Attention Span 2011 | Susana Gardner

David Kirschenbaum, ed. | The Portable BOOG Reader | BOOG LITERATURE | 2000

I acquired this anthology recently in an after reading pints and swap. From the stunning cover photo of Lee Ann Brown (taken by Allen Ginsberg no less) to the vast multitude of interior work by NYC based poets. Featuring Julie Patton, Wanda Phipps, Betsy Fagin, Sharon Mesmer and many, many more.

Dodie Bellamy | CUNTUPS | Tender Buttons | USA | 2001

This is a book I should have read right away, ten years ago today, actually. Ten years ago we all should have read it, but only now did I come to it. It is daring, a modern sort of nod to Lifting Belly. Modern and dual, bi-and all-BECOMING. It makes me WANT, it will make you WANT too. All MEN should read it NOW, all WOMEN too. Read it in one go, read it in two. Dodie Bellamy will bewitch you as she has me. Bewitched, betwixt, and tricked, all done up with all that lovely goo! An erotic love poem manifests each page. She will badger you, she will eschew you, as she wants you and you and you. So little! So Wild!!!

Sean Cole | Itty City | Pressed Wafer | 2003
Sean Cole | The December Project | BOOG | 2005

Like unexpected sound bites in rapid succession…

The moon is night alert. It’s half-nigh, strafing. Like an Alewife it slaps against the black movement of the sky. Every year I write about the moon, it’s ambitious, as if it did anything but whip the surf into dumb caps, as if it did anything but laps around the Earth.

Emily Critchley Love / All That / & OK by Emily Critchley | Penned in the Margins | UK | 2011

This is an amazing, thorough collection of British poet Emily Critchley’s publications to date. You need to read this book!

(The Avaunt Garde)

speaking in logic (or Greek) where nothing’s divided everything’s
dug up out of the dirt, bomb or butterfly, but such dirt gets stuck
(like red paint) under the nails & the world after all is not for such
violent admiring. the archaeological point may be us at the drinking
bowl us as the clouds part us offering ourselves up to ourselves in
graphic violence.to get the beauty of it hot

Frances Cruk | DOWN YOU GO OR Négation de Bruit | Punch | USA | 2011

Just in! This is a beautiful letterpress book, total gorgeousness all around. This is an amazing I-XX sequence, which begins:

Swarms!
We will bang
Into the sun Blinded
thirsty,
howling

(and continues in IX)

Again the fake garden, motionless plastic curves.
This time we are Great in our Smart
Bomb Time Machine device.
We come to fuck the mutants
We go to mutant them
I am with the mutant
firing limbs

I want to quote more. No, I want to type the whole sequence here for you now, but resist doing that…you need to order this book. And since I just received my copy, I want to digest its negation, its lyrical dreamy chasms before me.

Amy De’Ath | Erec & Enid | Salt | UK | 2010

From the title poem of De’ath’s impressive first collection:

Said Erec to Enide, the sun burst
down on my sails and glowing tore
my winnow North.
Said Enide to Erec, I don’t know how
to soothe you.
…
Said Erec to Enide,
Enide dozed, & her lips gently
popped as they parted. Erec sat on
the grass, the horse chestnut on his
chest, and the salmon who jumped,
and the curvature of his intense
guilt, his ergonomic fantasy office
and the parameter of his suburb.

j/j hastain | myrhh to re all myth | Furniture | forthcoming

‘This is a romance of fractals,’ an invigorating linguistic panoply which refuses to be any one thing. myrhh to re all myth gives us a vivid transdifferentiated poethic state—a sonic inquiry—thus feral post-gendered embodiment of ‘the infinitely ferric dress’. Multiple, layered, disarming and hauntingly worthwhile. Hastain spins a fine vocalic lyric gossamer about us, a future ethos and new grammatical treatise of fracture, rediscovery, and retelling, a myrhh re(garding) all myth.

Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: A Project For Future Children | Kelsey St. | 2009

Kapil threads together a now nearly forgotten story, as she realizes the tale of the two feral ‘wolf’ girls poetically as it is heart wrenching and hopeful.

“Lucidly, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next to your body; then my eyes clicked the photo into place. Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed.”

