Attention Span 2010 – Robert Stanton

John Ashbery | Collected Poems 1956-1987 | Library of America | 2008

On the (debatable, but defensible) premise that “the more Ashbery the better,” this is the best Ashbery to date. A universe unto itself.

Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer | Antwerp | New Directions | 2010

Bolaño remaking himself—somewhat painfully—from post-Beat bard to ruthlessly dispassionate novelist. Fascinating to watch.

Andrea Brady | Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination | Krupskaya | 2010

Human history—and the “essay”—as slo-mo explosion. A timely and salient product of imaginative (rather than ethical) deregulation.

Anne Carson | Nox | New Directions | 2010

Grief as it is, opaque and piercing. Even the accordion form of the text seems oddly allegorical: it’s constantly threatening to bend away from you and scatter as you read.

Joseph Massey | Exit North | BookThug | 2010

The contemporary king of minimalism (“Old news—after a storm— / torn apart between two lawns”—that’s a whole poem, “Sunday”) wandering down increasing philosophical paths.

Ange Mlinko | Shoulder Season | Coffee House | 2010

Mlinko here uses her stance as unapologetic aesthete to craft a surprisingly political volume, presenting in florabundant language our increasingly diminishing world as both great sorrow and supreme joy. Book of the year, if I’m forced.

Ange Mlinko | Hotel Lazuli | in An Instance | Instance | 2010

Written in the shadow of that trickster Pessoa, a glorious pendant to Shoulder Season. Her vocabulary alone—spirochete, cozier, bilabiate, duochrome, phenotype, a-pollyanna-ing (all used precisely)—makes me glad.

Jennifer Moxley | Fragments of a Broken Poetics | Chicago Review 55.2 | 2010

Can any one person be “the voice of a generation” these days? Probably not (and a good thing too), but Jennifer Moxley comes pretty close.

J. H. Prynne | Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage Artesian | Barque | 2009

Like most recent Prynne, this brushes achingly close to some unprecedented meaning without quite committing, leaving the reader alert and abuzz. Title of the year too, by some margin.

Kay Ryan | The Best of It | Grove | 2010

I kept coming back to this. Like good whiskey, Ryan’s poems are bracing in small doses, but increasingly nauseating when consumed in bulk. Taken individually, though, they impress as true works of “quietude,” promoting humility, pragmatism, stoicism and a kind of amused awe at the complexity of the world. “Wisdom” is impossibly unhip, but Ryan has her moments.

More Rob Stanton here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Michael Scharf

Ange Mlinko | assorted reviews in The Nation

Best Seidel takedown ever.  Better than the Possum Pouch essay claiming Seidel for Flarf.

Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | subpress | 2009

Truer than Williams or Olson. Half a Hesiodic Janus-face (with Luoma’s Works & Days). The great book of turn-of-the-century New York.

Jane Dark’s sugarhigh! | October 1, 2008 thru June 13, 2009 | janedark.com

Joshua Clover | poems read on May 13, 2008 at Princeton

Compiled the above set of entries into a PDF (minus a few things), resulting in le livre de la crise, a book of exquisite exposition. The poems, some written before Fall 2008, promise definitiveness of a different order.

Jeet Thayil, ed. | The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets | Bloodaxe | 2008

Great love and side-taking. Can sense many poems behind the choices even if I can’t see them, and can also catch sight of the social formations behind them (in a way that I haven’t for 20th C. Canada, Britain, Australia and related diasporim). Not the place to read Kolatkar and others for the first time, but for me the place, transformatively, to read Gopal Honnalgere for the first time.

John Ashbery | Collected Poems 1956-1987 | Library of America | 2008

The 12 poems of Rivers and Mountains take on a momentous scale and aspect, with “Clepsydra” and “The Skaters” as oeuvre prisms: light enters them in spectra, and leaves in lines (of what is to come). Double Dream as the best book of Fall 2008 (“Soonest Mended”; “Decoy”; “Definition of Blue”).

Jordan Davis | Reading at the Zinc Bar with George Stanley and Chris Nealon | May 15, 2009

This seemed to take place in bullet time.

