Attention Span 2011 | Sara Wintz

Richard Cándida-Smith | Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, And Politics in California | California | 1996
Jack Spicer | The House That Jack Built: The Selected Lectures of Jack Spicer | Wesleyan | 1998
Josephine Miles | “What We Compose” | College Composition and Communication, Vol. 14, No.3 | 1963
Carl Maas | The Penguin Guide to California | Penguin | 1947
David Zwirner Gallery | Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970

At some point I became super interested in California. Well, actually I was always interested in California but this year I read a lot about it. Utopia and Dissent is a book that I found on a shelf at the library at Mills College: where I went to undergrad. I started reading it beginning with the introduction because I couldn’t understand California art. Why did it all look different than what I saw as a teenager growing up in New York? The Introduction to Utopia and Dissent was/is a good introduction. Cándida-Smith touches on some of the origins of California art: that it developed in isolation from much of the United States, that the art that people made was created for each other—as opposed to being shown in galleries—and the difficulties of bringing a canvas across country in a wagon. This year I read the rest of the book. The chapters on Joan Brown+Jay Defeo, Wallace Berman, and Kenneth Rexroth I particularly loved.

Joan Didion | Where I Was From | Vintage | 2004
Eileen Myles | Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) | OR | 2010

I read Where I Was From and started crying on the airplane from San Diego to Newark coming home from family vacation. My mom was sitting next to me. I’m surprised that she didn’t say anything but I’m sure that I concealed it fairly well. I’ve had conversations with two different women this year about the relationship between geography and identity and Where I Was From came up both times. (Though one time it was [#oops] invoked by me.) Didion’s a powerhouse—I always use her essay “In Bed” (from The White Album) as an example—that she can write an essay about being stuck in bed with a migraine and still make it interesting. Justin Taylor told me to read Inferno after I had a tough time at a poetry reading. I borrowed his copy and read it on my way to work at Pratt on the G train at the beginning of summer. It ruled.

George Oppen | Of Being Numerous | Complete Reading Broadcast by KPFA | August 22, 1968

George Oppen is another one that I got into in undergrad. I read Of Being Numerous while sitting outside of the music building at Mills. I think I pretty much read it in one sitting and when I finished I thought, “This is my favorite book.” It’s still one of my favorites. Oppen was invoked a lot last summer at Bard—I think that he was on a lot of people’s minds. I love that phrase “the crystal fact.” I wonder why I keep hearing about him. I guess that this happens with lots of writers sometimes. I rode the bus from New York to Boston to crash a wedding with Andrew Kenower in the spring of this year and listened to this recording of Oppen reading Of Being Numerous while staring out the window and when I arrived in Boston Andrew was reading Oppen too.

Steve Dixon | Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation | MIT | 2007
Sally Banes | Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance | Wesleyan | 1987
Sue-Ellen Case | Performing Science and the Virtual | Routledge | 2006
Cecilia Corrigan | Selected YouTube Videos | Philadelphia | —

I became interested in performance. Partly because of my job this past year writing about performance for Peak Performances @Montclair’s outreach blog and partly by my own volition. The Steve Dixon book I’m still working my way through. I’ve been highlighting it like a textbook. Cecilia Corrigan came to read for me and Thom Donovan at Segue last winter and totally rocked the house. Her YouTube videos are smart and poignant: I love em. Her too.

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Sara Wintz is the author of WALKING ACROSS A FIELD WE ARE FOCUSED ON AT THIS TIME NOW (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse). Her work has been published in Jacket, 6×6, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Try!, Openned, HTML Giant, and on Ceptuetics (with Kareem Estefan). She lives in Berkeley.

Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – John Sakkis

Alastair Johnston | Zephyrus Image A Bibliography | Poltroon | 2003

George Oppen | The Collected Poems Of George Oppen | New Directions | 1976

David Brazil and Sara Larsen, eds. | Try Magazine | 2010

Micah Ballard and Patrick James Dunagan | Easy Eden | Push | 2009

Daniel Clowes | Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron | Fantagraphics | 1998

Gad Hollander | Walserian Waltzes | Avec | 1999

Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This To Me The Collected Poetry Of Jack Spicer | Wesleyan | 2008

Sean Cliver | Disposable A History Of Skateboard Art | Warwick | 2005

Jason Morris | Spirits And Anchors | Auguste | 2010

Steve Lavoie and Pat Nolan | Life Of Crime Documents In The Guerrilla War Against Language Poetry | Poltroon | 2010

Rodney Koeneke | Rules For Drinking Forties | Cy Press | 2009

More John Sakkis here. His Attention Span for 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Jennifer Scappettone

Some works that rocked my taxonomies this twelvemonth:

Hélène Cixous | Ex-Cities | Slought Books | 2006

On cities & revenance, the struggle of the year. “I have known for a long time that one does not go anywhere. It is the cities or the countries that come or do not come to you. Cities are fateful letters. They only arrive lost.”

