmise that the metamorphosis unfolds in the manner of a film, the projection of something already been (or “bean,” as the opening discourse punningly puts it). Like a loan word transposed into poetry, it slips by too fast to be savored—or is savored at narrative’s expense.
Stephen Crane, ed. Christopher Benfey | Complete Poems | American Poets Project | 2011
In his introduction, Benfey notes that Crane’s most individual qualities have long been ignored, even by sympathetic readers: they admire his starkness of language and modernity of line, but not the compressed, parable-like narratives these serve. Yet the time may have come for reassessment: aligning Crane with a certain vein of writing from the seventies, Benfey sees a ground prepared by the influx of poetry from Eastern Europe, and by the impact of deep image. This made me think a more contemporary ground might lie with the writers of Action Books. Though Crane lacks the grotesqueries they admire, he flirts with kitsch. His angels scoffing at churchgoers, man chasing horizon, split the difference between American Renaissance allegory and New Yorker cartoon; and it’s not surprising to learn that his original publisher, Fred Holland Day, was a mentor of Khalil Ghibran. All that aside—or rather, not aside—Crane’s work is fun to read. It’s nice to have this compact edition.
Donato Mancini | Buffet World | New Star | 2011
A pringle can probably tell us more about our world than a potato: ersatz, weighed down by packaging, more pleasurable than sustaining, the lowly chip—like its lowly consumer—is the material form of a relation (economic, ecological) that stitches reality. These wonderful poems tug at those stitches, making reality dance wonkily, like a puppet show. Fun facts, childish play, damning critique: Capitalism, you are what you eat.
Thomas Mann, trans. John E. Woods | Doctor Faustus | Vintage International | 1999
From the Mann-Adorno correspondence I learn that portions were taken verbatim from source texts—a precedent (yet another) for our contemporary practice. I feel especially close to Mann’s version: plundering one milieu to recreate another, he historicizes the avant-garde while making it the vehicle for a counter-history. In conceptual writing, however, a concept is nothing without execution. Here, as it should be, the devil is in the details.
I poeti della scuola siciliana | Vol. 1: Giacomo da Lentini | Vol. 2: Poeti della corte di Federico II | Vol. 3: Poeti siculo-toscani | Ed. Roberto Antonelli (vol. 1), Costanzo Di Girolamo (vol. 2), and Rosario Coluccia (vol. 3) | Mondadori | 2008
It’s silly to list these long-coveted volumes when I’ve only managed to make my way through a half dozen poems (under Carla’s tutelage, of course), but because they’ve already sent me on a fruitful detour through Rosetti, I feel, if not justified, then at least honest: my attention is directed where it takes new inspiration, though it can’t go forward on its own.
Laura Riding | Omitted Poems and Superseded Versions, 1927-1938
I spent a fair portion of the year tracking down fugitive publications and original editions by A. R. Ammons, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Laura Riding, with gains in each case. The biggest surprise came with Riding, whose bibliography contains perhaps a hundred pages of uncollected poetry and a wealth of material for a variorum, a companion to First Awakenings (the uncollected work through 1926) and Collected Poems (Riding’s “self-determining canon”). What lies beyond, in the archive, I can’t say, but the unpublished writing strikes me as a separate issue. It’s the successive stages of Riding’s public presentation that interests me—a story well worth preserving.
Andrew Schelling | From the Arapaho Songbook | La Alameda | 2011
It feels good to be in synch with a friend: little did I know when I took up The Ghost Dance Religion that Andrew was already studying one of its principal languages, Arapaho, an Algonkian tongue that flourished where he now lives. The aim: “to get closer to plant, animal, rock, weather, or hydrological cycles, by way of the Native words that held them.” The resulting work has an objectivist compression, which, despite the economy, finds space for all that the eye can see, or ear hear, all that deepens a day. Living up to the demands of Arapaho as expressed in his book’s epigraph, from Edward Sapir: “Single Algonkian words are like tiny Imagist poems.”
