Attention Span 2011 | Michael S. Hennessey

Ron Padgett | How Long | Coffee House | 2011
Ron Padgett | Tulsa Kid | Z Press | 1979

When Ron Padgett’s latest book, How Long, came in the mail, I happily dropped everything and spent the afternoon reading it cover to cover. I first had the pleasure of hearing some of these poems during the Tulsa School Conference Grant Jenkins organized at the University of Tulsa in November 2009, as part of a career-spanning set of poems focusing on Padgett’s Oklahoma roots, and relished being able to see them in print for the first time. Ron’s one of our greatest everyday elegists—a role in which he’s sadly had far too much practice—and those talents are on full display here, for dear friends both recently and long-since departed, and for Padgett himself, as he faces his own mortality and reflects on his life’s work. Reading these poems against Tulsa Kid, written nearly half a lifetime before, makes this feeling of loss even more acute. Of course, in both books we also find plenty of Padgett’s trademark wit and casual conceptualism, which tempers and sweetens the rawer emotions, and the earlier volume also includes a number of playful collaborations with Joe Brainard and George Schneeman (my personal favorite featuring a tiny cowboy riding a rooster with the caption, “shit on you”).

Alice Notley | Culture of One | Penguin | 2011

Like Padgett’s latest, I first heard excerpts from this book in Tulsa and was grateful to have it as a companion during a very hectic week traveling from Cincinnati to Philadelphia to Cleveland and back, where Notley’s claustrophobic desert environs provided a centering influence. While I’ll always have a soft spot for the “dailiness” of her early New York School-inspired work, the hybrid novelistic forms she’s developed over the last few decades are quite formidable, and in Culture of One they culminate in a work of great empathy and distance, guided by a sharp sociological eye. It’s poetry that’s draws upon every instant of Notley’s tumultuous life; a book that rips your heart out and comforts you at the same time.

John Cage | Silence | M.I.T. | 1961 and A Year from Monday | Wesleyan | 1967
Kyle Gann | No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” | Yale | 2010

This past fall, I was grateful to have a number of very talented students from our College-Conservatory of Music in my contemporary world poetry class, and while they were enthusiastic to talk about Kate Lilley, Mónica de la Torre, Christian Bök and John Tranter, our conversations, both in class and afterwards, would often drift to contemporary composers, conceptual artists and pop music. Cage was a particularly important figure to them—as he was when I first discovered him as an undergrad—and their enthusiasm sent me back for deeper reading, first to Kyle Gann’s recent book on Cage’s most infamous work and then into the writings themselves. It’s somewhat disorienting to re-immerse yourself in work so central to your aesthetic development, that feels as if it’s written in your bones, and Cage’s disarmingly friendly voice, his Zen-poetic phrasings, his fragmented constructions that invite you to start and stop freely, all serve to heighten this sensation. Judging from the testimony of a great many poets (Ashbery, Bernstein and Berrigan all jump to mind), the “Cage-phase” is a fundamental moment for the young artist, and I couldn’t be happier that my students’ experience gave me the opportunity to reconnect with it and reorient my critical perspective.

CAConrad, ed. | Jupiter88 | http://jupiter88poetry.blogspot.com | 2011

CAConrad’s cinéma vérité “video journal of contemporary poetry” has had an auspicious first eight months, showcasing an astounding array of poets in its fifty-five installments, along with another thirty-one video tributes to Allen Ginsberg curated for this year’s Howl Festival. The common factor uniting these authors is their friendship with Conrad himself—recently hailed by Ron Silliman as “Philly poetry’s modern day Ben Franklin”—and the various episodes are filmed either when these poets visit Philadelphia or when Conrad travels outside of his hometown. Jupiter 88 is a testament to the power of coterie fostered by technology, or better still, technology fostered by coterie: though our viewing experience is nonetheless vicarious and mediated, it’s also an intimate one, bolstered by the host’s affinity for his guests, the brief glimpses of their private spaces and the personalized touches, including the strange props that frequently dominate the frame. Moreover, Jupiter 88’s creative use of technology at the disposal of many (a webcam, Facebook used as a media host, Blogger used as a homepage) not only serves as an idiosyncratic document of a thriving period in contemporary poetics, but also welcomes the remote viewer into that discourse.