Manfredo Tafuri | The Sphere and the Labyrinth, read for the second time | MIT | 1987

His books keep blowing me away. Once one has clarified the assumptions, nearly every sentence delivers a mordant perception. “The change wrought by Canaletto upon the urban context of Venice attests to the profound reality of this city for the eighteenth century; to the fact…that the most devastating manipulations are legitimate on an urban organism that has become merely an object at the disposal of the fantasy of a tourist elite.”

Roberto Saviano | Gomorrah | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2007

Anyone who wears clothes or deposits trash should read it. Matteo Garrone’s adaptation onto film is equally recommended for the dialect and the architecture. Creepier than neorealism (appropriately, as we’re headed the other way politically).

AES+F (Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, Vladimir Fridkes) | The Feast of Trimalchio | Biennale di Venezia | Video | 2009

Tableaux surrounding the Roman plutocrat from the standpoint of Moscow could have been easy high jinks, like Fellini’s. But assumption of the day’s affect of sacral conversation (of videogames that is) makes them mesmerizing. Best viewed against backdrop of live cruise ships hastening the demise of a sinking cosmopolis: this was perhaps unconsciously the festival’s most site-specific work.

Jia Zhangke | The World | Office Kitano | 2004

Makes fateful cinematic diptych with the above, from Beijing.

George Oppen, ed. Stephen Cope | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | University of California | 2007

If only Pound could get the message in heaven: “You should have talked / To women”—& much more. Can’t wait to teach Oppen again.

Rob Halpern | Disaster Suites | Palm Press | 2009

Keeps making lyric gutsy. Timely, down to the afterword which wishes the work’s own ephemerality.

David Larsen, ed. and trans. | Names of the Lion by al-Husayn ibn Ahmad ibn Khalawayh | Atticus/Finch | 2009
David Larsen | neo-benshi performance of the 2004 Wolfgang Petersen film Troy at Flarf Video Festival | May 2009

500 odd epithets for the creature, including “‘Who Destroys Capital’ (?)”⁶⁴ Want all my history like this, as serial translation.

Rob Fitterman & Vanessa Place | Notes on Conceptualisms | Ugly Duckling | 2009

When two wits like these team up for “thinkership” a primer’s bound to be implosive. A pocketbook that begs for more such pocketbooks.

Tan Lin | Reading from | Segue Series |  http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Segue-BPC.html | April 2009

Tons more feed for thought, after filing a piece for boundary 2.

Walter Benjamin & Theodor Adorno | The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 | Harvard | 2001

Resisted for a long time, out of loathing for fetishization of biographical being—then torn through in a day, destroyed. The intimate content of research drives its criticality tumultuously home.

Plus several conversation circuits:

Al Filreis, ed. | PoemTalk | Poetry Foundation, PennSound & Kelly Writers House podcast | http://poemtalkatkwh.blogspot.com/ (subscribable through iTunes) | 2008-, monthly

You get the writer uttering and writers that read disagreeing live. Amazing for modeling close reading, & makes even the dreariest commutes curious.

Herman Melville | “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight” & other poems | annotations brought on by Wild Orchids, a new review, Ed. Sean Reynolds

Incredible that only specialists (i.e. “Americanists”) seem to read Melville’s body of verse. The journal, out of Buffalo, will be reintroducing glorious pages to consciousness.

Belladonna | Elders Series | Belladonna | 2008-09

#1: E. Tracy Grinnell/Leslie Scalapino; #2: Rachel Levitsky/Erica Kaufman/Sarah Schulman/Bob Gluck; #3: Tisa Bryant/Chris Kraus; #4: Emma Bee Bernstein/Susan Bee/Marjorie Perloff; #6: Kate Eichorn/M. NourbeSe Philip/Gail Scott; #7: Cara Benson/Jayne Cortez/Anne Waldman; #8: Jane Sprague/Diane Ward/Tina Darragh. I edited the number left out here.

Despite my discomfort with the name (about which see Eichorn’s analysis in the preface to #6); my year’s most delirious cycle of discoveries, revisitations, reflections on the nature of dialogue, calls for more.

More Jennifer Scappettone here.