Elisabeth Workman | Maybe Malibu Maybe Beowulf | Dusie Kollectiv | 2011
Through experiments on a rodent (namely myself), I can say that these poems all hit the goody place, the pleasure center of the brain, which laps up the lines like so many pulses: “pink tufa dust / of the Golden Girls,” “Caucasian dawgs,” “a probe, a hole, a ‘Burger King,’” “SpongeBob / ejaculates brief histories of time.” All meaningless, of course, but perfectly directed, electric.
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Beyond these, let me cite without comment two books I blurbed this year: Stan Apps, The World as Phone Bill (Combo Books, 2011), and G. P. Lainsbury, Versions of North (Caitlin Press, forthcoming). Also, two broadsides that gave me great pleasure: Tim Atkins, Pet Soundz (Crater Press, 2011), and Rodney Koeneke, At the Small Bar in the Embassy (Cuneiform Press, 2011).
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More Benjamin Friedlander here.
Friedlander’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Andrew Schelling
Ian Hamilton Finlay | A Model of Order: Selected Letters on Poetry and Making | WAX366 | 2009
A tiny volume, edited by Thomas A. Clark with astounding restraint—the introduction checks in at about 100 words. Creeley, Zukofsky, Gael Turnbull, Ronald Johnson, and eight or so others are Finlay’s correspondents here. Readers get to witness Finlay’s struggles to describe “thingpoems” (his early term for concrete poetry), specifications for one-word poems (it all depends on the title), and ruminations on how to live and how he edited his magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. Of concrete poetry he writes that “by its very limitations [it] offers a tangible image of goodness and sanity; it is very far from the now-fashionable poetry of anguish and self” (1963).
Aleister Johnson | Zephyrus Image: A Bibliography | Poltroon | 2003
This book should be read by every practicing American poet, before the unbridled political interventions & nutty humor of the 1970s drift off into history. Yes, Johnson’s volume is a bibliography—the third in his San Francisco trilogy that includes Auerhahn and White Rabbit Presses—but first you get 170 pages of freewheeling accounts of a vital poetry scene, portraits of poets, printers, political activists, and their friends, all in the San Francisco epoch of the Diggers, Watergate, eco-activism, psychedelic drugs, and of course old-fashioned letter-press printing the likes of which never been seen elsewhere. The heroes are Michael Myers and Holbrook Teter, who operated Zephyrus Image as a guerilla interventionist platform, producing exquisitely made press-objects, often in the form of disarmingly comical comments on the day’s political events. How they got their material out so fast is probably a storybook lesson in energy & optimism. Their collaborators were Ed Dorn, Tom Raworth, Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, Diane di Prima, Beverly Dahlen—and the book is written grippingly well, leaking humor and spirit juice everywhere.
James Thomas Stevens | A Bridge Dead in the Water | Salt | 2007
The bridge of the title is the land bridge of the Bering Strait, which anthropologists hypothesize North America’s Indians used to migrate from Asia. Many Indians don’t believe the story-line though, and this book is part of that counter-tradition. Hence a bridge (theory) dead in the water. Stevens is a fine poet, mixing political outrage, Projective tendencies, tneder poems of love, with a wellspring of humor. After demolishing the “bridge” in the book’s first section, he travels to China and those poems are sly but also reverential.
Carolyne Wright, trans. | Majestic Nights: Love Poems of Bengali Women | White Pine | 2008
If you’ve been put off by the modern poetry you see from India, then give this book a try. Carolyne Wright, a fine translator, has traveled Bengal & Bangladesh, and her selection is superb. Bengal has always been noted for its poets, but rarely have the women been visible. Bitingly contemporary, yet the poetry echoes and reechoes with the images and emotional responses of vast traditions and counter-traditions. Excellent notes on the poems, and biographies of the poets.
