Posts Tagged ‘Caroline Bergvall’
Attention Span 2011 | Román Luján
Raúl Zurita | Purgatory: A Bilingual Edition | California | 2009
Raúl Zurita | Song for His Disappeared Love / Canto a su amor desaparecido | Action | 2010
Manuel Maples Arce | City : A Bolshevik Superpoem in 5 Cantos / Urbe : Poema bolchevique en 5 cantos | Ugly Duckling | 2010
Myriam Moscona | Negro marfil / Ivory Black | Les Figues | 2011
Uljana Wolf | False Friends | Ugly Duckling | 2011
Carlos Oquendo de Amat | 5 Meters of Poems / 5 metros de poemas | Ugly Duckling | 2010
Michael Palmer | Thread | New Directions | 2011
Marosa di Giorgio | The History of Violets / La historia de las violetas | Ugly Duckling | 2010
Jose Kozer | Stet: Selected Poems | Junction | 2006
Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. | Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing | Northwestern | 2011
Jen Hofer | One | Palm | 2009
Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat | 2011
Charles Bernstein | Attack of the Difficult Poems | Chicago | 2011
Gonzalo Rojas | From the Lightning: Selected Poems | Green Integer | 2006
Juliana Spahr | Well Then There Now | Black Sparrow | 2011
Robert Walser | Microscripts | New Directions / Christine Burgin | 2010
Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon Grosman, eds. | The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry | Oxford | 2009
Brian Kim Stefans | Viva Miscegenation | Make Now | Forthcoming 2011
Marjorie Perloff | Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century | Chicago | 2010
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Román Luján is a Mexican poet and translator currently living in Los Angeles, where he is studying for his Ph.D. in Latin American Literature at UCLA. His books of poetry include Drâstel (Bonobos, 2010), Deshuesadero (FETA, 2006), Aspa Viento in collaboration with painter Jordi Boldó (FONCA, 2003) and Instrucciones para hacerse el valiente (CONACULTA, 2000). Some of his poems and translations can be found at Eleven Eleven, Mandorla, Aufgabe, and Jacket2.
Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Marjorie Perloff
Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat | 2011
The title poem is Bergvall’s brilliantly satiric version of Chaucer, anatomizing the current socio-cultural scene, but this rich collection also includes the experimental verse of “Goan Atom,” and (my favorite) “Cropper,” Bergvall’s multilingual exploration of sedimentation—of “borders, rules, boundaries, edges, limbos at historical breaches.”
Craig Dworkin | Motes | Roof | 2011
Minimalist procedural lyrics that uncover the secrets within given words and morphemes. Dworkin’s version of Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise, it’s a totally delightful and pleasurable but also intellectually rigorous book.
Peter Gizzi | Threshold Songs | Wesleyan | 2011
This may be Gizzi’s best book to date: the mood is elegiac (the poet’s brother Michael had just died) but also jaunty: whenever the darkness becomes too hard to bear, a colloquial—even funnynote brings us back to the everyday world: “Don’t back away. Turtle into it / with your little force.”
Christian Hawkey | Ventrakl | Ugly Duckling | 2010
Hawkey’s surreal lyric sequence, prompted by the life and work of Georg Trakl. Using a great variety of verse forms and prose interludes, Hawkey produces a terrifying and moving poem about legacy, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves so as to avoid self-recognition.
Heinrich Heine, trans. into Portuguese and with an introd. by André Vallias | Heine, hein? – Poeta dos contrários | Sao Paulo: Perspectiva | 2011
Heine, one of the great lyric poets of all time, is still very little known in the US and translations have been partial and problematic. But Vallias, himself a fine poet, has produced an amazing book, including all the major poems as well as essays, letters, and bibliographical material. My Portuguese is very rudimentary but I marvel at what can—and is being—done elsewhere to bring one nation’s poetry into the present of another’s.