Claudia Rankine | Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric | Graywolf | 2004

In last year’s Attention Span list, I praised Maggie Nelson’s Bluets as “a breathtakingly ambitious work that crosses genres and disciplines as it explores its enigmatically ambiguous topic,” and this year I’m glad to have found another book that accomplishes all this and more. While Nelson maintains an essential continuity throughout her diverse investigations, Rankine dwells in the possibilities of fragmentation, allowing the swiftly-scattered subject matter to thread emotional connections at its own leisurely pace. Moreover, while both authors lull readers into a welcome intimacy with the author and take risks in terms of form, Rankine’s metatextual wizardry (including copious illustrations, David Foster Wallace-esque endnotes and found intertexts) achieves the startling effect of placing readers inside and outside of the book simultaneously. Reading Don’t Let Me Be Lonely at a peaceful seaside retreat in North Carolina, I experienced a further distancing from the deeply-felt litany of violence contained therein (the Oklahoma City Bombing, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and most saliently, September 11^th), and was moved to feel lost time and pain return with such great immediacy.

CANADA (Luis Cerveró, Nicolás Méndez & Lope Serrano) | various music videos, shorts, commercials, etc. | http://www.lawebdecanada.com | 2008-present

Like many people, I first encountered this Barcelona-based directors collective last fall through their unforgettable video for El Guincho’s “Bombay”: a dizzying, rapid-fire montage of cinema and sex, evoking Man Ray, Réne Magritte, Erwin Wurm, Michel Gondry, b-movies, and much, much more. Other stunning clips followed (for Scissor Sisters’ “Invisible Light,” Two Door Cinema Club’s “What You Know” and most recently, Battles’ “Ice Cream”) and browsing through their website I was surprised to find an expansive archive of films of all sorts—shorts, screen tests, ads, television bumpers, etc.—underscoring CANADA’s ambitious mission of “creative excellence in projects in a variety of areas: advertising, fashion, music videos, TV and cultural events.” Though the quick and sunny collage style’s emerged as the group’s hallmark, they can also produce gorgeous results from simpler and quieter concepts, and while I experience the same giddy joy as watching a younger generation of music video auteurs (Gondry, Spike Jonze, Mark Romanek, Jonathan Glazer, Anton Corbijn) come into their own, this feels different. Instead of biding their time with music videos until the movie studios come calling, CANADA’s work, though steeped in cinema history, seems perfectly conceived for the 21^st century—attention-grabbing art for art’s sake that courts short attention spans and revels in the possibilities of microforms.

Lorine Niedecker | Collected Works | California | 2002

The somewhat accidental launch of PennSound’s Lorine Niedecker author page this past winter—thanks to the intervention of Marcella Durand and Eric Baus (the full story’s here)—sent me back to Jenny Penberthy’s marvelous Collected Works to reconnect. I made my way through her poetic output over the course of a long Megabus ride to Chicago, moved not only by its great variety, but also its continuities: the Objectivist observational minimalisms that lay dormant through her neglected middle years only to flourish again in her marvelous final poems. It’s further testament to Niedecker’s tragic circumstances that there’s so little audio of her, and yet I’m grateful that we have Cid Corman’s brief recording of Harpsichord & Salt Fish poems to present to our listeners.

Charles Bernstein | Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions | Chicago | 2011

Our new decade’s brought with it not only a career-spanning Bernstein retrospective (All the Whiskey in Heaven) but also a new volume of critical work: the long-overdue Attack of the Difficult Poems, his first collection of this sort since 1999’s My Way: Speeches and Poems. Rereading old favorites (“Against National Poetry Month as Such,” “Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers,” “Recantorium [a bachelor machine, after Duchamp after Kafka]”) and discovering hidden gems (“Electronic Pies in the Poetry Skies,” “Making Audio Visible: Poetry’s Coming Digital Presence”), what I’m most struck by is poetry’s rapid techno-cultural evolution, from late-90s days of Usenet, listservs and America Online to our current “wreaderly” quasi-utopia, where open source venues like PennSound, Jacket2, the Electronic Poetry Center, UbuWeb, Eclipse, the aforementioned Jupiter88 and scores more make work available to ever-widening audiences. Conversely, while it’s heartening to realize how far we’ve come, Bernstein’s still-incisive criticism reminds us how this process has only served to widen the chasm between poetry’s progressive wing and “official verse culture.” After so much worthwhile looking backwards in these recent volumes, what I most want is a collection of the new poems that have accumulated in the five years since Girly Man.

