Posts Tagged ‘Hoa Nguyen’
Attention Span 2010 – Anselm Berrigan
Thomas Bernhard, trans. Sophie Wilkins | Correction | Vintage | 1975
Thomas Bernhard, trans. Ewald Osers | Old Masters | Chicago | 1985
Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey | 2009
Allison Cobb | Green-Wood | Heretical Texts | 2010
Murat Nemet-Nejat | The Structure of Escape | Talisman | forthcoming
David Markson | Reader’s Block | Dalkey Archive | 1996
Ralph Waldo Emerson | “Experience” | various | 1844
Robert Bresson, trans. Jonathan Griffin | Notes on the Cinematographer | Green Integer | 1975
Eleni Stecopoulos | Armies of Compassion | Palm | 2010
Lorine Niedecker | “Wintergreen Ridge,” in Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy | California | 2002
Fred Moten | B Jenkins | Duke | 2010
Pattie McCarthy | Table Alphabetical of Hard Words | Apogee | 2010
Jean Fremon | The Paradoxes of Robert Ryman | Burning Square/Brooklyn Rail | 2008
Jess Mynes | Sky Brightly Picked | Skysill | 2009
Alice Notley | Reason & Other Women | Chax | 2010
Karen Weiser | To Light Out | Ugly Duckling | 2010
Stanislaw Lem | Fiasco | Harvest/HBJ | 1987
Ann Lauterbach | “Or To Begin Again” | Penguin | 2009
Robert Fitterman | “This Window Makes Me Feel,” in Rob the Plagiarist | Roof | 2009
More Anselm Berrigan here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2007, 2004. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Pattie McCarthy
Anselm Berrigan | Free Cell | City Lights | 2009
“I do take relentless / as a compliment. All this work / dealing with making it work.”
Allison Cobb | Green-Wood | Factory School | 2010
“But every age has its ghosts, a kind of rage. The language.” “The word ‘forest’ itself forms a fence.”
CA Conrad & Frank Sherlock | The City Real & Imagined | Factory School | 2010
“‘Of / course they talk about genocide. / They’re Polish.’ The show ends. / Everything burns. A new set / is built for tomorrow.”
Sarah Dowling | Security Posture | Snare | 2009
“Makes a movement of hand toward // clothing that intervenes / and conforms exactly.”
Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Pitch: Drafts 77 – 95 | Salt | 2010
“Reduplicate the awkwardness. // If given text in a dream, try extra hard to read it.”
Susan Howe | Poems Found in a Pioneer Museum | Coracle | 2009
“It was the only thing she had left / from the journey across.”
Chris McCreary | Undone: a fakebook | furniture | 2010
“You recover / from upside // down & demand a bigger / engine.”
Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey | 2009
“Up nursing then make tea / the word war is far”
Lisa Robertson | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House | 2009
“And you are a rare modern painting in the grand salon / And you are a wall of earth.”
Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | Tinfish | 2010
“Inexpert, I / investigate // Inexpert, I / walk, and walk.”
Kevin Varrone | g-point almanac: Passyunk Lost | Ugly Duckling | 2010
“she said she grew up // when dodos were ubiquitous, / when snyder avenue was rome”
Karen Weiser | To Light Out | Ugly Duckling | 2010
“the chapel of a bird’s body / is any body / breathing with ink”
Attention Span 2010 – Cathy Wagner
Aaron Kunin | The Sore Throat | Fence | 2010
Radical constraint. Self-reflexive to the point of wilderness.
Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey | 2009
Technique!
Laynie Browne | The Desires of Letters | Counterpath | 2010
You don’t go to poetry for wisdom? When it’s funny? And formally brilliant? And aware that tradition will stick its nose in? So it picks that nose and that pocket?
Stephen Rodefer | Call It Thought | Carcanet | 2008
“Then I stand up on my hassock and say sing that, / It is not the business of poetry to be anything.” Astonishing playful poetic know-how flung around as if it might hurt somebody. Call it ambulance.
Andrea Brady | Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination | Krupskaya | 2010
Brave and erudite. Documentary precision, passionate correlation. How do we make war out of ourselves? “What would make you throw yourself out?”
Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008
Iteration strummed to song. Say it again, Ted.
Brenda Iijima | If Not Metamorphic | Ahsahta | 2010
It’s trying to be adequate to the bio-crisis. Formally ambitious, absurdly sane.
Lance Phillips | These Indicium Tales | Ahsahta | 2010
Visceral detail: a phenomenology. “One purses fingers and lips to form a membrane.”
Akilah Oliver | A Toast in the House of Friends | Coffee House | 2009
Everything I want to quote from this book feels irritatingly depressurized when extracted from its spinning, oblique, humorous gravitas, but let’s try “this is a happy story but first i want to tell you about the shape of the incredible sadness. a porn movie you volunteer for. unpaid. untended. the sadness has that shape.”
Ara Shirinyan | Your Country is Great: Afghanistan–Guyana | Futurepoem | 2008
Funny as a crutch. As they say.
Daniel Kane | We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry | Iowa | 2009
Fascinating on visionary consciousness, formal innovation, and the mutually influential connections between Duncan, O’Hara, Ashbery, Ginsberg, others and radical postwar filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Alfred Leslie, Stan Brakhage, others.
