Posts Tagged ‘Anne Boyer’
Attention Span 2011 | Melanie Neilson
Rae Armantrout | Versed | Wesleyan | 2009
Anne Boyer | The Romance of Happy Workers | Coffee House | 2008
Rod Smith | Deed | Iowa | 2007
CA Conrad | The Book of Frank | Chax | 2009
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009
Steve Farmer | Glowball | Theenk | 2010
Eileen Myles | The Importance of Being Iceland | Semiotext(e) | 2009
Sianne Ngai | Ugly Feelings | Harvard | 2005
Jerry Lewis | The Total Film-Maker | Random | 1971
Kevin Killian | Impossible Princess | City Lights | 2009
Monica de la Torre | Public Domain | Roof | 2008
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009
Gertrude Stein | Lucy Church Amiably | Something Else | 1930 reissued 1969
Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This to Me | Wesleyan | 2008
Philip Whalen, ed. Michael Rothenberg | The Collected Poems | Wesleyan | 2007
Lew Welch, ed. Donald Allen | Ring of Bone: Collected 1950-1970 | Grey Fox | 1979
Donald Bogle | Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters | Harper Collins | 2011
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. | Race Music | California |2003
Bern Porter | Found Poems | Nightboat | 2011
Jessica B. Harris | High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America | Bloomsbury | 2011
James Lee Burke | Detective Dave Robicheaux series of 18 thrillers set in Louisiana: The Neon Rain to The Glass Rainbow | Pocket | 1989-2010
Lewis Klahr, Engram Sepals | Melodramas (sequence of seven 16mm films, 75 minutes) | 1994-2000
Elvis Presley | The Country Side of Elvis | RCA | 2001
Raymond Chandler, performed by Elliott Gould | Red Wind (1938) | New Millennium Audio | 2002
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More Melanie Neilson here.
Neilson’s Attention Span for 2009. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Anne Boyer
Alice Notley | Culture of One | Penguin | 2011
Bernadette Mayer | Studying Hunger Journal | Station Hill | 2011
China Miéville | Embassytown | Del Rey | 2011
Dana Ward | This Can’t Be Life | Edge | Forthcoming 2011
Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö | The Story of a Crime | Various Publishers | 1965-1975
Maureen McHugh | Nekropolis | Eos | 2002
Patrik Ouedník | The Opportune Moment, 1855 | Dalkey Archive | 2011
Paul Chan | The essential and incomplete Sade for Sade’s sake Ebook | Badlands Unlimited | 2011
Paul Chan | Phaedrus Pron Ebook | Badlands Unlimited | 2011
Rosa Luxemburg | The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg | Verso | 2011
Jacques Rancière | The Philosopher and His Poor | Duke | 2004
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More Anne Boyer here.
Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2010 – James Wagner
Tan Lin | Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) | Zasterle | 2009
Tan Lin | Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] | Wesleyan | 2010
My review of Seven here.
Vanessa Place | The Guilt Project | Other | 2010
Vanessa Place | Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts | Blanc | 2010
Vanessa Place | Pussy Codes | Ubu Editions | forthcoming 2010
My interversation with Vanessa here.
Robert Walser | The Microscripts | New Directions | 2010
Anne Boyer | The Two-Thousands, a history of the future in advance of itself | Scribd | 2010
My review here.
Amina Cain | I Go To Some Hollow | Les Figues | 2009
My review here.
K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams 1-20 | Slack Buddha | 2009
My review here.
Steve Timm | Un storia | BlazeVOX | forthcoming 2010
My blurb here.
More James Wagner here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2009 – Josef Kaplan
Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2008
They said they would never put any photos of cats in Artforum.
Michael Scharf | For Kid Rock/Total Freedom | Spectacular Books | 2007
Re-read this after the post-’08 election euphoria (and my money) had been plowed into corporate handouts. Scharf refracts the claustrophobic political atmosphere of 2002/2003 through an equally stringent pyramid of de rigueur poetics to show that “total freedom” is, of course, totally not. The book’s appulsion of liberal aesthetics and furtive atrocity reads both cogent and anxiously sympathetic, a “bourgeois panic” that is mordant, lucid, the relentlessness of its critique entirely correct.
Gordon Faylor | 5 6 | Self-Published | 2009
The Mechanical Turk meets Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.
Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter, eds. | Issue 1 | For Godot | 2008
The fall of the house of usher.
Roberto Bolaño | 2666 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2008
It’s nice how this post-modern novel is almost totally unconcerned with the meta, how it instead just ruthlessly tails the fractal, internal details that spin off from stuff like… ordering a coffee, or a city’s (sub)conscious conspiracy to murder every woman living in it. The Baudelaire epigraph: “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom”; Sonora stretching out its infinite ends.