Marianne Morris | SolacePoem (afterParvine‘Tesami) | Tusk Records | UK | 2011

Listen to this link and be bewitched by this UK/CAN sylph in her gorgeous words and sound work. Seeing Morris perform is the only way to trump the poetic sound experience.

Tom Pickard | MORE PRICKS THAN PRIZES | Pressed Wafer | USA | 2010

This little book is packed with kicks & punches as it delivers a great poetic memoir of sorts, seriously small enough to fit in your pocket! While recounting a particular period of his experiences as a young poet, Pickard’s story also recounts the difficulty of ‘being’ a poet, father and citizen in the 60’s. Also, just received some beautiful postcards from Tom. He is an amazing photographer as well, and now I have many images of his far off corner in ‘Blighty’ (he taught me that!) The pic of him and Allen Ginsberg is tacked to my study wall.

Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | USA | 2009

I was pleased to meet Douglas this past summer at the Boston Poetry Marathon and then again in NYC for a Zinc reading. I am still digging into Dug’s Theogony. For some reason, when I meet poets I instantly fabricate (in my dense head) what kind of poems they write…Rothschild, for me was a poet of the long poem category…so at first I was surprised to see all of these small(ish) poems throughout the book…but then I realized it is all one poem we are all writing, right? One long fabulous poem! Here is one I particularly like… I also want to quote UNEXPOSED here, but no, I will not expose it. No, I will not expose it! Go find it!

PANZY 

& then another
first one & then a flock
of snow bells

Jaime Robles | foundlings | EXETER | UK | 2011

Receiving this book was a real treat—like a foundling itself, beautiful and austere in its form. And heart-wrenchingly prescient! It is works like this that bring me to poetry. It is many things, an inventory, a recalling of the past, an articulation of sorrow and even the beauty therein…a book of lost children, lost mothers, of hope.

from foundling 2275, a boy

                        This Silver Ribbon is
                            Desired to be preserved as
          The Childs mark for distinction

This ribbon binds but also reaches,
Observes the shortest distance between me and her,
Maps the call of a bird—
Tinsel and silky: each stitch a feather.

Michael Ruby | Window on the City | BlazeVOX | 2006

This is a beautiful book, another fabulous contribution to publishing from BlazeVOX! & a Dusie Kollektiv participant at that! It was also a great pleasure to hear Michael read his work at the Dusie Zinc Reading this past summer, I sent him away with his pockets full of chocolate.

Kathrin Schaeppi | Sonja Sekula: Grace in a Cow’s Eye: a memoir | Black Radish | 2011

An amazing book project convergence, re-seeing / investigation, and collaboration with the late Swiss visual artist and writer Sonja Sekula. When Schaeppi performs works from this book, I am inspired to write it to the score of one-woman musical. Vielleicht einmal!

Gertrude Stein | Lifting Belly | The Naiad Press Inc. | 1989

Lifting belly confounds me, entrances and enchants me.
Lifting belly what is earnest. Expecting an arena to be monumental.
Lifting belly is recognized to be the only spectacle present. Do you mean that.
Lifting belly is a language. It says island. Island a strata. Lifting belly is a repetition. (17)

§

Susana Gardner‘s Herso: An Heirship in Waves was published earlier this year by Black Radish.

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

Attention Span 2010 – Brent Cunningham

Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009

The title of Nichols’s book, to my ear, indicates a kind of linguistic density that actually the poems inside don’t much have—instead you get poems of such emotional authority and seriousness of purpose that immediately I was ready to go anywhere with them. There’s lightness and levity as well, lots, but it’s in the refreshing context of feeling like the poet really, deeply knows what she’s doing, I mean really. Even the formal moves, the spacing, leaving phrases off in space, composition by field and the like, has a kind of rightness and intentionality to it that I don’t often accept so unquestionly. This is the kind of book I take around with me to remind me how to write as well as how to read. What else can I say? I know it came out last year and was mentioned often then, but I just love this book