Christian Marclay, dir. | The Clock | a film | 2010
To my mind, the finest conceptual work ever produced: this 24-hour montage of film clips played in real time (featuring an infinite variety of clocks, watches, and verbal signals indicating that exact time in each shot) is endlessly enchanting—a Waiting for Godot for the 21st Century where we are always waiting—for the event that never happens and which is immediately eclipsed and displaced by another event. Can life be this dramatic? The Clock is nerve-wracking, funny, moving: and when you come out of the gallery (I saw about 8 hours worth at LACMA) you think you’re still in the picture, about to witness the bank robbery or the wake-up call, even as the music bleeds unaccountably from one scene into the next.
Vanessa Place | Tragodía: 1: Statement of Facts | Blanc | 2010
This compendium of court testimonies and police reports—all of them taken from Place’s own files (she is an appellate criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles) has raised enormous controversy: Place has been accused of being soft on rapists. But the fact of this Statement of Facts is that she has simply arranged her material so as to tell it like it is—no sides taken, no points made, and yet an unforgettable image of how events in the contemporary city play themselves out. The book reads like a Henry James novel: what, we ask at every turn, really happened?
Srikanth Reddy | Voyager | California | 2011
Reddy’s writing-through of Kurt Waldheim’s memoir (3 times in 3 different ways) is a devastating exposé of political mendacity and maudlin self-justification. It’s a brilliantly rendered work that literally “speaks for itself.”
Jonathan Stalling | Yingelishi | Counterpath | 2011
Yingelishi (pronounced yeen guh lee shr) sounds like an accented pronunciation of the word “English,” even as, for the Chinese reader, its characters spell out “chanted songs, beautiful poetry.” Spalding combines homophonic translatation, with the dictionary meaning of the different phrases as well as their Chinese characters so as to demonstrate what the new language of some 350 million people looks and feels like. Comes with a website so that we can hear these sounds spoken and chanted. It’s a brilliant tour de force.
Uljana Wolf, trans. Susan Bernofsky | False Friends | Ugly Duckling | 2011
These DICHTionary poems are based on so-called “false friends” in German and English—words that look and/or sound familiar in both languages but differ in meaning. The comedy that results is full of surprises—a lovely sequence for our multilingual moment. And Ugly Duckling’s production is, as always, a pleasure.
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Susan Howe | THAT THIS | New Directions | 2010
I list this last and separately because Howe’s very important book won the Bollingen Prize and I was one of three judges so my comment on it is a part of the award citation.
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Marjorie Perloff‘s most recent book is Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Her Wittgenstein’s Ladder has just been translated into Spanish and is soon coming out in French. She is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.
Perloff’s Attention Span for 2006, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Erín Moure
Theodor Adorno, trans. Rodney Livingstone | Lectures on Negative Dialectics | Polity | 2008
Not Negative Dialectics in itself, but a real way into that book, this book holds Adorno’s preparation notes for his lectures on his theory of intellectual experience that became ND. The lectures provide both a way into Adorno’s methodology in that book, and also lay out a kind of field of responsiveness, as Adorno prepares to address an audience, and moves his ideas outward. I love books like this, that let me enter into a practice more deeply.
Oana Avasilichioaei | Spelles | No Press and Hex Laboratorium | 2010
Echoes of the medieval distaff gospels, and of performance of poetry as voice (for there is a CD) and as spelling, performance of spelling (and the “elle” in “spelles” is a critical gendering of the text) as performance of the book without author (for the author’s name figures nowhere on or in the object/book), now in the hands of the reader. Echoes yes of Bergvall and Robertson here, and of the performancing in and out of English that is characteristic of Avasilichioaei’s work.
Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat | 2011
Bergvall’s strange rich turnings in and returnings to an English that is old, raw, syncopated, new. And feminist!
Natalee Caple | The Semi-Conducting Dictionary | ECW | 2010
Strindberg’s life. Poems amazing in their structures and a book that opens a wonderful presence and questioning of gendering.
