Attention Span 2011 | Keith Tuma

Steven Zultanski | Cop Kisser | Book Thug | Toronto | 2010

“Workers of the world, come on already.” 32 brands of beer matched by 32 Zultanski personalities, Lenin a deck of identity cards, Mao with Zultanski’s mother: this is a collection of long tail poetry taking on the banality of information with insight and wit, its idioms absolutely contemporary, its prosody deadpan, its cover brighter than canary yellow. Rod Smith wouldn’t let me out of Bridge Street Books without it. He was right to insist.

Rae Armantrout | Money Shot | Wesleyan | 2011

“All we ask / is that our thinking / sustain momentum, / identify targets.” I don’t know a poet who thinks more in her poems, via analogy, juxtaposition, definition, and otherwise. Armantrout begins the first poem with a line from the Book of Revelation promising a new world, noting that new worlds are always with us—and also not with us—in “The spray / of all possible paths.” But thinking can’t stop with recognition or contemplation: “Define possible.” Several of the poems think about the collapse of the economy, e.g. “Money Shot” and “Soft Money,” where one notorious phrase from the pornoculture—“so hot”—deflates those who would eroticize social inequality.

Jeff Hilson | In The Assarts | Veer | 2010

A comic sonnet sequence and something of a clearing in the dark wood of recent experimental English poetry, no less serious or engaged for its light touch. The kitsch of England from crossbows to Kinks, Anne Boleyn to Jeremy Irons. “I am sick of the banks of England” in a mix of faux-archaic and contemporary registers where Wyatt meets Berrigan: “I was lost in doe a deer.” Stephen Rodefer gets a cameo, and there’s passing reference to In the American Tree and The Reality Street Book of Sonnets. One poem opens with what is probably a joke about a recent book by Jean-Luc Nancy. That one takes us back to the book’s first poem, where the reader is asked to “Give them thy finger in the Forêt de Nancy.”

William Fuller | Hallucination | Flood Editions | 2011

It’s not only poetry that almost successfully resists the intelligence—try banking: “Several times a day someone passes by the door holding a report.” That’s the first sentence of the book’s last poem, a prose poem called “The Circuit.” Maybe it’s best to indicate the texture and quality of these prose poems making for more than half of Fuller’s book by quoting first lines from a few others: “More numbness from less pain, I heard the preacher say. When does apprehension become extinction? Of what omitted act is it the fruit?” (“Flaming”). “It dreamt that it spoke as it dreamt and wrote down what it spoke in echoes of situations dreamt about which its mind wondered at” (“The Will”). “For the period of thirty lunar days after the receipt of appropriate notice [undefined], the parties [not specified] shall attempt in good faith to resolve whatever dispute has (evidently) arisen by employing the advanced measurement approach, which computes a given event’s penumbra as it tumbles into the lap of someone who studies it.” Seeing as if through fog events apprehended only after the fact constitutes most worlds; these poems map our life “in the dark” while admitting—not always as ominously as “The Circuit” does—the “imperceptible” as fact.

Frances Kruk | Down You Go / Négation de Bruit | Punch | 2011

A series of fragments after Danielle Collobert, two or three lines or clusters of lines per page, white space the silence between them and allowing for their little explosions —“I revolt / project.” “Swarms! We will bang / into the sun Blinded.” Bitterness distilled to an essence: “I ordered a hurricane & I am still / on this island I am still / on this island.” I had to look up “crkl,” which appears twice, and so courtesy of Wikipedia: “Crk-like protein is a protein that in humans is encoded by the CRKL gene…. CRKL has oncogenic potential.” I don’t know Collobert’s work well enough to suggest the most pertinent comparisons, having seen only two books translated by Norma Cole, but I do know that this is a powerful and defiant book—“We come to fuck the mutants / We go to mutant them / I am with the mutant / firing limbs.” One of the best young British poets is Polish-Canadian.

Mina Loy, ed. Sara Crangle | Stories and Essays of Mina Loy | Dalkey Archive | 2011

As Crangle notes in her introduction, this first book-length collection of Loy’s short stories, drama, and commentary is not a “definitive” or “critical” edition, but its apparatus includes a smart and readable introduction and 100 plus pages of notes briefly situating and glossing the work while detailing the nature of the manuscripts involved and listing Loy’s editorial corrections. The book ought to make for the best news of the year in modernist studies, though you can ignore modernist studies and just read it.