Robert Bringhurst | The Solid Form of Language: An Essay on Writing & Meaning | Gaspereau | 2004
Bringhurst, who lives in British Columbia, is not well known to Americans—unless you happen to be a printer. In that case his The Elements of Typographic Style sits in your print shop at arm’s reach. A fine essay writer, author of about the best book ever written on oral literature (A Story as Sharp as a Knife), Bringhurst is also a poet and book designer. This little volume is his tribute to writing systems. I’ve read it three times and need to go through it again. Funny how we writers can know so little about writing—not only our own specific system, but about the way writing systems around the world are organized. Arabic, Chinese, Algonquian languages: what are the glyphs or symbols they use, and what relationship do the symbols hold to speech? Tiny in dimension, but full of superb illustrations—Bringhurst designed the book himself of course.
Rabindranath Tagore, trans. Chase Twichell & Tony K. Stewart | The Lover of God | Copper Canyon | 2003
Unlike traditions from China or Greece, India’s fine poetry has rarely attracted good translators. Put this volume, translated by Chase Twichell and the Bengali scholar Tony Stewart, on that small shelf, alongside Ezra Pound’s Kabir, Denise Levertov’s medieval Bengali lyrics, and a few other volumes. If you’ve wondered how a Nobel Prize winner like Tagore can look so execrable in English, this is the place to get an alternative. Until now I thought the only Tagore worth an American paying attention to were the films of Satyajit Ray. While the poems of this volume are grand in the old erotic-devotional tradition—love affair of Krishna and Radha—they turn out to have been composed by Tagore under a pseudonym when he was a teenager—and he foisted them on the Bengali literati of his day. It was a great Modernist literary hoax, worthy of a Dada saint. Or could it have been more than that? Tagore was still working on these stanzas at his death nearly seven decades later. If any book might propel India’s archaic traditions of spirit & eroticism into the new millennium of skepticism & passion, this is it.
Shin Yu Pai | Adamantine | La Alameda | 2010
Another excellent collection of poems by Shin Yu Pai. Her use of line break, and the clarity of her image, are breathtaking. Many poems draw on tales lifted out of the news, others respond to contemporary visual artists, and most have a photographic precision. Maybe less humor than in the earlier La Alameda volume, Equivalences, but the depth and intensity have gathered more fully here. Subtle underpinnings include wry response to media portraits of Asian and Asian American individuals. Shin Yu Pai likes to work in sequences, but many of the poems stand alone, creating distant echoes off one another, and resounding into her other books.
Pekka Hamalainen | The Comanche Empire | Yale | 2008
An eye opening revision of the history of North American’s western plains & mountain regions. It documents the rise of an indigenous empire—on the Southern Great Plains, through the Southwest, and along the Front Range of the Rockies—which turned the Spanish imperial dream of a northern New Spain into a defensive rear-guard action, and which thwarted Anglo-American expansion for a century or more. This is the story of Comanchería, with a deep analysis of how the Comanche, mastering the horse & the use of metal for weapons and tools, became exceptional fighters, politicians, & traders, and eclipsed 18th century European efforts at Empire.
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Andrew Schelling, poet & translator, is author or editor of twenty titles, most recently From the Arapaho Songbook (poetry) and The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature. He has published six books of translation from India’s classical or medieval poetry, a volume of essays, Wild Form, Savage Grammar, and has recently taken up study of the Arapaho language. He teaches at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Schelling’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Patrick Pritchett
Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Pitch: Drafts 77-95 | Salt | 2010
The penultimate volume to the now rapidly concluding Drafts. The angel of history (AKA midrash) is alive and kicking in these fantastically sculpted and minutely attentive poem-narratives. DuPlessis may have been all along creating a whole new genre here. This angel is the principle of continual poetic revision as intervention. It reads and writes the past not as it was, but as it is found: deeply fractured by contingency, open to an ongoing process of revision. The midrashic angel takes up its task not merely by bearing witness to what it sees, but through actively constructing new alignments of meaning from the scattered wreckage of the debris field. The highlights, for me, are “Draft 87-Trace Element,” and the already legendary “Draft 85-Hard Copy.” For more, see the feature on RBD in Jacket2.