A Public Quality

George Oppen – Ballad (1’18”), from Of Being Numerous. Text, courtesy Languagehat. About Swan’s Island. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, writing about “Ballad” for Big Bridge. More of DuPlessis’s dialog with Oppen, as presented at Eric Baus’s To The Sound. • One of the tracks on a tape from Robert Creeley’s archive (4’16”), newly available on PennSound. The tape opens with Oppen’s remarks, clearly in medias res, on Paris and an unnamed reviewer who inspired his “Epigram: I have been insulted in St. Peter’s” (New Collected Poems 297). He then reads (at 0’48”) “Ballad” (NCP 207-08) and (at 2’25”) “Power, the Enchanted World” (NCP 204-06).

Attention Span – Thomas Devaney

Dan Machlin | Dear Body | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2007

A book I continue to read and recommend.

George Oppen, ed. Stephen Cope | George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2007

“Lay it on the line—” (page 203).

Bill Berkson & Colter Jacobsen | Bill | Gallery 16 Editions | 2008

Bill feels like a lost classic. Jacobsen’s drawings are beautiful. The book reads like a dream. Berkson culled the text from a juvenile detective novel. From Bill: “War broke out the following day, as agreed.”

Prageeta Sharma | Infamous Landscapes | Fence | 2007

“And I still remain difficult when it is advantageous.” No doubt—Sharma has found her register: it’s daring, brutal, and always, a pleasure. Infamous Landscapes breaks new ground for Sharma and clears the air a bit.

Alan Filreis | Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960 |  North Carolina | 2008

Yes, it’s a serious historical book, a major book, but Filreis’s personal voice and deep connections to mid-century modernism show how many formal concerns of the work were linked to progressive politics; it is an untold history of the so-called language/nature problem (and the reactions to it) that continue into our moment.

Sharon Mesmer | The Virgin Formica | Hanging Loose | 2008

I read Francis Picabia’s I Am a Beautiful Monster (MIT Press, 2007) and Mesmer’s Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2007) during the same one week period. It was an uncanny pairing. Now I’m reading Mesmer’s The Virgin Formica, which is relentless and fearless, and except for Picabia’s book, may be peerless.

Christina Davis | Forth A Raven | Alice James | 2006

These are spare and unsparing poems. Davis writes: “In the history of language/ the first obscenity was silence.” There is a God.

Brandon Downing |  Dark Brandon | Grievous Pictures | 2007

B. Downing’s prowling, humour noir DVD Dark Brandon is not an intervention, but more of a break-in. These deep cultural cullings are an unsettling reflection of Downing’s one way mirror. The mirror is our age’s “own face” as Clark Coolidge might say.

Pierre Reverdy, trans. Ron Padgett | Pierre Reverdy: Prose Poems | Black Square / Brooklyn Rail | 2007

Both Reverdy and Padgett adorn the unadorned. Here is a masterful and open-hearted poet translating a kindred soul. From the poem “Waiting Room” Reverdy writes: “And the trees, telegraph poles, and houses will take on the shape of our age.”

Kevin Killian | Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow | Belladonna 117 | 2008

“Read my lips, ‘I’m into you,’ the virus seems to wriggle / through plate glass.” Is Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow the first chapbook in the Belladonna series written by a man? Bravo to Rachel Levitsky and Erica Kaufman on the series overall, and bravo to Kevin Killian on Wow.

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Noteworthy, other books and poems from the hubbub include: Peter Gizzi’s The Outernationale, anything translated by Sawako Nakayasu; Serge Fauchereau’s Complete Fiction translated by John Ashbery & Ron Padgett; Joseph Massey’s Within Hours; Joel Lewis’s on-the-level every day Learning from New Jersey; Steve Dickinson’s up-tempo Disposed; Jennifer Moxley’s The Line; The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, edited by Michael Rothenberg; David Trinidad’s loving The Late Show. “Some of These Daze” from Charles Bernstein’s Girly Man. The Route, a capacious investigation by Jen Hofer and Patrick Durgin: “We want to say something in another language which is also ours” (page 120).

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More Tom Devaney here.

Attention Span – Benjamin Friedlander

Anne Boyer | Art Is War | Mitzvah | 2008

I’m not a believer in the Holy Spirit, but the fact that some poets make every sentence flutter with life while others merely kill brain cells does give me pause.

