Attention Span 2011 | Erín Moure

Theodor Adorno, trans. Rodney Livingstone | Lectures on Negative Dialectics | Polity | 2008

Not Negative Dialectics in itself, but a real way into that book, this book holds Adorno’s preparation notes for his lectures on his theory of intellectual experience that became ND. The lectures provide both a way into Adorno’s methodology in that book, and also lay out a kind of field of responsiveness, as Adorno prepares to address an audience, and moves his ideas outward. I love books like this, that let me enter into a practice more deeply.

Oana Avasilichioaei | Spelles | No Press and Hex Laboratorium | 2010

Echoes of the medieval distaff gospels, and of performance of poetry as voice (for there is a CD) and as spelling, performance of spelling (and the “elle” in “spelles” is a critical gendering of the text) as performance of the book without author (for the author’s name figures nowhere on or in the object/book), now in the hands of the reader. Echoes yes of Bergvall and Robertson here, and of the performancing in and out of English that is characteristic of Avasilichioaei’s work.

Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat | 2011

Bergvall’s strange rich turnings in and returnings to an English that is old, raw, syncopated, new. And feminist!

Natalee Caple | The Semi-Conducting Dictionary | ECW | 2010

Strindberg’s life. Poems amazing in their structures and a book that opens a wonderful presence and questioning of gendering.

Paul Celan, trans. Pierre Joris, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull | The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials | Stanford | 2011

Drafts, preparatory notes, revisions, and references to Paul Celan’s seminal speech on poetics, the Meridian speech. A poetics in movement, meticulously prepared. Essential.

Phil Hall | Killdeer | BookThug | 2011

These long-lined essays in poetic form are both a poetics and an autobiography of a poetic practice, and are an incredible entry (like the Adorno, like the Celan) into a poetics of space, movement, articulation, process, by a Canadian poet often underestimated.

Christian Hawkey | Ventrakl | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Trakl tracked and trailed by Hawkey, keenly on-key. Tremulous, lovely, Hawkey explores language’s strangeness by entering the foreign language—German, here—in its physicality and in its links with a human person, Georg Trakl, and another human person, Christian Hawkey. Curiously, as well, the book makes a lovely pairing with my own O Resplandor (also 2010). To enter the body of the other, by reading, in any language, making one’s own language strange.

Anxo Angueira and Teresa Bermúdez, eds. | Que lle podo ofrecer a quen me intente? un monográfico sobre Lois Pereiro | Xerais and U Vigo | 2011

A look at the work and life of the iconoclastic Galician poet Lois Pereiro (1958-1996) that includes an anthology of his poetry in translation, portraits of him by other writers, a transcript of a major reading he gave in A Coruña shortly before his death, critical articles, and new poems by others.

Meredith Quartermain | Recipes from the Red Planet | BookThug | 2010

These stories simply delighted me. Their broken turns of logic and semantics are lovely and reflect, somehow, the way I think. To read and reread.

Timothy Snyder | Bloodlands | Basic | 2011

The most comprehensive look at Eastern European 20^th century history, at the turmoils, genocides, exclusions across an entire territory between Germany and Russia. A history that was kept from me, in any case, in school in Canada, and that, I suspect, is still not taught. Snyder’s book enables a new look at the area and will inspire future historians; a signal book.

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More Erín Moure here.

Moure’s Attention Span for 2010, 2008. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Stephen Collis

Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | TinFish | 2010

Site-specific poetry at its best—collages, documents, and roller derby—what more could you ask for? Sand continues to produce some of the most earnest, delicate, and pointed political poetry out there.

Jane Sprague | The Port of Los Angeles | Chax | 2009

What Sand does with Portland, Sprague takes up in Los Angeles, only with more thorough-going lyricism. Ikea products come ashore, drug dealers get busted, and the commons once again raises its head amidst new enclosures—”this / in the how now moment sullied biosphere.” One of my favorite poetry books to come along in a while.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Pitch: Drafts 77-95 | Salt | 2010

The next installment of DuPlessis’s major life-long poem, now getting up over 800 pages all told. I’m finding the increasing pleasure is in following the Drafts back “down the ladder,” as it were, along the line of 19, as there are now 5 poems in each 19-poem cycle which pass over each other once again, picking up on stray elements, deepening and contorting themes.

Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light | Station Hill | 2010

Long one of the best under-recognized poets, Wolsak’s new “collected” includes everything from The Garcia Family Co-Mercy and Pen Chants to her amazing prose-poem/essay, An Heuristic Prolusion. Precise thought, compressed imagery, and a deeply human sense of the universe and our fragile place in it. A book to keep close by at all times.

Jeff Derksen | Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics | Talon | 2009

Selected essays from one of his generation’s seminal poet-critics. Need to know what neoliberalism is and how poetry (as it must) bites the hand that feeds it? This is your book. I know of no other writer who can so seamlessly move from complex analyses of political economy to wry readings of avant-garde poetry.

Rachel Zolf | Neighbour Procedure | Coach House | 2010

Poems from a stay in Palestine, the opening section, “Shoot & Weep,” is alone worth the price of admission—some of the most powerfully affective statistics (!) I have ever read, as Zolf weaves magic out of Butler’s Precarious Life.

Jules Boykoff | Hegemonic Love Potion | Factory School | 2009

Along with Derksen, Rodrigo Toscano, and Kevin Davies, one of my favorite guides to the perplexing terrain of late neoliberal mayhem—and what poetry might be doing there. Sharp, sharp wit. News that indeed stays news.

Josely Vianna Baptista | On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids | Manifest | 2003

A late discovery for me, and the press might not exist any more, but Baptista’s poems, in Chris Daniels’ painstaking translations, certainly satisfy Dickinson’s requirement that poetry take the top of your head off. South American concrete, material lyricism—this is language as I want to meet it—a net thrown over another world.

Erín Moure | My Beloved Wager | NewWest | 2009

Essays from some 30 years of a writing life, reading Moure on translation—amongst other things—is a marvel, instructive and electrifying. I have deeply enjoyed this book.

More Stephen Collis here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Rachel Blau DuPlessis

I recently had the pleasure of blurbing (to say it more politely, offering a back jacket comment for) a book about varieties of spiritual experience presented in contemporary US poetries, all people writing long poems. And they are all poets working “on the dark side of the force”—am I getting tired of the debates among experimental, post-avant, avant-garde, innovative—or what? Norman Finkelstein’s book, to come out from Iowa in 2010, is called On Mt. Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry, and it talks quite lucidly about Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Michael Palmer, Ronald Johnson, Nathaniel Mackey, Armand Schwerner, and Susan Howe.  The list made me start wondering—were there more women writing long poems who were spiritual or who were variously interested in the sacred?  I started thinking who some of them could be.

Turns out That Anne Waldman has just published (Penguin, 2009) a rather rousing and moving book, one long work, called Manatee/Humanity, with quite a striking cover by Kiki Smith. It is spiritual in the sense of being drawn from and mimetic of a ritual, and it is a haunting, incantatory book. Among its features is the articulation of human evolution in the voice of (probably) our foremother “Lucy.”  Another is the pooling of thoughts and feelings within the poet’s consciousness in her identifying with—being spoken to and through– a manatee (a large water mammal, very gentle and playful, whose habitats are—whose existence is–endangered). Actually, the piece (hybrid and total) is pierced with voices from all sectors of the universe, from under water, from outside the galaxy, from our evolutionary past and our present. It seriously considers the question of human survival, and in a sense is one outcry, direly mixed between a scream and a hope. Waldman’s commitments to a transformational poetics as spiritual would make her and her books part of my (imagined) “next volume” of a book about long poems by writers invested in the sacred.

United States writers are not the only ones who have recently articulated an interest in the spiritual. Turns out that Anne Blonstein has just published her tenth book of poetry, The Butterflies and the Burnings (Dusie Press, 2009). Blonstein is a British national, living for the past years in Switzerland where Dusie is also based. This is another book length work approaching the question of the spiritual, quite differently, although, like Waldman’s poem it is similarly research based. This is a book of vocation—I mean this both as poetic vocation, but also as an investigation of the vocation of religious figures. In a wonderful pun (the scintillation of poetic surface is one feature of Blonstein’s work), she is “unfolding the vulvate” (108). She tracks mainly Catholic women saints—most of them from the long medieval period, but some across the ages. Along with—and this is important, as Holocaust materials figure strongly for Blonstein—the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Bonhoeffer was one of the few German clergymen who resisted Hitler publicly and tried to help overthrow him, and he was executed by the Nazis just before the end of the war. Blonstein’s poem sequence to and through him is one of the high points of this unusual book, which dazzlingly animates a variety of spiritual figures and saints, from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Mary the Egyptian. Among the most striking works are dialogues or closet dramas—they would make really interesting radio plays (the Gertrude-gertrude-gertrude text is notable). The works are as if monologues from the surreal or post-real parts of their consciousnesses. All were sorely tested, all were visionaries, and the construction by Blonstein of a sense of a shimmering field of possibility amid their pain is remarkable.

