Posts Tagged ‘Dana Ward’
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 | Anne Boyer
Alice Notley | Culture of One | Penguin | 2011
Bernadette Mayer | Studying Hunger Journal | Station Hill | 2011
China Miéville | Embassytown | Del Rey | 2011
Dana Ward | This Can’t Be Life | Edge | Forthcoming 2011
Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö | The Story of a Crime | Various Publishers | 1965-1975
Maureen McHugh | Nekropolis | Eos | 2002
Patrik Ouedník | The Opportune Moment, 1855 | Dalkey Archive | 2011
Paul Chan | The essential and incomplete Sade for Sade’s sake Ebook | Badlands Unlimited | 2011
Paul Chan | Phaedrus Pron Ebook | Badlands Unlimited | 2011
Rosa Luxemburg | The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg | Verso | 2011
Jacques Rancière | The Philosopher and His Poor | Duke | 2004
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More Anne Boyer here.
Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Dana Ward
Patti Smith | Just Kids | Ecco | 2010
I read this as the sun went down during a three hour layover at the Philadelphia airport turning what looked to be three of life’s most tedious hours into three of its most magical.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi | The Soul at Work | Semitotext(e) | 2010
“The mobile phone makes possible the connection between the needs of semio-capital and the mobilization of the living labor of cyber-space. The ringtone of the mobile phone calls the workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flows”
Word to Bifo.
David Brazil | Spy Wednesday | TAXT | 2010
David Brazil | 1-18-09 | @ A Voicebox | 2009
“One is not permitted to forget that/this world is ordered as it is/according to protocols of violence/& exploitation. On which we/batten.” (from Spy Wednesday)
Anne Boyer | The 2000s: A History of the Future in Advance of Itself
“I wrote yet another revolutionary email. The revolutionary email said: ‘Culture is a barbarism against the soul’ & ‘because I have loved so many others the stakes are not myself.’”
Laura Moriarty, ed. | A Tonalist Poetry Feature | Jacket #40 | 2010
Laura Moriarty, ed. | A Tonalist Poetry Feature | Aufgabe #8 | 2010
“Some people write lyric poetry because they just want to and think it’s great. Some write it though they think it’s impossible. The latter are A Tonalists.”
So much incredible writing in these two sections that I can’t even begin to name favorites. Both sections have been inexhaustible resources of pleasure & inspiration this year.
Thom Donovan | Wild Horses of Fire | whof.blogspot.com | ongoing
Thom’s blog is an incredible ever evolving constellation of art writing, poems (his own & others), proposals, calls for action, & always, more generally, a call for re-thinking. Astonishing intelligence is mated here to astonishing warmth.
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010
Lisa Robertson | The Lisa Robertson Issue; ed. Dan Thomas Glass | With+Stand #4 | 2010
Glass’ great editorial work in the Lisa Robertson issue of With + Stand made for a beautiful & diverse companion while reading through R’s Boat this spring in one long extended sigh of happy envy.
Lisa Howe | Sensible Sensations | unpublished manuscript | 2010
This long poem of Lisa’s is a work of ekphrasis (written after a show by Cincinnati artist Matt Morris), & also a celebration of community, written with a special consideration for the artists & writers & musicians in Cincinnati’s Brighton neighborhood. I had the pleasure to hear Lisa read it twice this spring, & each time the dynamism & loveliness of the writing linked me up to the loveliness & dynamism of our local experience together.
Lauren Dolgen, concept | Teen Mom | MTV | 2010
Too powerful, complex & problematic to say a lot about here, but this is the first reality series I’ve ever loved, if that’s what I should say about how this show makes me feel.
Mark Fisher | Capitalist Realism | Zero Books | 2010
“So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.”
Helene Cixous | Three Steps of the Ladder of Writing | Columbia | 1993
Brandon Brown | The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catallus | Unpublished ms | 2010
A friend sent me the Cixous thinking I’d like it & boy oh boy was he right! With the Patti Smith thing this book has been the calibrating writing of my summer. I’ve read it twice & keep going back, & every time I end up exhilarated, dying to read all the books she’s attending, & dying to write more books of my own. Outstanding! As to Brown’s translation of Catallus I’ve been reading this book off and on through out the year& it’s as big, as stupefying & wondrous as the universe itself. Don’t sleep.
More Dana Ward here. His Attention Span for 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.
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.
