Attention Span 2011 | Suzanne Stein

Brian Whitener | False Intimacy | Trafficker | 2011

Erika Staiti | In the Stitches | Trafficker | 2011

Dana Ward | Cory Arcangel’s “All the Parts from Simon and Garfunkel’s 1984 Central Park Performance Where Garfunkel Sings with His Hands in His Pocket” | Open Space, the SFMOMA blog | November 10, 2010

Kaja Silverman | Flesh of My Flesh| Stanford | 2009

Barrett Watten | Total Syntax | Southern Illinois | 1985

§

There are some other things I loved this year also. Laura Moriarty’s | A Tonalist | (Nightboat Books | 2010). David Brazil’s | yo! eos! | (Neo-Baroque, 2011). Sara Larsen’s | The Hallucinated (cannot exist, 2011). I stopped going to poetry readings at the beginning of November. I read The Coming Insurrection. I remembered I went to work in an art museum because I love the way I feel when I am looking at paintings, so I looked at a lot of paintings. I read The Handbook of Poetic Forms. I watched Gena Rowlands in Opening Night again and I bought the John Cassavetes | Five Films box set from The Criterion Collection | 2004. I went to the Bancroft Library for the first time. I listened to Stephen Cope’s | Conference of the Birds | podcasts. I went to Detroit. I stopped in Boston, Baltimore, and Denver. I went to Maine. I visited the Kabuki Hot Springs eight times. I read The Painting of Modern Life. I didn’t go to the office on a lot of Fridays. I looked at a calendar chronology of Duchamp. I bought a rotary telephone and a Sunday subscription to the New York Times. “No knows where that humming is coming from; one could not stop it if one tried.” (Barrett Watten, Total Syntax, 1985.)

§

Suzanne Stein is a poet. She works currently as community producer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, editing the museum’s online magazine, Open Space, and organizing a variety of talk- and conversation-based programs. She lives in Oakland. Stein’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009. 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 – Rodney Koeneke

Lauren Shufran | The Birds | self-published | 2010

“half Punkish ideology, half ludicrous athleticism,” all sleek Greek comic fronting “During Hella Restless Times.”

Bruce Boone | Century of Clouds | Nightboat Books | 2009

Served up last century, lost through the clouds, spiked in the now for the win.

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

Lazarus reborn on Christmas as Ian Curtis.

Lauren Levin, Catherine Meng & Jared Stanley, eds. | Mrs. Maybe | 2010

What Timberlake did to sexy the Mrs. does maybe to staples.

Anselm Berrigan | Free Cell | City Lights | 2009

The socius blown through poet & getting its rhetoric high.

Ariana Reines going to Haiti | Blog of Ariana Reines | 2010

Poetics rethunk via contrails, tap taps, feet.

Brandon Downing | Lake Antiquity | Fence Books | 2009

History bending its head feelingfully to meticulously whacked lithography.

Sam Lohmann, ed. | Peaches and Bats | 2010

The regional conceived as planisphere.

Brandon Brown | Wondrous Things I Have Seen | Mitzvah Chaps | 2010

Latest stop on BB’s dromedary progress from strength to strength to strength.

Sara Larsen & David Brazil, eds. | Try! | 2010

We’re still having fun, and you’re still the one.

Lindsay Hill | The Empty Quarter | Singing Horse Press | forthcoming

Mauritania’s sand in metaphor creep to everything.

More Rodney Koeneke here.  His Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2006. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – John Sakkis

Alastair Johnston | Zephyrus Image A Bibliography | Poltroon | 2003

George Oppen | The Collected Poems Of George Oppen | New Directions | 1976

David Brazil and Sara Larsen, eds. | Try Magazine | 2010

Micah Ballard and Patrick James Dunagan | Easy Eden | Push | 2009

Daniel Clowes | Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron | Fantagraphics | 1998

Gad Hollander | Walserian Waltzes | Avec | 1999

Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This To Me The Collected Poetry Of Jack Spicer | Wesleyan | 2008