Anne Boyer | odali$qued | Blogspot | ongoing
Poetry’s Battlestar Galactica: humans create little machines which create other little machines and they all blow each other to pieces, over and over again. Also a response, doing Kafka one better by cutting out the Max Brod-style middleman. An anti-bureaucratic literature that inverts and immolates against pretty much every authoritarian context in sight.
Tan Lin | HEATH (PLAGIARISM/OUTSOURCE) | Zasterle | 2009
Poetry’s The Blob. Less a “book” than an open source platform for critical reimagining. Strikingly handsome for being that, too—like the titular man himself? Or the shrub?
Rachel Loden | Dick of the Dead | Ahsahta Press | 2009
“This machine” / you know / “kills hypocrites”
Marie Buck | Life & Style | Patrick Lovelace Editions | 2009
“People! Cool personalities!” These burrowings into consumerism, vanity, gender cultures, celebritydom (both literary and pop-culture-y), social networking, social damage, flagellism and futurity are often as gentle as they are disturbing. Not a small feat. The absence of irony doesn’t come off as pedantic, but instead gives everything a tragic, keen(ing) sheen.
Brad Flis | Peasants | Patrick Lovelace Editions | 2009
The Lottery-esque scratch-and-win cover reveals a severed head, which is kind of how the whole book works. Also worth noting that the severed head looks like a combination CNN image capture/Chuck Close portrait, which, again, is kind of how the whole book works.
David Lau | Virgil and the Mountain Cat | University of California Press | 2009
Stately state mash-ups. Lau redistributes allusion across a field of junked discourses, declares a new decadence based in the reification of history. The tone of this book is just so oddly, wonderfully grandiloquent, like wigs worn to the King’s beheading: “a domed frieze phrased in freedom, / extra moiety signum // as time’s / dipterous nonextension / deemphasized dispatches to come– // incurable, its miserable son.”
More about Josef Kaplan here.
Attention Span 2009 – David Buuck
Rodrigo Toscano | Collapsible Poetics Theater | Fence | 2008
Simply put, one of the most important steps-forward (& outward) in embodied politicized poetics & performance in years.
Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: a project for future children | Kelsey Street | 2009
Bhanu Kapil | Rabbit Butoh, Bunny Butoh | Trafficker | 2009
Liberatory bio-perversity mediated through colonial memory, metabiology, & interspecies tongue-play.
Yedda Morrison | Girl Scout Nation | Displaced | 2008
Yedda Morrison | Darkness (chapter 1) | little red leaves | 2009
Ecopoetics, appropriation, class politics, & conceptual photography, via uncanny excursions through deforested gurl’hoods & art-choked hearts of darkness; field-guides & escape-routes for the yank-yank crises.
Tan Lin | Heath (plagiarism/outsource) | Zaesterle | 2008
Tan Lin | ambience is a novel with a logo | katalanche | 2008
Fan-chatter, reading-as-scanning, disco as method, celebrity-death as product placement; might just out-Warhol Kenny G. I is a cursor—you’ve been list-served.
al-Husayn ibn Ahmad ibn Khálawayh, trans. David Larsen | Names of the Lion | Atticus Finch | 2009
One of the most compelling translation/research projects I’ve seen in years. Philology as performative scholarship, transduced into a heroic list poem ripe for the growling.
Christina Peri Rossi, trans. Marilyn Buck | State of Exile | City Lights | 2008
Condensed lyrics written in 1972 while on the run into exile from Uruguay, torqued by translator Buck’s own forced-exile as a political prisoner in the federal prison in Dublin, CA.
Dennis Lee | yesno | Anansi | 2007
Dennis Lee | un | Anansi | 2003
Neologisms for neologics, composting pre-necro toxiholic bombbalm into ecopoetic anthropox. My thanks to Christian Bök for the turn-on.
The pamphlet is personal is political:
CA Conrad | (Soma)tic Midge | Faux | 2008
Anne Boyer | Art is War | Mitzvah | 2008
Dodie Bellamy | Barf Manifesto | Ugly Duckling | 2008
Dana Teen Lomax | Disclosure | Dusie | 2009
Fervent & fevered missives for those who think that conceptual writing practices somehow must preclude the embodied heat of class politics.
New Zines!
Model Homes (eds. Flis & Buck), President’s Choice (Zultanski), With+Stand (Thomas-Glass), Abraham Lincoln (Mohammad & Boyer), Bad Press Serials (Lindsay, Morris, & Stevenson), Fold (Timmons & Apps), Area Sneaks (Mosconi & Gonzalez), Cannot Exist (Gricevich), Try (Brazil & Larsen), ON (Cross, Donovan & Schlesinger), Plantarchy (Katko)…
A wealth of compelling new mags demonstrating once again that the counter-institutional is where the new(s) really happens.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick | Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity | Duke | 2003
“Paranoia is anticipatory.” RIP, Eve.