Attention Span 2009 – John Latta
Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008
A model book. A sort of anti-book. The whole, in its jostle and jag, its loud call to attend, to refuse to allow one’s attention to plummet into the usual listlessness, functions with impeccable formal force, enacting the cacophonous compendium it musters. . . . What it posits is a supposed world of “radiant connectedness,” a world beyond narrative ploys (“your life has no plot so stop narrating”). Except: it refuses to mete out the necessary credence in that world, the connectedness is a foil, a spark-spitting short in the circuitry, sign of dystopia.
Kent Johnson | Homage to the Last Avant-Garde | Shearsman | 2008
Is Kent Johnson a nervous Nellie, or what? I think he positively thrives on yatter and scorch, that version of the lyrical big itch that accounts for Art and Trouble (two manifestations of one compulsion) amongst all us humankind. He’s always looking to “mix it up a little,” flinging down the fat puff’d up old-style boxing gloves of ego for a little delight in exchange and engagement. Man least likely to consider (or care) about the possibility of looking a little foolish. Besides, he likes people, in all the muddle and mayhem and mopery. Endearing crazy vulnerability and that obscenely huge grease-slick of high ambition. And all of it highly nuanced and terrifically “up front.” . . . What Kent Johnson does—unlike anybody else—is interrogate (badger) that place, that “situation,” its ways and functions, how its writers behave and misbehave, lie to others and themselves, trade favors and insults, pose, vindicate, prance, vilify.
Richard Owens | Delaware Memoranda | BlazeVOX | 2008
Proper care of the materials, human, historic, and natural, a respecting attunement: that’s one place to begin. Everywhere in Owens’s notes and accumulations that make up the six sections of Delaware Memoranda, a poem of the river that pours through the eponymous Water Gap, there is the insistence: “to strike an appropriate key.” Or: “the dire need / to repurpose the trash so rightfully ours.” There’s something supple, all-including, and, most rare, highly moral about Owens’s work here in Delaware Memoranda: unhesitant witness he is, turning up the river’s sluice and item with measure and respect, all the while refusing to make a bright something where there is nothing: “Not to fetishize the fucking river / but to think through the transformation / —how we come—to be to mean / encountering others along the banks.”
Forrest Gander | As a Friend | New Directions | 2008
A kind of skinny roman à clef, a version (with all the fat skimmed off) of some part of Arkansas poet Frank Stanford’s short life. Which is, admittedly, probably the “wrong” way to read anything. And, I admit, it made me itch a little—even in my admiration for the way Gander so deftly turn’d that life into art. . . . I read it in a gulp, one sitting. It is prose pump’d up to a high pitch with no release—a gusto-prose.
C. S. Giscombe | Prairie Style | Dalkey Archive | 2008
Giscombe is entirely capable of shuffling the terms, reassigning the scores, mocking the tune, all in a disturbing sleight-of-hand way that leaves one pop-eyed and shiftless and itchy, wondering if the train’s pull’d out or the stationmaster’s slipped one a mickey, and what about the music?
“Trim paragraphs of uninflected speech hung over the prairie, sound’s origin. Eros came up out of its den in the embankment—came out tawny, came out swarthy, came out more ‘dusky’ than ‘sienna.’ The sky was a glass of water. White men say cock and black men say dick. One gets even in the midwest, one gets even in the midwest, one gets even in the midwest. Eros was a common barnyard pest, now coming to be seen in suburban settings as well, a song with lyrics, clarified and ‘refined’ both . . .”
Distill’d into that signifyin’ fox, “Eros” and “pest” and “song”—“Mistah Fox” elsewhere—is a hugely rich—complicated—history of racial and sexual and geographical attitudes; what’s astonishing is how deftly Giscombe sounds—utters and penetrates—that history.) . . . There’s a kind of ferocious need in Giscombe’s work to annotate, to record the details, a need that struggles against meaning’s lazy splay ravaging of the discernible. I love how—since Here (1994), Giscombe’s books’ve carried notes detailing the precise addresses where composition occurred.
Jeff Hilson | Stretchers | Reality Street Editions | 2006
Out of a terrific essay call’d “Why I Wrote Stretchers,” some “rules” and constraints glean’d: “Each stretcher is nominally a 33-line unit,” a decision made for reasons “ultimately banal, based on [Hilton’s] age at the time of writing the first set.” “The poems incorporate a lot of found material . . . much of it (though by no means all of it) verbal detritus heard or seen on journeys through this city.” “Pillaging cheap secondhand texts for material enforced another kind of reading which was partial, discontinuous and manic.” “Page 33 of texts became for a time a focus.” “The opening is a measure for the rest of the stretcher not necessarily in terms of content, but certainly in terms of (line) length. This is what gives stretchers their shape. If stretchers have a constraint it is that they can’t be too wide.” “All spelling mistakes are deliberate.” “Each stretcher tells a story and each story contains many other stories.” Hilson calls the stretchers “ruins, constructed ruins,” and he “tried whenever possible to avoid the ‘effects” which line ending can produce . . . They are tatters, ragged flags.”