Sean Cliver | Disposable A History Of Skateboard Art | Warwick | 2005

Jason Morris | Spirits And Anchors | Auguste | 2010

Steve Lavoie and Pat Nolan | Life Of Crime Documents In The Guerrilla War Against Language Poetry | Poltroon | 2010

Rodney Koeneke | Rules For Drinking Forties | Cy Press | 2009

More John Sakkis here. His Attention Span for 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Peter Quartermain

Victor Coleman | Icon Tact: Poems 1984-2001 | Book Thug | 2006

Sardonic and sometimes savagely funny, other times just plain pissed-off; now and again tender, or screwball. Coleman, who reads widely, should be better known and warrants wide readership—and if the last three words make me sound like Elmer Fudd, well, Coleman would enjoy that.

George Deem | Let George Do It | Post-Apollo | 2009

Paintings and drawings; prose and verse. George Deem, who died in 2008, was a language artist, as well as a painter. As Ulla Dydo says in her introduction, this book “is not about painting, it is about writing.” A modest treasure. I’ve turned to it more than once, since I got it a few months back.

Lorne Dufour | Jacob’s Prayer | Caitlin | 2009

Simple prose is hard to write, and even harder to sustain. Dufour does it brilliantly, evoking the hardships of life in a British Columbia aboriginal village where he was schoolteacher, and the people who saved his life during and after a freak storm on hallowe’en in 1975. Sheer unpretentious good writing; generous, warm, loving—and political as Dickens.

George Economou | Ananios of Kleitor: Poems & Fragments and Their Reception from Antiquity to the Present | Shearsman | 2009

A wonderful romp through the petty, predatory and even campy squabbles and pedantry of certain scholars of Ancient Greek texts, at the same time funny and informative. Economou has a terrific parodic ear for the grave tones of scholarship, and an equally terrific poetic ear for the real delights of ancient Greek lyric. A tour de force.

Susan Holbrook and Thomas Dilworth, ed. | The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation | Oxford | 2010

Long needed, superbly edited, indispensible.

Kevin Killian and David Brazil, ed. | The Kenning Anthology of Poet’s Theatre1945-1985 | 2010

Generous (so many plays! so many really good ones!). Eye-opening. Inspiring. Useful. A great read. Let’s hope for a follow-up volume.

Ammiel Alcalay, general editor | Lost And Found: The CUNY Poetics Documentary Initiative Series I | CUNY | 2009

Five issues, each with a different editor, issued in seven fascicles: selected correspondence of Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn; selected correspondence of Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara; Muriel Rukeyser on Darwin; selections from Philip Whalen’s Journals; Robert Creeley and Daphne Marlatt at the Vancouver Poetry Conference 1963. Series II, promised for Fall 2010, will include Muriel Rukeyser, Jack Spicer, and others. Need I say more?

Gérard de Nerval, trans. Richard Sieburth | The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbé de Bucquoy | Archipelago | 2009

Nerval’s cheeky and indeed risky Tristram-Shandyish response to the crazy law in the Second French Republic (July 1850) which through exorbitant stamp-tax made impossible the publication of fiction in newspapers. Nerval’s quest, serialized in Le National, for the memoir of the man who actually escaped from the Bastille, which he once glimpsed on a bookstall but did not buy, has its occasional longueurs, but the whole thing is a nicely comic demolition of easy distinctions between fact and fiction. Not previously published in English, in excellent translation, with valuable introduction and relevant annotations.

Jacques Roubaud, trans. Jeff Fort | The Loop | Dalkey Archive | 2009

The second installment of The Great Fire of London, Roubaud’s highly resourceful and deeply moving Oulipean struggle with memory and loss; to read this is to skirt terrible despair, yet strangely enough to come out of it refreshed, strengthened.

José Saramago, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Death With Interruptions | Houghton Mifflin | 2009

“The following day no one died” opens this story in which Death takes a vacation. Saramago’s gift here is a clear-sighted logic which exposes and ridicules (with hilarious ingenuity) the profound and absurd ineptitude of all expediency. The novel turns out to be a passionate defence and celebration of love and compassion—but to say that is to sound clichetic. If there is a cliché in the book, then it’s a fresh one.