William Corbett | The Whalen Poem | Hanging Loose | 2010
The maestro at the top of his game, swinging loose and easy—nothing to it. There’s a luxurious liberation coursing through this poem that abounds with grace notes and is overflowing with his customary generosity toward memory and experience, the sweet, raspy pellicles of detail, that is, finally, the history of a life, and of writing a life, inner and outer, moment by moment, and is deeply moving.
Forrest Gander | Core Samples from the World | New Directions | 2011
An itinerary of otherness, strewn with uncanny moments of tenderness and glancing blows that crack the fragility of conscience. The earth’s alien powder is sifted through, poured out, regathered in rich pulses of telluric current from the far side of everywhere. Poem, photo, and prose fold into and out of each other, remapping their own contours. The overlap and feedback amplifies into a kind of 21st Century global witness that is porous and humbling and weird. I can’t think of another book like it. Utterly extraordinary.
Christian Hawkey | Ventrakl | Ugly Duckling | 2011
Officially a tour de force, this is a magnificent accomplishment, one that completely mesmerized me. Hawkey has reinvented the gorgeous and tortured weirdness of Trakl for the 21st Century. More than that, he has carried the logic of the translator’s task forward into a region that is all “interpass, penetrate.” The cumulative effect, when read straight through (and it’s that rare book of poetry, almost impossible to put down), is—how to say this without sounding absurd?—one of the most precisely calibrated vulnerability. Reader, I was carried away.
Fanny Howe | Come and See | Greywolf | 2011
These poems are like messages from a skeptical clairvoyant. The sense of recognition here is humbling and amazing, like the call for justice contained in the simple gesture of saying “you are here.” Everything superfluous is stripped away and what’s left is haunting. “A Hymn” seems to sum up all her concerns and convictions. (Harry Lime as a mix of Paul Celan and Oscar Levant?) These poems insist on an order of seeing that is miraculous, like the movies, and where forgiveness is all about how we do the work of looking. Like a form of levitation, they will break your heart with clarity.
Sharon Howell | Girl in Everytime | Pressed Wafer | 2011
There’s a freshness and insouciance to these lyrical forays that balance the prosaic and the ordinary against the privileged and the secret. The effect overall is one of constant surprise and delight. Spicer, a presence here surely, as has been noted. But behind Spicer, Wordsworth—not the bloated, complacent Will.I.Am of the Preludes, but the swift, sharp gleaner of chthonic music and the joyous spookiness of being alive.
Andrew Joron | Trance Archive: Selected and New Poems | City Lights | 2010
Lines decrypted from a dark book, pitched to an arcane thrum, a holy thread of labyrinthine sound that interweaves the soul’s salt with the sugar of the tongue. In this divinatory praxis, Joron capitalizes on the generative slippages which govern the chance combinatory properties of language. Following the logic of paronomasia, the poems here teeter, at times, on the brink of decay, yet what rescues them is the commitment to the sublime yield of phonemic constellation and all the spaces, and nodes, of micrological difference that open up between each slip-gap, each meld-slide, within a horizon of negation and wonder. The gravity well of logos is mitigated only by the poem’s own negentropic counter-thrust.
Peter O’Leary | Luminous Epinoia | Cultural Society | 2010
A book of impossible risk and endless doxology: in the end, they are the same thing. Liturgical datastreams downloaded and uploaded continually, like the angels in Jacob’s Dream. Fervent and unabashedly naked in its declaration of poetic vision. It reduces to so much kitsch the weak ironies of slacker emo-whimsy emanating from Brooklyn or the timid affirmations of bourgeois pathos praised in the Sunday Times, both of which somehow pass for “spirit” in the late imperium. This is a poetics that dares and ratifies the visionary ratios of song. Written out of what Abraham Joshua Heschel called “spiritual audacity,” Luminous Epinoia is a hymn to the theophanic. This is poetry of vatic kerygma—pure proclamation.