Josef Kaplan | Our Heavies | chapbook | 2009

T-Pain presents The 1990s, a bildungsroman.

Juliana Spahr | “The Incinerator” | Lana Turner | 2008

Total destruction of the pathetic fallacy.

Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni | 2008

She stands, at 5′ 1”, like Donatello’s David, hand on cocked hip, sword resting at waist, hat pulled low. Seconds until the voice comes in, on, over. Each death and loss adds to its saturate. It sings through (“spell it ‘galaxie'”) life, this unbearably beautiful book its form. Icon incarnations as multiply era-synechdochic; metamorphoses as mirror; close encounters as abrasions, as identifications, interstices, and interpellations (“the magnificent instability of the sign”). Attack, Sustain, Decay, Release.

Kunwar Narayan, trans. from Hindi by Apurva Narayan | No Other World: Selected Poems | Rupa | 2008

Xi Chuan, trans. from Mandarin by Arthur Sze | “On Wang Ximeng’s Blue and Green Horizontal Landscape Scroll, A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains” | Boston Review 34.3 | May-June 2009

Hans Varghese Mathews | “Words and Picturables: Image and Perlocution in English Verse” | Phalanx 3 | http://www.phalanx.in

The Almost Island conference in Delhi this past February (curated by Bei Dao, Sharmistha Mohanty, and Vivek Narayanan) brought together poets from China and India for a multi-day set of dialogues, visits, and retreats. (Gist: movement, led by Ashis Nandy, toward some meanings for India and China as “civilizations,” in senses that avoided much that is either discursively co-opted or out-of-bounds.) Kunwar Narayan and Xi Chuan read together the first night. I’ve lent away my copies of No Other World, but Narayan is considered to be, and felt like, a Stevens-caliber figure, a poet whose subtlety matches the stakes of the Hindutva era. Xi Chuan, part of the circle of poets associated with Bei Dao’s journal Jintian (founded in 1978), read a selection of poems that included “Wang Ximeng”; the poem seemed a reply to “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” with society as self. I agreed with Hans Mathews, one of the respondents, that it seemed to destroy the framing of the event; Mathews’s own essay contains a phenomenal phenomenology of the poetic image.

Roberto Calasso | The Forty-Nine Steps | Minnesota | 2001

Brilliant on Nietzsche. Devastating on Brecht (while preserving the poems). Stirner, Schreber, Wedekind all also here, and Benjamin. The best possible antidote for George Steiner. Calasso’s Ka also a great restorative following unreadable translations of the Mahabharata.

More Michael Scharf here.

Attention Span 2009 – Bill Berkson

Charles M. Joseph | Stravinsky & Balanchine | Yale | 2002

Morton Feldman | Morton Feldman in Middelburg: Words on Music Volumes I & II| MusikTexte 34 | 2008

John Ashbery | Collected Poems 1956-1987 | Library of America | 2008

Pierre Reverdy, trans. Joh Ashbery | Haunted House | Brooklyn Rail & Black Square | 2008

William Kentridge et alia | WK5 | SFMoMA & Yale | 2008

John Godfrey | City of Corners | Wave | 2008

Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008

Kenneth Koch | The Collected Poems | Knopf | 2005

Alex Hamilton | Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art | University of Michigan | 2007

Isaiah Berlin | Russian Thinkers | Penguin | 1977

Duncan McNaughton | Bounce | First Intensity | 2007

Bill Berkson’s recent books are Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems (Coffee House, 2009) and Ted Berrigan (with George Schneeman, Cuneiform, 2009).

Attention Span – Rod Smith

John Ashbery | Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems | Ecco

Robert Creeley | Selected Letters | manuscript

Mark Cunningham | 80 Beetles | Otilith

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge

Peter Gizzi | The Outernationale | Wesleyan

Aerial 10: Lyn Hejinian Special Issue | manuscript

Joanne Kyger | About Now: Collected Poems | National Poetry Foundation

Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo

Mel Nichols | Bicycle Day | Slack Buddha

Tom Raworth | Let Baby Fall | Critical Documents

plus one:

McKenzie Wark | 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International | Buell Center/Forum

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More Rod Smith here.