Tom Pickard | More Pricks Than Prizes | Pressed Wafer | 2010

A brief memoir of the 1970s that has Pickard’s arrest, imprisonment, and eventual acquittal on charges of selling marijuana as its central story, with glimpses of Eric Mottram and Jeff Nuttall and a more extensive account of Basil Bunting and what he did for Pickard as mentor and character witness at the trial. I wish we had more of this kind of thing about the days of the so-called British Poetry Revival. I’d trade it for a dozen academic studies. Written in a no-nonsense prose, with one moment where Pickard puts his foot on the gas. That’s where he’s detailing a scheme to use books as ballast in crates previously emptied of “almost one ton of Ugandan bush” and writes of selling the people who were doing this all of his copies of The Strand Magazine, his sets of The Times History of World War I and Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s not enough to make the weight so he starts buying up crap books all over London. Here’s the Homeric moment: “The ancient bookseller was blissful as we bought much of his space wasting dust gathering, back breaking, spirit deadening unread and unreadable religious and military texts; all those pounds of printed pages by puffing parsons, anaemic academics, bloated bishops, geriatric generals, corpulent combatants and high ranking haemorrhoidal heroes. All that catechistic cataplasm, the militarist mucus, that pedantic pus from festering farts. The engaging entrails of emetic ambassadors, pestiferous papers by prudish pedagogues. I struggled to the wagon with arms full of books, and still he wasn’t satisfied—so I purchased conquering chronicles by conceited commanders….” This goes on for another 40 or fifty lines and ends as follows: “And it still wasn’t enough so I bought the works of talk show hosts, canting sofa cunts coughing up chintzy chunder, bloated volumes by toady poets who sit in circles blowing prizes up each other’s arseholes with straws—until we’d filled the crates.”

Jed Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger, eds. | Mimeo Mimeo 4 | Winter 2010

Like Pickard’s memoir, a valuable resource for those who want to catch up with the British poetry that matters most, including the “only known essay” by Asa Benveniste, whose poems ought to have more readers, interviews about small press publishing with Tom Raworth and David Meltzer, essays by Ken Edwards and Alan Halsey (on the mimeo editions of Bill Griffiths), and selections from Eric Mottram’s correspondence with Jeff Nuttall. It concludes with Miles Champion’s interview with Trevor Winkfield.

Gizelle Gajelonia | Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus | Tinfish Press | 2010

The modernist canon as read and written through in Hawaii—Stevens, Bishop, Crane, Ashbery, and Eliot’s “The Waste Land” for starters. Here’s the Eliot poem’s opening lines:

He Do Da Kine in Different Voices

January February March April May June
July August September October November
December is the cruelest month, mass breeding
Plumeria leis out of homestead land, mixing
Exoticism with desire, stirring
Dull roots with windward and mauka showers….

The chapbook ends with prose titled “The Day I Overthrew The Kingdom of Hawai‘i”: “I remember filling out the application form. Gajelonia, Gizelle, Evangelista. My middle name is my mother’s maiden name because I’m Filipino. ‘Are you an American citizen?’ the form asked. No, I told you I’m Filipino. Technically. I have a green card. And a green passport. But I’m an American. I’ve been here 4 years. I got my period here. My first love was an American boy named David Powers. My favorite boy band was N Sync, not Backstreet Boys. I’m in the ninth grade. In the Philippines there’s no such thing as a ninth grade. I’m not sure what I am. Is that an option? Call my mother in case of an emergency….”

Rachel Warriner | Eleven Days | RunAmok | 2011

One poem each day between the IMF’s arrival in Ireland and the agreement signed: “burn me up / in anonymous austerity / your fat face / lies / in last sovereign days” is how it begins and “sold out and done” is how it ends. For now. Promising work from a new press in Cork.

Ron Silliman | Wharf Hypothesis | LINESchapbooks | 2011

I’d lost track of Silliman’s poetry since the The Alphabet was published entire and found it pleasant and interesting to look over his shoulder on the train from Victoria to the Text Festival in Bury, England, noticing him noticing this and that (missing baseball diamonds) and thinking about writing and about kissing while punning along (“feeling blurby—Simon / mit Garfunkel”). Like Dickens in America—maybe—and Dickens ends the poem, which is said to belong to “Northern Soul,” which is in turn said to be a part of Universe. Beautifully produced, with a cover photograph by Tom Raworth.

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Keith Tuma‘s On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes is due from Salt later this year.

Tuma’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009 . Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Barbara Jane Reyes

alurista | Tunaluna | Aztlan Libre | 2010
Gizelle Gajelonia | Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Bus | Tinfish | 2010
Kristin Naca | Bird Eating Bird | Harper Perennial | 2009
Michael Luis Medrano | Born in the Cavity of Sunsets | Bilingual | 2009

This is a super masculine, justifiably angry collection of poems about growing up in a culture of institutional violence. Medrano shines when he allows his poetic speaker even the slightest bit of vulnerability, where his words and tone become personal and tender. It’s when he strips the poems of their tough guy posturing that we can really appreciate his music.

