Attention Span 2011 | Susana Gardner

David Kirschenbaum, ed. | The Portable BOOG Reader | BOOG LITERATURE | 2000

I acquired this anthology recently in an after reading pints and swap. From the stunning cover photo of Lee Ann Brown (taken by Allen Ginsberg no less) to the vast multitude of interior work by NYC based poets. Featuring Julie Patton, Wanda Phipps, Betsy Fagin, Sharon Mesmer and many, many more.

Dodie Bellamy | CUNTUPS | Tender Buttons | USA | 2001

This is a book I should have read right away, ten years ago today, actually. Ten years ago we all should have read it, but only now did I come to it. It is daring, a modern sort of nod to Lifting Belly. Modern and dual, bi-and all-BECOMING. It makes me WANT, it will make you WANT too. All MEN should read it NOW, all WOMEN too. Read it in one go, read it in two. Dodie Bellamy will bewitch you as she has me. Bewitched, betwixt, and tricked, all done up with all that lovely goo! An erotic love poem manifests each page. She will badger you, she will eschew you, as she wants you and you and you. So little! So Wild!!!

Sean Cole | Itty City | Pressed Wafer | 2003
Sean Cole | The December Project | BOOG | 2005

Like unexpected sound bites in rapid succession…

The moon is night alert. It’s half-nigh, strafing. Like an Alewife it slaps against the black movement of the sky. Every year I write about the moon, it’s ambitious, as if it did anything but whip the surf into dumb caps, as if it did anything but laps around the Earth.

Emily Critchley Love / All That / & OK by Emily Critchley | Penned in the Margins | UK | 2011

This is an amazing, thorough collection of British poet Emily Critchley’s publications to date. You need to read this book!

(The Avaunt Garde)

speaking in logic (or Greek) where nothing’s divided everything’s
dug up out of the dirt, bomb or butterfly, but such dirt gets stuck
(like red paint) under the nails & the world after all is not for such
violent admiring. the archaeological point may be us at the drinking
bowl us as the clouds part us offering ourselves up to ourselves in
graphic violence.to get the beauty of it hot

Frances Cruk | DOWN YOU GO OR Négation de Bruit | Punch | USA | 2011

Just in! This is a beautiful letterpress book, total gorgeousness all around. This is an amazing I-XX sequence, which begins:

Swarms!
We will bang
Into the sun Blinded
thirsty,
howling

(and continues in IX)

Again the fake garden, motionless plastic curves.
This time we are Great in our Smart
Bomb Time Machine device.
We come to fuck the mutants
We go to mutant them
I am with the mutant
firing limbs

I want to quote more. No, I want to type the whole sequence here for you now, but resist doing that…you need to order this book. And since I just received my copy, I want to digest its negation, its lyrical dreamy chasms before me.

Amy De’Ath | Erec & Enid | Salt | UK | 2010

From the title poem of De’ath’s impressive first collection:

Said Erec to Enide, the sun burst
down on my sails and glowing tore
my winnow North.
Said Enide to Erec, I don’t know how
to soothe you.
…
Said Erec to Enide,
Enide dozed, & her lips gently
popped as they parted. Erec sat on
the grass, the horse chestnut on his
chest, and the salmon who jumped,
and the curvature of his intense
guilt, his ergonomic fantasy office
and the parameter of his suburb.

j/j hastain | myrhh to re all myth | Furniture | forthcoming

‘This is a romance of fractals,’ an invigorating linguistic panoply which refuses to be any one thing. myrhh to re all myth gives us a vivid transdifferentiated poethic state—a sonic inquiry—thus feral post-gendered embodiment of ‘the infinitely ferric dress’. Multiple, layered, disarming and hauntingly worthwhile. Hastain spins a fine vocalic lyric gossamer about us, a future ethos and new grammatical treatise of fracture, rediscovery, and retelling, a myrhh re(garding) all myth.

Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: A Project For Future Children | Kelsey St. | 2009

Kapil threads together a now nearly forgotten story, as she realizes the tale of the two feral ‘wolf’ girls poetically as it is heart wrenching and hopeful.

“Lucidly, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next to your body; then my eyes clicked the photo into place. Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed.”

Marianne Morris | SolacePoem (afterParvine‘Tesami) | Tusk Records | UK | 2011

Listen to this link and be bewitched by this UK/CAN sylph in her gorgeous words and sound work. Seeing Morris perform is the only way to trump the poetic sound experience.