Attention Span 2010 – Suzanne Stein
Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Charlotte Mandell | The Fall of Sleep | Fordham | 2009
“But whatever one’s age, no one enters sleep without some sort of lullaby. No one can do without being led along by a cadence one does not even perceive, since it is precisely the cadence of absence that penetrates presence, sometimes in one single movement—in one single push that suddenly sends the present floating alongside itself—sometimes at several times—in several successive waves, like a tide licking the sand and impregnating it a little further each time, depositing flakes of sleepy foam. Rocking movements put us to sleep because sleep in its essence is itself a rocking, not a stable, motionless state. Lullaby: one charms, one enchants, one puts mistrust to sleep before putting wakefulness itself to sleep, one gently guides to nowhere—”
Kevin Davies | Pause Button | Tsunami | 1992
What would it have been to have been myself and to have already have known this?
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia | The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy | Semiotext(e) | 2009
Bifo prescribes: more time for talking, traveling, reading, thinking, loving, eating, and dreaming, and less time spent killing ourselves and each other with overproduction and that horrible farce of the contemporary age: “connectivity”. Thumbs up.
Dana Ward | Typing “Wild Speech” | Summer BF Press | 2010
the tender way is wilder than
Robert Glück | reading from About Ed (ms) | The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand | October 18, 2009
Audiences never give standing ovations at poetry readings, not in the Bay Area anyway that I’ve ever seen, but on this evening Bob received the energetic equivalent of that just walking up to the mic. He read two pieces from a manuscript in progress, About Ed. The first piece would be very short, he let us know, as the second was to be very long. The short piece was called “Ed’s First Sexual Experience (Not Counting His Dad)”, and it involved Ed, Ed’s older lover, an acid (mushroom?) trip, a tree house, and an unexpected bit of coprophilia. This story from the first line had the crowded room laughing—not a little bit laughing, but kind of convulsively, hysterically laughing, embarrassedly laughing, laughing a lot, sweating with laughter, laughing ourselves to tears. The room felt warm, open, rowdy, and there were so many of us in it. What I recall is that the second part, “The Moon is Brighter than the Sun”, was about the death of Ed, and also about the breakup of Bob and Ed. The detail I remember best is that there’s an apartment that Ed moves in to, in the adjacent-to-Castro area, and Bob describes the location of the apartment extensively, what the neighborhood was like then and what it is like to drive past it now, and in the story he and Ed paint the walls of that apartment together, in the middle of their break-up, and maybe they fought a lot or didn’t fight a lot while doing that? Why do breakups so often also involve extreme acts of domesticity? During the breakup, in the story, we’re also in the middle of Ed’s death, the death which occurs much later, and Bob describes the loss of Ed’s death as also the intolerable revisiting of the loss of breaking up. As giddy as the room was during the first story, it was motionless during the second. That piece did go on a very long time, I remember, there was a part about Bob driving out to the beach in the story, or to the Golden Gate Bridge? to scatter Ed’s ashes? Am I misremembering? I want it to be that Bob drove to the Sutro Baths, where I’ve spent a lot of time living & mourning, but I don’t think that’s what happened. I really want to recount something else here too, and this is the way we, the audience, a community of friends and lovers, exes, enemies, “frenemies”, were held so entirely in the palm of the hand of this story of Bob’s. A lot of us were crying in the room that night. Is that stupid to relate? People I’ve been brutal or bitter enough to think had no capacity left for tears or sorrow were weeping openly. We’ve all lost someone, and reliving that loss, or projecting yourself into the inescapable future and feeling it, fucking awful. But being alive and feeling it while breathing and listening, in a room full of others, to Bob Glück—
Brandon Brown | Tooth Fairy; The Orgy; Your Mom’s a Falconress & Other Poems | all self-published | 2009-2010
Trapped in a humanitarian corridor, ordering
the end of the orgy. Ids in their
ordure. Hair odor in
the hallway. My heart struggles.
It’s big as a chard, but it never learns.
Blood makes us pet in the alley
behind the petting gallery. I love
sleep. I love eat. I love the perpendicular
orgy that makes my fingers (…etc)
Chris Kraus | I LOVE DICK | Semiotext(e) | 1997
“Dear Dick, I’m wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the 70s has been read only as ‘collaborative’ and ‘feminist’. The Zurich Dadaists worked together too but they were geniuses + had names.”
“I realized the only thing I had to offer was my specificity”
Plus, what’s that bit about how can a straight woman achieve every bit of outness as out, articulated gay pride? Thanks to Stephanie Young for running home after the mani/pedi to fetch the book and bring it back to me as a loan. And thanks again to Chris Kraus & I Love Dick for, on top of everything else, the introduction to the artist Hannah Wilke.
Erika Staiti | Erika has title anxiety until finished and these are unfinished writings | 2009-2010
I love a work, a practice, a thought held open as long as possible, and yet patient and persistent, and these atmospheric performative drafts enact that.
