Posts Tagged ‘Ange Mlinko’
Attention Span 2011 | Laura Carter
In alphabetical order:
Robert Fitterman | Now We Are Friends | Truck | 2010
“The resulting portrait has almost a Cubist diffraction, with some features exaggerated while others go under-emphasized or completely disappear. But such portraits are also over-complete, exceeding the boundaries of momentary self-presentation in a way that can be uncomfortable: high school photos are posted and tagged, those drawings you’d forgotten on DeviantART resurface.”—from editor’s note.
A striking mirror.
Noah Eli Gordon | The Source: an investigation in constrained bibliomancy and ambient research | Futurepoem | 2011
“And now I will show you how it happened to be in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at that time knew nothing. They were like well managed horses, and could tell when to stop or turn. They said things we felt were true, things like: ‘When I came to you out of all that dust and heat and toil, I positively smelt violets.’ They kept up a constant fire of introducing each other. They thought every instrument would perform its work best if it were made to serve not many purposes but one. It was out of this that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for those values.”
A striking mirror, with an honest undertone that tells us what the problems are, how they are antithetical to what may go by truth.
Kirsten Kaschock | A Beautiful Name for a Girl | Ahsahta | 2011
“Airplanes are moveable Babels, and I
know not to reach that way for God, up—
that a god
is a small thing and comes by being quiet.”
The truth of what Kirsten says, the unreliability of birdsong, the irony that falls in and becomes something other than a way of seeing the opposite—beautiful, poignant, mature.
Jacques Lacan, trans. Bruce Fink | On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (Book XX: Encore 1972-1973) | Norton | 1998
“‘Usufruct’ means that you can enjoy (jouir de) your means, but must not waste them. When you have the usufruct of an inheritance, you can enjoy the inheritance (en jouir) as long as you don’t use up too much of it. That is clearly the essence of law—to divide, distribute, or reattribute everything that counts as jouissance.”
A necessary text, one I took a course on in graduate school. Also noted is Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose’s commentary on the seminar, among other readings, Bruce Fink’s included.
Sabrina Orah Mark | The Babies | Saturnalia | 2004
“Can you describe for me Walter B. after the desertion?
Too much architecture, not enough rain.
How do you recognize Walter B. in their abandoned homes?
He is the only one, among drifts of white hair, who knows several things at once.
Why, at the end of the Goat Song, does Walter B. stop feeding the babies?
At the end of the Goat Song, it becomes impossible to grow this old.”
A beautiful book, and one can’t help but wonder about Walter B.[enjamin?’s] appearance. Clearly, we are no longer truly modern.
Ange Mlinko | Starred Wire | Coffee House | 2005
“The syrup’s frozen on the north side.
The bear is not just as scared of us.
Insert the cherries in the earth,
read the manual for escapes,
sunscreen under the pillow,
rain scratching glasses.
Between Sir William Harvey and John Dewey the circulation of books.”
This book is one I have continually returned to since its release several years ago.
Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman | Notes on Conceptualisms | Ugly Duckling | 2009
“Radical mimesis is original sin.”
A primer.
Vanessa Place | Only Yahweh | Ood Press | 2011
“if I’m any judge of the Almighty, the Lord God has seen fit in His Infinite to keep a steady supply of bricks and bracks on Hand, so design, goddishly, of bullfights and god-temples, I forgot gods pare only their nails and forced my creations to contort around what should instead of what would, isn’t it that degree of unfathomability which keeps us smacking of the divine, the dew of divine authority, a future conditional, Lord knows”
Poet be like Vanessa Place.
Mathew Timmons | The New Poetics | Les Figues Press | 2010
“Where are we with the New Birds?”
Poets on Twitter—watch out. Where are we, again?
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Laura Carter lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is recommencing studies toward a PhD in English and literary studies. She earned her M.F.A. in 2007, also in Atlanta. Carter’s Attention Span for 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Robert Stanton
John Ashbery | Collected Poems 1956-1987 | Library of America | 2008
On the (debatable, but defensible) premise that “the more Ashbery the better,” this is the best Ashbery to date. A universe unto itself.
Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer | Antwerp | New Directions | 2010
Bolaño remaking himself—somewhat painfully—from post-Beat bard to ruthlessly dispassionate novelist. Fascinating to watch.
Andrea Brady | Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination | Krupskaya | 2010
Human history—and the “essay”—as slo-mo explosion. A timely and salient product of imaginative (rather than ethical) deregulation.
Anne Carson | Nox | New Directions | 2010
Grief as it is, opaque and piercing. Even the accordion form of the text seems oddly allegorical: it’s constantly threatening to bend away from you and scatter as you read.
Joseph Massey | Exit North | BookThug | 2010
The contemporary king of minimalism (“Old news—after a storm— / torn apart between two lawns”—that’s a whole poem, “Sunday”) wandering down increasing philosophical paths.
Ange Mlinko | Shoulder Season | Coffee House | 2010
Mlinko here uses her stance as unapologetic aesthete to craft a surprisingly political volume, presenting in florabundant language our increasingly diminishing world as both great sorrow and supreme joy. Book of the year, if I’m forced.
Ange Mlinko | Hotel Lazuli | in An Instance | Instance | 2010
Written in the shadow of that trickster Pessoa, a glorious pendant to Shoulder Season. Her vocabulary alone—spirochete, cozier, bilabiate, duochrome, phenotype, a-pollyanna-ing (all used precisely)—makes me glad.
Jennifer Moxley | Fragments of a Broken Poetics | Chicago Review 55.2 | 2010
Can any one person be “the voice of a generation” these days? Probably not (and a good thing too), but Jennifer Moxley comes pretty close.
J. H. Prynne | Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage Artesian | Barque | 2009
Like most recent Prynne, this brushes achingly close to some unprecedented meaning without quite committing, leaving the reader alert and abuzz. Title of the year too, by some margin.
Kay Ryan | The Best of It | Grove | 2010
I kept coming back to this. Like good whiskey, Ryan’s poems are bracing in small doses, but increasingly nauseating when consumed in bulk. Taken individually, though, they impress as true works of “quietude,” promoting humility, pragmatism, stoicism and a kind of amused awe at the complexity of the world. “Wisdom” is impossibly unhip, but Ryan has her moments.
Attention Span 2009 – Michael Scharf
Ange Mlinko | assorted reviews in The Nation
Best Seidel takedown ever. Better than the Possum Pouch essay claiming Seidel for Flarf.
Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | subpress | 2009
Truer than Williams or Olson. Half a Hesiodic Janus-face (with Luoma’s Works & Days). The great book of turn-of-the-century New York.
Jane Dark’s sugarhigh! | October 1, 2008 thru June 13, 2009 | janedark.com
Joshua Clover | poems read on May 13, 2008 at Princeton
Compiled the above set of entries into a PDF (minus a few things), resulting in le livre de la crise, a book of exquisite exposition. The poems, some written before Fall 2008, promise definitiveness of a different order.
Jeet Thayil, ed. | The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets | Bloodaxe | 2008
Great love and side-taking. Can sense many poems behind the choices even if I can’t see them, and can also catch sight of the social formations behind them (in a way that I haven’t for 20th C. Canada, Britain, Australia and related diasporim). Not the place to read Kolatkar and others for the first time, but for me the place, transformatively, to read Gopal Honnalgere for the first time.
John Ashbery | Collected Poems 1956-1987 | Library of America | 2008
The 12 poems of Rivers and Mountains take on a momentous scale and aspect, with “Clepsydra” and “The Skaters” as oeuvre prisms: light enters them in spectra, and leaves in lines (of what is to come). Double Dream as the best book of Fall 2008 (“Soonest Mended”; “Decoy”; “Definition of Blue”).