More Peter Quartermain here. His Attention Span for 2008, 2006. Back to directory.

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.

Attention Span 2009 – Elizabeth Treadwell

Jennifer Firestone & Dana Teen Lomax, eds. | Letters to Poets | Saturnalia | 2008

“I for one don’t care about George Bush, we shouldn’t be disturbed by dogs, or low caste people and the power they have, they are average minds with a lot of power and attention, but for me they are just farts who don’t know the true history of how cultures and science weave. They are always into themselves, they cannot perceive other people or the pain that they are causing them. Obviously you can’t reach them with language.”—Victor Hernandez Cruz, to Brenda Coultas

“Female history is always destabilized by whatever guy is now watching the line of women parading by. It’s maddening but those guys will never change. We have to think differently. ….I think females need to write new fictions to hold their truths….. We have to set each other up better all the time and the terms of the world are always inadequate to women’s true accomplishments…..The feminine line means that above all women mustn’t be contemptuous of themselves. Just when the last thing going on is one’s purported femininity, it erupts like a big bow. We’re just so many things. I distrust my own jargon, my abandoning of the feminine for the female. I guess I was preferring sex over gender, but later thinking how arrogant to pretend not to be feminine. For anyone really. Why is the feminine the thing to hate. Something men, or mothers made to control girls. Surely it can free us too, then in some homeopathic way. I often forget words, that’s why I like holes. All this quiet diving through the dictionary and a bird comes up tweeting.”—Eileen Myles, to Jennifer Firestone

Reid Gomez | K’e/For Future Reference | http://reidgomez.blogspot.com | ongoing

“Food, dolls, stories, baskets, beadwork, silverwork, weavings, hand drums, flutes, songs and dances tell us who we are and teach us how to care for ourselves and our relations. Farmers, artists, wise men and women, weavers, dancers and singers invest their time and money living tradition, making a place for us in the here and now. They invest their resources in us and our future, creating and forging relationships that support us as individuals and as people. When we support them we support ourselves. When we purchase objects or services based in hate and exploitation we are funding hate and exploitation.”

Ann Vickery | Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing | Wesleyan | 2000

Such dear close history, a little surprised I’m just reading it now.

Nate Dorward, ed. | Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada | The Gig | 2008

The Johanson on Annharte and O’Leary on Wolsak were of particular interest to me.

Trevor Joyce | Courts of Air & Earth | Shearsman | 2008

The gorgeous Irish. Love it. Trans from the trad, intro’d by Fanny Howe.

Tim Atkins | Folklore | Salt | 2008

“Milks. Stitched into history.”

A curious pleasure to read this in conjunction with the above.

Andrew Rippeon | Priest | 2008

This little chap just appeared in my box, beautiful work.

Cathy Park Hong, Evie Shockley, &c, eds. | jubilat

Never a dull issue. I especially enjoyed the interview with CB I Hate Perfume in #15.

David Brazil & Sara Larsen, eds. | Try

Again with the never a dull issue, plus highly lovable production values.

Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone | Poems | Green Integer |1999

Keeping this close of late.

More Elizabeth Treadwell here.

Attention Span 2009 – Cedar Sigo

John Wieners | The Lanterns Along The Wall | Other Publications | 1972

Suzanne Stein | Hole In Space | OMG | 2009

Sara Larsen and David Brazil, eds. | Try! Magazine (A first year subscription) | 2008-9

Joanne Kyger | Lo & Behold | Voices From The American Land | 2009

Tom Raworth | A Serial Biography | Fulcrum Press | 1969

Kimberly Lyons | Phototherapique | Katalanche and Portable Press At Yo-Yo Labs | 2008

Micah Ballard | Parish Krewes | Bootstrap Press | 2009

Dodie Bellamy | Barf Manifesto | Ugly Duckling | 2008

Rene Daumal, trans. Roger Shattuck | Mount Analogue | Pantheon | 1960

Bill Berkson | Goods and Services | Blue Press | 2008

Filip Marinovich | Zero Readership | Ugly Duckling | 2008

More Cedar Sigo here.