Yoko Ono | Grapefruit: a Book of Instructions and Drawings | Simon & Schuster | 1970 Yoko Ono | Onobox | Rykodisc | 1992

Yoko Ono’s work always occupied a respectful, if peripheral, place in my mind. Certainly, I thought her contributions to Double Fantasy were better than John Lennon’s, and happily scorned those making cheap jokes at her expense; however I never really had the chance to immerse myself in her work until this past year. Grapefruit was fascinating, largely for the ways in which its event pieces firmly root her in, yet subvert Fluxus tradition (Ono can be, at times, more whimsical, more poetic, or more emotionally attuned than, say, George Brecht), but also for the way in which its texts served as raw materials for her diverse musical pursuits. While Onobox showcases plenty of what folks might stereotypically expect—namely, challenging avant-garde voice pieces and sound collages—that’s finished after one disc, and the remaining five sides are filled with ridiculously good stuff that even pedestrian listeners couldn’t find fault with: uncompromising feminist anthems, wry social observations, solid grooves, haunting ballads, blistering rockers, New Wave experimentation, and much more. We made a two-disc distillation of the best bits for the car and listened to it nonstop through the new year’s bleak opening months, happily singing along with each track.

Keith Haring: 1978-1982 | Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati | 2011

I’ve loved Haring’s work ever since I was a child and yet in all my years of museum-going, I don’t recall ever seeing his work in person, so you can imagine my delight in discovering that a newly-curated show focusing on the artist’s formative years was debuting downtown at the CAC. To be honest, it’s a somewhat imperfect show, ending just as Haring hit his stride, but the absence of work from his primetime years and his poignant final output is more than made up for by the sheer density of materials archived here—plenty of paintings, but also flyers, video works, sketchbooks, diaries, slideshows and all sorts of other ephemera. What impressed me most was the opportunity to interact with these ancillary artifacts, tracing lines of influence (most notably the Burroughs/Gysin cut-up method) and seeing how Haring’s multifarious student interests were honed into an idiosyncratic style.

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More Michael S. Hennessey here.

Hennessey’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009. Back to 2011 directory.

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.

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Attention Span 2011 | Astrid Lorange

Michael Farrell | thempark | Book Thug | 2010

thempark uses Ashbery’s Where Shall I Wander and Hotel Lautréamont as templates. Which is to say, the poems take Ashberian hairpin-bends and fill them with a million nanobots. Some are built from the data of top-40 jams and TV broadcasts, some are the gnats that asphyxiate inside a fruit salad tub, some are outtakes from a doco on Australian tea biscuits and birdsong.

John Paetsch | Hex Nihilo | bas-books | 2011

This is the future: Philadelphia is flanked by the Pacific Ocean, trees are data-sets, everything is smuggling everything else and speeding up a highway, aliens are radios like Spicer told us years ago. The future has two modes: prose so funny it pulls groins; sparse verse that empties guts.

J. Gordon Faylor | Sebaceous Heph | bas-books | 2010

This book has you right on the edge of getting a joke, limbered yet straining for relief, hands about to clap: you’re right there… And then, the syntax does a sneaky, rude little deviation and you’re suffering the immensely cruel pleasure of not-knowing. It’s perfect timing, perfect anti-comedy, and smart in a way that squeezes sebum everywhere.

Kieran Daly | PLAYS / FOR THEATRE | bas-books | 2011

This collection speaks to the performance(s) of: proposition, philosophy and non-philosophy, gift economy, chronic boredom, auto-didacticism, tinkering, naming. You have a window, carpet, access to light, you are in a performance, and it’s that perfect moment where you laugh because it’s truly funny to just be moving your elbow or fixing a pipe.

Chris Alexander | Panda | Truck | 2011

This book was composed collectively by anyone who’s ever described the panda from Kung Fu Panda. This book was curated perfectly by Chris Alexander, who shows the inexhaustible, partial, oriented, polemical, dedicational labour of description. This book is an Everybody’s Autobiography.

Leslie Scalapino | How Phenomena Appear to Unfold | Litmus | 2011

A brilliant collection of essays somewhere between poetics, criticism, event-theory and demonstration of an entirely alien grammar that does everything at once. Scalapino reads and writes into four dimensional cubelets, cubelets that construct truly new things for thinking.

Charles Bernstein | Attack of the Difficult Poems | Chicago  | 2011

Queer pedagogies, queering pedagogies. This book is about professing, teaching, file-sharing and reading-as-writing, because of, and in spite of, all manner of constraint.

Kristen Gallagher | We Are Here | Truck | 2011

One has historically asked oneself: is light made of particles or waves? And the answer, these days, is generally: both! Like, when, you’re dreadfully lost and can’t find your way on a map, you both are and are not located, and you both are and are not moving meaningfully. In this book, you try to find a house, and find something a lot more interesting. As Stein would say, there is no there there! Thankfully!

