Attention Span 2011 | Stephen Burt

Angela Leighton | On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word | Oxford | 2007

Art for art’s sake becomes art for form’s sake becomes art for the sake of nothing, or nothing inside: a nihilism not for destructive Russians but for pensive, patient ancients, in a line of descent that starts with Lucretius and keeps on ticking, to (take your pick) Stevens or Ashbery or you or me. Bonus: includes the best case I have ever seen for sustained attention to the thoughtful poetry of W. S. Graham.

Jennifer Finney Boylan | She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders | Broadway | 2003

“I didn’t want to be told I had to be a woman…. People can’t have everything they want, I thought. It is your fate to accept a life being something other than yourself.

“I don’t think this is so crazy, even now. If I could have pulled this off, I would have.”

Christopher Nealon | The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century | Harvard | 2011

At least half the people who read Third Factory probably knew this book was on the way: it’s out, and it’s short, and it doesn’t disappoint. Some of its supposedly contrarian claims are going to be commonplaces pretty soon—sort of like the claims in The Well-Wrought Urn. Bonus: includes the best case I have ever seen for sustained attention to the thoughtful poetry of Kevin Davies.

Timothy Donnelly | The Cloud Corporation | Wave | 2010

Another long-awaited book about the deformations that way-too-late capitalism works on the voice and the soul; exhilarating and saddening at the same time. It helps if you, too, love Stevens, disappointments, urbanity and urbanneness (not the same thing, and not in that order). “Right around here is where I start getting lost.”

Jennifer Homans | Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet | Random | 2010

I started reading this book because I had to (it was a candidate for an award): I didn’t think I cared for ballet at all. By the time I finished it I had come to care a great deal, not just for the art form and its history, but for the magisterial way in which Homans takes her imagined reader in hand: it’s a doorstop, but it’s also a masterpiece, and it’s a book you ought to consult if you ever plan to write a large-scale cultural history of anything at all.

Charles Baudelaire, trans. Wallace Fowlie | Flowers of Evil/ Les Fleurs du Mal and other works: a dual language book | Dover | 1992 (1963)

“Through the symbolic bars separating two worlds, the main road and the castle, the poor child was showing his own toy to the rich child who was greedily examining it.”

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Stephen Burt is a professor of English at Harvard. His books include The Art of the Sonnet, with David Mikics, and Close Calls with Nonsense.

Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Cathy Wagner

Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman, ed. | Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology | Oxford | 2009

Beautifully polemical anthology that situates Latin American poetry in its complicated historical and cultural matrices. Alongside work by poets we’ve heard of (or should have), represented here are Aztec and Mayan poems addressing the European invasion; astonishing oral poetry, old and new; and a selection of visual and concrete poetry that connects the midcentury concrete poetry revolution to indigenous traditions. The anthology draws attention to the influence of indigenous poets on avant-garde internationalistas: “The poet is a God. Don’t sing about rain, poet. Make it rain!” an Aymara poet told Vicente Huidobro. Many poems here reflect what Vicuña calls “a poetics of resistance.” I was elated by Gabriel Gudding’s translations of the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario, whose poems Englished had never shaken me before.

Christopher Nealon | The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century | Harvard | 2011

Brilliantly makes its case: that contemporary and recent poetry has all along been influenced by and actively investigating the workings of capital. I didn’t agree with every one of Nealon’s interpretations of individual poems, but I rarely find myself reading criticism with this much note-taking gusto. I have been telling everyone about this book.

Srecko Kosovel, tr. from Slovene by Ana Jelnikar and Barbara Siegel Carlson | Look Back, Look Ahead: The Selected Poems of Srecko Kosovel | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Contemporary of Rilke’s. Imagine Rilke with lashings of John Wieners and Khlebnikov.

Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian | The Wide Road | Belladonna | 2011

An enviably intellectually-fecund friendship set itself the important work of trying to think and write sex, collaboratively, as women. I wish I’d had this book years ago. “We eroticize our earthly situations and conditions and likewise they eroticize us…Our vagina accommodates the proverbial railway station it has sometimes been compared to. To be enormous is a wish that comes over us in our hot desperation. Then, miraculously, everything on earth swells to our proportions.” Yup that’s how it works. Crazy smart and crazy sexy.

