Attention Span 2009 – Stephen Cope

Joseph Donohue | Terra Lucida | Talisman House | 2009

Donohue’s singular economy of reticence and revelation is in evidence here throughout. Why is he not more widely read and celebrated?

Kenneth Goldsmith, ed. | Poetry Magazine: July/August 2009 | Poetry Foundation | 2009

Still trying to find the right acronym for Flarf: Faux Libertines Against Real Feeling, perhaps? Feminists, Libertarians, Antinomians, Revolutionaries, and Fakes? False Lyricists Appropriating Real Fascism?  Finally Liberated Artists. Recouping… etc. These are not the most interesting Flarf poems I’ve encountered, but still remain more interesting than the vast majority of poems published in this esteemed organ over the last, say, two decades. As for conceptual poetry: I recently ran across a copy of Goldsmith’s “Baseball” in the “sports” section of a used bookstore. Nuff said.

Fanny Howe | The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation | Greywolf | 2009

Perhaps the most important piece of advice I received in graduate school was the simple exhortation: “you should listen to Fanny.”

Adonis | Sufism & Surrealism | Saqi | 2005

Been a concern of mine for awhile – seems time may be ripe to explore Sufic modernisms (and explode thereby the oft exclusively Eurocentric – even when colonial or postcolonial – narratives of modernism still so prevalent). Plus, I’ve needed a lucid discussion of ‘ibn Arabi since I first went through Corbin’s book a decade ago.

Carl Rakosi | The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi | NPF | 1986

The least critically acclaimed—or critically attended-to anyway—of the Objectivists. Having had occasion to revisit this collection for a seminar, I found myself by turns delighted, enlightened, bedazzled, bewildered, inspired—and at every turn engaged. Rakosi still awaits his full share of critical reception and recognition: I wonder why?

Lytle Shaw | Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie | Iowa | 2006

Someone had to write this book, and I suspect Shaw’s discussion of “coterie” will have applications beyond this particular poet—beyond, perhaps, the New York School—for some time to come.

Ariana Reines | The Cow | Flood Editions | 2006

This one floored me. Visceral, vital, clinical, conceptual—it strikes a dissonant chord in the nerves. Precisely, I think, what I’ve been needing.

C. T. Funkhouser | Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms | Alabama | 2007

Best book on the subject, bar none.

Mark Scroggins | Louis Zukofsky: The Poem of a Life | Counterpoint | 2007

Scroggins’s approach is novel, as he mixes narrative with criticism in alternating chapters. Biographies rarely capture my attention the way that this one did, and I found myself repeatedly returning to the poems to find resonance and resource where before I encountered only the opacity of technique. An absolutely necessary book.

Ming-Qian Ma | Poetry as Re-Reading: American Avant-Garde Poetry and the Poetics of Counter-Method | Northwestern | 2008

A dense and pleasurably complex book. Following on Bruce Andrews’s theory of “re-reading,” Ma suggests that “poetry, to the extent that it is a critical-analytical reengagement with method as a problem, is the “rereading [of] the reading that a social status quo puts us through.” But this is no mere rehashing of stock-in-trade Lang Po theory; Ma’s trajectory is unique in engaging philosophical (and not just literary or aesthetic) modernism (and not just that of the trendy sort), At this point, I’m content to have my mind in the book, if not fully wrapped around it.

Wildcard selection: I’ve been known to add music to my lists before—this time I’ll offer relevant text instead. Liner notes to the following recording:

Balla et Ses Balldins |  The Syliphone Years | Stern’s | 2008

In this era of iTunes digital downloads, the inclusion of such booklets as this may become more and more necessary. It’s nothing new, of course, and I could name dozens of other collections with equally impressive notes—this is only the most recent. But as cds go the way of lps before them, one can only hope that the paratext doesn’t vanish with them…(a note on this: I recently downloaded my first two albums in MP3 format. Great sound, easier storage, certainly—but the lack of detailed information on instrumentation, composition, context, etc. has me leaning towards purchasing the actual cd at some later date (i.e. when I can afford the $50 or so…)).

More Stephen Cope here and here.

Attention Span 2009 – Leonard Schwartz

Joseph Donahue | Terra Lucida | Talisman House | 2009

Donahue’s long running and much awaited serial poem is now gathered in one place. Extraordinary in its richness of thought, perception, imagination…

Jacqueline Risset, trans. Jennifer Moxley | Sleep’s Powers | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2008

This was one of the most engaging books I have read in a long time. In this book of short essays poet and translator Jacqueline Risset asks us to go beyond dream, which is image and narrative, into sleep, which is a different form of thought altogether.

Andrew Zawacki | Petals of Zero, Petals of One | Talisman House| 2008

This philosophically engaging poet follows out both the logic of the arrow and the logic of the arrow’s shadow in this arresting book.

Nathanael (Nathalie Stephens) | Absence Where As: (Claude Cahun And The Unopened Book) | Nightboat Books | 2009

A philosophical prose that suggests the possibility of an autonomous art…

Anne Waldman | Manatee/Humanity | Penguin | 2009

Surely as poets we must strive to speak not only to humanity but to animality and divinity too. Anne Waldman does so…

Brian Henry | The Stripping Point | Counterpath Press | 2007

Brian Henry contributes mightily to a poetics of citationality.

Stacy Szymaszek | Hyperglossia | Litmus Books | 2009

Elizabeth Robinson says it best: “part dissonance, part song.” The fragmented can also bespeak the possibility of continuing.

Rene Char, trans. Gustaf Sobin | The Brittle Age and Returning Upland | Counterpoint Press | 2009

Great to have this translation of the great French poet by the recently passed away great American poet finally in print…

Danill Kharms, trans. Matvei Yankelevich | Today I Wrote Nothing | Overlook | 2007

Matvei Yankelevich has done an extraordinary thing in resucitating in English translation this nearly forgotten Russian absurdist (“Oberiu”) poet (1904-1942).

Barbara Guest | Complete Poems | Wesleyan University Press | 2008

All of Guests’s poems in one big edition…

Caty Sporleder | Flay: a book of mu | Blazevox | 2009

A new writer to watch…

More Leonard Schwartz here.