Michael Palmer | Thread | New Directions | 2011
Simply put, his best work since At Passages. There’s a certain kind of reader who can’t get past Palmer’s apparent break from the heavily encrypted style of his earlier work. Narrow constructionists, they want every book to be Sun or Notes for Echo Lake. But the idiom he has been exactingly developing since 1988, a kind of theater of the neo-allegorical that juxtaposes the driest of satire with a messianic thirst for the impossible ur-sprach, continues what were always his deepest concerns. Here, they are brought to a vivid pitch in this delicate and powerful collection. Flashing with spiked barbs of humor, these poems still inhabit the melancholy landscape where language ratifies itself by signifying its own failure. Written under the sign of Saturn, they are harrowing in their humility and directness. Simplicity here is neither a reduction nor a retreat, but the earned complexity of a late style in a late hour. To call the title sequence a tour de force is to defame it. These “threads” are addresses, colloquies, homages, haunted questions that concentrate Palmer’s concerns for the art as a site for making counter-meanings, the micro-resistances that push back against the crushing sense of fatigue born of suffering and slaughter. This is elegy as crystalline paleography. Every word is merely on loan from the thief’s journal. They haunt the dream of memory with the hope for the Not-Yet.
Andrew Schelling | From the Arapaho Songbook | La Alameda | 2011
This may well be the best thing Schelling’s ever done. Superbly attentive to the discrete seams where language and geography ripple over and through each other, this is an initiation into another world—one that exists side by side with the everyday. These poems track pathways back and forth between the ancient and the contemporary, language and the natural, without ever sliding into the false a-historicism of the romantic. The care with words—guttural, elusive, probing, shamanic—and the handling of the line breaks—is deliciously deft and subtle. A beautifully wrought, intimate book.
Rosmarie Waldrop | Driven to Abstraction | New Directions | 2010
The title sequence is superb. Waldrop’s extraordinary constellation—beginning with “Zero or, the Opening Position”—reads like a history of the metaphysical comedy of negation, its failures and its hopes, as traced through everything from cosmology to monetary exchange. It is a poem about the manifold ways nothing is implicated in everything, whether the via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysus or the khora of Derrida. A recitation of zero and its history as a concept. Of its migration into the West from medieval Arabic mathematics and its subsequent role as a placeholder for the underlying, the foundational that is anti-foundational, “zero, the corrosive number,” as she calls it, without which nothing counts.
Elizabeth Willis | Address | Wesleyan | 2011
I heard Willis read “Blacklist” two years ago at MLA and it fairly took the top of my head off. In this poem, the legacy of the Salem witches is made over as a noble tradition of transgression, a powerful and ongoing voice of resistance to the state, the system, and the boss. Woody Guthrie was a witch! After the headiness of the dazzling Meteoric Flowers, the tune and turn of this collection digs deeper into the marrow of the word, refining down to nubs and particles, a process not to be confused with simplicity. To say the thing austerely turns out to be incredibly complicated.
Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 | Station Hill | 2010
The summa of an extraordinary ambition. If the stutter is the plot, then what to say of the hyphen, the line-break, the neologism reaching after a glimpse of fugitive cognition in a cascade of vowels? The fragment here becomes fragrant, imbued with a fragile knowing. The letter, atomized, becomes the law of spirit—darkened with matter, made radiant by it. It is by such carefully broken apart attentions that these poems stage extravagance as investigation. They generate a singing that both binds and unravels, spelling out a new form of orthography that makes the traces of the invisible not only legible, but achingly near to us.
Andrew Zawacki | Roche Limit | Tir Aux Pigeons | 2011
Laid out in four-line stanzas, each one marked by roughly four beats per line, this short, perfect poem surges forward in a compelling rhythm capable of surprising turns and reverberating with fractal resonances—the complex echo chamber of attractions and resistances as words slide through one another and into their own process of associative elision and repetition, a principle of rime, as Duncan might say, that recalls the innermost linguistic and ontological structures for mapping levels of relation.
