Attention Span 2009 – Harold Abramowitz

Allison Carter | A Fixed, Formal Arrangement | Les Figues Press | 2009

Ara Shirinyan | Handsome Fish Offices | Insert Press | 2008

Carlos Blackburn | Selected Poems of Hamster | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2008

C.J. Martin | Lo, Bittern | Atticus Finch | 2008

Deborah Meadows | Goodbye Tissues | Shearsman | 2009

Dolores Dorantes | SEXOPUROSEXOVELOZ And SEPTIEMBRE | Kenning Editions-Counterpath Press | 2008

Jane Sprague, ed. | Palm Press | 2008-2009

K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge Books | 2009

Kim Rosenfield | re: evolution | Les Figues Press | 2009

Kyle Schlesinger, Thom Donovan and Michael Cross, eds. | ON Contemporary Practice 1 | Cuneiform Press | 2008

Mairéad Byrne | Example As Figure | Ubu Editions – Publishing The Unpublishable | 2008

Mathew Timmons | Lip Service | Slack Buddha Press | 2009

Matthew Klane | Sons and Followers | Matthew Klane | 2009

Rosa Alcalá, Ash Smith, Sasha Steensen | UNDOCUMENTARY, Water Shed, The Future Of An Illusion | Dos Press | 2009

Stan Apps | Grover Fuel | Scantily Clad Press | 2009

Stephanie Rioux | Sticks | Mindmade Books | 2009

The Pines | “Peek thru the pines” | thepines.blogspot.com | 2008-2009

More Harold Abramowitz here.

Attention Span – Jennifer Scappettone

Once again I am away from my shelves, so render these but demi-impressionistically:

David Buuck | constraint-based board-bearing made-to-order essays | various performances | 2008

Cringing through this with his Catholic aunts enriched the context.

Taylor Brady & Rob Halpern | Snow Sensitive Skin | Atticus/Finch | 2007

Command mouths.

Dolores Dorantes, trans. Jen Hofer | sexoPUROsexoVELOZ | Counterpath and Kenning Editions | 2008

Difficult to choose between this and lip wolf, Hofer’s translation of Laura Solòrzano’s lobo de labio put out by Action Books in 2007. Read the notes as you read the lyrics.

Carla Harryman | direction for Kathy Acker’s Requiem | work toward performance as part of Poet’s Theater Showcase at Links Hall, Chicago | 2008

Rendered “reading” a spatialized & corporeal experience, formosa.

F.T. Marinetti | Venezianella e studentaccio | typescript | 1944

Gothic Baroque Rococo Impressionist Secessionist Futurist Refusturism.

Luigi Nono | Intolleranza 1968 | Sofferte onde serene | Prometeo:  Tragedia dell’ascolto | various years, performances, publications

“To listen to the dark, to listen to how the lights move, how the water emanates light. To listen to the way the sky is a creature of the stones, of the tiles, of the water. To know how to see and hear the invisible and inaudible. To arrive at the lowest grade of audibility, visibility.”

Roberto Rossellini | Paisà | OFI | 1946

Makes “site-specificity” seem trifling. Needs to be issued anew.

Aldo Rossi | A Scientific Autobiography | MIT | 1981

How have I never had this recommended to me? Oh, right. Ditto.

Leslie Scalapino | It’s go in horizontal:  Selected Poems, 1974-2006 | Wesleyan UP | 2008

Anti-citational oppositional time, “entirely from the inside out.”  A clamorous ethics not just a phenomenology: a tall order for poetry, finally gathered here.

Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Ed. Patrick Durgin | Kenning Editions | 2006

Long-awaited.

Haskell Wexler | Medium Cool | H&J | 1969

Time precisely to watch it again.

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More Jennifer Scappettone here.

Attention Span – Sawako Nakayasu

Vanessa Place | Dies: A Sentence | Les Figues | Los Angeles | 2005

Epically macabre, linguistically denselight, terribly terrifically continuously archaically presently engaging—it’s not a poem, nor a novel, but a sentence, should you get one.

Rusty Morrison | The true keeps calm biding its story | Ahsahta | 2008

like the spider that travels with me back through to write poetry again stop

Rosmarie Waldrop | Curves to the Apple | New Directions | 2006

Thankful to revisit all three books of the trilogy, together now, and to be read along the brilliant continuum of excluded middles.

Steven Dolph and Brandon Holmquest, ed. | Calque 2-4 | na | 2007-2008

Calque is am ambitious journal devoted to translation, which includes interviews, reviews (by reviewers who know both languages well enough to comment on the translation), reviews on reviews (it’s often a smart but harsh attack, but does the important work of promoting extended dialogue regarding what happens to translations in the US).

Pierre Joris | A Nomad Poetics | Wesleyan | 2003

Rosmarie Waldrop has her excluded middle; Joris occupies it with his middle voice—not active nor passive, home nor away—I want to go to Pierre Joris’s future please.

Kass Fleisher | The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History | SUNY | 2004

This “native american studies” (that’s what it says on its back cover) book takes an astute and compelling stance on american-ness, history, truth, and (creative) non-fiction that parallels and intersects my current thinking-living-writing in between cultures and genres.

Dolores Dorantes, trans. Jen Hofer | sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre: A Bilingual Edition of Books Two and Three from Dolores Dorantes| Kenning Editions & Counterpath | 2007

Two books (from a lifelong project called Dolores Dorantes)—two languages—two presses—and a multiplicity of thought—tenderness in the face of massacre meet up in fragments, could only meet up as such—

Dick Higgins | foew&ombwhnw | Something Else | 1969

I love the four-column format mountains, I love the rolling hills of his essays (like Games of Art), I love the Danger Music flowers, I love the Anger Song daffodils… why “volunteer to have your spine removed” when you can be playing The Chin Game? Blessed are the clamourbound.

Susan Landers | Covers | O Books | 2007

These “cover songs” function a bit differently in literature than in those of pop music, but it does indeed give Dante’s originals (from his Inferno) a new (musical and otherwise), often fragmentary interpretation. In other words, it’s an excellent and dangerous work of translation.

Hannah Weiner | Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Kenning | 2007

If only I had known sooner the ways in which she was engaged in art and performance, with her terrific inventiveness in the events of language in both private and public realms!

Achiote Press & Tinfish Press | Ongoing

Two excellent small presses that fantastically situate their publishing projects in the growing spaces of ethnic-minority-other-avant-gardisms. Tinfish has been at it (and on the Pacific Rim, specifically) for a long time now, and Achiote is more California-based (I think?), and is relatively new.

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More Sawako Nakayasu here.