Attention Span 2011 | G.C. Waldrep

Not necessarily my “favorites” over the past year, but these are the eleven books I spent the most time thinking about, in no particular order:

Peter Larkin | Terrain Seed Scarcity | Salt | 2001

Somehow I missed this when it originally came out. A magisterial anthem and model of challenging ecopoetics, stretching towards the post-human (perhaps) but very, very beautiful. I have been fantasizing about quitting my day job and spending the next six years or so studying this text. (Larkin also has a new collection, Leaves of Field, from Shearsman, but I haven’t read it yet.)

Laynie Browne | Roseate, Points of Gold | Dusie | 2011

The best collection so far by a mid-career poet not enough of my friends and colleagues know about.

Laura Mullen | Dark Archive | California | 2011

Adonis, trans. Khaled Mattawa | Selected Poems | Yale | 2010

John Taggart | Is Music: Selected Poems | Copper Canyon | 2010

I still wonder whether one of Taggart’s earlier single volumes (perhaps When the Saints) isn’t the best introduction to his work, but he is an absolutely essential and underrecognized poet. I’m still hoping this volume will convene a larger audience for his work.

Dana Levin | Sky Burial | Copper Canyon | 2011

Peter O’Leary | Luminous Epinoia | The Cultural Society | 2010

Harriet Tarlo, ed. | The Ground Aslant: Radical Landscape Poetry | Shearsman | 2011

If you’ve been wondering where the interesting contemporary British poetry is hiding, you can find quite a bit of it here (including the abovementioned Peter Larkin and also Elisabeth Bletsoe, whose second collection, Landscape from a Dream [Shearsman, 2008], is worth finding).

Zach Savich | Annulments | UP of Colorado | 2010

Maryrose Larkin | The Name of This Intersection Is Frost | Shearsman | 2010

Jonathan Stalling | Grotto Heaven | Chax | 2010

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Also: Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions, 2011); Dan Beachy-Quick, Circle’s Apprentice (Tupelo, 2011); Jean Valentine, Break the Glass (Copper Canyon, 2010); C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon, 2011); Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010); Melissa Kwasny, The Nine Senses (Milkweed, 2011); Harold Schweizer, On Waiting (Routledge, 2008); Seyhan Erözçelik (trans. Murat Nemet-Nejat), Rosestrikes & Coffee Grinds (Talisman, 2010); Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Fady Joudah), If I Were Another (FSG, 2011); René Char (trans. Mary Ann Caws & Nancy Kline), Furor & Mystery and Other Writings (Black Widow, 2011); John Yau, A Thing among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P., 2008), Shane McCrae, Mule (Cleveland State, 2010).

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G.C. Waldrep’s latest collections are Archicembalo (Tupelo, 2009) and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (in collaboration with John Gallaher; BOA Editions, 2011). Projective Industries just released his chapbook, ‘St. Laszlo Hotel.’ He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and serves as editor-at-large for The Kenyon Review. Waldrep’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2006, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – G.C. Waldrep

Gustaf Sobin | Collected Poems | Talisman | 2010

The poetry book of the year, for me. A gorgeous summation of Sobin’s lyric achievement. Should be on every American poet’s bookshelf.

Anne Carson | NOX | New Directions | 2010

Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010

Andrew Joron | The Sound Mirror | Flood | 2009

He really has the best ear of any poet I know writing in English. Trance Archive (City Lights, 2010) is also worth any reader’s time who isn’t already following Joron’s work.

Evelyn Reilly | Styrofoam | Roof | 2009

Sandy Florian | Prelude to Air from Water | Elixir | 2010

In my opinion, and for what little comparisons may be worth, Florian is the most original practioner of the Anglophone prose poem in our moment. Her other 2010 title is Of Wonderland & Waste, from Sidebrow.

Yang Lian, trans. Brian Holton | Riding Pisces | Shearsman | 2008

A major contemporary Chinese poet who has not yet found his American audience. He’s better served in Britain, where his other recent collections include Concentric Circles (2006) and Lee Valley Poems (2010).

Julie Carr | 100 Notes on Violence | Ahsahta | 2010

Keith Waldrop | Several Gravities | Siglio | 2009

The perfect companion to his ever-so-slightly-earlier volume Transcendental Studies, which won the National Book Award. The collages are wonderful, and the selection of his lyric work is judicious.

Jack Collom & Lyn Hejinian | Situations, Sings | Adventures in Poetry | 2008

Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Fady Joudah | If I Were Another | FSG | 2009

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Also rereading pretty much all of Leslie Scalapino and Fanny Howe this summer—at least the lyric work—alongside some Alice Notley I’d missed hitherto. Waiting for some new/fresh time to read J. Michael Martinez’s Heredities, which looks fantastic, and the new translation of Raul Zurita’s Purgatorio from California.

More G.C. Waldrep here. Waldrep’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2006, 2004. Back to directory.

Featured Title – Broken World by Joseph Lease

Joseph Lease | Broken World | Coffee House | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 3 mentions in Attention Span 2008

I’ve carried this book from country to country for the last year and a half, picking it up whenever I need to think—or rather hear—the poem. Lease has something of Palmer in him, something of Creeley, a bit of Spicer. The argument of the book is chilling, and sad, and somehow, redemptive. I’m into reading books where I actually feel a poet on the other side, the flesh & blood one, who knows when to cast identity upon the page like a stone tossed into the lake. I read a book like this and I want to borrow some of his moves and drink a glass of Merlot. (Dawn Michelle Baude)

This is the first Joseph Lease book I’ve read. He’s got a funny way with desperation and anger that I appreciate. (Rae Armantrout)

Also mentioned by G.C. Waldrep.

Featured Title – Selected Prose by George Oppen

George Oppen, ed. and introd. Stephen Cope | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2008 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 5 mentions in Attention Span 2008

“Lay it on the line—” (page 203). (Tom Devaney)

The pensive poet at his vanity (where beautiful poems were so often made up), appealingly deshabille. (Benjamin Friedlander)

“But taking as a whole the phase of the world’s history which we have reached, it has become a commonplace remark to say that we have crossed the threshold of the Apocalypse.” (Michael Scharf)

Also mentioned by John Palattella and G.C. Waldrep

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.