Jordan Davis | Reading at the Zinc Bar with George Stanley and Chris Nealon | May 15, 2009
This seemed to take place in bullet time.
Josef Kaplan | Our Heavies | chapbook | 2009
T-Pain presents The 1990s, a bildungsroman.
Juliana Spahr | “The Incinerator” | Lana Turner | 2008
Total destruction of the pathetic fallacy.
Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni | 2008
She stands, at 5′ 1”, like Donatello’s David, hand on cocked hip, sword resting at waist, hat pulled low. Seconds until the voice comes in, on, over. Each death and loss adds to its saturate. It sings through (“spell it ‘galaxie'”) life, this unbearably beautiful book its form. Icon incarnations as multiply era-synechdochic; metamorphoses as mirror; close encounters as abrasions, as identifications, interstices, and interpellations (“the magnificent instability of the sign”). Attack, Sustain, Decay, Release.
Kunwar Narayan, trans. from Hindi by Apurva Narayan | No Other World: Selected Poems | Rupa | 2008
Xi Chuan, trans. from Mandarin by Arthur Sze | “On Wang Ximeng’s Blue and Green Horizontal Landscape Scroll, A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains” | Boston Review 34.3 | May-June 2009
Hans Varghese Mathews | “Words and Picturables: Image and Perlocution in English Verse” | Phalanx 3 | http://www.phalanx.in
The Almost Island conference in Delhi this past February (curated by Bei Dao, Sharmistha Mohanty, and Vivek Narayanan) brought together poets from China and India for a multi-day set of dialogues, visits, and retreats. (Gist: movement, led by Ashis Nandy, toward some meanings for India and China as “civilizations,” in senses that avoided much that is either discursively co-opted or out-of-bounds.) Kunwar Narayan and Xi Chuan read together the first night. I’ve lent away my copies of No Other World, but Narayan is considered to be, and felt like, a Stevens-caliber figure, a poet whose subtlety matches the stakes of the Hindutva era. Xi Chuan, part of the circle of poets associated with Bei Dao’s journal Jintian (founded in 1978), read a selection of poems that included “Wang Ximeng”; the poem seemed a reply to “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” with society as self. I agreed with Hans Mathews, one of the respondents, that it seemed to destroy the framing of the event; Mathews’s own essay contains a phenomenal phenomenology of the poetic image.
Roberto Calasso | The Forty-Nine Steps | Minnesota | 2001
Brilliant on Nietzsche. Devastating on Brecht (while preserving the poems). Stirner, Schreber, Wedekind all also here, and Benjamin. The best possible antidote for George Steiner. Calasso’s Ka also a great restorative following unreadable translations of the Mahabharata.
More Michael Scharf here.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2011 | Dan Beachy-Quick
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Robert Duncan | The H.D. Book | California | 2011
H.D. | Sea Garden (in Collected Poems) | New Directions | 1986
Susan Howe | That This | New Directions | 2011
Forrest Gander | Core Samples from the World | New Directions | 2011
Ange Mlinko | Shoulder Season | Coffee House | 2010
Craig Santos Perez | [saina] from unincorporated territory | Omnidawn | 2010
Stanley Plumly | Posthumous Keats | Norton | 2009
Martin Corless-Smith | English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul | Fence | 2010
Srikanth Reddy | Voyager | California | 2011
Brian Teare | Pleasure | Ahsahta | 2011
Giorgio Agamben | Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture | Minnesota | 1992
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Dan Beachy-Quick is author, most recently, of Circle’s Apprentice. He teaches in the MFA Program at Colorado State University.
Beachy-Quick’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.
Written by Steve Evans
September 22, 2011 at 9:00 am
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with Ange Mlinko, Brian Teare, Craig Santos Perez, Dan Beachy-Quick, Forrest Gander, Giorgio Agemben, H.D., Martin Corless-Smith, Robert Duncan, Srikanth Reddy, Stanley Plumly, Susan Howe