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Patrick Pritchett is the author of several books of poems, including Burn, Antiphonal, and Salt, My Love. Recent projects include editing a feature on Rachel Blau DuPlessis for Jacket 2, a talk for MSA on Pound, Sobin, and the ruins of modernism, and a book project on the messianic turn in postwar poetry. He is currently a Lecturer in the History and Literature Program at Harvard University and Visiting Lecturer in Poetry at Amherst College. Pritchett’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Andrew Schelling
Sherwin Bitsui | Flood Song | Copper Canyon | 2010
For anyone who identifies with the land of the American West—all that good Western dust lightly held on our altoplano—this book will sit in your hands as a familiar. Yet buried in all that familiarity coil the edges of violence, abrupt encounters with spirit-world, wild-life, thunder, flash floods. Something close to surrealist imagery occurs here—but not the surrealism of old Europe’s super-charge dream-state. Here it erupts in fragmented visions of deserts, buttes, asphalt baked cities, ravens, long sun-blistered highways. If I read the book rightly, this is the account of an archaic singer’s vision of present day Navajo life. Bitsui’s ear is terrific, and just enough Navajo words occur to send the conscientious reader to a Diné lexicon.
Leslie Scalapino | Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night | Green Integer | 2007
Sometimes I feel alone in my generation, in how much I read Leslie Scalapino’s poetry. Maybe I can’t separate out her writing from the generosity she showed so many of us younger writers and friends over the decades, publishing work in O Books, meticulously responding to letters—hers a dark shy generosity. We will miss her. Of the many titles of Leslie’s on my shelf, I’ll select this as it contains “It’s go in quiet illumined grassland,” one of her most incantatory Buddhist-inflected poems, and the haunting Gulf War Noh play “Can’t is Night.” In fact this fall I will use “Can’t is Night” alongside some Fenellosa-Pound Noh plays with my Naropa kids—we’ll act them out at the local Buddha hall Zen center yurt.
Joanne Kyger | About Now: Collected Poems | NPF | 2007
This is how books used to be made. Bring together a fine poet, pair her with one of the subtlest book designers out there, and construct a book that weighs in your hands like an artifact meant to serve you a whole lifetime. Joanne Kyger’s work: humor, concision, ecological savvy, political alertness, the tempered eye of the naturalist. So many small press titles that run through the years, helping us all ‘live lightly on the earth’; finally collected here, each poem laid with a comparable lightness on the page by JB Bryan.
Paul Moss, edited, translated by Andrew Cowell & Alonzo Moss, Sr. | Hinóno’éínoo3ítoono: Arapaho Historical Traditions | U of Manitoba P | 2005
What good tales, of the recent historical past, occurring in the region given the Arapaho by the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851): between the Platte and the Arkansas Rivers, from the Continental Divide into Kansas. Not old-time myths, but events that happened in somebody’s memory. Captivity tales, visions, coyote helpers, the Medicine Wheel. Bi-lingual, with a good account of Arapaho grammar, and a careful glossary of notable words. The translators’ use of Arapaho narrative devices to discern line-break and stanza makes this a contribution to Ethnopoetic practice.
Robert Bringhurst | A Story Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World | Nebraska | 1999
Most exciting book I read last year. Even my first and second year college students couldn’t put down the volume, which weighs in at 527 pages. The fullest account of the Boasian project in “salvage ethnography,” with a cast of characters a novelist couldn’t invent. Also a detailed, and not at all abstract look at oral literature. Accounts of how the singers proceed, how they reshape tradition to deal with smallpox, rip-offs, hunger, even anthropologists with pencils. Bringhurst knows his languages, knows natural history, the twists & turns of ethnography. Even the footnotes ring with discovery.