Paul Celan, trans. Pierre Joris, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull | The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials | Stanford | 2011
Drafts, preparatory notes, revisions, and references to Paul Celan’s seminal speech on poetics, the Meridian speech. A poetics in movement, meticulously prepared. Essential.
Phil Hall | Killdeer | BookThug | 2011
These long-lined essays in poetic form are both a poetics and an autobiography of a poetic practice, and are an incredible entry (like the Adorno, like the Celan) into a poetics of space, movement, articulation, process, by a Canadian poet often underestimated.
Christian Hawkey | Ventrakl | Ugly Duckling | 2010
Trakl tracked and trailed by Hawkey, keenly on-key. Tremulous, lovely, Hawkey explores language’s strangeness by entering the foreign language—German, here—in its physicality and in its links with a human person, Georg Trakl, and another human person, Christian Hawkey. Curiously, as well, the book makes a lovely pairing with my own O Resplandor (also 2010). To enter the body of the other, by reading, in any language, making one’s own language strange.
Anxo Angueira and Teresa Bermúdez, eds. | Que lle podo ofrecer a quen me intente? un monográfico sobre Lois Pereiro | Xerais and U Vigo | 2011
A look at the work and life of the iconoclastic Galician poet Lois Pereiro (1958-1996) that includes an anthology of his poetry in translation, portraits of him by other writers, a transcript of a major reading he gave in A Coruña shortly before his death, critical articles, and new poems by others.
Meredith Quartermain | Recipes from the Red Planet | BookThug | 2010
These stories simply delighted me. Their broken turns of logic and semantics are lovely and reflect, somehow, the way I think. To read and reread.
Timothy Snyder | Bloodlands | Basic | 2011
The most comprehensive look at Eastern European 20th century history, at the turmoils, genocides, exclusions across an entire territory between Germany and Russia. A history that was kept from me, in any case, in school in Canada, and that, I suspect, is still not taught. Snyder’s book enables a new look at the area and will inspire future historians; a signal book.
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More Erín Moure here.
Moure’s Attention Span for 2010, 2008. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | David Dowker
Will Alexander | Compression & Purity | City Lights | 2011
Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat | 2011
Michael Boughn | Cosmographia | BookThug | 2010
Clark Coolidge | This Time We Are Both | Ugly Duckling | 2010
Robert Duncan, ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman | The H.D. Book | California | 2011
William Fuller | Hallucination | Flood | 2011
Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian | The Wide Road | Belladonna | 2011
Susan Howe | That This | New Directions | 2010
Alice Notley | Culture of One | Penguin | 2011
George Quasha | Verbal Paradise | Zasterle | 2010
Leslie Scalapino | The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom | Post-Apollo | 2010
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More David Dowker here.
Dowker’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Julie Carr
Jennifer Moxley | Coastal | The Song Cave | 2011
Brutally honest, and masterfully formed. It feels intimate and distant at once. I read it five times in a day trying to figure out how she strikes that balance.
Linda Norton | The Public Gardens | Pressed Wafer | 2011
I’ve been waiting for and needing this book for years. The voices of Boston and Brooklyn. Mixing genres sweetly, powerfully.
Dawn Lundy Martin | Discipline | Nightboat | 2011
One of the strongest uses of the prose poem I’ve seen maybe ever. Each page hits it.
John Keene | Annotations | New Directions | 1995
Gorgeous language. The sentence is played like a viola. Fast, unexpected, but deeply connected.
Michael Ondaatje | Coming Through the Slaughter | Vintage | 1976
Reading this for the first time. Stunned by the surprises of it, the shifting voices, and by its musicality.
Tim Roberts | Drizzle Pocket | Blazevox | 2011
Though I am married to the author, the book is by someone I only meet by reading it. Scary and great and unlike anything else I’ve ever read.