—Aug 15 09 : Oakland
More David Buuck here.
Attention Span 2009 – Alli Warren
Suzanne Stein | Hole In Space | OMG! | 2009
The poet’s body as a public communication sculpture.
David Larsen, trans. | Names of the Lion | Atticus/Finch | 2009
A pleasure to finally see this text in print after David’s jaw-dropping performance at the Unitarian Center in San Francisco, 2007.
Robert Fitterman | Rob the Plagiarist | Roof Books | 2009
“Why listen to my gut when I could listen to thousands of guts?”
David Brazil & Sara Larsen, eds. | Try | 2008-2009
AKA “Try!” Together with Dodie & Kevin’s “Mirage Periodical,” this little stapled, xeroxed magazine owns the Bay Area. It’s an INDUSTRY.
Lisa Robertson | The Men: A Lyric Book | Book Thug | 2006
“The funny pathos of men – I salute this.” I keep returning to this little lyric book.
Brandon Brown | The Poems Of Gaius Valerius Catullus 1-60 | Unpublished | 2009
Catullus is envious.
Abner Jay | One Man Band | Subliminal Sounds | 2003
Jay traveled around the South in a mobile home and performed as the (self-described) “last working Southern black minstrel.” Hilarious and heartbreaking.
Stephen Rodefer | Four Lectures | The Figures | 1981
News to me. Killed me. Continues to kill me.
Anne Boyer | Art Is War | Mitzvah Chaps | 2008
A new world treatise. Includes the smash hit “Difficult Ways to Publish Poetry.”
Bill Luoma | When the Pathogenic Wind Comes | Unpublished
The looping–“with crooked spring and great pouring”–is trance-making.
John Cassavetes | Films | 1959-1977
Especially “A Woman Under the Influence” and “Faces”—Gena Rowlands is my one true love.
More Alli Warren here.
Attention Span 2009 – Brandon Brown
K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams | Unpublished
Kasey’s most recent work complicates any orthodox aesthetics of Flarf. While it surely deploys the twin, cardinal rules of computer aid and histrionically “bad” content, the “Sonnagrams” are for me also work of conceptual translation, doubly or triply nuanced by Mohammad’s own training as a Shakespearean scholar. And this is Shakespeare 2009: “Then do I pray this adage may hold tight / Mohammad sweetens seagull panties right.”
Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman | Notes on Conceptualism| Ugly Duckling Presse | 2009
The “Notes” themselves an experiment in conceptual collaboration, the NOC were as controversial in summer 2009 as “The Call” Don Denkinger made correctly in the 1985 World Series. I found them extremely generative, useful, and profound.
Sara Larsen and David Brazil | Try!| stapled magazine | 2008-2009
Try! is heir to the rich tradition of Xeroxed, stapled, hand-delivered, often-appearing magazines in the Bay Area. Try! comes out every two weeks—and it really does! It also manages to collect the newest, most vibrant writings that surpass the alienating categories of genre and xenophobic (read: your given “local poetry community” xenophobia) coterie-or-nuthin’ loyalties. I love it. You love it.
Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | In Girum | 2008
I spent the oughts waiting for this book to come out and thanks to In Girum Nocte etc. press it has.
Rob Halpern | Disaster Suites | Palm Press | 2009
Disaster Suites is an outrageous work, the word that has accompanied my living adjacent to and with Rob over the last few years of his writing and reading these magnificent polemics against complicity and the tonal shifts of global capital.
Madeline Gins | What The President Will Say And Do!! | Station Hill | 1984
Not quite a neglectorina and certainly not a new release, but since this is my first “Attention Span” I’ve got to include one of my all-time favorites.
Anne Tardos | I Am You | Salt | 2008
Woah. Seriously. The high point for me probably the sudden photograph of Anne glaring at the reader into the ostensible Macbook camera, literalizing the transgression of the lyric already at work through the bloodbath and beyond.
Dana Ward | The Drought | Open 24 Hours Press | 2009
The drought is over thanks to O24HPress. Fundamentally an advancement of the lyric impulse as mediated not only by “post-avant” poetics (including contemporary post-avant manifestations—Ward’s work stands not as an emblem of some categorical “other” or “hybridity” to some bicameral hegemony of flarfists and conceptualists, but for me it is one of the finest proofs of a world out there) but fulsome ecologies of pop prosody and interpenetrations.