Diane Glancy | The Cold and Hunger Dance | Nebraska | 1998
A haunted book. Most of its pieces sit on the edge between essay, poetry, translation, and memoir. It looks easy but I bet it’s not. There’s a whiff of sage and other herbs, bitter, medicinal, sweet, nauseating—between Sun Dance and Bible, Cherokee heritage, Christian faith. Lots and lots of driving by night thunderstorm across the Great Plains.
Thomas A Clark | of Woods & Water | Moschatel | 2008
Good to remember how poetry’s power also comes from the unspectacular, the subtle, the brief rhythms, the filtered sunlight through soft leaves. Green solace in a technology-mad world. Poems so light it seems the poet’s hand scarcely perturbs language at all.
Jerome Rothenberg | Poetics & Polemics 1980-2005 | Alabama | 2008
The talks here—especially those on Ethnopoetics, poetry & the sacred, and so forth—remind me why so many of us set out on this troubled, wonderful path in the first place.
Dale Pendell | Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown | Mercury House | 2008
Five conversations with Norman O. Brown. Each in the form of a walk—which Pendell took with Nobby in those last years before Brown’s Alzheimer’s silenced him. For those of us who cut our teeth on Love’s Body’s subtle, visionary politics, its aphoristic wildness, and its dance at the edge of poetics, here is the late book he never got around to writing. I knew Brown, and these reconstructed conversations provide the cadences of his speech, plus his greatest trait: never to settle for easy ways out, no matter how painful clear seeing might be. Pendell wrote these talks up afterwards from memory, they are not the result of tape recording. How did he do it?
Salim Ali | Indian Hill Birds | Oxford | 1949
Tiny volume, maybe the best writing I’ve encountered in a field guide. Salim Ali (1896-1987) was the doyen of ornithology in India. A terrifically literary man, an exemplar of the India that emerged after Independence under the guidance of Nehru: resolutely secular, democratic, confident in both art and science, proud of its culture, far away from North America. Of Salim Ali’s many field guides for birds, his natural history essays, and the autobiographical writings, I choose this title because of its concision, its sumptuous illustrations by G.M. Henry, and the precise use of terminology. Of the common myna he writes: “The nest is a collection of twigs, roots, paper and miscellaneous rubbish placed in holes in trees. Large nesting colonies occupy weep-holes in revetments alongside the hill roads in the Himalaya….”
Ron Silliman | The Alphabet | Alabama | 2008
Rather daunting to have this enormous TOME, but all those separate books on the shelf don’t get you the full poem. It’s the architecture of the sections that intrigues me at present, a lot like the attention to architecture you find through Pound’s CANTOS. And the cumulative emotion that develops within each section, sentence heaped on sentence. Many of the individual volumes have such independent spirit—Paradise, What, ABC, and so on. Now you can see how the various sections fit into the larger whole (itself part of a yet larger whole)…. I hope I finish reading this before UNIVERSE appears.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2011 | Jed Rasula
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Donna Stonecipher | The Cosmopolitan | Coffee House | 2008
Prose poems composed in Cornell-box-like “inlays,” nudging minutiae of found materials into an arresting cosmology, like peering into a Jess collage made strictly of words. One paragraph can resemble a building permit, while the next dips a thermometer into your hippocampus. It starts eerie and ends that way, having scooped its exponential insinuations over, under, and around you until you’re a bonfafide citizen of Stonecipher’s cosmopolis.
Julie Carr | 100 Notes on Violence | Ahsahta | 2010
No single book of poetry absorbed me as much last year as Carr’s, its impact reducing me to that owl gaze of a word, “Wow.” It felt like witnessing Poetry emerging from the primal cauldron, every line a masterstroke from the original smithy. Harrowing, heartening, threatening, fortifying and unnerving all at once. It will take years to absorb.
