Attention Span 2011 | Marjorie Perloff

Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat | 2011

The title poem is Bergvall’s brilliantly satiric version of Chaucer, anatomizing the current socio-cultural scene, but this rich collection also includes the experimental verse of “Goan Atom,” and (my favorite) “Cropper,” Bergvall’s multilingual exploration of sedimentation—of “borders, rules, boundaries, edges, limbos at historical breaches.”

Craig Dworkin | Motes | Roof | 2011

Minimalist procedural lyrics that uncover the secrets within given words and morphemes. Dworkin’s version of Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise, it’s a totally delightful and pleasurable but also intellectually rigorous book.

Peter Gizzi | Threshold Songs | Wesleyan | 2011

This may be Gizzi’s best book to date: the mood is elegiac (the poet’s brother Michael had just died) but also jaunty: whenever the darkness becomes too hard to bear, a colloquial—even funnynote brings us back to the everyday world: “Don’t back away. Turtle into it / with your little force.”

Christian Hawkey | Ventrakl | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Hawkey’s surreal lyric sequence, prompted by the life and work of Georg Trakl. Using a great variety of verse forms and prose interludes, Hawkey produces a terrifying and moving poem about legacy, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves so as to avoid self-recognition.

Heinrich Heine, trans. into Portuguese and with an introd. by André Vallias | Heine, hein? – Poeta dos contrários | Sao Paulo: Perspectiva | 2011

Heine, one of the great lyric poets of all time, is still very little known in the US and translations have been partial and problematic. But Vallias, himself a fine poet, has produced an amazing book, including all the major poems as well as essays, letters, and bibliographical material. My Portuguese is very rudimentary but I marvel at what can—and is being—done elsewhere to bring one nation’s poetry into the present of another’s.

Christian Marclay, dir. | The Clock | a film | 2010

To my mind, the finest conceptual work ever produced: this 24-hour montage of film clips played in real time (featuring an infinite variety of clocks, watches, and verbal signals indicating that exact time in each shot) is endlessly enchanting—a Waiting for Godot for the 21^st Century where we are always waiting—for the event that never happens and which is immediately eclipsed and displaced by another event. Can life be this dramatic? The Clock is nerve-wracking, funny, moving: and when you come out of the gallery (I saw about 8 hours worth at LACMA) you think you’re still in the picture, about to witness the bank robbery or the wake-up call, even as the music bleeds unaccountably from one scene into the next.

Vanessa Place | Tragodía: 1: Statement of Facts | Blanc | 2010

This compendium of court testimonies and police reports—all of them taken from Place’s own files (she is an appellate criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles) has raised enormous controversy: Place has been accused of being soft on rapists. But the fact of this Statement of Facts is that she has simply arranged her material so as to tell it like it is—no sides taken, no points made, and yet an unforgettable image of how events in the contemporary city play themselves out. The book reads like a Henry James novel: what, we ask at every turn, really happened?

Srikanth Reddy | Voyager | California | 2011

Reddy’s writing-through of Kurt Waldheim’s memoir (3 times in 3 different ways) is a devastating exposé of political mendacity and maudlin self-justification. It’s a brilliantly rendered work that literally “speaks for itself.”

Jonathan Stalling | Yingelishi | Counterpath | 2011

Yingelishi (pronounced yeen guh lee shr) sounds like an accented pronunciation of the word “English,” even as, for the Chinese reader, its characters spell out “chanted songs, beautiful poetry.” Spalding combines homophonic translatation, with the dictionary meaning of the different phrases as well as their Chinese characters so as to demonstrate what the new language of some 350 million people looks and feels like. Comes with a website so that we can hear these sounds spoken and chanted. It’s a brilliant tour de force.

Uljana Wolf, trans. Susan Bernofsky | False Friends | Ugly Duckling | 2011

These DICHTionary poems are based on so-called “false friends” in German and English—words that look and/or sound familiar in both languages but differ in meaning.  The comedy that results is full of surprises—a lovely sequence for our multilingual moment. And Ugly Duckling’s production is, as always, a pleasure.

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Susan Howe | THAT THIS | New Directions | 2010

I list this last and separately because Howe’s very important book won the Bollingen Prize and I was one of three judges so my comment on it is a part of the award citation.

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Marjorie Perloff‘s most recent book is Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Her Wittgenstein’s Ladder has just been translated into Spanish and is soon coming out in French. She is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.

Perloff’s Attention Span for 2006, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | G.C. Waldrep

Not necessarily my “favorites” over the past year, but these are the eleven books I spent the most time thinking about, in no particular order:

Peter Larkin | Terrain Seed Scarcity | Salt | 2001

Somehow I missed this when it originally came out. A magisterial anthem and model of challenging ecopoetics, stretching towards the post-human (perhaps) but very, very beautiful. I have been fantasizing about quitting my day job and spending the next six years or so studying this text. (Larkin also has a new collection, Leaves of Field, from Shearsman, but I haven’t read it yet.)

Laynie Browne | Roseate, Points of Gold | Dusie | 2011

The best collection so far by a mid-career poet not enough of my friends and colleagues know about.

Laura Mullen | Dark Archive | California | 2011

Adonis, trans. Khaled Mattawa | Selected Poems | Yale | 2010

John Taggart | Is Music: Selected Poems | Copper Canyon | 2010

I still wonder whether one of Taggart’s earlier single volumes (perhaps When the Saints) isn’t the best introduction to his work, but he is an absolutely essential and underrecognized poet. I’m still hoping this volume will convene a larger audience for his work.

Dana Levin | Sky Burial | Copper Canyon | 2011

Peter O’Leary | Luminous Epinoia | The Cultural Society | 2010

Harriet Tarlo, ed. | The Ground Aslant: Radical Landscape Poetry | Shearsman | 2011

If you’ve been wondering where the interesting contemporary British poetry is hiding, you can find quite a bit of it here (including the abovementioned Peter Larkin and also Elisabeth Bletsoe, whose second collection, Landscape from a Dream [Shearsman, 2008], is worth finding).

Zach Savich | Annulments | UP of Colorado | 2010

Maryrose Larkin | The Name of This Intersection Is Frost | Shearsman | 2010

Jonathan Stalling | Grotto Heaven | Chax | 2010

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Also: Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions, 2011); Dan Beachy-Quick, Circle’s Apprentice (Tupelo, 2011); Jean Valentine, Break the Glass (Copper Canyon, 2010); C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon, 2011); Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010); Melissa Kwasny, The Nine Senses (Milkweed, 2011); Harold Schweizer, On Waiting (Routledge, 2008); Seyhan Erözçelik (trans. Murat Nemet-Nejat), Rosestrikes & Coffee Grinds (Talisman, 2010); Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Fady Joudah), If I Were Another (FSG, 2011); René Char (trans. Mary Ann Caws & Nancy Kline), Furor & Mystery and Other Writings (Black Widow, 2011); John Yau, A Thing among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (D.A.P., 2008), Shane McCrae, Mule (Cleveland State, 2010).

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G.C. Waldrep’s latest collections are Archicembalo (Tupelo, 2009) and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (in collaboration with John Gallaher; BOA Editions, 2011). Projective Industries just released his chapbook, ‘St. Laszlo Hotel.’ He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and serves as editor-at-large for The Kenyon Review. Waldrep’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2006, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.