Posts Tagged ‘Jack Spicer’
Attention Span 2011 | Melanie Neilson
Rae Armantrout | Versed | Wesleyan | 2009
Anne Boyer | The Romance of Happy Workers | Coffee House | 2008
Rod Smith | Deed | Iowa | 2007
CA Conrad | The Book of Frank | Chax | 2009
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009
Steve Farmer | Glowball | Theenk | 2010
Eileen Myles | The Importance of Being Iceland | Semiotext(e) | 2009
Sianne Ngai | Ugly Feelings | Harvard | 2005
Jerry Lewis | The Total Film-Maker | Random | 1971
Kevin Killian | Impossible Princess | City Lights | 2009
Monica de la Torre | Public Domain | Roof | 2008
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009
Gertrude Stein | Lucy Church Amiably | Something Else | 1930 reissued 1969
Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This to Me | Wesleyan | 2008
Philip Whalen, ed. Michael Rothenberg | The Collected Poems | Wesleyan | 2007
Lew Welch, ed. Donald Allen | Ring of Bone: Collected 1950-1970 | Grey Fox | 1979
Donald Bogle | Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters | Harper Collins | 2011
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. | Race Music | California |2003
Bern Porter | Found Poems | Nightboat | 2011
Jessica B. Harris | High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America | Bloomsbury | 2011
James Lee Burke | Detective Dave Robicheaux series of 18 thrillers set in Louisiana: The Neon Rain to The Glass Rainbow | Pocket | 1989-2010
Lewis Klahr, Engram Sepals | Melodramas (sequence of seven 16mm films, 75 minutes) | 1994-2000
Elvis Presley | The Country Side of Elvis | RCA | 2001
Raymond Chandler, performed by Elliott Gould | Red Wind (1938) | New Millennium Audio | 2002
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More Melanie Neilson here.
Neilson’s Attention Span for 2009. Back to 2011 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 – 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 2010 – Dan Beachy-Quick
Daniel Tiffany | Infidel Poetics | Chicago | 2010
G.W. Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Rescher | Monadology | Pittsburgh | 1991
Allen Grossman | True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing | Chicago | 2009
Julie Carr | 100 Notes on Violence | Ahsahta | 2010
Lucy Ives | Anamnesis | Slope | 2010
Devin Johnston | Creaturely and Other Essays | Turtle Point | 2009
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009
David Markson | Wittgenstein’s Mistress | Dalkey Archive | 2006 (reprint)
Peter Riley | A Map of Faring | Free Verse | 2005
Jack Spicer | The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer | Black Sparrow | 1980
Lyn Hejinian | Saga/Circus | Omnidawn | 2008
Attention Span 2009 – Andrew Epstein
Roberto Bolano | The Savage Detectives | FSG | 2007
As many others have said, this novel has to be one of the most exhilarating, devastating, exhausting, and revealing accounts to be found of avant-garde poetry and the movements that sustain it – the avant-garde as dream, as farce, as tragedy, as inspiring coterie and impossible community, tantalizing possibility and heart-breaking, inevitable failure. “The problem with literature, like life, said Don Crispín, is that in the end people always turn into bastards.”
Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer | Wesleyan University Press | 2008
“I gave you my imaginary hand and you give me your imaginary hand and we walk together (in imagination) over the earthly ground.” Such a beautiful, and beautifully edited, book. The early work, like Spicer himself, feels suddenly indispensable. “Plague took us and the land from under us, / Rose like a boil, enclosing us within.”
Lisa Robertson | The Weather | New Star Books | 2001
“Days heap upon us,” Robertson writes. As do words, well-turned, elusive, gorgeous, consistently surprising, like days themselves. “A slight cloud drifts contrary to the planet; the day might be used formally to contain a record of idleness… It is the clear, magnificent, misunderstood morning; we pick up the connections.”
David Shapiro | New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) | Overlook Press | 2007.
A radiant gathering: always surprising and strange, mournful, playful, and wise. “Thus, in presenting sleep // The poem must leap over the cut-offs. / You see clearly in a revolution, // Look down and notice how you have slept.” … “Out of the pills and the pencils, out of toothbrushes and night guards, out of CDs and Altoids, out of feathers and staplers, out of time clocks and syllabi, out of tissues and scissors, nothing straight has ever been made.”
Gabriel Gudding | Rhode Island Notebook | Dalkey Archive Press | 2007
This is a seriously big, seriously funny book: ambitious and capacious, sharp-eyed and dangerous (at least to other drivers on the road). “Very hazy / the bug splats collect & remark / upon the butterscotch light / of the sun directly / ahead. The corn stands in lines of / musketeers row upon rank / : It is late corn. It is late. / At 5:47 PM the sun is a / sharper orange, juicier. Then it pales.// What strange fate light is here: as if / a pig is coming out of the sun instead of / sunlight. what white, fat, changing light.”
Alice Notley | Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems: 1970-2005 | Wesleyan University Press | 2006.
Like the other large selecteds here, this volume is such a welcome, generous bringing together. “Your Dailiness, / I guess I must address you / begin and progress somewhat peculiarly, wanting / not afraid to be anonymous, to love what’s at hand / I put out a hand, it’s sewn & pasted hingewise & / enclosed in cover. I’m 27 and booked …”
Katie Degentesh | The Anger Scale | Combo Books | 2006
Flarf is trying to break your heart. “I hated my mother for hating cats / but I wanted her to live, and I knew that // in this era of navel gazing, / it was my navel she was always gazing at. // After mastering the rules of grammar / she was like a ghost to all my friends // No one felt they had the right to have her committed / while baking cookies.”