J. Michael Martinez | Heredities: Poems | Louisiana State UP | 2010

This book is challenging the way I think of writing histories of conquest and imperialism (both of which are staples in my own work) in poetry. Martinez balances “experimentalism” and Latinidad without objectifying either, which proves to me that we can still be “ethnic” poets writing about our grandmothers without falling victim to trope.

John Murillo | Up Jump the Boogie | Cypher | 2010

I appreciate Murillo committing to a tradition of Hip-hop, and expanding that tradition to include poetic formalism. “Ode to the Crossfader,” on the page communicates what I’ve heard in live reading, and/or in live reading really communicates what is on the page, clipped lines, caesurae and all. It appropriately opens Up Jump the Boogie; it is an invocation to the poet’s muse, and his ars poetica. Yes, let Hip-hop poetics also call upon its classical muses; think of this poetry as accomplishing what visual artist Kehinda Wiley does on canvas. You can call it much needed appropriation, or even reappropriation of the “master’s tools.” I think of it simply as remix.

Rachel McKibbens | Pink Elephant | Cypher | 2009

Another fantastic offering from Cypher Books, which has fast become one of my favorite indie poetry publishers. I can only hope to see more and more new titles from them. What I enjoy about Rachel McKibbens is the well-crafted, no holds barred fierceness of her confessions, catharses, and epiphanies. McKibbens’s lovely and serrated debut collection, Pink Elephant, reminds us why poetry as testimony is so necessary. The ex-punk rock chola and mother of five, 2009 Women’s Individual World Poetry Slam champion writes about abandonment and abuse in stark, startling language and well-wrought fable, delivered in well-paced lines, laying bare the history of a woman who’s “fed [her] body to the hungry for years.”

Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor | Pause Mid-Flight | Surrounding Sky Studio | 2010

Storyteller and poet Mabanglo-Mayor’s collection contains a chapbook and CD. Her poems are incantation and spellcasting, a nice synthesis of memory, body politics, Philippine and Pacific Northwest geography and mythology.

Joseph Bruchac | Above the Line | West End | 2003

One of the more memorable poems in this collection is the one in which Bruchac references that X-Files episode—an Area 51 experiment causes a US Air Force pilot and an old Hopi woman to switch bodies, and the front half of a gila monster to be encased in a stone. This poem verges on rant (he almost loses his cool and poetic poise), and so I mention it here, so that we can think of one aspect of Bruchac’s work, his writing against and pointedly calling out USA mainstream pop culture use of Native Americans. We still equate the people with scenery and wildlife.

Manuel Maples Arce | City: A Bolshevik Superpoem in 5 Cantos | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2010

Reading Arce’s City: Bolshevik Superpoem in 5 Cantos, I can’t help but think Whitman, and Ginsberg, though I understand this poem was originally published in 1924, so it predates Ginsberg. Of course, I also think of Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, obviously because Arce wrote the poem in Spanish, but mostly for the kind of surreal bustling and teeming masses (though not so much vomitous masses). Still, I think of the poet (Arce, Lorca, Whitman, Ginsberg) holding his gaze primarily at (literal and figurative) ground level, an expansive, panoramic gaze in terms of who inhabits the city’s streets, who makes the city work.

Reginald Dwayne Betts | Shahid Reads His Own Palm | Alice James | 2010

Just read this book in one sitting. These are poems from the point of view of an incarcerated African American man, the monotony and despair of passing time, an elaboration of the culture of the “inside,” of survival, negotiation, regret, contrition. This book confirms for me that it is possible for poetry to be masculine and even muscular, but not fall into the territory of machismo. The poems are honest and heavy without being heavy-handed and dramatic. The “I” of these poems I appreciate for his emotionally balanced tone, so as not to fetishize (glorify or denigrate) the incarcerated, or give us spectacle and sentimentality. The words which compose these lines are well-considered. The lines which compose these poems are clean, even lithe. They give space, or open themselves up to the reader without pandering or relying on cliché.

I realize that it becomes easy to enter any poem or body of poems about subject matter with which I am unfamiliar, when the poems open themselves, give us readers space to actually read them.

I was just talking the other day about poetry collections that suffocate, as if I am trapped in a too-warm, unventilated room, and someone’s perfume is so strong it’s weighing down my lungs with its fragrance. It’s too much, and if I were elsewhere, a ventilated or open air space, I could appreciate how lovely the fragrance is.

I bring this up now just to say that Dwayne’s collection is the opposite of this. Perhaps that’s ironic, given the potential suffocation of the jail cell which I think he conveys well throughout the collection. Still, there’s that infernally slow passage of time, which I think necessitates the precision of word choice, punctuation, and line break, and which I think are very well-handled.

More Barbara Jane Reyes here. Her Attention Span for 2009. Back to directory.