Attention Span 2011 | Craig Dworkin

Derek Beaulieu | Seen of the Crime | Snare | 2011 (forthcoming)

Collected short essays from the fearlessly indefatigable, inquisitive, and generous poet, letraset master, micro-press publisher, and collector of literary curiosities. I haven’t seen the final manuscript, but an early draft suggests that this will be the practical, earnest compliment to the abstruse theoretical wink of Notes on Conceptualisms.

Gregg Biglieri | Little Richard the Second | Ugly Duckling | 2011

A gorgeous new book by my favorite poet. Little Richard offers a lyric meditation on doubling (echo), words (and letters), and the +ow (/wo) effect. Wow. The philosophical aviary of these post-objectivist stanzas resound with all the interlingual puns that can pass in the augenblicke of Minerva’s insomniac bird (which blinks rarely, and has two eyelids, but is the only bird to blink like humans do). Printed letterpress on luxuriously doubled sheets of laid Neenah paper, with elegant hand-sewn Japanese stab-binding and a device evoking the culture ministry of some central asian dictatorship.

Kieran Daly | Plays/ For Theater | bas-books | 2011

I’ve been genuinely surprised and excited by everything I’ve seen from Daly, which suggests that there is still some room left for both the reduction and expansion of conceptual writing before the mode is played out (and Daly pushes in both directions simultaneously). This is hard-core conceptual theatre in which bibliography takes center stage. Gertrude Stein meets Jarrod Fowler.

Judith Goldman | l.b.; or, catenaries | Krupskaya | 2011 (forthcoming)

The concatenated series of poems in Judith Goldman’s l.b chart the narratives formed by texts of uniform density hanging freely from two fixed readings not in the same semantic line. On the one hand, the book dramatizes language under the regimes of contemporary communication—the protocols and phatics of privatized and publicly traded language—with all the false and inescapable sociality of networked media and commercial memoranda. On the other hand, the motivated material play of the signifier points to the paths of greatest resistance: chance, ludic laughter, and the recalcitrant residuum of the body.

At the level of composition, l.b is also a kind of catena patrum: a series of extracts from earlier writings, forming a commentary on some portion of scripture. Goldman’s finely sutured microcollage of forms and phrases moves from Aristotle to Andy Warhol, Kathy Acker to William Wordsworth, Abu Ghraib to Thomas Wyatt. Where the traditional catena is also a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine, here the discrepant result is a more thoroughly, honestly, chronic text: not the false time of doctrine and tradition, but something more true to its own time, and to linguistic time itself.

Helen Hajnoczky | Poets and Killers: A Life in Advertising | Snare | 2010

As if Rob Fitterman wrote a season of Mad Men, Hajnoczky gives us the life story of a character told exclusively through the language of corporate advertising, with the publication date of the (actual) found text keyed to the corresponding year of his (fictional) life. Given the degree to which North Americans are all shaped by the interpellating hail of commercial media, this is also the biography of many of its readers as well. The book, sporting a handsomely textured purple cover decorated with ‘pataphysical gidouilles, contains a generous and considered Afterword. Snare, run by Jon Paul Fiorentino in Montréal, has rapidly established itself as a press to watch and a venue of envy for conceptual writers.

Yedda Morrison | Darkness | Make Now | 2011 (forthcoming)

Morrison has produced an edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which only references to the natural world remain. But what counts as “natural” is far from self-evident, and Morrison’s erasures open onto a range of philosophical and ethical questions. At one extreme, the reader begins to suspect that perhaps we can never recognize a truly natural world, one uncoloured by our human perspective, at all. And at the same time, at the other extreme, one begins to suspect that maybe there is nothing—including our own artifice—that is not in fact a part of an all-encompassing natural world after all.

The test of conceptual writing is the degree to which the distance between the concept and the execution creates enough friction to generate a spark across that gap. Here, the ethereous space between the idea and the text—between mind and body, artifice and nature, erasure and source—ionizes with violent disruption and report.

Joseph Mosconi | Galvanized Iron on the Citizen’s Band | Poetic Research Bureau | 2009

Each poem here is a mash-up of euphemistic cant, with one half taken from the slang of soldiers and the other from the code of truckers (the G.I. and C.B. of the deacronymized title). The results come across like eroticized slogans, often with an uncomfortable and vaguely aggressive comedy. The thin, oversize hardback is bound like a primer for early readers, with the text set in an enormous 25-point Times New Roman, as if Jenny Holzer were excerpting lines from mid-career Bruce Andrews’ poems, to be printed on billboards or bumperstickers. Conceptual, wry cultural critique, with one ear to the art world and one ear to the microphonemics of the best Language writing. Two poems, just to give a taste: “Gucci/ Kit/ Diesel/ Cop”; “Shamurai/ Cash/ Box.”