Ron Silliman | The Age of Huts (compleat) | University of California Press | 2007
Ron Silliman | The Alphabet | University of Alabama Press | 2008.
A remarkable, inexhaustible achievement. “Ketjak,” like the rest of the works in these books, has a rare quality: addictive and good for you at the same time. “The form itself is the model of a city, extension, addition, modification.”
Carole Maso | The Art Lover | New Directions | 2006 [reprint, 1991]
“I am a lover of detail, a marker—it’s a way of keeping the world in place. One documents, makes lists to avoid becoming simply petals. I am like you, Max: a looker, an accountant, a record keeper, a creator of categories, a documenter. For evidence, I rip flyers from telephone poles, save every scrap of paper I get. Listen carefully. Organize. Reorganize.”
James Schuyler | Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951-1991 | Turtle Point Press | 2004
A wonderful trove of chatter, wit, news, and aperçus. “December in New York is one big mess. Everybody gets drunk too much: Mike Goldberg looks gray and shaky; New York looks bright and shaky; Frank, I’m sorry to say, looks gray and shaky. Write him plenty heap big buck-up notes and postals; Xmas is depressing for some of us deracine Christians.”
Joshua Clover | The Totality for Kids | University of California Press | 2006
Under the paving stones, the city! But it’s another city, a shattered and shattering place which Clover discovers to be where we already are living: “City which is / A love letter. Interior to that, / City emerging naked from the white / Indifferences of winter. City / Once hidden in the library and now / Drowsing in the sleep of the collective.” “Say hello to the generation that burned itself in effigy.”
More Andrew Epstein here.
Attention Span 2009 – G.C. Waldrep
Alice Notley | Alma, or The Dead Women | Granary Books | 2006
Geoffrey Hill | Selected Poems | Yale University Press | 2009
Jack Spicer | My Vocabulary Did This to Me | Wesleyan University Press | 2008
Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer | 2666 | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 2008
Wallace Stevens | Collected Poetry & Prose | Library of America | 1997
Fanny Howe | The Winter Sun | Graywolf Press | 2009
Asher Ghaffar | Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music | ECW Press | 2009
Lisa Robertson | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House Books | 2009
Carla Harryman | Adorno’s Noise | Essay Press | 2008
Alice Oswald | A Sleepwalk on the Severn | Faber | 2009
Ismail Kadare, trans. David Bellos | The Siege | Canongate | 2008
Some other titles I’ve spent time thinking about this past year, in no particular order and for many different reasons: Ulf Stolterfoht, Lingos I-IX (trans. Rosmarie Waldrop); Emily Wilson, Micrographia; Cal Bedient, Days of Unwilling; Michael Dickman, The End of the West; Katy Lederer, The Heaven-Sent Leaf; Cole Swensen, Ours; Susan Stewart, Red Rover; Kevin Prufer, National Anthem; Lyn Hejinian, Saga/Circus; Robyn Schiff, Revolver; Laynie Browne, Daily Sonnets; Jacqueline Risset, Sleep’s Powers (trans. Jennifer Moxley); Eric Baus, Tuned Droves; Dan Beachy-Quick, This Nest, Swift Passerine; Mark Cunningham, Body Language; Brian Teare, Sight Map; Sandy Florian, The Tree of No; Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection; J. Robert Lennon, Castle & Pieces for the Left Hand; John Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth?
More G.C. Waldrep here.
Attention Span – Simon Schuchat
Tony Towle | Winter Journey | Hanging Loose | 2008
The romantic temperment, tempered by time, cool and classical.
James Church | Corpse in the Koryo | St Martins | 2007
North Korean detective Inspector O solves the mysteries of the universe.
Jack Spicer | My Vocabulary Did this to me | Wesleyan | 2008
All of me, why not take all of me!
Paul Clark | The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History | Cambridge | 2008
An account, not of the politics, but of the culture—how those model operas were collectively created, what happened to painting, what about the movies—sympathetic and brilliant.
August Kleinzahler | Sleeping it off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected | FSG | 2008
The tough guy, a guilty pleasure.
Susan Naquin | Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400-1900 | California | 2000
A beautiful, granular history of the celestial capital when it was still itself, from the Yongle Emperor to the Boxers.
Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | Subpress | 2007
Lovely music of what happens, gracefully.
Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin | 2007
The American sound, clear and chill—need I explain?
Stephen Owen | The Late Tang: Poetry of the mid-9th century | Harvard East Asian Monographs | 2007
Belated companion to his high Tang masterwork, fully its equal—what you need on Li Shangyin, Du Mu, Bo Juyi, and the milieu.
Der Nister | The Family Mashber | New York Review Books Classics | 2008
Magic socialist realism in the shetl of Berdichev.
Ron Padgett | How to Be Perfect | Coffee House | 2007
As is.
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More Simon Schuchat here.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2011 | Sara Wintz
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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.
Written by Steve Evans
October 18, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with Carl Maas, Cecila Corrigan, David Zwirner Gallery, Eileen Myles, George Oppen, Jack Spicer, Joan Didion, Josephine Miles, Richard Cándida-Smith, Sally Banes, Steve Dixon, Sue-Ellen Case