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Astrid Lorange is a PhD candidate, poet, teacher, researcher, occasional band member and homebrewer from Sydney, Australia. Her books include Eating and Speaking, Minor Dogs and Pussy pussy pussy what what (Au lait day Au lait day).

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Attention Span 2010 – Nada Gordon

Stan Apps | Universal Stories with Unknown Particulars | valeveil e-book | 2009

A work of conscience and searching thought: What does poetry do in the world? What does it do for us?

Lynn Berhrendt | petals, emblems | Lunar Chandelier | forthcoming 2010

My blurb: “The affect-drenched poems in Lynn Behrendt’s Petals/Emblems leap off beauty’s edge right on to the electrified grid of being: that difficult ‘barrage/ of having been born/ at all.’ There (here) everything’s objective correlative: love and pain ‘crave form like alms’ and surely find it, sensuous, phonic, and unsettling, ‘heavy’ with ‘gyn grief’ and ‘undaunted desire.’ ‘This ache to tell you something’ shoots the poems through with yearny rhetorical force like the ‘inward arch’ of ‘nostalgic ocean’: palpable, fluid, engulfing.”

Charles Bernstein | All the Whiskey in Heaven | Farrar | 2010

Do I even need to say why?

Brandon Brown | The Orgy | self-published | 2010

I wrote on Ululations that this book “… spreads a metaphorical net onto the orgy of late capitalism in the hyper-information age (‘this crystal mall must be destroyed’); and most compellingly, to me, it seems to refer back on itself to the orgy of writing that makes itself felt in every moment of this galvanized, kind of emo (in the best possible sense: ‘My heart struggles./ It’s big as a chard, but it never learns.’) poem.”

K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge | 2009

I blurbed this one, too. [All “this shining and this _utter [!].” Terminal Humming is a very exciting book and I love it. Eavesdropping and borrowing from diverse discourses, K. Lorraine Graham has created a complex “essay on scrounging.” It is a wonderfully violent “attempt to unleash inner badness” in poems that are hot and audacious, in a girly way: “Wonder Woman boots twirl twirl.” Terminal Humming is just the right amount of weird. In it, “kinks become beautiful and obvious,” and “language [hums] as angry form.” Read this “downwind chess urine bird bathing extravaganza” of a book!]

Michael Gottlieb | Memoir and Essay | Faux | 2010

A moving, witty, precise and somewhat theatricalized bildungsroman. How he got this way.

Carla Harryman | Adorno’s Noise | Essay | 2008

Like psychedelics for the intellect.

Rodney Koeneke | Etruria | manuscript

Exquisite. Someone please publish this. This is poetry exuding the most poignant possible elegance.

K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams 1-20 | Slack Buddha | 2010

Don’t be surprised if you find yourself ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING upon reading these poems. Seriously. Kasey is my idol.

Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009

Mindbogglingly delicate and audacious, all at once.

Lanny Quarles | chapbooks

He sent us an envelope of chapbooks which I loved. Gary squirreled them away somewhere so I can’t check titles. Endlessly inventive!

Ariana Reines |The Cow | Fence | 2006

I know I’m late to this one, but wow, The Cow. She packs a punch.

Monica de le Torre | Public Domain | Roof | 2008

It’s conceptual! It’s funny! It’s whip-smart! It’s art!

Dana Ward |Typing Wild Speech | Summer BF Press | 2010

All the outspilling radiance of life and death here, like a pop Proust or a more-beatific-than Kerouac Kerouac.

PLUS: live computer-facilitated performances of Danny Snelson (“Mabuse”) and Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford (“The Ballad of the Death of Spring”) Why limit ourselves to the page? This is a future of poetry.

More Nada Gordon here. Her Attention Span for 2005. Back to directory.

Lipstick Traces – June 2009

Most of the mp3 files linked to on Lipstick of Noise live on other servers, but occasionally I upload clips to the Third Factory site hosted by Duration. According to the Awstats, these are the eleven most listened to tracks for June 2009:

Rosmarie Waldrop – Shorter American Memory of Declaration of Independence

Julie Patton – Alphabet Soup

Charles Baudelaire, trans. Keith Waldrop – Carrion

Eugene Ostashevsky – DJ Spinoza Talks to Flipper

Paul Dutton – Untitled

Alice Notley – In the Pines 14 (excerpt)

Lisa Robertson – “Plentifully of reason…” from The Men

Daniil Kharms, trans. Matvei Yankelevich – Blue Notebook 4

Jackson Mac Low – from Black Tarantula Crossword Gatha

Stephanie Young – fr. Betty Page We Love You Get Up

Charles Bernstein – Solidarity Is the Name We Give to What We Cannot Hold