Noah Eli Gordon | The Source | Futurepoem | 2011
Though this is a procedural work, the poems press way beyond their method. This is my favorite of Noah’s books. It’s funny and sharp, but in many moments also quite meditative and moving.
Lydia Davis | The Collected Stories | Picador| 2010
This is the first time I’ve really gotten all the way into Lydia Davis, and I read every story in this 752 page book in three days. In my favorite ones, the speaker is estranged, lonely, and frightened. A good book to bring on a midlife crisis.
Caroline Bergvall | Reading at Naropa | Naropa SWP | 2010
Caroline’s new book, Meddle English (Nightboat, 2011), is amazing. But I am reporting on hearing her read from it. I would travel pretty far to hear her again. One of those readings that will stay with me a very long time. Life giving.
Eileen Myles | The Inferno | O/R Books | 2010
Um. Pure pleasure—and a little embarrassing to read on an airplane when someone’s looking over your shoulder.
Joseph Lease | Testify | Coffee House | 2011
I blurbed this book, so to paraphrase myself: political/personal poems that matter and sing. Tough and necessary.
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Julie Carr is the author of Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines and 100 Notes on Violence and co-publisher with Tim Roberts of Counterpath Press.
Carr’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2009 – Scott Thurston
Karen Mac Cormack | Implexures (Complete Edition) | Chax Press and West House Books | 2008
I’d read extracts from this project first in The Gig back in 2004, then got hold of the beautiful Chax / West House edition of the first nineteen parts published in 2003. Mac Cormack has written what she calls a ‘polybiography’, responding to a family history written by her great- aunt Susan Hicks Beach and letters to and from her own grandparents and parents, whilst traversing an extraordinary array of other discourses from post-structuralist theory to cultural history and etymology. At its launch in London in June 2008, Alan Halsey summed it up when he said it’s both not a big book and it is a big book because there’s a lot in it. This is a very rich text indeed.
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009
I was first presented with this book by its author on a visit to Maine at Easter 2009 and my re-reading of it is even now bound up with that locale. Moxley continues her project of revivifying the lyric, and all that entails, in a collection of reflective poems on the possibilities that being both presents and denies us. Some of the poems here come on in a similar mode to Moxley’s autobiography The Middle Room in the way they handle experience and memory, and all the pieces have an understated technical assurance that constantly reminds one of the possibilities of language itself. I shall be re-reading these pieces for a long time to come: a phrase which stays with me is ‘my accuracy is unstable’.
Caroline Bergvall | Cropper | Torque Press | 2008
In common with the two previous titles, Bergvall’s book explores the autobiographical mode and is a story of her relationships with language(s) (French, Norwegian and English) and desire, and a demand that the body be heard in-between. The piece unsettles the English it is written in with orthographical, phonological and cross-linguistic play and also incorporates lines in Norwegian (the piece was a response to write a text in Norwegian, only partly met). However, it is also one of Bergvall’s most candid pieces to date – deepening my understanding of how the complex range of formal practices in her work all stem from the way in which she experiences herself as on the border of languages.
Andrea Brady | Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination | Dispatx | 2006
This text has been online for some time and this indeed is its natural habitat as it was designed with a tapestry of hyperlinks woven in to indicate source materials, which are legion. As a way of revealing the compositional approach of the author, these links are very generous. That said, I found my encounter with the piece only really took off when I painstakingly cut and paste sections together to form a printable copy (I have admitted this to the author!). In this work Brady explores the history of Greek Fire as an analogue of the use of White Phosphorous in the attack on Fallujah in 2004. Thought through a trail of damages that includes the horrific treatment of phosphorous workers at a match factory in London’s East End, this is a highly political poem that is full of memorable and disquieting images. Still available online at dispatx.com.