Jeffrey Yang | An Aquarium | Graywolf | 2008
A bestiary of the sea, alphabetical (“Abalone” to “Google” to “Rexroth” to “Zooxanthellae”) and wayward, comic and modest. What I find enthralling: Yang’s restraint (a form of caring, of respect), the near absence of the usual clamoring self, I-identify’d or not. (In “White Whale” one reads “Round and round we wheel / . . . / till self’s freed from ego.”) In its place: taut arrays of (predominantly) fact (“Nature describes its own design.”) intertwined with myth and (mostly point’d) human history, “a felicity of association.” Sense of no padding, the lovely leanness of the notational. . . . Yang is a fierce cultural internationalist in the tradition of Rexroth and Pound (a guideway nigh-completely abandon’d by the presumed inheritors of the lineage, the mostly myopic and homegrown Language writers), capable of drawing on Chinese, Arabic, Mexican, Hawai’ian (see the poem about “Hawaii’s native triggerfish,” the humuhumunukunukuapua’a), Indian, and Old Norse, beyond the usual European and “Classical” sources.
Chris Nealon | Plummet | Edge | 2009
Plummet is nigh-terrific. Nealon works a supple long line (“I know prose is a mighty instrument but still I feel that plein-air lyric need to capture horses moving” he writes in “Poem (I know prose . . .)”) and, in a world seemingly divided between the jaunty and the raunchy, chooses both (“Your job? Just keep cracking Demeter up” slides uneasily into “At the gates of Arabic I enter, illiterately // Actually I know two words // shaheed / habibi // I watch depictions of electrocution under bright fluorescent lighting with a slightly elevated heartbeat” into “Do I have an astral body or a tapeworm?”), Verve and wit is what regulates (without throttling) the underlying political rage of the book.
we’re here to puke in many colors—
elf-puke, witch-puke, giant-puke
disco puke and punk puke
vomit on the apron of the government
vomit on the boots of the police
it’s January 17, 1991
it’s March 20, 2003
It’s morning
Puke and sing
(Out of longer poem call’d “Sunrise.” The dates, obviously, of the beginnings of “our” two illegal and preemptive incursions—wars—against the sovereign state of Iraq.)
Elizabeth Marie Young | Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize | Fence Books | 2009
The revels and joys of utter excess. Thumbing through: “prose poems,” though too raggedly untidy (odd long or variably short paragraph indentations, queer titular sprawl erratics, stuff that looks, not squared off blocky, something like verse with midriff-bulge). Studious (or not) “can’t be bother’d”-ismus. The titles blare infidelity to any serious “pose” (or “poise”) whilst generally avoiding the crime of the “merely zany.” . . . I love the spastic anarchy of it, the ga-ga gawkinesses, the insouciant (possibly “intentional”) “errors” (“bells . . . peel”), the odd conjunct of the various alluded-to’s (Hemingway, Gene Stratton-Porter, The Waste Land, one hit wonder Gary Wright). I like its push against the tidy, the finely-wrought, I like its ramp’d up rampant all-over energy with broken off threads (or sunken under-juttings) of random narrative.
Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey Press | 2009
Nguyen’s work is sparse (sprawl’d), notational, constellatory, measured. Too, it is uncensoring, all-encompassing, both domestic (“Wipe poop,” “Grackles in the hackberry” “Bendy vegetables in the drawer”) and liable to jut off anywhere (“Levittown goes ‘green’ / Oil at $100 a barrel,” “Cupid rides a goddam dolphin / at the hand of Venus”). I think it’s easy to mistake Nguyen’s seemingly casual jottings—and the quick variousness of the turns there, quotidian detritus, news reports, stray conversational gambits, syntactical goofs, myth-hints East and West—for “mere” verbal manifestations of dailiness, its root unstructuredness. Too, though, there’s a push toward myth and ritual that seems always on the verge of intervening / disrupting the quotidian notational. The stunning Kiss a Bomb Tattoo (Effing, 2009) arrived nigh-simultaneously.
Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian | Situations, Sings | Adventures in Poetry | 2008
Out of the “Postface”: “Beginning with the exchange of free-verse lines that (some 300 mailings later) became Sunflower (originally published by The Figures in 2000), we gradually multiplied and diversified our projects. Soon, a typical exchange would include ten or so formally different works.
Only one of these works, called ‘Interview,’ is not included in this volume; we anticipate that it will appear as an independent book, a companion (though not a necessary companion) to this one.
Apart from ‘Interview,’ all the poems we’ve composed together to date are collected here. There are eleven of them.”
More John Latta here.
Attention Span 2009 – CA Conrad
Soma)tic Reading Enhancements
:an introductory note:
(Soma)tic Reading Enhancements are an extension of my (Soma)tic Poetics and exercises, in fact they’re actually not just an extension but are the poetics themselves, as the same praxis applies, for the origin of writing is locked with the origin of reading. As the writing of (Soma)tics is an engagement with the thing of things and the spirit of things, so is (Soma)tic Reading Enhancements.
The enhancements for each book were chosen intuitively, rather than randomly, a structure derived from initial sensations upon receiving a particular book. It is my wish as a poet to encourage the readers to not be passive, and to take credit for a poem’s absorption. After all, we each bring a unique set of experiences and circumstances to filter and digest poems, making them part of ourselves in our own way. Try these (Soma)tic Reading Enhancements, and maybe you will want to alter the enhancement as you read, or create a different one for yourself. Let’s encourage one another to have full participatory poetry reading! These books are some of my favorite books published in 2009, and the year is barely half over. I imagine poetry lovers a hundred years away looking back and saying 2009 was a great year for poetry!