Peter Cole, ed. and trans. | The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 | Princeton | 2007

A half-millennium of poetry sifted with patient labor from the sand of history, then weighed and melted and wrought anew. To appreciate the wonder of this labor, imagine the David Shields anthology listed below rewritten in contemporary idiom, with tonal differences flattened out, but with a corresponding gain of coherence. A book to set beside Pound’s Provencal, which is only fitting since the poets involved were writing at roughly the same time.

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton | New Star | 2008

Momentum, ease, and a gift for gab are never sufficient for a book to be as enjoyable as this one. But when the poet is also a collector and historian of minor experience, these qualities begin to seem pretty foolproof. “A walk / on gilded splinters / in terrycloth / slippers,” with birdsong loud and clear when the TV is turned off.

Tony Harrison | Collected Poems | Penguin | 2007

Modernism scarcely registers here, but in Harrison’s case that’s not a defensive posture. His poems are episodes from a class war in which language is the battlefield: those who know it best are best favored to strike with impunity, and deadly surprise, and live to strike again.

Susan Howe | Souls of the Labadie Tract | New Directions | 2007

She makes other poets sound forced who strive to say one-quarter as much. Her secret? If you work your material until it’s in tatters, until it stains your thoughts and permeates your dreams, any stray word can be Sibylline.

Andrea Lauterwein | Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory | Thames & Hudson | 2007

A handsomely illustrated book about Kiefer, whose encounter with Celan’s work triggered a profound change, but not, it seems, a profound reading. Which makes this a fascinating study of reception, surprisingly close to another book I admired last year—Christoph Irmscher’s Longfellow Redux (U of Illinois P, 2008).

Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo | 2008

It’s impossible to read these poems without wanting to share the lines out loud. Silence is helpless here: even when I’m alone with this book, I break the silence, laughing. Is there anything more poignantly utopian than that? If ideology is the presence of society in our heads, then laughing out loud when we’re alone is the very summoning of that society, an involuntary assertion of communion.

George Oppen | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | ed. Stephen Cope | California | 2008

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

Mark Scroggins | The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofksy | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007

Sometimes, all you need is a firm grip from a friend to make it across slippery ground. With Zukofsky, Scroggins is that friend.

Frank Sherlock and Brett Evans | Ready to Eat Individual | Lavender Ink | 2008

The black bars framing each page reproduce the characteristic look of an empty food pouch, of the sort distributed in New Orleans after Katrina—marking this poem as a kind of shared meal, each portion of which once filled the empty space between need and excrement. Sustenance temporarily, debris for posterity.

David S. Shields, ed. | American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries | Library of America | 2007

The new edition of the Oxford anthology of American verse gives a mere twenty-seven pages to poets born before Emerson—clearly, the earlier years are due for a reappraisal. Here, the editor’s particular interest lies in the emergence of literary culture, so popular culture is actually less evident than in John Hollander’s companion volume of the nineteenth century, which surprised me. Surprising too is the canon that slowly emerges. Measured in pages, the top five poets are all familiar names: Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor, Philip Freneau, Anne Bradstreet, Timothy Dwight. But after Dwight the discoveries come fast and furious, pushing Ebenezer Cook (of “The Sot-Weed Factor”) down to ninth place, and Phillis Wheatley all the way down to fourteenth. Whether these new rankings create new reputations remains to be seen (the Scottish-born West Indian James Grainger is already gaining ground among scholars), but since the test of a book like this one rests ultimately on the poems, one reads more for choice moments than careers. And here I’ve found more than enough to justify a reapportionment of pages in the next Oxford. I’m especially fond of the following lines by Hannah Griffitts:

My Sense, or the Want of it—free you may jest
And censure, despise, or impeach,
But the Happiness center’d within my own Breast,
Is luckily out of your reach.

(From a short poem against marriage, written around the time of the Revolution—found in a commonplace book.)

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More Benjamin Friedlander here.

Attention Span – Michael Scharf

Arun Kolatkar | Kala Ghoda Poems | Pras Prakashan | 2004

Two or three things he knows about the capital of Maharashtra.

Barbara Guest | The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest | Wesleyan | 2008

Esp. the hilarious The Countess from Minneapolis and the they-get-better-ever-year Rocks on a Platter and Miniatures.

Brandon Downing | Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics | Grievous Pictures | 2007

Isolates the individual compulsion, or drive, toward forming and maintaining identities from the inherited concepts and media through which one is forced to do it. Separates out the focal power that images draw from their original contexts, and, at 10x and 100x, sets fire to the frog, freeing princess from the chrysalis. Visual intelligence that makes gallery work (like, say, Isaac Julien’s WESTERN UNION: Small Boats) look at once commercial and provincial. A kiss like that.