Robert Musil, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike | The Man Without Qualities | Picador | 1997
I’m still only about half way through this massive, unfinished novel, that I’ve been digesting in slow intense chunks over a six month period. This is a book often compared to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Joyce’s Ulysses, but to me it also illuminates and complements the works of two great C20th Polish novelists: Stanislaw Witkiewicz (Nienasycenie – Insatiability) and Witold Gombrowicz (several novels and the infamous Dziennik – Diary). Musil’s observational writing is superb but it is the way he handles the theme of cultural change which is totally fascinating and which makes the book seem fresh and relevant to our current predicaments. As Karen Mac Cormack has pointed out, at times it reads like a philosophical treatise.
James Lovelock | The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning | Allen Lane | 2009
The creator of the Gaia hypothesis, a theory of the Earth as a physiological system, and inventor of the electron capture detector, Lovelock’s scientific credentials are second to none, which makes the impact of this book about as gloomy as can be imagined. Lovelock essentially argues that we need a shift in emphasis in green thinking from sustainability to managed retreat in the face of inevitable global climate change. This book cuts through much received thought about green issues, for example Lovelock is a strong advocate of nuclear power, and though doubtless raising as many problems as it ‘solves’ for the scientific community, to the lay reader this is urgent and important information.
Gil Ott | traffic | Chax Press | 2001
I first fell in love with Ott’s work when I read an extract from his Zasterle Press book The Whole Note on Silliman’s Blog. That was about as perfect a book I could imagine at the time and perhaps still is, though traffic is also remarkable. Complete with a generous preface (in content rather than length), this is a long slow burner that I seem to favour reading on trains at present. Each page has a short verse or verses then a space then a short prose paragraph at the bottom. Endlessly fascinating, meticulous and rewarding poetry: ‘this poem, the notebook open on the bed where you might find it. One is one alone, is one among others’.
Kevin Davies | Comp. | Edge Books | 2000
Miles Champion told me years ago I should read this, but I had to actually go to the United States to secure a copy (thanks Steve!). I’ve since learned that Davies has only published one book since so at least I’m not too far behind as this was a real wake-up call even nine years after its first publication. A review by Brian Kim Stefans noted Jeff Derksen’s use of the term ‘rearticulatory’ which seems to me the way to go in keeping a post-Language political critique alive and kicking. And this book definitely is. And hilarious: ‘Entropy is built into the chicken’!
Maggie O’Sullivan | Waterfalls | Etruscan Books | 2009-08-13
A handsome cloth-bound edition of pieces which I’d only previously read in photocopied pamphlet form. O’Sullivan’s stunning poems really benefit from resetting and the addition of colour to her images but they are as tantalisingly incantatory as ever, poems to spell with, to do ritual by: ‘DID YOU KNOW THE AIR – THE WASH OF HAZEL / MAPPED ON THE SWING OF HER SIGHT?’ Parts of the work are responses to the Irish Famine of 1845-52 and explore O’Sullivan’s own Irish roots.
Nicholas Johnson | SHOW | Etruscan Books | 2001
This book shows English verse music working to its full height and depth in long-lined long lyric poems which make the everyday world full of rich, almost mythic, potential. There are also voices here, heavily accented, speaking in dialect in a way which reminds me of the late, great Bill Griffiths, whose last book Johnson published with his own Etruscan press. The book closes with ‘The Margarete-Sulamith Cycles of Anselm Kiefer’ which responds to Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ and is practically a sound poem.
Jacques Rancière, trans. Gabriel Rockhill | The Politics of Aesthetics | Continuum | 2008
I tend to read theory as poetics, for what can inform practice, and this was a productive encounter for me. I don’t know other works by Rancière although at times he seemed to be simply going over the commonplaces of postmodern theory, including ideas associated with Lyotard in particular, without acknowledgement. However, it is his notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (le partage du sensible), a law that produces a system of self-evident facts of perception, that enables his assertion of the aesthetic dimension as inherent in any radical emancipatory politics, by ‘undoing the relations between the visible, the sayable and the thinkable.’