To the muscle that bends language,
CAConrad
*
Stacy Szymaszek | Hyperglossia | Litmus | 2009
Boil 4 tablespoons of whole cloves in a quart of water. Boil on high flame for 5 minutes. Shut flame off and let the infusion cool to a hot/warm drinkable temperature. Now, VIGOROUSLY brush your teeth and gums for a full five minutes. Brush, brush, brush hard, brush, YEAH, REALLY BRUSH tooth by tooth and GUMS, especially give the gums an intense, hard brushing. Now, sit down and take a mouthful of the clove infusion, but don’t swallow, just let it soak into the freshly brushed teeth and gums. Then SPIT IT INTO an empty pan or bucket. Start reading, feeling the clove treatment TINGLE and soothe, and move your lips deliberately, and tongue, whisper the poems, speak them, whisper. Take another mouthful of your clove infusion, AND THIS TIME VIGOROUSLY swish it in your mouth, between your teeth, and from cheek to cheek, really swish it around, then SPIT IT INTO your bucket. Whisper the next poem, then read it again with a louder voice. Stop midway, maybe at page 55, the poem ending, “hemorrhage / of / air / into everyone’s / sky ” and make some more clove infusion, but this time for a nice footbath. Scrub your feet VIGOROUSLY before dipping them into the hot clove infusion. Ah, now continue. Occasionally flip to the cover and say aloud “BETTY’S REVENGE!” which is the name of the painting on the cover! Are you FILLING with the sensations of poetry and clove infusion? “a threat designated me at birth / attuned to close-calls / and violent eruptions of selfhoods / built on faults / to treat with a homeopathic / sibilant whisper / sssss / achieve / a hatred sealant”
Nathaniel Siegel | Tony | Portable Press @ Yo Yo Labs | 2009
You need a can of whipped cream, as we’re working with the lower chakras. Put a plastic garbage bag under a chair and get naked. Don’t be shy, I’m not asking you to do this on stage, you’re alone, you’re safe, IT’S GREAT! Shake your whipped cream and squirt a good lather of it on the seat of your chair, and the back of the chair. Sit down gently, gently into the whipped cream seat. Did you ever sit on a lather of whipped cream before to read poetry? If not, an entire new file of memory will be created in your brain. Every once in awhile spray a little more whipped cream here and there, and move your limbs and back into it, READ ALOUD while doing so, and READ LOUD AS YOU CAN as a matter of fact. Midway through the book, somewhere near the stanza ending, “manager driving me home / putting music on / not getting he’s trying to tell me something” stand and feel the whipped cream like a luxurious and strange garment. If you’re adventurous, as I hope you are, try gently sticking the whipped cream nozzle into your asshole and inject the creamy dairy product up there. Go ahead, remember, no one’s looking. NOW sit back down. How is that? It’s really good, isn’t it? Admit it, it’s good, right? Whipped cream enema, something everyone would love if they gave it a shot. You’ll never forget this marvelous book, “be caught off guard in a pool hall a naked guy / hold my friend all night until she goes for her AIDS test / hold my friends hand 48 hours in a coma no sleep / a vision of her the sand: light lifting up a reflection a lake”
Frank Sherlock | Over Here | Factory School | 2009
Is there a shopping mall near you? I went to one in Philadelphia called The Gallery for this book. Shopping malls are filled with the strangest opportunities to engage poems anew. The elevator in this mall was clear glass, and I would get on, stand facing the mall below, and read. People would get on, and it would move up, then down, then be still for a little while as I read, “It is difficult to / provide anything / more than skeleton / for the peace / though this skin / is seeded w/ nerve / endings flinching / at the prospect / of touch” Have you ever hid in the middle of a round rack of pants for sale? The busy department store was perfect for hiding, reading, smelling the fresh cotton and polyester, possibly made by very tired hands, “The genocide / comics / are lullabies / a rest / from hearts / from fatigues” In the furniture department there are very comfortable chairs to read in, “The void is here the invisible distance that makes this aesthetic boom / Shatters dispersal of selves figure into a common finger tongue brain” Near the pet food you can always find poisons and traps for other animals, unwanted animals. Have prepared on a roll of tape such messages as STOP THE KILLING AND PET YOUR CAT, and such, then sit on a sparkling new bicycle for sale, and read, “I am a passenger sitting in a suspicious / way w/ a yearn for the new to be older / Strangers become friends even if they are sometimes objects / The white star is on the blue field / There is a black eagle on a red sea / Crates have brought w/ them the dead people & the letters / sent from loved ones when the dead people were alive” Buy some bubble gum and ride the escalator up, up, up, and down, and back around, reading, “So it is decided that / men who pose for pictures w/ guns have terrible taste / in eyewear Some faces reflect the light of others Every lake / tastes different & even at the end the land / remains a place to fall in love”
kathryn l. pringle | Right New Biology | Factory School | 2009
Do this on a hot, humid day, like I did, it’s an especially sublime experience on such a day. Wrap your naked body in maps, atlas pages, or even imaginary maps you draw yourself. Scotch tape your suit of PLACES the lines as highways, lines as borders, takes us by car, plane, solely imagined. THEN put your OTHER clothes on over your DIRECTIONS TO SUIT THE WORLD. Remember to bring drinking water, because if you pass out you’ll miss the best parts of the poems. Don’t pass out. Where do you want to go out there with your fellow citizens? They’re not noticing the bulk under your normal human clothes, don’t worry about it. On your way to your public location to read, if you shoplift, or commit other crimes, and they strip search you: MAPS! Let them find their own way. If you arrive at the location THIS book senses location(s), note she wrote with her own body at the start, “This book could not have been written without the influence of many Presidents of the United States of America and Sigmund Freud.” Are you sweating into your maps? Isn’t it divine? Your sweat permeating mountain chains FEED the Mississippi FEED the sea! What is over your heart? Go to a public restroom to open your shirt if you don’t remember. Reading this poet, rub that artery of highways while reading to send along what you read, “a gift is the city and the setting of work / a gift of the foreherein Organism old also / these phantasms spin / around, they drive / absurd universes” Take the directions when they come INHALE she writes “INHALES / mind is two lines, or stands / a singing oracle / a swinging oracle, able sung” We’re the book, we are. It’s amazing.
