Attention Span 2010 – Marcella Durand

George Albon | Empire Life | Littoral | 1998

“Mass resets interior.” Tight.

Kamau Brathwaite | SAVE COWPASTOR | www.tomraworth.com/wordpress

The complete archives of this Web site, spanning many years, are word-in-and-as-witness to CowPastor’s destruction.

Peter Culley | Hammertown | New Star | 2003

A double writing this, but within sevens, form springs beauty.

Emily Dickinson | Selected Letters | Harvard | 1986

There’s probably a better and fuller edition out there somewhere, and if not, there should be. All the same, life-changing.

Paul Foster Johnson | Refrains/Unworkings | Apostrophe | 2008

We may be “immoderate,” but this book says it beautifully moderately.

Rachel Levitsky | Neighbor | Ugly Duckling | 2009

This book illuminated the complex workings of my 30-unit tenement building within the larger political and social systems within which we exist.

Michèle Métail | La route de cinq pieds | Tarabuste | 2006

Another example of Métail’s innovating form around content around form (going way past Oulipo): in this case, a route through China in five-syllable form drawn from Chinese classical poetry.

Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009

Bought at and devoured after her reading at the Poetry Project this spring. (And The Middle Room shortly thereafter.)

Charles Olson | Call Me Ismael | Johns Hopkins | 1997

Some necessary ecology to which I was way too long delayed.

Kristin Prevallet | [I, Afterlife] [Essay in Mourning Time] | Essay Press | 2007

Gets into, beautifully, the disconnects between land, life, death, action, “me” and “world.”

Karen Weiser | To Light Out | Ugly Duckling | 2009

Communiqués from the gorgeous static of growing things.

Honorable mentions: Lyx Ish’s essay in Avant-Gardening, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place; C.S. Giscombe’s Prairie Style; Maurice Maeterlinck and L.L. Langstroth’s books on bees; Kevin Varrone reading from passyunk lost at the Poetry Project (and now the book has finally arrived!).

More about Marcella Durand here. Her Attention Span for 2008, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.

Attention Span – Elizabeth Treadwell

Sarah Vap | Dummy Fire | Saturnalia | 2007

“Sitting around in paper gowns, in deep study.”

This book twirls faithfully its own slippy vernac.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson | Collected Poems | Shearsman | 2008

“Folded & re/folded the/map of the/town is pass/ed through/our lives/& hands ac/ross the table.”

A conjure board for the recent nearby.

Kim Hyesoon, trans. Don Mee Choi | Mommy Must Be A Fountain of Feathers | Action | 2008

“she hammers away till the keyboard is bloodied”

“I want to shove a finger into the silence and make it vomit.”

Etel Adnan | In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country | City Lights | 2005

“There should be only one school, the one where you learn the future…without even any students. Located in the guts of the species.”

Ines Hernandez-Avila, ed. | Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representations | Altamira | 2005

“This is not a treaty!”

Myung Mi Kim | Under Flag | Kelsey St | 1991

“These men these women chant and chant”

Rereading in anticipation of her new book Penury. As Sarah Anne Cox said to me recently, “it’s hard to find something that truly moves you.”

Diane Glancy | Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears | Harcourt Brace | 1996

Rereading. A recent article in the New Yorker, mired per usual in the vast inaccuracy of the ruling class, jokingly compared a boycott of the Beijing Olympics on account of Tibet to a boycott of those in Salt Lake City on account of the Cherokee. I wish more people would read this luminous, frightening, deeply informative book, which to me has an affinity with Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Christian Wiman, ed. | Poetry: the Translation Issue | Poetry Foundation | April 2008

The first issue I’d read. I liked it.

Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin | 2007

Sarah Anne Cox | Truancy | Dusie | 2007

VA | board books, picture books, & chapter books | various | various

I could live without some of the tropes, others I probably could not.

Caroline Bergvall & C.S. Giscombe | Reading at Small Press Traffic | November 2008

I am eagerly awaiting this event.

Yedda Morrison | girl scout nation| Displaced | 2008

“and yet/a doe”

*

More Elizabeth Treadwell here.

Attention Span – Michael Scharf

Arun Kolatkar | Kala Ghoda Poems | Pras Prakashan | 2004

Two or three things he knows about the capital of Maharashtra.

Barbara Guest | The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest | Wesleyan | 2008

Esp. the hilarious The Countess from Minneapolis and the they-get-better-ever-year Rocks on a Platter and Miniatures.

Brandon Downing | Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics | Grievous Pictures | 2007

Isolates the individual compulsion, or drive, toward forming and maintaining identities from the inherited concepts and media through which one is forced to do it. Separates out the focal power that images draw from their original contexts, and, at 10x and 100x, sets fire to the frog, freeing princess from the chrysalis. Visual intelligence that makes gallery work (like, say, Isaac Julien’s WESTERN UNION: Small Boats) look at once commercial and provincial. A kiss like that.

C.S. Giscombe | Prairie Style | Dalkey Archive | 2008

The phenomenology of driving during adult life.

Gennady Aygi, trans. by Peter France | Field – Russia | New Directions | 2007

Tarkovsky and Sokurov track the same maternal grasses. Stripped down to the wind.

George Oppen, ed. Stephen Cope | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2008

“But taking as a whole the phase of the world’s history which we have reached, it has become a commonplace remark to say that we have crossed the threshold of the Apocalypse.”

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008

Lovers of late JA meanderings through pre-code detritus who look to counter other lovers’ complaints about cut & pasteability will find, here, that reading each section ‘in order’, or continuously across the breaks and gaps, makes the book lose part of its meaning. The obsessive superfineries of the arrangement, shorn against undoing, and the intricate intactness of “Lateral Argument” underscore the point perfectly: within a supersaturate, none of the pieces fit. The author also wishes to inform you that Stephane was wrong about the book/bombe; the blank page 68 is a comment on the French.

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Robin S Ngangom, eds. | Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the Northeast | NEHU | 2003

Revised edition due shortly from Penguin. Until then, greetings from Shillong.

Miles Champion | Eventually | The Rest | 2008

Read “Colour in Huysmans” slowly, with the right column as a kind of gloss on or completion of the left, and then see how inadequate that is.

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton | New Star | 2008

Plowing on Sunday. Plowing North America.

Vivek Narayanan | Mr. Subramanian | unpublished ms. | 2008

Stephen Dedalus, in Madras at 35.