Travis Ortiz | Variously, Not Then | Tuumba | 2011 (forthcoming)

The book I have been most anticipating for the longest time. Ortiz has taken a finely polished series of prose poems (originally composed in a west-coast, post-language, ‘90s mode of socially motivated radical parataxis) and written through them both lexically and typographically. The result simultaneously displays both the remixes, with their delicious lines like “geography towers is narrative,” and also the original texts. Those originals are the epitome of their genre, and so opening Variously is like discovering a forgotten time-capsule containing a pristine print from a lost, never-screened film documenting its own vanished golden-age. A treasure chest, in other words. Luxuriously designed, and a rare issue from Lyn Hejinian’s revamped Tuumba press.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven | Body Sweats | MIT | 2011 (forthcoming)

Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (an interesting poet in her own right – see Parlance [Coach House, 2003]), this long-needed collection remaps the frontiers of Modernism by allowing us to fully see, for the first time, just how radical von Freytag-Loringhoven’s writing was. We know her performative persona was something to be reckoned with (she scared the shit out of William Carlos Williams, offering to infect him with her syphilis in order to help free up his poetry – they ended up more than once in fistfights on his suburban front lawn), but her linguistic fearlessness puts her in the same league as Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, and Abraham Lincoln-Gillespie. Moreover, these poems will be a wake-up-call to many contemporary poets: a century later the Baroness’ work is still as drastic as anything being published today.

Eric Zboya | Translations | Avantacular | 2010

Two volumes, in collaboration with Andrew Topel, of “algorithmic” translations, which transform the letters of a poem into extruded dendrites of exploded non-lexical exclamation. Abstract, illegible geometric patterns in a densely inked but subtly-shaded blue-black sheen, each shape is determined by an alphabetic logic that human viewers can appreciate but cannot reconstruct. A new idiom for digital poetry, visual poetry, and appropriation.

Steven Zultanski | Pad | Make Now | 2010

Ultimately more about the tension between the literal and the figural imagination than the Beavis and Butthead idée fixe of its domestic inventory (the book purports to catalogue every object in Zultanski’s apartment and whether or not his dick can lift it), PAD nonetheless suggests a new kind of confessional autobiography, filtered through the strategy of a clinically deodorized conceptualism. In the process it creates a new meter, and gives a parodic send-up of the charge that Conceptual writing is a phallocentric guy-thing. Zultanski’s premise begs its anatomical sequel—whether every object in an apartment fits in a writer’s vagina—which would offer yet another a new scale for classifying possessions but with a radically different psychological twist. I’m looking forward to that book, which I trust is being written as I type, if it’s not already in press. In the meantime, the bottom line: I can lift Steven Zultanski’s PAD with my dick.

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More Craig Dworkin here.

Dworkin’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2007 . Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Craig Dworkin

Nathan Austin | Survey Says! | Black Maze Books | 2009

All of the answers from a two month stretch of Family Feud game shows, alphabetized by the second letter of each phrase. Survey Says! is the literary version of those vernacular works of obsessive fan collage made popular on YouTube (every curse on the Sopranos; every “what?” from Lost; every “Buffy” from the first season of the eponymous show; et cetera). The next task would be to match Austin’s answers to the appropriate questions in Ron Silliman’s Sunset Debris….

Derek Beaulieu | Local Color | ntamo | 2008

A visual translation of Paul Auster’s 1986 novella Ghosts, in which the characters are named—Reservoir Dog style—by primary colors. Beaulieu has removed Auster’s text, but left a rectangle of the eponymous color wherever the names appear. Each page thus looks like a manic, rigid version of a Hans Hoffmann abstraction, with overlapping monochromes floating on a narrative field. To be read alongside Alison Turnbull’s Spring Snow (London: Bookworks, 2002) and All the Names of In Search of Lost Time (Toronto: Parasitic Ventures, 2007).

Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer | The Cave | Adventures in Poetry | 2008

Long awaited, this publication is like finding an old home movie from the ’70s. Or maybe one of Stan Brakhage’s home movies from the ’70s (well, at least one of Ed Bowes’ films from the period, though they seem to be irretrievably lost). A Rashomon-like account of a trip to Edlon’s Cave near West Stockbridge, Massachusetts in the Fall of 1972, the book is a banter you want to press your ear to: a paratactic battery of deliciously opaque (but always ultimately referential) phrases featuring that prime ’70s mode of dense internal rhymes, hard saxon consonant clusters, and bopped akimbo rhythms. Lots of geology, lots of Wittgenstein, and an unaccountable obsession on everyone’s part with breasts (which may explain the lines “bearer/ dome milks,” from Coolidge’s contemporaneous Space). The work was at one time tentatively titled Clark’s Nipples.

Robert Fitterman and Nayland Blake | The Sun Also Also Rises; My Sun Also Rises; Also Also Also Rises the Sun | No Press | 2009

The first of these three pamphlets extracts all the sentences beginning with the first person singular pronoun from The Sun Also Rises in a grammatical analysis of Hemingway’s masterpiece. The second booklet rewrites those sentences to account for Fitterman’s move to New York in the early 1980s. And Blake’s contribution rounds out the trilogy by reducing Hemingway’s prose to truncated intransitives and catalogues of definite nouns, rewriting the novel in the mode of John Ashbery and Joe Brainard’s Vermont Notebook.

Kenneth Goldsmith | Sports | Make Now | 2008

The final installment in Goldsmith’s New York trilogy, inevitably following Traffic (2007) and Weather (2004) with the logic of an AM news station. Like those other books, the interest here is generated from the distance between the deodorized and totalizing paratexts (a year’s worth of weather reports; a day’s worth of traffic reports; the transcript of the longest baseball game ever broadcast) and the messy specifics of the texts themselves, riddled with inexplicable gaps, lacunae, and aporia. Like the photograph of a Mexico City traffic jam on the cover of Traffic. Or the photo of a basketball game on a book about baseball.

Lawrence Giffin | Get the Fuck Back into That Burning Plane | Ugly Ducking Presse | 2009

Heir apparent to Kevin Davies’s pitch-perfect spin of idiomatic vernacular, critical theory, and a range of references spun between stunned horror and laugh-out-loud humor. “Is this thing on [?]” Giffin asks at the end of the second section. Absofuckinlutely YES.

James Hoff | TOP TEN | No Input Books |2008

Hoff compiled a decade of “Top Ten” columns from Artforum, in full facsimile but with the illustrating images blacked out like funereal Mondrians. The frustrated indexicality recalls Robert Smithson’s nonsites, but the images were never representative to begin with and always pointed more to the magazine’s decorative turn toward a frivolous hatue fashion, obsessed with runway models on aircraft carriers and the design of Prada boutiques. The prose, however, remains some of the decade’s essayistic best. Perfect bathroom reading.

P. Inman | ad finitum | if p then q | 2008

Absolute hardcore. After two decades of carefully reading Inman’s work I still have no idea what he’s doing. But whatever’s going on, it involves a thrilling frisson of microphonemic densities, a radical torque of grammar, and an obdurate materiality whose unassimilability is the test of its politics. I hope I never really figure it out so I can keep re-reading ad (in)finitum.

Dana Teen Lomax | Disclosure | Ubu Editions | 2009

Ihre Papieren, bitte! It has been a long time since poets were expected to be authentic, and the government doesn’t much care either, so long as your papers are genuine. Under the regime of the modern bureaucratic police state, identity is less an essence than a manner of presentation—not self-fashioning, but self-documenting. Here is the documentation, in the most radically confessional work of poetry ever published: parking tickets, loan statements, rejection letters, report cards, lab results, a drivers license, et cetera. Identity, we learn in Disclosure, is always nostalgic: these documents freeze a moment in time—when Lomax was 145lbs, or in sixth period study hall, or placing fourth in the Junior Golf Program or delinquent on her payments—but while those papers remain a fixed part of her permanent record she will continue to change, unstable, mutable, unpredictable. Full disclosure: I know less about my girlfriend of ten years than I do about Dana Teen Lomax, and I’ve never even met her.

Yedda Morrison | Darkness | Little Red Leaves | 2009

The first chapter from an edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with everything but references to the natural world whited out. Like most works of conceptual writing, the premise at first sounds mechanical, but what counts as “the natural world” is far from self-evident, and opens onto a range of philosophical and ethical questions. A lesser writer would have been paralyzed by indecision, their bottle of correction fluid drying to a brittle pallid skin before the little brush could set to paper (or the photoshop tool mouse to screen, as the case may be).