Akilah Oliver | A Toast in the House of Friends | Coffee House | 2009
Maybe it was the trees on the cover, or the NEED for something MOVING around me, but I took this book out to the protected wildlife parks around Philadelphia and found a secluded stream, first for my feet, then…. Bring a battery-powered radio, turn it to a talk radio station, but put it far enough away from you that you can hear it, but can’t make out what it is they’re saying. Faint, keep it faint, go and adjust it if you can understand them, as we want the voices to be clearly voices, but the words unattainable with our senses. Get your feet in the moving water and start reading, “language is leaving me: ahhhhh—this victimization shit / is not stable and the victors: / when are we going to safari / we: [astounded exclamation] / nancy reagan out of my head” This is a book, and it feels like it is written right into your skin when you read it. I found an old scuba mask, and if you have one, please wear it and rest your head in the stream, submerging your ears at least for the reading of one poem, “well the point is, things were calm down / here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i / want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am / so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to / hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home. give me a chance to say / welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat. what do you wear / out there?” That was the one I read underwater, under running water. This book needs time to be alone between poems. How is the water? How is today for you, reading Akilah’s poems? “i’d like all the stone butches to wave their hands in the air right now, wave em / like they just don’t care / (it seems to be unfortunate but true; corporate spell check does not recognize you / we are all too young to remember this”
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009
Make A LOT of ice cubes in your freezer the night before. Make an ice sling, it’s very easy: use 2 plastic bags from the grocery store, fill them with ice, put these in a towel, tie the towel around your neck, but make certain that the ice is near your face at all times. Naked is best, of course. So get naked. Put your feet in a bucket of hot water and crushed garlic (4 or 5 cloves). Be ready to add more hot water and ice as you read, “I like the letters of the alphabet that slide downhill / somehow we all expected to become exasperated little gods” WHOA, this book gets you gets you gets you! WHY THE ICE YOU ASK? Why ask?, it’s ice, it’s poetry, it’s all good, no one’s getting hurt, right? Can you TASTE the garlic through your bare feet? It’s nice, it’s like eating through your feet while reading, right? What weird and lovely creatures we are! Rest your chin on the ice, SMELL the ice, inhale the cool air. It’s summer while I’m doing this, now, and lovely, the poems make me happy, “if I’m going to have to bite heads off they / damn well better taste good / it occurs to me” I mean REALLY, can you TASTE IT, “the bad guys were there in their bad guy uniforms / our bus driver was wearing a fake bad guy uniform / so he could go inside to get us food and cigarettes / [commercial break] / back at the mansion water sprinklers / water the lawn in the pouring rain” From time to time it’s good to read, then close your eyes and take a DEEP BREATH of the ice, a big ice sniff. Touch your tongue to them, hold one in your bared teeth through the reading of one poem, then SPIT it back into your ice sling and read the poem aloud, have you ever felt such things while reading? It’s beautiful to feel.
Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey | 2009
There really are patches of grass in Philadelphia where the yuppie pure bred dogs have NOT made their pure bred toilets. That’s where I went for this book, that patch I know of, a DELICIOUS patch of dirt, weeds, bugs, pebbles and bits of glass and metal, plastic bag tumble weeds. Wherever you are, whatever climate, whatever the earth, be in it for this book. I buried my bare feet after digging a hole with a sharp stone. It’s good to have water out there. It is very hot and humid in Philadelphia in August, and I LOVE hot and humid weather, LOVE to FEEL the air, and pour the water into my face while reading. “And I do think it’s true that men stole / the magical instruments of women / & we were too busy / with ordinary life / to worry about this” If eating dirt is too much for you then smell it at least, SMELL the grass. The grass sweats chlorophyll, or I’m smelling myself in the grass, but it’s kind of nice. But I ate a little of the dirt with some water, AH, gritty and weird while reading, “I might literally shut down / like a bug little legs / curled in the air” Feel OK about stopping midway to dig around, digest the poems and dirt, dig around, digest, dig into the earth and make little dirt castles for whoever is small enough to move in. There were enough beer can tabs for me to make a little table with four chairs. Remember this book with the earth covering your feet, “The ‘perfect red king’ / is a man becoming a woman / and bleeding every month / ‘Fixed with a triple nail’ / This is hard work / becoming a woman” and you will believe everything in here with the best parts of you working for it.