Tom Pickard | MORE PRICKS THAN PRIZES | Pressed Wafer | USA | 2010

This little book is packed with kicks & punches as it delivers a great poetic memoir of sorts, seriously small enough to fit in your pocket! While recounting a particular period of his experiences as a young poet, Pickard’s story also recounts the difficulty of ‘being’ a poet, father and citizen in the 60’s. Also, just received some beautiful postcards from Tom. He is an amazing photographer as well, and now I have many images of his far off corner in ‘Blighty’ (he taught me that!) The pic of him and Allen Ginsberg is tacked to my study wall.

Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | USA | 2009

I was pleased to meet Douglas this past summer at the Boston Poetry Marathon and then again in NYC for a Zinc reading. I am still digging into Dug’s Theogony. For some reason, when I meet poets I instantly fabricate (in my dense head) what kind of poems they write…Rothschild, for me was a poet of the long poem category…so at first I was surprised to see all of these small(ish) poems throughout the book…but then I realized it is all one poem we are all writing, right? One long fabulous poem! Here is one I particularly like… I also want to quote UNEXPOSED here, but no, I will not expose it. No, I will not expose it! Go find it!

PANZY 

& then another
first one & then a flock
of snow bells

Jaime Robles | foundlings | EXETER | UK | 2011

Receiving this book was a real treat—like a foundling itself, beautiful and austere in its form. And heart-wrenchingly prescient! It is works like this that bring me to poetry. It is many things, an inventory, a recalling of the past, an articulation of sorrow and even the beauty therein…a book of lost children, lost mothers, of hope.

from foundling 2275, a boy

                        This Silver Ribbon is
                            Desired to be preserved as
          The Childs mark for distinction

This ribbon binds but also reaches,
Observes the shortest distance between me and her,
Maps the call of a bird—
Tinsel and silky: each stitch a feather.

Michael Ruby | Window on the City | BlazeVOX | 2006

This is a beautiful book, another fabulous contribution to publishing from BlazeVOX! & a Dusie Kollektiv participant at that! It was also a great pleasure to hear Michael read his work at the Dusie Zinc Reading this past summer, I sent him away with his pockets full of chocolate.

Kathrin Schaeppi | Sonja Sekula: Grace in a Cow’s Eye: a memoir | Black Radish | 2011

An amazing book project convergence, re-seeing / investigation, and collaboration with the late Swiss visual artist and writer Sonja Sekula. When Schaeppi performs works from this book, I am inspired to write it to the score of one-woman musical. Vielleicht einmal!

Gertrude Stein | Lifting Belly | The Naiad Press Inc. | 1989

Lifting belly confounds me, entrances and enchants me.
Lifting belly what is earnest. Expecting an arena to be monumental.
Lifting belly is recognized to be the only spectacle present. Do you mean that.
Lifting belly is a language. It says island. Island a strata. Lifting belly is a repetition. (17)

§

Susana Gardner‘s Herso: An Heirship in Waves was published earlier this year by Black Radish.

Gardner’s Attention Span for 2010, 2007. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Amina Cain

Bhanu Kapil | (a poem-essay, or precursor: NOTES: for a novel: Ban en Banlieues) | Belladonna* | 2011

Because lying in the street for a long time is beautiful and necessary and also violent.

Matthew Goulish | 39 Microlectures | Routledge | 2000

“Do whatever you need to with this book, and, if possible, do not let it damage your thoughts.”

Pamela Lu | Pamela: A Novel | Atelos | 1998

It took me a long time to get to this, and now I need to get to the next one, but I loved its intimacy and searching.

Octavia Butler | Kindred | Doubleday | 1979

This novel is amazing in its movement through time and in its narrative voice, which is crystalline.

Amanda Ackerman | The Seasons Cemented | Hex Presse | 2010

Like paying attention to a single line in a highly ornamental design, and then the next one, and then the next. Empty space is there too.

Violette Leduc, trans. Derek Coltman | The Lady and the Little Fox Fur | Peter Owen | 1967

There is pleasure in this short novel, for a character and for a reader, even when it seems as if a word like ‘pleasure’ should have gone missing.

Ronaldo Wilson | Poems of the Black Object | Futurepoem | 2009

Dreaming until it takes shape. And then achingly clear.