Aaron Kunin | The Sore Throat & Other Poems | Fence | 2010

A lot of writers are influnced by philosophy, but Kunin is one of very few living poet I know where I feel like I’m reading someone with truly philosophical sensibilities and skills, i.e. who really lives in a Kantian or maybe in this case more a Spinozian reality. What his work shows, I think, is in part how much feeling there is in thinking, and also how much pleasure there is in the artistic distanciation of self-conciousness

Khaled Mattawa | Tocqueville | New Issues Poetry & Prose | 2010

I’m not entirely persuaded by all the elements of Mattawa’s work, but I like to mention him since I think he’s completely worthwhile yet almost completely off the radar of most self-identified experimental writers. This makes sense if you read his early, more conventional and overly-wringing writing, or if you look at those who blurb his books, etc., but this book is serious and thoughtful about its politics, courageous in its formal experimentation, and fervent in its contempt for false emotion. If you read one book blurbed by Yusef Komunyakaa this year, it should be this one, etc.

Brenda Iijima, ed. | eco language reader | Nightboat | 2010

To the properly sceptical this book probably won’t, and probably shouldn’t, prove there’s a new movement or even a new sensibility afoot, but whatever Iijima’s anthology is or isn’t claiming in those terms it is certainly very well edited, filled with a great group of contributors, and embarrasingly rich with new ideas and new passions.

Laura Moriarty | A Tonalist | Nightboat | 2010

I should perhaps recuse myself here since I’m one of Laura’s “A Tonalists,” but whether the pseudo-movement/anti-movement/non-movement of the title has any reality or not, Moriarty has used the idea of groups and groupings to make a fierce, delicate, layered text that stands as a work, and an art, of its own.

Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | 2009

Rothschild has, basically, a classical sensibility (where “classical” is considered as running the gamut from the unadornedness of certain ancient greek writers to the unadornedness of Ted Berrigan), which is then shot through with a whole lot of eccentric, baroque intelligence. I may have been a little less taken with the long middle section about NYC than some: it’s what seem to be framed as the more “minor” poems that really have stayed with me. And in a way that makes perfect sense because the significance of the minor is what Rothschild himself is so productively interested in.

Tan Lin | Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) | Zasterle | 2009

There’s something fascinating about limit cases, and Lin has been exploring those frontiers for a few books now, but this is the first time I really & completely got it. I like to carry around what I’ll call Heath (the title is a subject of debate by the way) just to show aspiring conceptualists how tepid and obvious their plans often are, by comparison. Really I can’t think of another book that seems to have gone farther off the grid of our presumptions about “the book” and “poetry” than this pleasantly transgressive text. It’s a further mystery that it remains, inexplicably, rather readable (with the right kind of approach). Everything in it—images, computer code, emails, texts—have the feeling of being placed, not overly systematically, but such that they beg for your own thinking to complete them.

Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, Kyle Schlesinger, eds. | ON: Contemporary Practice, Issue #2 | Cuneiform | 2010

Some will say the structure of this magazine, where poets talk about the work of poets, will only add to the feeling that experimental poetry is a small coterie with a secret knock to get in. Others, including me, find ON to be just what was lacking, and will find it far less about in-group backslapping than one might presume (very much like the Attention Span project, which has a lot in common with ON). Coterie is a sword of the two-edged variety, and ON is a much needed venue for poets to not only talk about works by their contemporaries but to fashion a renewed sense of basic, shared critical values.

Yedda Morrison | Girl Scout Nation | Displaced Press | 2008

This is the oldest book on my list but I only just got to read it. I had the pleasure of hearing a lot of the poems in this book for a few years at various readings, but the effect of reading them all together is fierce and splendid and at an entirely other level. Anger and love seem to be Morrison’s twin obsessions here and in other works—the love that both lies and lies in every anger, maybe. These concerns dovetail into her starkly eco/feminist/activist/understandably-pissed-off approach in ways that I find enviously original. She’s doing some great work and to me this book is both sweeping and, despite or because of the intensity, suprisingly personal.

Tyrone Williams | The Hero Project of the Century | The Backwaters Press | 2010

Unlike a decade ago Williams is not a secret anymore, but he’s still one of those poets I always read no matter what. I’d say I liked this book just a sliver less than On Spec, but it’s still terrific. Compared to On Spec it’s driven a bit more by content than form, but regardless TW is always, to me, most compelling in the way he works with linguistic density, counterpunctuating it with sudden moments of simple anger and direct content. I never thought enjambed aesthetic complexity could come across as so persuasive and natural, but it is here.

