Attention Span 2011 | Robert Stanton

Rae Armantrout | Money Shot | Wesleyan | 2011

“Just” another incredible book from Armantrout, maybe even her greatest to date. Her best poems—personal favourites here include “Across,” “Fuel” “Soft Money,” “Exact” & “This Is”—are the best poems being written in America (& in American) right now.

Larry Eigner, ed. Curtis Faville & Robert Grenier | The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner | Stanford | 2010

A whole new way of seeing—& of thinking/feeling/recording what is seen. What more can one ask of a poet? I’m still ploughing through the four volume set, but this already feels like a major event in my reading life. . . .

Graham Foust | To Anacreon in Heaven | Minus A | 2010

Just when Foust’s more usual gallows-humour-driven expressionistic-minimalist style was in danger of edging into shtick, he diversifies—in this & in To Graham Foust on the Morning of His Fortieth Birthday (The Song Cave, 2010)—into sentence-by-sentence prose meditation, retaining his virtues in concision & upset but presenting them on a much bigger canvas. Like a colder Spicer, a more fucked-up Stevens, he rejuvenates the serial-poem-about-poetry-that’s-really-about-life for a more cynical age. Where will he go next?

Mark Ford | Six Children | Faber | 2011

What a strange, troubling & strangely moving volume this is. Ford’s poetry has been described as a cross between Ashbery’s & Larkin’s—fairly accurately, it must be said, although in itself this doesn’t prepare for the absolute oddness of such an amalgam. A deep student of the New York School, & of Ashbery in particular, Ford can’t summon the playfulness, optimism or confidence of his American forebears, replacing them with chilly despair, repressed anxiety & mortal dread. Death pervades—elegies to the poet’s father, a memorial to a friend & fellow poet—along with a new, for Ford, post-colonial nostalgia-slash-guilt. Like the title poem, which thrillingly instills an ambivalent Whitman with appropriate Miltonic splendor, this book works, & is curiously uplifting in its dejection. Also recommended, on a similarly morbid note: Paul Muldoon’s new volume, Maggot (Faber, 2011).

Barbara Guest | Forces of Imagination | Kelsey St. | 2003

Alongside Eigner & Zanzotto (see below), my third big, belated discovery of the year was, courtesy of John Wilkinson’s critical advocacy, Barbara Guest. I’m still working (wandering) through her Collected Poems, but this collection of “essays” and assorted reflections really caught my attention: a more convincing, fluid meeting of “theory” & “poetry” than any “Language” text I’ve ever encountered. True & precious abstraction. . . .

Geoffrey Hill | Clavics | Enitharmon | 2011

Fun to see—in this & in Oraclau | Oracles (Clutag, 2010)—Hill try to shoehorn his late-won, new-found wilder style back into strict forms (and formalists don’t come much stricter than George Herbert, the obvious model here). Clunky in places, outright bad in others, full of infelicities the younger Hill would never have countenanced, this volume is nevertheless full of a poetic liveliness a 79-year old High Anglican Oxford Professor of Poetry has no earthly right to access. Hills’ Oxford lectures have been enjoyable so far too, especially when he called for a crazier “Mad Meg” spirit he felt was lacking from contemporary British poetry. Maybe he should read more Keston Sutherland (see below).

Joseph Massey | At the Point | Shearsman | 2011

Massey’s sophomore effort proves more of less can sometimes be more. In this case, a more structured, leaner, meaner & altogether poised survey of the same Californian territory already addressed in his impressive debut, Areas of Fog. The obvious byproduct & overflow of a long-sustained & concentrated observation, this new book nevertheless seems to be forever gesturing off at something larger, something just out of view. . . .

Jennifer Moxley | Coastal | The Song Cave | 2011

This should be insufferable: a “9/11” poem long on art & artistic survival techniques, short on political comment & commentary. Moxley, however, pulls it off (again). By tackling self-absorption head on, she somehow embodies, ennobles & transcends it all at once, producing a poem both diagnostic & exemplary in the process, something her less explicitly but more intrinsically narcissistic peers would struggle with. (Between this, the Foust text mentioned above & Peter Gizzi’s wonderfully titled Pinocchio’s Gnosis, The Song Cave gets my vote as press-of-the-year.)