Vanessa Place | Statement of Fact | unpublished MS | 2009

Just the facts, Ma’am. The only way to be more clever than Kathy Acker, it turns out, is to be less clever. Charles Reznikoff sampled the National Reporter System of appellate decisions for his verse in Testimony; Acker incorporated legal documents from In re van Geldern as part of her modified plagiarism; but Place recognizes that such documents are far more powerful left unedited. And they read, frequently, like the reticent syllogistic prose of Hemingway short stories. Reframed from the public record as literature, the results are emotionally unbearable.

More Craig Dworkin here.

Attention Span 2009 – Jessica Smith

derek beaulieu, ed. | Speechless | 2009

This new magazine of visual poetry features an all-women first issue.

Norman Fischer | Charlotte’s Way | TinFish Press | 2008

Helen White, ed. | Infusoria: an exhibition of visual poetry by women from three continents | krikri | 2009

A DVD showing pieces from the 2009 exhibit Helen curated in Belgium, featuring work from 17 female visual poets.

Jeff Encke | Most Wanted | Last Tangoes | 2004

A deck of cards, each of which is illustrated and imprinted with a poem.  Fun to play with and/or read.

Alec Finlay | Mesostic Tea | Slack Buddha Press | 2009

The mesostic, John Cage’s now-neglected form, finds a home in Alec’s guide to tea. I’m not just glad to see the mesostic being used when it seems everyone is keen to write sestinas and pantoums—I like the tension between the Chinese tea names (which comprise the mesostics) and the English descriptions (which run horizontally). The cup ring that decorates the cover is a nice touch, echoing Cage’s stain artwork.

Friedrich Kerksieck | Matchbook | Small Fires Press | 2009

A tiny matchbook-sized magazine, enclosed in an actual matchbook, now on its second issue, featuring poems from a wide aesthetic range and scratch-and-sniff stickers.

Jordi Boldo + Roman Lujan | Aspa Viento | 2003

A beautiful edition featuring Lujan’s artwork and pictures of visual poetry printed on rocks.

kathryn l. pringle | RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY | Factory School / Heretical Texts | 2009

Factory School’s Heretical Texts series is completely trustworthy—every book they publish is a hit. Thus RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY is representative of a larger body of work—the editorial selection that comprises FS’s total run.

Jennifer Scappettone | From Dame Quickly | Litmus | 2009

Litmus did a beautiful job of translating Scappettone’s colorful visual poetry to the mass-produced page.

Sandra Beasley | Theories of Falling | Western Michigan University | 2008

The most traditionally lyric of this group, Sandra’s autobiographical/narrative poems stick with me. There’s still room to say something new in poetry.

More Jessica Smith here.

Attention Span – Mark Truscott

Laynie Browne | Daily Sonnets | Counterpath Press | 2007

Courageously and delightfully open.

Donato Mancini | Hell Passport No. 22 | Perro Verlag | 2007

Like much of Mancini’s work, this circuitry of messy tracings forces us to wonder not just how we read but what reading might be.

Carl Andre | Cuts: Texts 1959-2004 | MIT | 2005

I’m not too hot on Andre’s poetry, but I suspect pieces such as “Anaxial Symmetry” and “The Dialectic Between Two States” will keep me going for years.

Aram Saroyan | Collected Minimal Poems | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2007

Not only a music heard, but seen.

Derek Beaulieu | Flatland | Information as Material | 2007

Bullseye.

Jessica Wyman, ed. | Pro Forma: Language/Text/Visual Art | YYZBooks | 2007

Simon Glass’s annotated translation of Genesis 11:1-9 is worth the price of admission on its own.

Jordan Scott | blert | Coach House | 2008

I haven’t actually read this for a little while, but it was finally published in the spring. Go read it.

Trevor Joyce | What’s in Store | NWP & The Gig | 2007

This year’s discovery. Thanks, Nate.

Angela Carr | Ropewalk | Snare | 2006

Reads a bit like a grad school creative thesis, which it is, but glimmers dazzle.

Clint Burnham | Smoke Show | Arsenal Pulp Press | 2005

Holy shit.

Stephen Collis | Phyllis Webb and the Common Good: Poetry/Anarchy/Abstraction | Talonbooks | 2007

An illuminating reaquaintance with an important foremother. I loved The Commons too.

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More Mark Truscott here.