More Brent Cunningham here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Matvei Yankelevich

Maged Zaher | Portrait of the Poet As an Engineer | Pressed Wafer | 2009

This is a poet. This is an engineer. What better combination? Emotion collides with technology, programming with psychology. Lingo cohabits with angst. This is really strong work with it’s very own thing, with influences divergent enough to create something different but not unfamiliar. I like reading this book and giving it to people and then buying it again.

Graham Foust | A Mouth in California | Flood | 2009

I tried to read new poetry this year, actual books, not just chapbooks and manuscripts, and I’ve been meaning to find out—who is Graham Foust, and what’s he all about. This book is a pure depressive joy to read, like listening to Modest Mouse’s first album. Or something like that. It’s a mouth in pain, perhaps. But it’s beautiful, some of the phrases I just had to re-read and re-read. He does stuff, a kind of performative utterance, in each poem. A twist that I physically feel. I think maybe Graham Foust is a Physical Poet par-excellence.

Catherine Wagner | My New Job | Fence | 2009

I loved the “My New Job” section of this book most. It made me jump, or it jolted me—a kind of aesthetic/intellectual/visceral response I can’t quite locate or describe. Cathy Wagner startles as before, but does the job newer, leaner, better.

Macgregor Card | Duties of an English Foreign Secretary | Fence | 2009

This is a book of adventures that always bring the author and the reader back to one’s friends, for high-tea maybe, or for a heart-felt reunion. The words themselves become Macgregor Card’s friends, too; he sees them—and says them—again and again. My friend Ellie Ga’s cover photo is a pretty great reason for loving it, too. See, friends again. But, though many of the poems are dedicated (or feature as characters) real live friends (and also aesthetic-friends of the authors that are long gone, like the Spasmodic poets), it never feels like an in-thing or a closed circle. It’s a book that nourishes the reader with its hospitality. And hospitality bears repeating.

Robert Fitterman | Sprawl | Make Now | 2009

LOL. Do actually read trough it. The Mall of the Subconscious. Very subtly done. Consumer review: I was impressed by the variety this store has to offer, and the prices are reasonable.

Danielle Dutton | Sprawl | Siglio | 2010

Yes, same title. Totally different, though read in tandem… could be quite interesting. Sprawl is one of the best new novels of our time, no question. Diane Williams hovers nearby, as does Markson in its disassociations, and maybe Abish in its obsessions. As does Douglas Sirk. Discomfort in Suburbia.

Ish Klein | Union! | Canarium | 2009

Surprises abound. I like the way the logic twists slowly over the time of the long-ish poems. The centering of the lines put me off at first, but then I got into it. Ish Klein has a unique sympathy for everything her language touches even when it’s in despair. Nice title!

Kristin Prevallet | I, Afterlife: An Essay in Mourning Time | Essay Press | 2007

Been meaning to read it since it came out… Finally did. And glad I did. Resonated with me personally. Ideas about elegy here were not only compelling but very useful, both to life and to poetics. It’s a beautiful use of essay, narrative, and poetry interwoven, without being some kind of forced “hybrid.”

William Carlos Williams | Spring & All | Frontier Press (reprint of the 1923 Contact Press edition) | 1970

It is a pleasure to read this in its own edition as a separate little book. I keep doing it. Spring and Fall.

(When will we get the original Lost Lunar Baedeker in a reprint edition, or a new one of Spring and All…? Any takers…? Is New Directions gonna do it?)

Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | 2009

How do you pronounce that again? In any case, it suit this book to follow Williams in this little list. Politics, yes. “Minor Arcana” is of course a canonical text as far as digestion of the Bush-years goes. And it’s laugh-out-loud, as the kids say. But there’s much more here. Very delicate stuff made with a persevering hand. A light trace of knuckle on these pages. Something I can come back to.

Mac Wellman | Miniature | Roof | 2002

Weird and wonderful poems. Defamiliarize yourself.