Jenn McCreary | : AB OVO : | Dusie | 2009
Bring all of this: bread, nuts, seeds, honey, water with lemon and orange slices. Take a chair some place in your house or apartment where you NEVER sit, some place you would never even CONSIDER sitting. Like in a hallway, in a corner facing the corner, in the bathroom, or UP on a table, let’s do it! This enhancement, and this book, contain a variety of different pregnancies. So sit in a place you would NEVER sit, sit there with your plate of food, and water, make something new of the body you’ve known your home to be. Eat some of the food, drink some of the water, slowly, chew a long, long time. This is about being the poems of this book now, “…what the gardens can / do is import the world outside. when borders / are undefined, lines may be lost or may cease / to be. the ground beneath your feet becomes / or does not.” Let’s let it become beneath our feet. Where you are, put a plant there after you’re finished reading the book. A new plant, a small, young plant. Not a lot of light? A philodendron for low light then. “the walls of this room have become the world / all around.” This book, the plant, the reading, it’s all going to SHIFT you, unless you’re unmovable, but I bet you can be jarred as only good poems can jar. “It’s almost like the ocean. it’s nothing / like the ocean. in that space / where no one else / is. it’s such a long way / down. & strange. / my ears revolve for wolves. I find my footing / & walk across the air / to where you are.”
Joseph Massey | Areas of Fog | Shearsman | 2009
These poems for me came from lower chakras, they’re so marvelously spare they need our flanks to shake the storage of memory files loose. Take a string, not a sewing thread, something a little thicker and more durable, and something which is made of fiber, not plastic. Make certain the string is long enough to reach into your pants, around your crotch and ass, and out the back. You should have a good 12 inches of string hanging out the front of your pants, and the exact same amount hanging out the back of your pants. Make sure you lubricate the string that’s against your skin, and be generous in lubricating it, we don’t want to get rope burns from reading Joe’s book, we want it beautiful instead. NO ONE is going to notice the string, so don’t worry, and even if they do, they’re busy, and won’t let it stay in their minds for more than a minute. Go out into your town or city, or wherever you live where there are people. Test the string before leaving, pull it from the front, then pull it from the back. How is that? Is it nice? Of course it is, it’s perfect for poems! Find a place to lean and read, “There are seasons here / if you squint. And there’s / relief in the landscape’s / sloughed off cusps of color / fallen over the familiar / landmarks, the familiar / trash–things that last.” There’s something beautiful about being with these quiet poems jarring our insides, while in public. Now pull your string, then reach to the other side and pull your string again, and read, “dusk dims / between leaves / on the tree / whose name / I refuse to find.” I put the string RIGHT IN my ass crack, which made me totally aware of my surroundings, “Enough to make / the foliage / flinch, / wind slits. / Music sifts / out of a house.” Music not just coming out of things around us, but from these poems as well, “how the light / makes do. / A thrust of / things– / a world– / words– / crush / against / the margin of you.”
Erica Kaufman | Censory Impulse | Factory School | 2009
Go to the middle of an overpass and stare down at the traffic without blinking for as long as you can. As soon as you blink open the book. Let the traffic and road below frame the book as you read. Open yourself to FEELING urges to spout off words, lines, entire poems as loud as you want whenever you want. You’re reading poetry, you have the world’s permission to feel URGES and FEEL urges. Smells, sounds, even taste’s sensations come up with the cars. The filth of exhaust, do you get it? Stop from time to time, to close your eyes and hum a hummmmming all your own, lifting to high hummmm, low hummm, hummmmmm your hum. It’s getting into you out here, the poems, the pulsing travel of words and cars? “this is a vocabulary of possession / this is why i won’t meet you / in the road a curb under an insect / shaped fountain i bring / a trampoline to the park / offer up a bench / say my blood is somewhere / it’s not important / like distance the how long / of intimate the panic / that shuts any mind down / conquer the hill feel it / please use these anecdotes / as an introduction”
Rob Halpern | Disaster Suites | Palm | 2009
Does it storm where you live? If it doesn’t, try sitting in the shower under an umbrella with a VERY LOUD recording of a thunderstorm playing. In Philadelphia we have the real thing, and I checked the weather reports for the PERFECT SUMMER STORM. Ah, and did I find it! Suites they are, and reading them in the middle of a torrential downpour with frightening lightning and thunder made the music OMNIPRESENT like few experiences of reading have done for me. Sit in an outdoor shelter. I chose the steps of a pre-revolutionary war building near Benjamin Franklin’s house. Bring a recording of a thunderstorm. If you have an MP3 player, ONLY have it playing in one ear. If you have an old fashioned tape recorder like I used, place it so one ear will absorb the bulk of the crackling. At times, when reading, it was as if the storm was answering the recorded storm, “Everyone out there listening knows / My body feels so way off the ground / As all the big stores go reaching for me” And sit a cup JUST OUTSIDE your shelter, let the cup absorb the storm’s water. I brought a metal cup, and set it FAR away from me, hoping to catch more than water. But it only caught water, a delicious cup of storm water. Drink and read, “Of being being sucked absorbed into ever vaster / Networks where history’s still being taped and re / -ality tested oh y’re just suffering the old imperial / Nostalgia he said but the neo-con retards fucked- / Up my spin without me and I guess I don’t know / How to criticize democracy value or to just say no!” And place a slice of bread in the storm to absorb the nitrogen from the lightning, and of course the delicious water; eat, and let them become your body, “Now let’s recount ourselves in terms of crisis dynamics / Depict the ends of state where history and the seas / Choose me since I see you there my dreamy fuck.”