Marguerite Duras, trans. Eileen Ellenbogen | The Vice-Consul | Pantheon | 1968

A “sequel” of sorts to The Ravishing of Lol Stein, there’s a humor in this novel I haven’t found in other works by Duras.

Renee Gladman | TOAF | Atelos | 2008

The kind of book that makes one want to write; I would follow this narrative voice wherever it took me.

Danielle Dutton | Sprawl | Siglio | 2010

The accumulations become more and more addicting and so do the shining singularities.

§

Amina Cain is the author of I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues, 2009). She lives in Los Angeles.

Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Jennifer Scappettone

Leslie Scalapino | The Dihedrons Gazelle Dihedrals Zoom | ms developed out of sound-based routes through a new dictionary; video of reading by Konrad Steiner available here | 2010

“[T]heir whole as bodies in the underground petroleum…holes spurting here and there, and the sky turned indigo, as did the ocean, now petroleum.”

As recorded on 2/14/10. Enough said. Leslie, we miss you.

Etel Adnan | The Arab Apocalypse (reprinted with a foreword by Jalal Toufic) | Post-Apollo | 2007

The illegible substance of the language of childhood persists through the blasts of civil war. To be read alongside “To Write in a Foreign Language,” available here.

Tonya Foster | mss in progress including “A Swarm of Bees in High Court” (forthcoming from Belladonna/Futurepoem in 2010), “Monkey Talk,” and “A Mathematics of Chaos: Pay Attention to Where You At/From” | extracts can be heard here | ongoing/forthcoming

“Geography can be transformative—the way a bullet to the body can be transformed.”

Edouard Glissant, trans. Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël) | Poetic Intention | Nightboat | 2010

“Whence, for the individual, this simple obligation: to open and to ravish the body of knowledge.”

“The work of a poet appears…derisory: it is only ever the foam of that ocean from which he wants to extract a cathedral, a definite architecture.”

“Yes: we are each in this drama the overseas of others.”

I could go on. But that would be to abstract tracts of a text so urgent in contextual detail, or what Glissant calls (& Stephens translates as) the “thrashed truth of one’s materiality.” This book, published as L’intention poétique in 1969, needs to change the way “we” understand modernism, the sixties, postwar theory, etc.

Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: A Project for Future Children | Kelsey St. | 2009

Because it’s the latest which is bound, but everything, and latest on color. See also “Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?” and the posts preceding her choice to defect from the now defunct Harriet. On reading: “I read in order to be a writer in the time I am in, which is a closed time. I read to open myself to time, which is the time that opens in turn to writing. I read to flee taut death; to embrace wet or sinking deaths instead.”

Henri Meschonnic, trans. Lisa Robertson & Avra Spector | “The Rhythm Manifesto” | ms, they tell me it’s available here | 2010

“Against all poeticizations, I say there is a poem only if a shape of life transforms a shape of language and if reciprocally a shape of language transforms a shape of life. I say that it is only in this way that poetry, as the activity of poems, can live in society, can do what only a poem can do for people who, without poems, wouldn’t even realize that they were undoing their subjectivity and their historicity to become nothing other than products in the market of ideas, the market of feelings, and the market of manners.” Much-needed antidote to what’s modish—in poetry, I mean. Feeding a steadily-becoming-obsession of mine with a focus on rhythm and meter in the postwar epos (early 1960s, against semiotics). Further resonance with Daria Fain & Robert Kocik’s Phoneme Choir, ongoing & described at http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/04/dance/choir-praxis.

Judd Morrissey | RC_AI | http://www.judisdaid.com/rcai.php | 2010

Text—recombinatory speakings out of Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice—as panorama, 380,000 pixels—or 422 feet—long. Ends with bubbly digital schmaltz, delightsome.

Pier Paolo Pasolini | La Ricotta | part of Ro.Go.Pa.G., & supplementary material on Criterion Collection edition of Mamma Roma | 1962

I searched for this film for over a decade and recovered it accidentally when permitting myself to watch Mamma Roma for the nth time. Stracci (“rags”) is enjoined to play Christ in a restaging of the Passion directed by a Pasolini figure played by Orson Welles. Couldn’t be more of a corrective to Gibson far before the fact; censored “for insulting the religion of the state,” so that he had to remove Welles’s final line, “dropping dead was his only means of revolution.” Hypercitational: poetry, philosophy, music, film, painting of others punctures the half-hour. At one point a tableau vivant of Rosso Fiorentino’s and Pontormo’s magisterially weird Depositions, typifying this short’s neorealist mannerism or mannerist neorealism.