T.J. Clark | The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing | Yale | 2006
Clark spent two months at the Getty looking at two works by 17c painter Nicolas Poussin: Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. The subtitle of the book is sort of an egregious caveat: it seems to mean mainly that if you’re a famous art historian you can assert a pass on publishing your diary as crit and your colleagues have to swallow it, but who cares what they think? This was the greatest pleasure of my winter furlough from work, and I was grateful for so attentive a tour of just two paintings. The reproductions are wonderful, and multiple, and the opportunity to listen in on an extended meditation not only on the physical, visual, textual, historic, and metaphoric but also the locally atmospheric and the personally intimate and socially reflective (to the contemporary) felt rare. The writer begins this meditation quoting Poussin: “I who make a profession of mute things”
YouTube | has been | my primary text | of FY10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iF-zSPHwuM
More Suzanne Stein here. Her Attention Span for 2009. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2009 – Anselm Berrigan
Will Alexander | “Exobiology as Goddess” from Exobiology as Goddess | Manifest Press | 2005
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge | “The New Boys” | Brooklyn Rail | October 2008
Stacy Szymaszek | Hyperglossia | Litmus Press | 2009
Allen Ginsberg | “Television Was That Baby Crawling Toward The Death Chamber” from Planet News: poems 1961-1967 | City Lights
Douglas Oliver | “The Infant and The Pearl” from Selected Poems of Douglas Oliver | Talisman | 1996
Dana Ward | “Typing ‘Wild Speech’” | na | unpublished
Renee Gladman | To After That (TOAF) | Atelos | 2008
Lawrence Giffin | Get the Fuck Back Into That Burning Plane | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2009
Marcella Durand | “Anatomy of Oil” from Area | Belladonna | 2008
CA Conrad | (Soma)tic Midge | Faux Press | 2008
CA Conrad | The Book of Frank Chax 2009
Fred Moten | Hughson’s Tavern | Leon Works | 2008
John Coletti | Same Enemy Rainbow | Fewer & Further 2009
John Coletti | Mum Halo | Rust Buckle | forthcoming
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood Editions | 2009
Frank Sherlock and Brett Evans | Ready to Eat Individual | Lavender Ink | 2008
Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | 2009
Also: Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, Laird Hunt’s The Exquisite, If You Give A Moose A Muffin, Blackest Night #2, and Le Carre’s Smiley novels.
More Anselm Berrigan here.
Attention Span 2009 – Brandon Brown
K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams | Unpublished
Kasey’s most recent work complicates any orthodox aesthetics of Flarf. While it surely deploys the twin, cardinal rules of computer aid and histrionically “bad” content, the “Sonnagrams” are for me also work of conceptual translation, doubly or triply nuanced by Mohammad’s own training as a Shakespearean scholar. And this is Shakespeare 2009: “Then do I pray this adage may hold tight / Mohammad sweetens seagull panties right.”
Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman | Notes on Conceptualism| Ugly Duckling Presse | 2009
The “Notes” themselves an experiment in conceptual collaboration, the NOC were as controversial in summer 2009 as “The Call” Don Denkinger made correctly in the 1985 World Series. I found them extremely generative, useful, and profound.
Sara Larsen and David Brazil | Try!| stapled magazine | 2008-2009
Try! is heir to the rich tradition of Xeroxed, stapled, hand-delivered, often-appearing magazines in the Bay Area. Try! comes out every two weeks—and it really does! It also manages to collect the newest, most vibrant writings that surpass the alienating categories of genre and xenophobic (read: your given “local poetry community” xenophobia) coterie-or-nuthin’ loyalties. I love it. You love it.
Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | In Girum | 2008
I spent the oughts waiting for this book to come out and thanks to In Girum Nocte etc. press it has.
Rob Halpern | Disaster Suites | Palm Press | 2009
Disaster Suites is an outrageous work, the word that has accompanied my living adjacent to and with Rob over the last few years of his writing and reading these magnificent polemics against complicity and the tonal shifts of global capital.
Madeline Gins | What The President Will Say And Do!! | Station Hill | 1984
Not quite a neglectorina and certainly not a new release, but since this is my first “Attention Span” I’ve got to include one of my all-time favorites.
Anne Tardos | I Am You | Salt | 2008
Woah. Seriously. The high point for me probably the sudden photograph of Anne glaring at the reader into the ostensible Macbook camera, literalizing the transgression of the lyric already at work through the bloodbath and beyond.