Dana Ward | The Squeakquel, pt. 1 & pt. 2 | The Song Cave | 2011

In this and in Typing Wild Speech and his newer work Ward is making something new with poetic narrative. Blows forward fast in dawn glow. Bliss to be with.

Ryan Walker | You Will Own It Permanently | regs times | 2010

Charming dorky conversational smart friendly, just adorable; I don’t know how you can get hold of this one, as it’s self-published—try bathybius.com/duh, or Lulu.

Sommer Browning | Either Way I’m Celebrating: Poems and Comics | Birds, LLC | 2011

Again charm, and serious wit, plus arch and goofy drawings. Somebody sent me this and I opened it after a hard day and was lightened. Thanks.

Juliana Spahr | Well Then There Now | Black Sparrow | 2011

Ethical effort is the engine of Spahr’s poems. (I am using an anti-ecological metaphor on purpose, because self-consciousness about the harm a contemporary subject does to the world is central to Spahr’s writing.) Sometimes the effort feels embarrassing, as if the poem’s tires have gone flat because it didn’t want to use up too much air while driving—the effort feels effortful. But then the effortfulness twists before my eyes so that I see that it is part of the poem (it becomes an aesthetic method), and that she is brave for allowing the effort to be part of the poem’s armature, and that an enormous risktaking intelligence is guiding the poem and organizing its anxious pleasures. I like to feel my suspicions of this work, and I like the thinking I have to do when I think about its challenges poetic and extrapoetic.

William Fuller | Hallucination | Flood | 2011

There is something hilarious about the way William Fuller’s profession (chief fiduciary officer at a trust company) is fetishized by his fans, as if he knows something other people don’t—he’s got the secret. Maybe he does. Wry mystical intelligence and pleasure in the word-hoard throughout, and the last poem “The Circuit” is worth the price of the book.

Evie Shockley | The New Black | Wesleyan | 2011

Witty and sharp. Uses many playful forms (often versions of acrostics) to examine the injustices, racist and otherwise, that manifest in the ways we address and describe one other. The formal play means that our attention keeps on being drawn to surface. As the Oulipians saw, surface reconfigured has the potential to disrupt what plays over our thought-screens; these poems are North American instances of Vicuña’s “poetics of resistance.”

Marianne Morris | Commitment | Bad Press & Critical Documents | 2011

Shiny gold-paper-covered chapbook from a younger Canadian poet living in London who grabs all of us, especially the banks, by the hairy scruff and shakes till falling money turns to fumes that light up the shit we’re in. Chris Nealon might want to check it out. A lot of pissed-off marvelously riotous poetry is coming out of the islands off Europe right now. Just got hold of Frances Kruk’s Down We Go chapbook, which is like a cracked white china bowl of shiny nails, and Chris Goode’s new anthology of young (all under 30) English poets, Better than Language: An anthology of new modernist poetries, also worth reading.

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Catherine Wagner teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her latest book is My New Job.

Wagner’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory. 

Attention Span 2011 | Franklin Bruno

Hans Abbing | Why Are Artists Poor | Amsterdam UP | 2002

Erica Baum | Dog Ear | Ugly Duckling | 2011

Paul Coors/Dana Ward | I want this forever | Perfect Lovers | 2009 

Timothy Donnelly | The Cloud Corporation | Wave | 2010

Roy Fisher | Selected Poems | Flood | 2011

(Despite the exclusion of anything from The Cut Pages, 1970)

Benjamin Friedlander | Citizen Cain | Salt | 2011

Karen MacCormack | Tale Light: New and Selected Poems 1984-2009 | BookThug | 2010

Christopher Nealon | The Matter of Capital | Harvard | 2011

Benjamin Péret, trans. Marc Lowenthal | The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works | Wakefield | 2011

Raymond Queneau, trans. Guy Bennett | For an Ars Poetics | Mindmade | 2010

Leon Stein | The Triangle Fire | Lippincott | 1962

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Franklin Bruno‘s writing appears. So do his recordings. A book of poems, The Accordion Repertoire, is due from Edge in 2012. He lives in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Bruno’s Attention Span for 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Joshua Clover

Bruno Bosteels | The Actuality of Communism | Verso | 2011

A fantastically useful orientation guide for the recent boom in political theory: Ranciere, Moreiras, Badiou, Zizek, various others. I can’t say I share the basic supposition, regarding the virtue of formalizations of concepts which attend the non-abstract problem of state form. But I was grateful to understand a bunch of stuff much better after reading.