J. H. Prynne | Sub Songs | Barque | 2010

After the bleak To Pollen and the (pleasingly) rebarbative Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage ARTESIAN, these nine lyrics seem, presented in an elegant and generous outsize folio as they are, positively relaxed by recent Prynne standards. It’s all relative, of course:

……………………………………………….The place-work of
willed repeats gains a familiar tremor in jointure, we say
sustainable our mouth assents slave dental unbroken torrid reason
will commute previous and lie down. None more credible, mirror
make up flat sat batch pinup gruesome genome. Now get out.

Keston Sutherland | Stress Position | Barque | 2009

Slow on the uptake here, probably because Sutherland’s previous volume, 2007’s Hot White Andy, scared the hell out of me (blazing as it was). Stress Position is intense too, but in a more diffused manner, making room for a cast of thousands (Ali whoever, Black Beauty, Dot, etc.), a bouncy elastic form (seven line stanzas, roughly seven beat lines, the odd extended prose footnote) & numerous scenic shifts (public toilet-set sexual assault, yacht-based cooking contest, etc.). Like David Cronenberg rewriting The Rape of the Lock, Stress Position evades any pat analogy you can throw at it. My vote for it as poem of the year (2009) elects it king of something or other. The same terrain is roundly abused again in The Stats on Infinity (Crater, 2010) & his prose study Stupefaction (Seagull, forthcoming 2011) looks promising too. Best English-language poet of his generation? Quite possibly.

Christian Wiman | Every Riven Thing | Farrar | 2010

This year’s mainstream-book-I-liked-much-more-than-I-expected-to. A new formalist previously overly interested in narrative (with very mixed results: see the sequence “Being Serious” for serious overwrought bathetic wallowing of the first water), Wiman is here thrown back onto his own story by a cancer diagnosis & its subsequent aftermath, becoming an intense, driven, forceful & skilful religious poet as a result. Everyday epiphanies meet convincingly apocalyptic tinges in a volume that, thankfully, rises above the merely confessional.

“Bubbling Under” (couldn’t resist a second eleven): works by Stephen Collis; Emily Critchley; Roy Fisher; Susan Howe; Paul Muldoon; Wendy Mulford (the Howe & Mulford texts here—That This & The Land Between—are properly, powerfully “adult” responses to grief and morality: an interesting contrast to the sometimes gleeful outlook of Ford & Muldoon); Ezra Pound (ed. Richard Sieburth); Tom Raworth; Rimbaud (trans. John Ashbery); David Foster Wallace (a pure joy—too funny to be the work of a suicide, surely?); Andrea Zanzotto (& Antonio Porta & Franco Buffoni & Milo de Angelis & Valerio Magrelli & Mario Luzi & Patrizia Cavalli—it’s been a very Italian year for me, all-told, reading-wise).

§

Rob Stanton was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, UK in 1977, raised outside Birmingham, educated in Cardiff and Leeds and currently lives in Savannah, Georgia, USA with wife, daughter and cats. His first book of poetry, The Method, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2011.

Stanton’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 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 2010 – Joel Bettridge

Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | Tinfish | 2010

Roberto Tejada | Exposition Park | Wesleyan | 2010

Nancy Kuhl | Suspend | Shearsman | 2010

Graham Foust | A Mouth in California | Flood | 2009

Kate Greenstreet | The Last 4 Things | Ahsahta |  2009

John Williams | Stoner | New York Review Books | 1965

Gino Segrè | Faust in Copenhagen | Viking | 2007

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. Sidney Monas | Crime and Punishment | Signet | 1968

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

Richard J. Pioli, editor | Stung by Salt and Water: Creative Texts of the Italian Avant-gardist F. T. Marinetti | Lang | 1987

Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi & Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer | Wesleyan | 2008

More Joel Bettridge here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Craig Dworkin

George Albon | Step | Post-Apollo | 2006

A book-length meditation on the moment between one foot leaving the earth and its back-again fall, or what Marcel Duchamp termed the “inframince”:

“le bruit ou la musique faits par un pantalon de velours côtelé comme celui ci quand on le fait bouger [the noise or music made by corduroy pants like these rubbing when one moves]”; pantalons de velours—/ leur sifflotement (dans la) march par/ frottement des 2 jambes est une/ séparation infra-mince signalée/ par le son [velvet trousers—/ their whistling sound (in) walking by/ brushing of the 2 legs is an/ infra-mince separation signaled/ by sound].”