Dana Ward | The Drought | Open 24 Hours Press | 2009
The drought is over thanks to O24HPress. Fundamentally an advancement of the lyric impulse as mediated not only by “post-avant” poetics (including contemporary post-avant manifestations—Ward’s work stands not as an emblem of some categorical “other” or “hybridity” to some bicameral hegemony of flarfists and conceptualists, but for me it is one of the finest proofs of a world out there) but fulsome ecologies of pop prosody and interpenetrations.
T.I. | Paper Trail | Grand Hustle / Atlantic | 2008
T.I.P.’s sixth studio effort is the shining mainstream hip hop LP of the fiscal year. The classic Clifford approach (the breathless Whitmanian line, the essential Atlantan drawl) inflected by his impending jail sentence—the record’s carpe diem message amplified by its anthemic choruses.
Anne Boyer | odalisqued.blogspot.com | Internet | 2008-2009
The thresholds between Anne’s “books” and her activity on the blog are constantly threatened and renewed. What you get in both places is a contemporary lyric, made in the place where web-based simulacra meets the real-time alienated worker, all the while expressive of Anne’s sui generis aesthetic and integrity.
More Brandon Brown here.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2011 | Dan Thomas-Glass
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Andrew Zawacki | Glassscape | Projective Industries | 2010
As I wrote on the 30 Word Review of this one: “I love the ‘tendons & tensions’ of the line/break, [Andrew] Zawacki’s attention to “global capital ’s local / cater- / waul.” I’ll admit to a minor Andrew Zawacki obsession. Dude can write.
Brian Ang | Paradise Now | Grey Book | 2011
Brian Ang | Communism | Berkeley Neo-Baroque | 2011
Brian Ang is moving toward something big & loud & unapologetic. He is diving into something. I do not always understand the tracks he leaves but I relish the motion.
Dana Ward | Typing Wild Speech | Summer BF | 2010
Dana Ward | The Squeakquel | The Song Cave | 2011
Someone (I can’t remember who) said Dana Ward is picking up where Bruce Boone left off. Nada Gordon recently said: “where Sartre gets nauseated, Dana sees kinetics and light.” Those kids are all right, but what grabs me & won’t let go, what’s uniquely him, is the abundant love of people in there. Dana Ward loves us, people, get up.
VA | Displaced Press | 2011
I bought the subscription. $50 for books by Thom Donovan, Brandon Brown, Suzanne Stein, Samantha Giles, Taylor Brady & Rob Halpern. This is so exciting. Brian Whitener et. al. are doing such awesome work, it deserves its own entry.
erica lewis | camera obscura | BlazeVOX | 2010
Taught this book to seventeen eighth-grade girls. It prompted reams of writing, turning a classroom into a camera obscura, questions about time, experience, memory, photography, & a bunch more. Can’t wait to do it again.
Joseph Lease | Testify | Coffee House | 2011
Joseph Lease | X Angel City | Sacrifice | 2010
Before this year I hadn’t read Joseph Lease. The fact that that fact changed is one of the things I will remember about this year. These dreamy & intensely felt poems believe so hard they make you believe along with them.
Juliana Spahr | Well Then There Now | Black Sparrow | 2011
“Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” is in my personal top-ten of best poems of the naughts. It’s found a beautiful new home among a range of other previously published work here; the whole is an impressive statement of Juliana Spahr’s aesthetic & concerns.
Lauren Levin | Keenan | Lame House | 2011
Lauren Levin | Not Time | Boxwood | 2009
Lauren Levin’s chaps were big for me this year. She is doing something that not even the hyper-gendered hyperbole of Ron Silliman’s excitement a couple years back does justice to. These rad clashy ping-pong lines, big loops of sound & thinking. Watch out world.
Michael Cross | Haecceities | Cuneiform | 2010
Big but also tight. Constrained but so effusive. Every time I pick this book up I hear a new angle of language, some lost repose of history. Michael Cross has a project that is so different from most; I’m very happy he’s doing it.
Phoebe Wayne | Lovejoy | c_L Books | 2010
Phoebe Wayne is a librarian by trade, so she thinks about cataloguing & preserving. That kind of thinking becomes very interesting in the world of public art on freeway pillars set to be demolished, as in the case of Lovejoy. It is also very interesting in the context of poetry itself, & chapbook publishing in particular. The ephemera that this list is part of the project of cataloguing, too—& the beautiful phrases we get to sculpt of our hours.
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Dan Thomas-Glass is a poet and teacher in the East SF Bay Area. He edits With + Stand.
Back to 2011 directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 28, 2011 at 10:33 am
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with Andrew Zawacki, Brian Ang, Dan Thomas-Glass, Dana Ward, Displaced Press, Erica Lewis, Joseph Lease, Juliana Spahr, Laura Levin, Michael Cross, Phoebe Wayne