David Meltzer | Beat Thing | La Alameda | 2004
The “beat thing” has been done to a crisp, done in, done to death, yet somehow Meltzer does it again with deep dish dazzle, heartfelt allover glow and wry surmise, recounting “all those guys / all those disguises.” A bop prosodic sprawling riff sails along unchecked for 150 pages, graced with a handful of delectable photos, putting hipster “moves & mudras” in a context where Hitler, Joe McCarthy and Bird rub haunches in what’s inexorably public yet somehow privately recalled: “how impulsively memory organizes into a choir,” the poet reflects at the end.
Joanne Kyger | About Now: Collected Poems | National Poetry Foundation | 2007
In the domain of titles, Kyger nails it time and again. Going On, Just Space, Again and As Ever are her four ‘selected’ books preceding this collection, its 769 pages unfurling the poems in six chronological sections. Wonder after wonder, though I can’t help but wonder about the missing structures. Consecutive arrangement obliterates the fetching portfolios of All This Every Day and The Wonderful Focus of You, books Harvey Brown introduced me to thirty years ago with his characteristic right on reverence. Still, why harp about such a lodestone, humming with sapience, sentience, exigence, and devotion.
Kenneth Irby | The Intent On: Collected Poems, 1962-2006 | North Atlantic | 2009
Another New World wonder, documenting Irby’s consistency from the get go. His gnarly syntax and unique polymathic sensibility radiate throughout a body of work as essential and unrepeatable as that of Thelonious Monk. It’s a relief to find the arrangements of the (very scarce) original books are preserved here, augmented with nearly 100 pages of unpublished poems.
Jonathan Williams | Jubilant Thicket: New & Selected Poems | Copper Canyon | 2005
Now that he’s gone, it’s chastening to realize how much he took with him, not least his wizened curiosity for hijinx and mayhem scraped off every gurgle of the American vernacular, transcribed resourcefully in eagle eye poems that read like reports from an unfunded intergalactic voyage. “Start as near the end of a poem as you can” is an adage he quotes: an unfailing guide to his invariable skill at hitting every bullseye in sight.
Andrew Schelling | From the Arapaho Songbook | La Alameda | 2011
Between the tale of a broken foot and prolonged close encounter with the Arapaho language, Schelling has managed to get useful kinks working inside these serpentine poems. The book, his best, feels open ended yet also compacted. Numinous ruffles abound, and the fur on the back of the neck bristles.
H.D. | Tribute to Freud | Godine | 1974
Reread after thirty years, then reread again the same week—it was that gripping. Struck this time by the bifocal power of this edition, which includes “Writing on the Wall” (the original book published in 1956) and “Advent,” the earlier notes written while H.D. was seeing Freud. A nimbus of creative love suffuses the whole, revealing a very different Freud than the stern Viennese magus of . This magus—with H.D. as privileged initiate—was host of a study was filled with heraldic figurines from antiquity: “a museum, a temple,” she calls it, venturing into a unique pas de deux.
Juan Bonilla, ed. | Aviones Plateados: 15 Poetas Futuristas Latinoamericanos, 2nd ed. | Puerta del Mar | 2009
A revelation, leading me to some mesmerizing (if very period-dated) works in which modernolatria wears its enthusiasm on its sleeve, its forelocks, and everywhere else it can pin a decal celebrating speed, airborne loop-the-loops, and the futurist program transposed along the spine of the Andes. Juan Marín, Marcos Fingerit, Luis Vidales, Luis Aranha, and Luis Cardoza y Aragón are now fixtures in my constellation of modernist poetry, plunging me into feverish bouts of translation over consecutive summers (some of which will soon appear in my anthology Burning City, in press with Action Books, co-edited with Tim Conley, whose new book, Nothing Could Be Further [Emmerson Street Press] is a wealth of minute fictions inscribed with the care of a tattoo artist working on an eyelid; think, Lydia Davis on helium.)
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Written by Steve Evans
October 28, 2011 at 11:12 am
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with Andrew Schelling, David Meltzer, Donna Stonecipher, H.D., Jed Rasula, Joanne Kyger, Jonathan Williams, Juan Bonilla, Julie Carr, Kenneth Irby