Following the lead of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Beckett, and Bruce Nauman, Albon puts the locomotive gesture in the service of philosophy. It’s been out a few years now, but I just came across this book and it’s the most intellectually exciting and sonically exacting poetry I have read in a decade. Absolutely thrilling.

Christian Bök | The Xenotext Experiment | manuscript | forthcoming

I have seen the future of writing, and its name is Deinococcus radiodurans. Bök has encrypted alphabetic letters as amino acids, writing a poem in the medium of genetic nucleotides inscribed in an animate biological substrate. With that sequence implanted in its DNA, the bacterium, through gene expression, manufactures a protein which can then be decoded in turn, using the same cipher, as an equally legible poem. It is not surprising that Bök has set himself an Herculean formal task and a nearly impossible lettristic puzzle. Nor is it surprising that he solved it with aplomb. But what will shock you is the degree to which the alphabetic code generates a style of wispy late-romantic lyricism (with a Steinian twist at the end).

Clark Coolidge | The Act of Providence | Combo | 2010

Just enough sense to encourage referential pursuits, but not enough to let semantics get the upper hand in the contest of percussive sound patterns and the grammatical slap of words in willful categorematic insubordination. Speed along the I-95 overpass of phrasal rhythm (“The city lulls you/ as you farm on by”) or settle down in the Armory district of documentary polaroids (“Having a good time? Lock right down”). Either way, “Providence rates.”

Michael Cross | In Felt Treeling: a libretto | Chax | 2008

This little book suggests tracery in both sense of the word: a delicate interweaving of open-work lines as well as phrases traced from archaic sources. With syllabically based sonic densities and fleeting gossamer hints of sylvan drama, Cross’ perspective shifts between the mottled-shade expanse of the forest and the hardwood singularity of every individual tree. Exquisite.

Larry Eigner, ed. Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier | The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner | Stanford | 2010

I have to confess that I never really understood all the fuss about Eigner. But then, every once in a while, I catch a glimpse. Like the poem first published in Bob Perelman’s journal Hills (Number 4; May, 1977): “Whoppers   Whoppers   Whoppers!/ memory fails/ these are the days.” I think of it every time I pass a Burger King. Here, that poem is number 952, on page 1267 of Volume III, leaving another 825 poems to go before the end of Volume IV. A luxury production (each book has the heft and gloss of a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary), the set is marketed for institutional sales. Put in an acquisition request with your local library.

Graham Foust | To Anacreon in Heaven | Minus A | 2010

Discursive, chatty, and topical by Foust’s standards, To Anacreon in Heaven is more direct and less wryly torqued than his previous books. But all the pain and precision are there in full. An alternative “Star Spangled Banner,” with an ethics of enmeshment and implication in place of bellicose nationalist fealty, the poem commemorates the battle between a subject who knows it can neither genuinely connect with others nor retreat to an easy unaffected detachment. The work, accordingly, is not Anacreontic in the traditional sense; if this is a drinking song, it has the bitter taste of necessity rather than cheer—“and that’s a vodka bottle full of quiet bees.” Every sentence goes straight into the stanza, but cannot leave the stanza to itself. Signature design by Jeff Clark.

Robert Grenier | Sentences | Whale Cloth | 1978

Long out of print and exceedingly rare, a score or so of Grenier’s legendary boxes were recently discovered; they had been safely stored inside Michael Waltuch’s printing press and completely forgotten for decades. Each of the 500 cards in Sentences offers an understated epiphany—a quick glimpse of the enlightenment that can only come from sustained meditative attention to the tantric forms of the individual alphabetic letters that filter, distort, and permit the linguistic environment of our everyday experiences. Shuffle ’em up and deal ’em out. The few remaining rediscovered copies are priced for accession by library special collections; see whalecloth.org for details.