We could also move to Canada for another spiritual long poem work. And this one is not a new book. In fact, it startled me to see that this year is its tenth anniversary. But the point about poetry is that sometimes one actually returns (gasp!) to something loved and admired so that it may strike you again. In this case, it’s Erin Mouré’s double titled work A Frame of the Book (shadowed by the title The Frame of A Book), published way back in 1999 by House of Anansi Press. This is a work, which, like Robin Blaser’s oeuvre, speaks of the erotic as an infusing power that is, by definition, spiritual. Not leading to the spiritual, but in itself spiritual, in the sense of self-transcending, and transformative. The frame of the book is love, sexual love, desire, physical longing, emotional yearning, amor loin and amour fulfilled. Jouissance is, here, an intellectual fulfillment too. In fact, body, mind and spirit are not riven, but made as one. That is a remarkable fact about the impact of Mouré’s language and book-construction (she both breaks the book open and rebuilds it, realigning its components, including typography, page-space, part-whole relations like top and bottom of the page, norms of where things go). This book is filled with diagrams, footnotes, different (from English) languages, “theory,” and in a way is an experiment with (noting an important statement from Lyotard that Mouré cites) inventing idioms that don’t yet exist for feelings of passionate suffusion. It is a remarkable book of the Book, almost a midrash on desire.

Well, I will circle round in this briefest comment on long poems and book-length works that show a variety of spiritual practices (as a case in point by contemporary Anglophone women)  to come to something odd, perhaps, but anyway, as in the majority of Finkelstein’s examples, something by a US male poet whose whole career has been devoted to the long poem. I’d call this one a walking meditation. Putting one foot in front of the other, step by step, with every step (strange metaphor!) as if a slightly different pebble, carefully crafted out of generally unadorned language, and placed in a long row, and reaching a long way into naming without ever arriving at a destination. It is the journey that is the spiritual practice. I am referring to Ron Silliman’s Ketjak (1974—this year being its thirty-fifth anniversary), a work recently republished within a grouping of four works (and “satellite texts”) called The Age of Huts (University of California Press, 2007). This work is the mother lode of Silliman’s practice, the discovery that “You could start almost anywhere and find anything” (45), which I would call not only “sociological” or “historical” (etc.) but also spiritual. That is because his writing denominates what is. What is, in language. Every sentence has been fabricated; most look at the world, a few look at language (puns, tricks of resemblances) or at his own writing process (physical and mental). It is an account of “this this this this” (89), and it thereby shows a remarkable patience and ambition at once, a patience with what is seen (sometimes felt or remembered) and an ambition to offer it up in words, one thing after another, without hierarchy or flurries of affect, but simply as a deictic meditation. To look at in language, as Creeley said. “Thinking of the practice” (65).

More Rachel Blau DuPlessis here and here.

Featured Title – In the Pines by Alice Notley

Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 7 mentions in Attention Span 2008

The American sound, clear and chill—need I explain? (Simon Schuchat)

Dark, uncomfortable, haunting dream-speech. Recalls for me Spicer’s medium-like approach in works like Heads of the Town Up to the Ether. (K. Silem Mohammad)

Because of the way she can deal with subjectivity, the subject constituting itself in private, in public spaces, and over and over again, not an incomplete subject but one in motion against death and ruinous politics. And the way she works with narrative, image. (Erin Mouré)

Also mentioned by Elizabeth Treadwell, Allyssa Wolf, David Dowker, and G.C. Waldrep.

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Alice Notley was the most-mentioned author in Attention Span 2007, with eight mentions for four separate titles, including Alma, or the Dead Women and Grave of Light: New & Selected Poems, 1970-2005.

Grave of Light also featured in Attention Span 2006.

Three titles—Coming After: Essays on Poetry, Disobedience, and From the Beginning—were included in Attention Span 2005. Disobedience was also mentioned in Attention Span 2003.