David Buuck | The Shunt | Palm | 2009
Take your laundry to the laundromat, even if you’re fortunate enough to have these machines at home. This is about reading poems while feeling machines in public. Set washer to the longest possible cycle. Sit on it, or have a chair beside it so you can lean into it, press into it. Stare at the book’s cover and stare at it even when you think you’re tired of staring at it, as it’s possible you’re trying to trick yourself into thinking you’re tired when you’re actually disturbed. Imagine those bloody arms and hands belong to someone you love more than anyone else in this world. What’s this person’s name? Say their name out loud while looking at the book cover. Be disturbed, you deserve it. We all deserve it. This is a cover to refer to while reading. PRESS a cheek into the washing machine, then pause while reading to open the lid, and place a hand inside the soapy water. Just keep it there for a few minutes while reading. Reading, your hand in filthy water trying to get clean. Midway through the book, pause to go outside and STRETCH your body, give a good stretch and yawn if you can yawn, this would be around page 54 with the stanzas, “We will be naming / the dead and injured / and reading anti-war / poetry. Email but put / “Anti-War Poetry / Book” in the subject / line to make sure / you’re not deleted.” The dryer, sit in front of it if it’s got a round glass window, sit as close as you can. While reading have the rolling heated clothes with the water sucking from their fibers be the image that frames the book. At some point OPEN THE DRYER and stick your head inside with your eyes closed and FEEL the intense heat and humidity, then close it and go back to reading. You would be surprised that no one really notices you, in case you worry about such things. Everyone’s busy, they don’t even care to know that you’re in the middle of experimenting with your reading. If you feel comfortable enough, invite someone in the laundromat to listen to you read from the book for them, “I think there / are theres here / in my devices / the rigorous buffoonery / the fleshy statistics / the secret minutes / the cathected works.”
Julian Brolaski | Buck in a Corridor | flynpyntar | 2009
Button mushrooms are what I bring to this. Any mushroom you want, but button mushrooms are the only mushrooms I enjoy raw. ENJOYMENT is essential! Please do not wash them, they absorb water. Brush them off with a clean, dry towel, that’s all. Go out into the fresh air and sun. Take these fungus which have grown in quiet darkness, bring them OUT into the lit world with you. Find a place to relax. Lie flat on your back, place a mushroom on crotch of your pants or dress or whatever. If you’re naked, GREAT, but be clean, as you have to eat these morsels. Spend a little time with your eyes closed, meditating on your genitals, on the mushroom on your genitals. Then move that mushroom up to your breast for the heart chakra point. Put a new one on your genitals. Rest and meditate again. Then move the first one to middle of your forehead, the second one to your heart, and yet a third one on your genitals again. Now start reading, but be aware that you are MOVING through the mushrooms a channel of energy UP from your genitals to your mind. Read, “to act in opposition to one’s genitals / turn your cock inside out and get a cunt like a prius / vs. take some cuntflesh and get a cock like the wright flyer I / @ kitty hawk / with adverse yaw / wingwarped / circumnavigated / how to fashion / a canard” After reading a little while, pause and take the mushroom off your forehead. Pull the stem off and eat it. Run your thumbs along the feathery gills on the underside of the cap. Press it inside out a bit. Cuntflesh into Cock, back again, back again, then EAT IT! It’s delicious, right? Move the mushrooms UP, from heart to forehead, etc., with a new one on genitals. Read, “going around adding –ess to nouns / “lion-ess” / “poet-ess” / that’s such a load / so that the daffydill yawns back / the one who taught me grk is dead / you want to put them in your lap” Pause and study the mushroom from your forehead, EAT IT, move them up, and keep reading until the delicious book is finished, the delicious mushrooms are finished, “we’ve all crossed thresholds we don’t brag about / iphigenia oxling / when arbolaf dies / one is hailed to arden / as one goes hitherto / asphyxiating along the gowanus / in spite of that rat light / in the gutted yardland / or where jackadaws coo / in concrete galoshes”
Anselm Berrigan | To Hell with Sleep | Letter Machine Editions | 2009
GET IN THE DARK. Bring a flashlight into a closet and take pillows and shirts and socks and panties and whatever the fuck you can find to CLOSE all the cracks of light from getting IN there. And put a fan in there, and bring water, and put the fan on low. THIS is now the atmosphere for THIS. It’s a good time to praise with utmost gratitude SIGHT! Is anyone going to be looking for you? Make sure you plan on telling everyone you’re going out, to a movie, somewhere, BUT to really have THIS as THIS atmosphere, having it as all your own, don’t tell anyone where you are. It’s none of their business how you absorb poems. These line breaks are more like line cuts, cutting across the page, a good thing the flashlight can trace. Do you have binoculars, do you? I tried this and it was marvelous: so put the book on the other side of the closet, which I did by suspending it with clothes hangers. Then flash the light on the book while reading the page through the binoculars, it’s great. It’s kind of hard actually, which is great. Every once in awhile SHUT OFF the light and sit there in the pool of pitch black quiet. Then SUDDENLY flick the flashlight back on and read quickly for a little while to make the reading in your head THE SOUND that comes, the light, the reading. “I’m glad for waste, its / ascension, its emotional arc / into the prose of governance. / Dumb hostilities issue forth / from all the movements of yester- / morrow; am I liberal when it / comes to prostitution? No.” How is this for you, you know you like dark poetry reading, “At the used frame shop / the cruel chase a world. Dan / Marino from Nutrisystem / tells good carbs from bad.”