T.I. | Paper Trail | Grand Hustle / Atlantic | 2008
T.I.P.’s sixth studio effort is the shining mainstream hip hop LP of the fiscal year. The classic Clifford approach (the breathless Whitmanian line, the essential Atlantan drawl) inflected by his impending jail sentence—the record’s carpe diem message amplified by its anthemic choruses.
Anne Boyer | odalisqued.blogspot.com | Internet | 2008-2009
The thresholds between Anne’s “books” and her activity on the blog are constantly threatened and renewed. What you get in both places is a contemporary lyric, made in the place where web-based simulacra meets the real-time alienated worker, all the while expressive of Anne’s sui generis aesthetic and integrity.
More Brandon Brown here.
Stoned and Inconsolable
Anne Boyer – Brute (0’35”). Text at slow-to-load MiPOesias Magazine (scroll down). Boyer’s blog, odali$qued. Her Coffee House book Romance of Happy Workers. On Women of the Web, back in 2007. And on Delirious Hem, just this May. Abraham Lincoln, the mag she edits with K. Silem Mohammad.
Attention Span – Benjamin Friedlander
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.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2010 – Dana Ward
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Patti Smith | Just Kids | Ecco | 2010
I read this as the sun went down during a three hour layover at the Philadelphia airport turning what looked to be three of life’s most tedious hours into three of its most magical.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi | The Soul at Work | Semitotext(e) | 2010
“The mobile phone makes possible the connection between the needs of semio-capital and the mobilization of the living labor of cyber-space. The ringtone of the mobile phone calls the workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flows”
Word to Bifo.
David Brazil | Spy Wednesday | TAXT | 2010
David Brazil | 1-18-09 | @ A Voicebox | 2009
“One is not permitted to forget that/this world is ordered as it is/according to protocols of violence/& exploitation. On which we/batten.” (from Spy Wednesday)
Anne Boyer | The 2000s: A History of the Future in Advance of Itself
“I wrote yet another revolutionary email. The revolutionary email said: ‘Culture is a barbarism against the soul’ & ‘because I have loved so many others the stakes are not myself.’”
Laura Moriarty, ed. | A Tonalist Poetry Feature | Jacket #40 | 2010
Laura Moriarty, ed. | A Tonalist Poetry Feature | Aufgabe #8 | 2010
“Some people write lyric poetry because they just want to and think it’s great. Some write it though they think it’s impossible. The latter are A Tonalists.”
So much incredible writing in these two sections that I can’t even begin to name favorites. Both sections have been inexhaustible resources of pleasure & inspiration this year.
Thom Donovan | Wild Horses of Fire | whof.blogspot.com | ongoing
Thom’s blog is an incredible ever evolving constellation of art writing, poems (his own & others), proposals, calls for action, & always, more generally, a call for re-thinking. Astonishing intelligence is mated here to astonishing warmth.
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010
Lisa Robertson | The Lisa Robertson Issue; ed. Dan Thomas Glass | With+Stand #4 | 2010
Glass’ great editorial work in the Lisa Robertson issue of With + Stand made for a beautiful & diverse companion while reading through R’s Boat this spring in one long extended sigh of happy envy.
Lisa Howe | Sensible Sensations | unpublished manuscript | 2010
This long poem of Lisa’s is a work of ekphrasis (written after a show by Cincinnati artist Matt Morris), & also a celebration of community, written with a special consideration for the artists & writers & musicians in Cincinnati’s Brighton neighborhood. I had the pleasure to hear Lisa read it twice this spring, & each time the dynamism & loveliness of the writing linked me up to the loveliness & dynamism of our local experience together.
Lauren Dolgen, concept | Teen Mom | MTV | 2010
Too powerful, complex & problematic to say a lot about here, but this is the first reality series I’ve ever loved, if that’s what I should say about how this show makes me feel.
Mark Fisher | Capitalist Realism | Zero Books | 2010
“So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.”
Helene Cixous | Three Steps of the Ladder of Writing | Columbia | 1993
Brandon Brown | The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catallus | Unpublished ms | 2010
A friend sent me the Cixous thinking I’d like it & boy oh boy was he right! With the Patti Smith thing this book has been the calibrating writing of my summer. I’ve read it twice & keep going back, & every time I end up exhilarated, dying to read all the books she’s attending, & dying to write more books of my own. Outstanding! As to Brown’s translation of Catallus I’ve been reading this book off and on through out the year& it’s as big, as stupefying & wondrous as the universe itself. Don’t sleep.
More Dana Ward here. His Attention Span for 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 16, 2010 at 11:18 am
Posted in Attention Span 2010, Commented List
Tagged with Anne Boyer, Brandon Brown, Dana Ward, David Brazil, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Hélène Cixous, Laura Moriarty, Lauren Dolgen, Lisa Howe, Lisa Robertson, Mark Fisher, Patti Smith, Thom Donovan