M. Nourbese Philip | Zong! | Wesleyan | 2008

Hauntological, as Philip notes, ululating effort to identify, localize the murdered Africans reduced by the illogic of law to cargo aboard the Zong, at the apex of Enlightenment. Alters “reading”: drowns the eye. Taught following Kamau Brathwaite’s 2005 Wesleyan title Born to Slow Horses, which also insists that the Atlantic is alive and history—despite all other proclamations and appearances—undead.

Lauren Shufran | The Birds | self-published chapbook | 2010

Riddled with antient rid-’ems: “Prior to this tryst my debt was pretty damn van- / Illa; kinkless, even—like interject- / Ing damns between my speech to impound flavors, or / Jouncing into fountains up in Rome in / Simplex Latin:.…” Just received, still trying to divine the architectonics of this padded echo chamber. “Ery spoken word performance hankers for its pri- / Vate Melos to corroborate that Venuses / De Milo and Baghdadi artifacts can still / Be looted—I mean, disinhumed—from loci all / Entombed by massacres your gifted homeboys mount- / Ed.” Close kin to Brandon Brown’s amazing translations of Catullus, another one for my short-list: but where are they? Shelves are a chaos and I can’t find ‘em. The awkward encrustations of tempo in this work—the making, the deriving—rebuke the voiding of historicity that is such the rage at present. Taking a cue from Mallarmé via Meschonnic via Robertson/Spector: “to mysteriously work toward lateness or neverness.”

Emilio Villa, ed. Claudio Parmiggiani | Emilio Villa: poeta e scrittore | Edizioni Mazzotta | 2008

Catalog of a retrospective of poetry, criticism, and artworks surrounding this crucial but elusive-by-choice border-crosser. Includes some of the poet’s concrete and visual poems, multilingual texts, collaborations with artists such as Alberto Burri, translations from various ancients, and notes toward an etymological dictionary of Italian that would do away with “positivist linguistics” and the “Romance fervor” by plumbing the roots of words in the archaic zones of Mesopotamia, the Syro-Babylonian coasts, and the pre- and protohistoric Mediterranean. So much food for thought and further work.

More Jennifer Scappettone here. Her Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Eric Baus

Fred Moten | B Jenkins | Duke | 2010

“come from some of everywhere, somewhere so deep that some of everywhere come with you. to become for our occult belongings, // worldly in that other way”

Dorothea Lasky | Black Life | Wave | 2010

“You are reading the work of a great poet, possibly one of the greatest ones of your time. If I am standing in from of you right now, you are listening to the voice of one of the greatest poets of your time.”

Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: A Project For Future Children | Kelsey St. | 2009

“I am not interested in animals. Return to the work as memory. Say it is a wolf becoming a girl, the action in reverse.”

Tan Lin | Seven Controlled Vocabularies | Wesleyan | 2010

“People are basically animals that know how to read.”

Steven Zultanski | Pad | Book Thug | 2010

“My dick cannot lift the walls. My dick cannot lift the ceiling. My dick cannot lift the floor.”

Will Alexander | The Sri Lankan Loxodrome | New Directions | 2010

“such swans / staggered by microbial reasoning / their aggressive nests / anatomical with anomaly”

Paul Killebrew | Flowers | Canarium | 2010

“It’s better than Atlanta, where they treat people like cars / in a city that combines the rustic elegance of Newark / with the quiet dignity of a beer bong.”

Edouard Glissant, trans. Nathalie Stephens | Poetic Intention | Nightboat | 2010

“When the poet travels to the ends where there is no country, he opens with the more deserved relation, in that space of an absolute elsewhere in which each can attempt to reach him.”

Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010

“Say I’m a beautiful animal who has mastered laziness / In reddened clearing in the occidental forest / In the album / Purse of goddess clicking / I long to see how it will continue to behave”

Norma Cole | Where Shadows Will | City Lights | 2009

“Here the subject thinks ‘there could be flowers’ or ‘the water was a bit disturbed when the ring fell in.’ All that, painted from said things, pleases it.”

More Eric Baus here. Back to directory.

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.