More Scott Thurston here.
Attention Span 2009 – Keith Tuma
Stephen Rodefer | Call It Thought: Selected Poems | Carcanet | 2008
This is a generous selection from Rodefer’s work, introduced by Rod Mengham. It’s too short on selections from Four Lectures, but other than that most of what you need is here. Reading the first and presumably earliest poems in the book, which I’d not seen, confirmed my suspicion that Rodefer emerged full-grown from the head of Apollo to set up as the last secretary of modernism. The poet is both hero and anti-hero in that tradition: leave it to Rodefer to remake “lives of the artists” as “lies of the artists.” We already knew that Rodefer is Villon, or might as well be, and some years on he’s translating Baudelaire as Zukofsky. There’s not a better poet alive.
Robert von Hallberg | Lyric Powers | The University of Chicago Press | 2008
This will ruffle a few feathers: “My argument is that the most distinctive authority of lyric rests still on its affirmative function, whereas the intellectual disciplines derive from doubt.” Praise rather than complaint as the central lyric impulse, criticality a subset of rationality, the limits of which lyric reveals. “Musicality authenticates poetry, a crucial function in a discourse that strains against social conventions.” Von Hallberg links poetry or rather an “orphic tradition” with structures of belief that persist beyond irony and skepticism in a secular culture, and answers those concerned that the “affirmative effect of form . . . might discourage an intelligent warrior class from the struggle to preserve the autonomy of the republic” with a question about “whether the pleasures of fully realized art do not encourage one to achieve a peace so well crafted that it seems divinely sanctioned.” Chapters on authority, praise, civility, thought, musicality, and universality: much to ponder throughout. This is a powerful defense of poetry at a moment when the academy could care less.
William Fuller | Three Replies | Barque | 2008
This is a chapbook containing “replies” to Parson Platt, Thomas Traherne, and Experience, dedicated to “the New Mystagogues.” Fuller has been reinventing the prose poem since Sugar Borders (1993), and his recent full-length collections, Sadly and Watchword, contain both prose and verse. But what these new poems are doing with the verse line and prose is pretty wild, a step beyond that earlier work. Does it make sense to speak of it as a prosody? As ever, the writing is both meditative and deadpan, fast as a disappearing proposition, thought emptying itself of pretension: “Compare this statement to the gas pump, seen from behind the steering wheel, late at night.”
Norma Cole | Natural Light | Libellum | 2009
Especially for its first sequence or grouping, “Pluto’s Disgrace,” as it works the Pluto/Persephone myth in fragments about “iron disorders” and everyday violence. Notes on metal and wealth. As ever, Pluto is in the dark, and Persephone altogether beyond him, “nobody”: “the smallest telescope / reveals a golden glow / coming from her neck.” Her presence calls up Cole’s fiercely ethical response: “if you can, wave–a / woman holds / binoculars to / her eyes.”
Joseph Macleod | Cyclic Serial Zeniths from the Flux: Selected Poems | Waterloo Press | 2009
Andrew Duncan selects and introduces the great Anglo-Scottish modernist, author of the book-length The Ecliptic (1930), which was of considerable interest to Pound, Bunting, and Rexroth and has been highly valued by poets in Cambridge (UK) since. Only two sections of that book are here, but there is plenty more poetry until now nearly impossible to find, including works from the 1940s, when Macleod published some of his finest poetry as Adam Drinan, and lengthy selections from Macleod’s verse drama, which Duncan rates highly, as he also views Macleod’s career in the theater as crucial. It’s time we move beyond considering what it is that the strange and (as far as poetry is concerned) sad history of Macleod’s career tells us about modernism and British poetry and start reading his poems closely. The poems are marvelous and the unpacking is worth doing. One strophe from “Enterprise Scotland” (1946): “The hard ingine of a mother love / sorts and snowks, fichers and favours, / wales the best of the braw stuff, / sprushes with carved paper / tissues that scintillate and undulate / into and furth of her bairn-multitudes / that enlighten and illuminate / the minds and eyes of her bairn-multitudes.”