Mac Wellman | The Difficulty of Crossing a Field | Minnesota | 2008

Wow… Especially awesome forward by Helen Shaw, and Wellman’s ongoing essay: “Speculations: An Essay on the Theater.” Great thinking, great writing, plus wry humor! Could be read alongside R. Foreman’s Unbalancing Acts as the big turn in turn of the century poetic theater (not poet’s theater). (With all the current buzz about poet’s theater, one must wonder why we poets, as a rule, aren’t reading plays or going to the theater to see what we have to learn from the other “dying” art-form. On that note…)

Sibyl Kempson | Crime or Emergency | 53rd State | 2009

I loved the fireball production of this at PS122. The text is like a mash-up of soap opera and action thriller and Bruce-Springstein-cabaret. Or maybe… Knife on the Water + The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant + Warhol’s Cowboys. Yikes.

Raymond Queneau | Witch Grass | NYRB Classics | 2003

Some confusion: the old edition of the same (great) translation is titled The Bark-Tree. (The translator, the incomparable Barbara Wright, explains why she changed the title.) But I think the translation in this re-issue is the same. This has to be the craziest (first) novel ever… 1933! So beautiful. So Pascal. So funny. So melancholy. Dig the ending(?). Nothing compares.

More Matvei Yankelevich. His Attention Span for 2007. 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 – Joanna Fuhrman

Rachel Loden | Dick of the Dead | Ahsahta Press | 2009

Loden’s rewriting of Creeley, Rilke and Stevens is as witty and devastating as contemporary poetry gets.

Chris Nealon | Plummet | Edge | 2009

“Ha-ha General Squier, the muzak has formed real songs.? / No longer will you fool me with your tricks, John Ashbery!” Not just witty, but actually funny.

Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | 2009

Finally, right? Rothschild is my Virgil in Disneyfied New York City.

Aleksandr Skidan, trans. Genya Turovskaya | Red Shifting | UPD | 2008

The title perfectly captures the passionate and unpredictable shifts and leaps in this book. This is the type of book that is so good and so different from anything else I’ve ever read it’s shocking.

Landis Everson | Everything Preserved | Greywolf | 2006

I was surprised to find I liked the later poems best. “Because I never wrote it / your poem is better than mine.” Beyond perfect.

Denise Duhamel | Ka-Ching | University of Pittsburgh Press | 2009

Such a great assortment of forms here! Her prose poem in the voice of the Florida widow made me cry on the subway platform.

Rachel Levitsky | Neighbor | UPD | 2009

“The problem with representational art is the audience is often / uninterested in what you represent.”

Bill Berkson | Portrait and Dream | Coffee House Press | 2009

Okay, well, I just started reading through this, but I’ve loved his previous collections and I was excited to see my favorite poem of his from the old New York School anthology is the first in the collection.

Rane Arroya | The Buried Sea | University of Arizona Press | 2008

I recommend the poem “The Singing Shark Dream, or Toto, I Don’t Think We Are in Tegucigalpa Anymore,” a crazed rewriting of West Side Story.

Sheila Callaghan | That Pretty Pretty; or, the Rape Play | Produced at Rattlestick Theater, published in American Theater magazine | 2009 (April)

Okay it’s a play, not a book, but I wanted poets to see it or read it because it overlaps with Flarf in some interesting ways. It’s also just really funny and trenchant and has a great dramatic structure. The most misogynist play I’ve ever seen was at Rattlestick, so it was especially gratifying to see a feminist send-up produced in that space.

Adeena Karasick | Amuse Bouche | Talonbooks | 2009

“AB boasts 18.5 mm wide soft margins and padded information. It can also be used as a headrest.”

More Joanna Fuhrman here.

Attention Span 2009 – Michael Scharf

Ange Mlinko | assorted reviews in The Nation

Best Seidel takedown ever.  Better than the Possum Pouch essay claiming Seidel for Flarf.

Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | subpress | 2009

Truer than Williams or Olson. Half a Hesiodic Janus-face (with Luoma’s Works & Days). The great book of turn-of-the-century New York.