Silvia Federici | Caliban and the Witch | Autonomedia | 2004

We read this book in reading group in the summer; I was interested to discover that many others’ experiences of it were quite different from mine. Someone took it as a defense of witchiness, rather than a history of how the conjured threat of feminine dark magic served as pretext to dispossess and discipline women. Well okay. But I have been pretty obsessed with revisiting the Italian Marxist feminists; while it seems to me more and more that their male comrades (Negri, Virno, Marazzi) got really crucial things wrong, they themselves were making some of the great breakthroughs of the era, ones that are with us more than ever, I think.

Jean-Marie Gleize | Tarnac, un acte préparatoire | Seuil | 2011

What poetry should be doing, if one is willing to submit to the ambiguous discipline of the word “should.”

David Harvey | Enigma of Capital | Oxford | 2010

Basically a primer version of the longer and more ambitious Limits to Capital, attempting to recast it along the lines of his Brief Introduction to Neoliberalism. And indeed it is lucid, clear, systematic, and persuasive: a nice reminder that spending decades thinking about a problem set can lead to refinement and immediacy of ideas rather than the opposite. In that sense it’s like a refutation of the idea of “Late Style.” But actually I miss the grander version: in the condensation and reader-friendliness of this account, certain explanations of causality within the dynamic of capital become too clear, too one-directional, less dialectical, and even sometimes mistaken. Of little matter. The best recent guide to the most complex man-made object in the word, endlessly useful, and with luck it will lead readers to the fuller and more frustratingly suspended—and finally more adept—versions.

Uyen Hua | a / s / l (age / sex / location) | ingirumimusnocteetsonsumimurigni | 2011

Tao Lin with a soul, albeit a fascinating and strange one, provisionally new.

Ke$ha | Animal | RCA | 2010

Vomiting up tequila and glitter.

Christopher Nealon | The Matter of Capital | Harvard | 2011

It is a delight to watch this book become influential, not because it deserves it—it does—but because it is clearly advancing the conversation.

Pasolini | In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology | City Lights | 2010

Pasolini! who had to leave the communist party to be a better communist! Reading this I was reminded of “On A Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” and how we tend to think of that essay as concerning how communism ruined, wasted, and killed its blindingly beautiful writers—until we revisit the essay, and rediscover that the story it tells of Mayakovsky unfolds his misery arising from the failure of the revolution to be communist enough, the ways that it stopped short, blunted itself, made concessions, quit the promise of its total radicality. Also, a couple of the Pasolini poems are translated by Jonathan Richman, which is just the oddest thing in the world. Trying to parse the subterranean connection between the atmospheres of Friulia and the summer air of Route 128 when it’s late an night is a real mindfuck.

Arthur Rimbaud trans. John Ashbery | Illuminations | Farrar | 2011

I haven’t read this yet but I’m sure it’s great.

McKenzie Wark | The Beach Beneath the Street | Verso | 2011

There is some sense now that histories of the Situationist International are like Harry Potter fanfic; the main impulse is to sustain the imagined experience of life in that bohemian Hogwarts of the group’s milieu in a neighborhood or two in mid-century Paris. The vital difference is that there is a self-reflexive claim here about what the imagination might be for, other than self-sustaining profitability.

Ellen Willis | Out of the Vinyl Deeps | Minnesota | 2010

“Willis’s music writing was clear and direct, without gamesmanship, but never one-dimensional. No one had previously captured the nuanced double motion in which rock could generate untold pleasures, presentiments of freedom and equality and unfettered sexuality—but could never escape the gravity of the exclusions and inequities and unacknowledged labor on which it depended. This dialectical conception of the world and its workings can be as every bit as revolutionary as rock, the last great invention of the postwar boom.”

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Joshua Clover is a Professor of English Literature at University of California Davis. He is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled The Epic of Capital, bringing together the study of poetry with contemporary political economy, and finishing a poetry collection called Tranche/Syntagma.

Clover’s Attention Span for 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to 2011 directory.