Rodrigo Toscano | Collapsible Poetics Theater | Fence Books | 2008
I have seen a few of the texts collected here performed at conferences: they’re fun to watch. One text, “Eco-Strato-Static,” which might have been written by Albert Camus had Albert Camus Toscano’s sense of humor, is up at the Meshworks YouTube site, in two parts, the first of which is here. This one might as well be—would work well as—radio drama. The physical theater of poetics theater is not always important, I think, though I’m hardly an expert, and it matters more to some of these works than others. A “collapsible” poetics theater might be one that you can fold and carry in your pocket, like a book. Toscano is very funny and his writing lively, playful—Sitwellian or Steinian and shaped by popular and local idioms and several languages—and these texts move easily if sometimes a little self-consciously among the discourses and problems of post-identity and labor politics, philosophy, and (alas) experimental poetry. It’s interesting to think of what the poetics theater format adds on the page, which is where most will find this work, and arguably where it is most realized. Consider the opening of Part 2 of “Truax Inimical,” for instance, where the format allows Toscano to get away with lines he’d never get away with in poems: “I fly in the deep of the night. I fly toward the source of the light.” That’s cheesy but only because I’ve stripped away numbers that precede each word (there’s one word per line) and slow the reading and make it something else. One of the few books I’ve read recently that is truly “innovative.”
Tim Atkins, ed. | Onedit 13 | http://www.onedit.net/issue13/issue13.html | 2009
This is one of my favorite webzines, its selections mixing familiar and less familiar names mostly from the UK and USA, each number short enough to allow for focus, avoiding the sprawl that the web encourages. Austere production nods to the typewriter, and Atkins keeps finding interesting new work. Number 13 includes “Proposals” by Allen Fisher, which features images of Fisher’s paintings (diptychs) giving on to texts (diptychs of verse and prose). There aren’t many images of Fisher’s paintings easy to find, so I was grateful for this simply for the view of Fisher’s practice it allows, and here the web format is perfectly considered. In what ways is Fisher Blakean? “As if anyone really knew what existence links to ecstatic life.” Work by Sophie Robinson, Rebecca Rosier, Emily Critchley, and others.
Caroline Bergvall | Alyson Singes | Belladonna Books | 2008
Pseudo-Chaucerian idioms romp through the history of women and post-feminist discourse: “Everything was different / yet pretty much the same. / Godabove ruled all / & the Franks the rest. / Womenfolk were owned ne trafficked / nor ghosted, and so were / most workfolk enserfed. / Sunsets were redder then, / legs a little shorter.” Light fare and the better for it, at its best when least self-conscious of an avant-garde, where sex trumps theory.
John Wilkinson | Down to Earth | Salt | 2008
The date and title of his last book, Lake Shore Drive, might suggest otherwise, but this is John Wilkinson’s first American book following his arrival at Notre Dame, because of its subject matter and in some ways its prosody. It makes sense that the book takes its epigraph from Ed Dorn. The longer poems catalog the devastation of the psychic and material landscapes encountered: “dawn / recurs with its terrible systems of belief, / whose proceeds kill in all good faith . . . .” The turbines involved are global, but the focus is on local exhaust fumes, which is to say North America. Since landing in the USA Wilkinson has also emerged as one of the sharpest critics writing about poetry, American and British both. A note describes Down to Earth as one book-length project, though there are titles for individual poems: the haunting “Like Feeling” and “The Indiana Toll” are probably my favorites. Anthony Walton’s Mississippi and Luis Urrea’s Across the Wire, together with an exhibition about Mexican migration at Notre Dame’s Snite Museum, are mentioned as important to the work. English idioms (“hoovered up”) survive and Wilkinson’s impressive vocabulary, but the sentence rhythms have been punched up, phrases clipped. Odd to have the burning tires and trashed cars of North America catalogued by such a poet, trimming his impossible eloquence. Traces of the earlier syntax remain, of course, and he’s capable of smuggling in Eliot or Bunting (who would after all make more sense to a new compression as it meets this catalog of horrors: “Words! A light-pen is too /compromised,” which is funny in more ways than one). I might add without pretending that it means very much that it seems to me likely that American readers will find this Wilkinson’s most “accessible” volume.