Jane Dark’s sugarhigh! | October 1, 2008 thru June 13, 2009 | janedark.com

Joshua Clover | poems read on May 13, 2008 at Princeton

Compiled the above set of entries into a PDF (minus a few things), resulting in le livre de la crise, a book of exquisite exposition. The poems, some written before Fall 2008, promise definitiveness of a different order.

Jeet Thayil, ed. | The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets | Bloodaxe | 2008

Great love and side-taking. Can sense many poems behind the choices even if I can’t see them, and can also catch sight of the social formations behind them (in a way that I haven’t for 20th C. Canada, Britain, Australia and related diasporim). Not the place to read Kolatkar and others for the first time, but for me the place, transformatively, to read Gopal Honnalgere for the first time.

John Ashbery | Collected Poems 1956-1987 | Library of America | 2008

The 12 poems of Rivers and Mountains take on a momentous scale and aspect, with “Clepsydra” and “The Skaters” as oeuvre prisms: light enters them in spectra, and leaves in lines (of what is to come). Double Dream as the best book of Fall 2008 (“Soonest Mended”; “Decoy”; “Definition of Blue”).

Jordan Davis | Reading at the Zinc Bar with George Stanley and Chris Nealon | May 15, 2009

This seemed to take place in bullet time.

Josef Kaplan | Our Heavies | chapbook | 2009

T-Pain presents The 1990s, a bildungsroman.

Juliana Spahr | “The Incinerator” | Lana Turner | 2008

Total destruction of the pathetic fallacy.

Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni | 2008

She stands, at 5′ 1”, like Donatello’s David, hand on cocked hip, sword resting at waist, hat pulled low. Seconds until the voice comes in, on, over. Each death and loss adds to its saturate. It sings through (“spell it ‘galaxie'”) life, this unbearably beautiful book its form. Icon incarnations as multiply era-synechdochic; metamorphoses as mirror; close encounters as abrasions, as identifications, interstices, and interpellations (“the magnificent instability of the sign”). Attack, Sustain, Decay, Release.

Kunwar Narayan, trans. from Hindi by Apurva Narayan | No Other World: Selected Poems | Rupa | 2008

Xi Chuan, trans. from Mandarin by Arthur Sze | “On Wang Ximeng’s Blue and Green Horizontal Landscape Scroll, A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains” | Boston Review 34.3 | May-June 2009

Hans Varghese Mathews | “Words and Picturables: Image and Perlocution in English Verse” | Phalanx 3 | http://www.phalanx.in

The Almost Island conference in Delhi this past February (curated by Bei Dao, Sharmistha Mohanty, and Vivek Narayanan) brought together poets from China and India for a multi-day set of dialogues, visits, and retreats. (Gist: movement, led by Ashis Nandy, toward some meanings for India and China as “civilizations,” in senses that avoided much that is either discursively co-opted or out-of-bounds.) Kunwar Narayan and Xi Chuan read together the first night. I’ve lent away my copies of No Other World, but Narayan is considered to be, and felt like, a Stevens-caliber figure, a poet whose subtlety matches the stakes of the Hindutva era. Xi Chuan, part of the circle of poets associated with Bei Dao’s journal Jintian (founded in 1978), read a selection of poems that included “Wang Ximeng”; the poem seemed a reply to “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” with society as self. I agreed with Hans Mathews, one of the respondents, that it seemed to destroy the framing of the event; Mathews’s own essay contains a phenomenal phenomenology of the poetic image.

Roberto Calasso | The Forty-Nine Steps | Minnesota | 2001

Brilliant on Nietzsche. Devastating on Brecht (while preserving the poems). Stirner, Schreber, Wedekind all also here, and Benjamin. The best possible antidote for George Steiner. Calasso’s Ka also a great restorative following unreadable translations of the Mahabharata.

More Michael Scharf here.

Very Fanciful

Bill Luoma – “I love the idea of a Jennifer sofabed” (0’50”) from My Trip to New York City. Recorded on February 11, 1994 as part of the Segue series at the Ear Inn and archived on Pennsound. Jeff Hull introduces, and Luoma opens the set by reading, with Jennifer Moxley, the long poem “n-space” by Helena Bennett (available for pdf download in Impercipient 6, archived on Brian Kim Stefan’s Arras site).