P. Inman | now/time | Bronze Skull | 2006

Two volumes of Inman’s collected poetry have been announced by James Davies’ imprint If p Then q; for now, it’s time to puzzle over this performance score. The title translates Walter Benjamin’s keyword Jetztzeit: the pressing immediacy of the present moment—or, more striking, the snapshot image of a past moment grasped with all the fullness of the present in an interrupting flash of profane illumination—isolated from the causal narratives constructed by conventional historical views. In Inman’s text, intersecting lines enact the concept at a syntactic level since each word is freed from the subordinations of grammar and separated from neighboring words by full stops. With “time. occupied. of. my. language.” in this way, words—for a moment—can be seen to be replete without the buttressing hierarchies of semantics. A word, in now/time constitutes a lexical plenum of sound and materiality: “a Nunc-stans,” as Hobbes writes in the Leviathan, “which neither they, nor any else understand.”

Kenneth Irby | The Intent On: Collected Poems, 1962-2006 | North Atlantic | 2009

Irby’s Collected is the secret consistory located somewhere between Placitas and Berkeley, somewhere between intellect and orexis, somewhere between Olson and Ponge, where Peter Inman and John Taggart hold council in lyric tribunal. One would do well to pay the kind of attention to the corpus of Irby’s poetry that it pays to the embodied, numinous world around us.

Joseph Massey | Exit North | BookThug | 2010

Microtonal miniatures from a poet able to gauge the precise, graduated degrees of catenarian variance in the tension of the simplest sentences.

Aram Saroyan | Complete Minimal Poems | Ugly Duckling | 2008

Not truly “complete” and certainly not “minimal,” but completely provocative and prescient works of minimalist poetry (UDP must have intended the title in the topological sense of “complete minimal surfaces,” such as catenoids and helicoids). They may have mean curvatures of zero, but the intensities generated by rotating one of Saroyan’s single words can feel infinite. Challenging Clark Coolidge’s conviction that there cannot be a one-word poem, Saroyan moves between visual poetry, the Bolinas goof, and steely proto-conceptual writing. I always hear Robert Grenier’s “JOE JOE” [from Sentences, see above] as a reply to Saroyan’s “Coffee Coffee.”

More Craig Dworkin here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2007. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – John Palattella

Elizabeth Arnold | Effacement | Flood | 2010

Günter Eich, trans. Michael Hofmann | Angina Days: Selected Poems | Princeton | 2010

Manny Farber, ed. Robert Polito | Farber on Film | Library of America | 2009

Graham Foust | A Mouth in California | Flood | 2010

Ruth Harris | Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century | Metropolitan | 2010

Tony Judt | Ill Fares the Land | Penguin | 2010

Gabriel García Márquez, trans. Asa Katz | Clandestine in Chile | New York Review Books | 2010

Marilynne Robinson | Absence of Mind | Yale | 2010

Frances Stoner Saunders | The Woman Who Shot Mussolini | Metropolitan | 2010

Ben Sonnenberg | Lost Property: Memoirs & Confessions of a Bad Boy | Summit | 1991

More John Palattella here. Palattella’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to directory.

Attention Span – Rae Armantrout

Ben Lerner | Angle of Yaw | Copper Canyon | 2006

This book isn’t new, but it’s new to me. I think Ben Lerner is brilliant.

Katie Degentesh | The Anger Scale | Combo | 2006

Like Ben Lerner, Katie Degentesh is new to me (I guess I’m a little slow) and really exciting. This is my favorite flarf.

Joseph Massey | Out of Light | Private | 2008

Joseph Massey is a relatively new arrival, but his minimalist, Zen-like poems seem like old friends.

Ron Silliman | The Age of Huts (compleat) | California | 2007

Ron Silliman is, of course, an old friend. It’s terrific to have his seminal early work back in print.

Fanny Howe | The Lyrics | Graywolf | 2007

As always, Fanny Howe blends the personal and the political into poems that sing.

Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007

Spahr’s poetic memoir blends the personal and the political in a different way.

Naomi Klein | The Shock Doctrine | Metropolitan | 2007

This is a clear, scathing history of the depredations of the Neocons.

Graham Foust | Necessary Stranger | Flood | 2007

I’ve been a Foust fan for awhile. His spare, skewed version of the lyric appeals to me.

Joseph Lease | Broken World | Coffeehouse | 2007

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