Attention Span 2011 | Suzanne Stein

Brian Whitener | False Intimacy | Trafficker | 2011

Erika Staiti | In the Stitches | Trafficker | 2011

Dana Ward | Cory Arcangel’s “All the Parts from Simon and Garfunkel’s 1984 Central Park Performance Where Garfunkel Sings with His Hands in His Pocket” | Open Space, the SFMOMA blog | November 10, 2010

Kaja Silverman | Flesh of My Flesh| Stanford | 2009

Barrett Watten | Total Syntax | Southern Illinois | 1985

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There are some other things I loved this year also. Laura Moriarty’s | A Tonalist | (Nightboat Books | 2010). David Brazil’s | yo! eos! | (Neo-Baroque, 2011). Sara Larsen’s | The Hallucinated (cannot exist, 2011). I stopped going to poetry readings at the beginning of November. I read The Coming Insurrection. I remembered I went to work in an art museum because I love the way I feel when I am looking at paintings, so I looked at a lot of paintings. I read The Handbook of Poetic Forms. I watched Gena Rowlands in Opening Night again and I bought the John Cassavetes | Five Films box set from The Criterion Collection | 2004. I went to the Bancroft Library for the first time. I listened to Stephen Cope’s | Conference of the Birds | podcasts. I went to Detroit. I stopped in Boston, Baltimore, and Denver. I went to Maine. I visited the Kabuki Hot Springs eight times. I read The Painting of Modern Life. I didn’t go to the office on a lot of Fridays. I looked at a calendar chronology of Duchamp. I bought a rotary telephone and a Sunday subscription to the New York Times. “No knows where that humming is coming from; one could not stop it if one tried.” (Barrett Watten, Total Syntax, 1985.)

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Suzanne Stein is a poet. She works currently as community producer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, editing the museum’s online magazine, Open Space, and organizing a variety of talk- and conversation-based programs. She lives in Oakland. Stein’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Alli Warren

Suzanne Stein | Hole In Space | OMG! | 2009

The poet’s body as a public communication sculpture.

David Larsen, trans. | Names of the Lion | Atticus/Finch | 2009

A pleasure to finally see this text in print after David’s jaw-dropping performance at the Unitarian Center in San Francisco, 2007.

Robert Fitterman | Rob the Plagiarist | Roof Books | 2009

“Why listen to my gut when I could listen to thousands of guts?”

David Brazil & Sara Larsen, eds. | Try | 2008-2009

AKA “Try!” Together with Dodie & Kevin’s “Mirage Periodical,” this little stapled, xeroxed magazine owns the Bay Area. It’s an INDUSTRY.

Lisa Robertson | The Men: A Lyric Book | Book Thug | 2006

“The funny pathos of men – I salute this.” I keep returning to this little lyric book.

Brandon Brown | The Poems Of Gaius Valerius Catullus 1-60 | Unpublished | 2009

Catullus is envious.

Abner Jay | One Man Band | Subliminal Sounds | 2003

Jay traveled around the South in a mobile home and performed as the (self-described) “last working Southern black minstrel.” Hilarious and heartbreaking.

Stephen Rodefer | Four Lectures | The Figures | 1981

News to me. Killed me. Continues to kill me.

Anne Boyer | Art Is War | Mitzvah Chaps | 2008

A new world treatise. Includes the smash hit “Difficult Ways to Publish Poetry.”

Bill Luoma | When the Pathogenic Wind Comes | Unpublished

The looping–“with crooked spring and great pouring”–is trance-making.

John Cassavetes | Films | 1959-1977

Especially “A Woman Under the Influence” and “Faces”—Gena Rowlands is my one true love.

More Alli Warren here.