Eric Baus | Tuned Droves | Octopus | 2009
Be fully dressed for this one. Fill a tub with a nice hot bath, bubbles TOO, and a good amount of it. Climb in, shoes and all, shirt, pants, even a coat if you want. It’s nice to FEEL the warm water soak into the fabric, and fill the shoes, soak into the socks, then, then it hits the skin, ah, time for poetry. Make yourself pee before doing this by the way or your bladder will pressure you out of the tub, unless of course you just want to pee yourself in the tub, it’s your choice, don’t let me interfere. This book is perfect for a submerged body, but don’t get suds on it, or water, and don’t doze off and drown, I’m sure Eric Baus would feel terrible, and I would have to console him and tell him that it wasn’t his fault you’re so stupid to fall asleep with such a book in hand. In fact you deserve to drown if you fall asleep while reading it. But you’re not stupid, you’re OK, you’re fine, but midway through reading the book STAND UP SUDDENLY, maybe just before “THE CONTINUOUS CORNER” section. Enjoy the water falling out of your clothes, drip drip, it’s dripping off of you, you have a body made MOSTLY OF water, but when it’s outside you it drips off, unless of course you peed yourself in the tub, then it’s dripping out of you. Enjoying this marvelous book? “When the work was finished, there were no chapters. / The name of the child was It Is Not Here. / It is unlikely this is precise. / To reproduce his mother’s voice, hydrogen was added to the body. / For all this activity, the sound was flat.”
More CA Conrad here.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2011 | Jeffrey Pethybridge
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Jaime Saenz, trans. Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson | The Night | Princeton | 2007
Somewhere there must be a list or book full of permanent poems on permanent things like the ocean or the night, and sometimes you say to yourself: man, I want to write one of those poems, but how? “And then a very odd thing happens: // at a certain moment you begin to see the other side of the night, // and you realize with a start it is already inside you. // But this, of course happens only with the great drunks.”
Walt Whitman, ed. Edward F. Grier | Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts: Volume II Washington | NYU | 1984
Focused reading on the hospital diaries, which in the context of documentary poetics read like a serial poem and all the more powerful for how it’s notational music plays against the eloquent prose of Specimen Days. The diaries might be a perfect test case for Spicer assertion that the poet has to be tricked into writing a serial poem. Interesting also how certain impressions or images––notably the capitol dome statue––stay with him and move from the notebooks to letters, sometimes to poems and how they change in each textual appearance.
Anthony Madrid | The 580 Strophes | manuscript
Crackling thru or under all the verve, humor, élan and wit of the Madrid persona is something else, a form of (momentary) liberty, maybe, yeah that’s it, and isn’t that one of the things Wilde said about masks. “You see, Horatio, I find it easy enough to play both parts in this comedy. / Like every self-righteous rebel, I have internalized the seminal tyrant.”
Kristin Ross | The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune | Verso | 2008
After reading this I dreamt I started distributing a free text––partly a collage partly not––entitled “The Right to Laziness” all thru Austin.
Arthur Rimbaud, trans. John Ashbery | Illuminations | Norton | 2011
Arthur Rimbaud, trans. Donald Revell | Illuminations | Omnidawn | 2009
Arthur Rimbaud, trans. Donald Revell | A Season in Hell | Omnidawn | 2007
Every time I read Rimbaud (in translation) I feel like I’m reading his poems for the first time: it’s full of surprises and that sense of the new, but I don’t feel my reading takes hold or deepens. No other reading experience has ever been elusive in precisely this way. The Ashbery is a great addition to the composite of Rimbaud in English.
Michael Cross | Haeccities | Cuneiform | 2010
Limned by their epigraphs, more even so than their titles, the poems make a terrific music that is at once specifically sensuous and generally allusive, and the result is a powerful form of the lyric. Or rather, maybe it’s better to hear these poems as issuing from that obscurer tradition––devolved from the epic––of wandering philosophers with their strange and beautiful hexameters: “in Pisa say, for Twombly, the frame maintains its course of shape / the frame-abyss, Apollo in the woods, lake-red for sacrifice and use.”
Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds. | The Torture Papers | Cambridge | 2005
Since the crimes detailed in these papers (and in subsequent documents) will never come before a court or a truth commission, what then? Can what we call cultural forms such as history or poetry embody an alternative, albeit lesser, form of accountability, and if so what will that reckoning look like? For me the start of the answer to this question has been to see within the torture memos the epic poem of American empire at the start of the 21st century.
Walter Benjamin, trans Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin | The Arcades Project | Harvard | 1999
Rereading this for the pleasure of wandering and it’s flashing methodology.
Hoa Nguyen | As Long As Trees Last | manuscript
Note-taking rhythms and syntax prevail, but are punctuated by a kind of cinematic image, and all of it is highly condensed and tuned to the mixture of textures (familial, economic, environmental) of daily living: “What can’t stay / late in the month: // dolphin fetus not birds / washing up in numbers.”
Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi, eds. | The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov | Stanford | 2004
Of all the letters of poets that poets read, these should be first on the list, sorry Keats.
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Written by Steve Evans
October 28, 2011 at 9:00 am
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with Albert Gelpi, Anthony Madrid, Arthur Rimbaud, Edward F. Grier, Forrest Gander, Hoa Nguyen, Howard Eiland, Jaime Saenz, Jeffrey Pethybridge, Joshua L. Dratel, Karen J. Greenberg, Kent Johnson, Kevin McLaughlin, Kristin Ross, Michael Cross, Robert J. Bertholf, Walt Whitman, Walter Benjamin