C.S. Giscombe | Prairie Style | Dalkey Archive | 2008

The phenomenology of driving during adult life.

Gennady Aygi, trans. by Peter France | Field – Russia | New Directions | 2007

Tarkovsky and Sokurov track the same maternal grasses. Stripped down to the wind.

George Oppen, ed. Stephen Cope | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2008

“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.”

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008

Lovers of late JA meanderings through pre-code detritus who look to counter other lovers’ complaints about cut & pasteability will find, here, that reading each section ‘in order’, or continuously across the breaks and gaps, makes the book lose part of its meaning. The obsessive superfineries of the arrangement, shorn against undoing, and the intricate intactness of “Lateral Argument” underscore the point perfectly: within a supersaturate, none of the pieces fit. The author also wishes to inform you that Stephane was wrong about the book/bombe; the blank page 68 is a comment on the French.

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Robin S Ngangom, eds. | Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the Northeast | NEHU | 2003

Revised edition due shortly from Penguin. Until then, greetings from Shillong.

Miles Champion | Eventually | The Rest | 2008

Read “Colour in Huysmans” slowly, with the right column as a kind of gloss on or completion of the left, and then see how inadequate that is.

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton | New Star | 2008

Plowing on Sunday. Plowing North America.

Vivek Narayanan | Mr. Subramanian | unpublished ms. | 2008

Stephen Dedalus, in Madras at 35.

Attention Span – Megan London

Edward Foster, ed. | Postmodern Poetry: The Talisman Interviews | Talisman | 1994

Gertrude Stein | Stanzas in Meditation | Sun & Moon | 1994

Nathaniel Mackey | Splay Anthem | New Directions | 2006

George Oppen | Selected Poems | New Directions | 2003

Albert Glover, ed. | Charles Olson: Letters for Origin | Cape Goliard | 1970

Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007

James Howard Kunstler | The Long Emergency | Grove | 2005

Ben Belitt, trans. | Federico Garcia Lorca: Poet in New York | Grove | 1955

David Gershator, trans. | Federico Garcia Lorca: Selected Letters | New Directions | 1983

Anthony Storr | Music and the Mind | HarperCollins | 1997

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More Megan London here.

Attention Span – John Palattella

Roberto Bolaño | Nazi Literature in the Americas | New Directions | 2008

Andrew Delbanco | Melville: His Life and Work | Knopf | 2005

Emily Dickinson | The Letters of Emily Dickinson | Belknap | 1958

John Godfrey | City of Corners | Wave | 2008

Imre Kertész | Detective Story | Knopf | 2008

Imre Kertész | The Pathseeker: Searching for Traces | Melville | 2008

Nathaniel Mackey | Bass Cathedral | New Directions | 2008

George Oppen | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2008

John Tipton, translator | Ajax | Flood | 2008

Brenda Wineapple | White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson | Knopf | 2008

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More John Palattella here.

Attention Span – G.C. Waldrep

I read dozens of poetry books, dozens of journals every year. The list that follows isn’t necessarily a list of recent books I “liked best,” but it is a list of the books I dreamed about, after.

Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin | 2007

Gennady Aygi, trans. Peter France | Field-Russia | New Directions | 2007

Gabriel Gudding | Rhode Island Notebook | Dalkey | 2007

Bin Ramke | Tendril | Omnidawn | 2007

Zachary Schomburg | The Man Suit | Black Ocean | 2007

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

Michael Burkard | Envelope of Night | Nightboat | 2008

George Oppen | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2007

Catherine Corman, ed. | Joseph Cornell’s Dreams | Exact Change | 2007

Daniil Kharms, trans. Matvei Yankelevich | Today I Wrote Nothing | Overlook | 2007

Joseph Lease | Broken World | Coffee House | 2007

Some others: Anne Boyer, The Romance of Happy Workers; Fanny Howe, The Lyrics; Johannes Goransson, A New Quarantine Will Take My Place; Cecily Parks, Field Folly Snow; Rusty Morrison, The Truth Keeps Calm Biding Its Story; Kristi Maxwell, Realm 64; Fredrik Nyberg, A Different Practice; Craig Morgan Teicher, Brenda Is in the Room; David Mutschlecner, Sign; Priscilla Sneff, O Woolly City; Tony Tost, Complex Sleep; Donald Revell, Thief of Strings; Noah Eli Gordon, A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow; C.S. Carrier, “Lyric”; Julie Doxsee, “Fog Quartets”; Jack Boettcher, “The Surveyic Hero”; etc.