cris cheek | part: short life housing | The Gig | 2009
An impressive selected poems spanning some twenty-five years, revised and introduced or reframed for this substantial, sharply produced volume. For me the best of it might be the longest, central section, titled fogs, written in Lowestoft, England over ten years: “The initial year’s procedure was to go for a walk in a fog and to talk into a voice recorder whilst walking. Speaking fogs, phatic models for embodied creative consciousness, intensified formal quirks of my curiosity with these engagements.” Here’s the ending of one of the poems in that series, sans format (the poems are all in boxes, for starters) and line and word breaks: “rains for a blithering pink in the shape of collective drunk mated who milks buckled moons from a stick waves a clouding root stun-planted shivering dress of sheet lightning ink plotted witness and span.”
Paul Craig Roberts at Counterpunch, and Nouriel Roubini at his RGE Monitor site, among three or four economists who are worth reading as it all falls down.
More Keith Tuma here.
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.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2011 | Pattie McCarthy
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Elizabeth Willis | Address | Wesleyan | 2011
“I’m building the haystack / I’ll disappear into”
Cole Swensen | Greensward | Ugly Duckling | 2010
“It’s the future that vanishes, not thinking, and the dog sets off at a run, as it is, as it always has been, her gift and wish to bring it back to him.”
Carlos Soto Roman | Philadelphia’s Notebooks | Otoliths | 2011
“one pack one pagan one pain one panic one paper one / parachute one paradox one paragon one parade one”
Jena Osman | The Network | Fence | 2010
“Plaster, spikes, and rivets all overboard as ballast. To gain altitude, to fly high over the city like a small planet.”
Linda Norton | Public Gardens | Pressed Wafer | 2011
“She cries every night for three or four hours, and sometimes I think I’m going crazy, I’m so tired. But her shit really does smell sweet.”
Susan Howe | That This | New Directions | 2010
“That this book is a history of / a shadow that is a shadow of”
Ryan Eckes | Old News | Furniture | 2011
“you know by looking at the dunkin donuts / walt whitman is buried in camden / ben franklin is buried in philadelphia / and the delaware river is a zombie”
Julie Carr | Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines | Coffee House | 2010
“The / idea, which she knows to be illogic, but cannot let go of, is that / if she is pregnant the baby will keep her mother alive.”
Sarah Campbell | Everything We Could Ask For | Little Red Leaves | 2010
“Some bird brought you here / On foot”
Anselm Berrigan | Notes from Irrelevance | Wave | 2011
“Digging the ecstasy / of swinging? Yes. Laughing / at the tree? Is the tree / funny? Yes.”
Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat Books | 2011
“The body is ay so redy and penyble’, / the heed of advertising for Telewizja Polska, / the state-run TV network, / told the Associated Press news agency. / BBC NEWS 25 May 2006. / Here is endeth the Summer Tale.”
§
Pattie McCarthy is the author of Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, Verso, and bk of (h)rs, all from Apogee Press—as well as L&O, forthcoming this year from Little Red Leaves Press. She teaches literature and creative writing at Temple University and is a 2011 Pew Fellow in the Arts.
McCarthy’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 24, 2011 at 1:14 pm
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with Anselm Berrigan, Carlos Soto Roman, Caroline Bergvall, Cole Swensen, Elizabeth Willis, Jena Osman, Julie Carr, Linda Norton, Ryan Eckes, Sarah Campbell, Susan Howe