Attention Span 2011 | Dan Thomas-Glass

Andrew Zawacki | Glassscape | Projective Industries | 2010

As I wrote on the 30 Word Review of this one: “I love the ‘tendons & tensions’ of the line/break, [Andrew] Zawacki’s attention to “global capital                    ’s local / cater- / waul.” I’ll admit to a minor Andrew Zawacki obsession. Dude can write.

Brian Ang | Paradise Now | Grey Book | 2011
Brian Ang | Communism | Berkeley Neo-Baroque | 2011

Brian Ang is moving toward something big & loud & unapologetic. He is diving into something. I do not always understand the tracks he leaves but I relish the motion.

Dana Ward | Typing Wild Speech | Summer BF | 2010
Dana Ward | The Squeakquel | The Song Cave | 2011

Someone (I can’t remember who) said Dana Ward is picking up where Bruce Boone left off. Nada Gordon recently said: “where Sartre gets nauseated, Dana sees kinetics and light.” Those kids are all right, but what grabs me & won’t let go, what’s uniquely him, is the abundant love of people in there. Dana Ward loves us, people, get up.

VA | Displaced Press | 2011

I bought the subscription. $50 for books by Thom Donovan, Brandon Brown, Suzanne Stein, Samantha Giles, Taylor Brady & Rob Halpern. This is so exciting. Brian Whitener et. al. are doing such awesome work, it deserves its own entry.

erica lewis | camera obscura | BlazeVOX | 2010

Taught this book to seventeen eighth-grade girls. It prompted reams of writing, turning a classroom into a camera obscura, questions about time, experience, memory, photography, & a bunch more. Can’t wait to do it again.

Joseph Lease | Testify | Coffee House | 2011
Joseph Lease | X Angel City | Sacrifice | 2010

Before this year I hadn’t read Joseph Lease. The fact that that fact changed is one of the things I will remember about this year. These dreamy & intensely felt poems believe so hard they make you believe along with them.

Juliana Spahr | Well Then There Now | Black Sparrow | 2011

“Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” is in my personal top-ten of best poems of the naughts. It’s found a beautiful new home among a range of other previously published work here; the whole is an impressive statement of Juliana Spahr’s aesthetic & concerns. 

Lauren Levin | Keenan | Lame House | 2011
Lauren Levin | Not Time | Boxwood | 2009

Lauren Levin’s chaps were big for me this year. She is doing something that not even the hyper-gendered hyperbole of Ron Silliman’s excitement a couple years back does justice to. These rad clashy ping-pong lines, big loops of sound & thinking. Watch out world.

Michael Cross | Haecceities | Cuneiform | 2010

Big but also tight. Constrained but so effusive. Every time I pick this book up I hear a new angle of language, some lost repose of history. Michael Cross has a project that is so different from most; I’m very happy he’s doing it.

Phoebe Wayne | Lovejoy | c_L Books | 2010

Phoebe Wayne is a librarian by trade, so she thinks about cataloguing & preserving. That kind of thinking becomes very interesting in the world of public art on freeway pillars set to be demolished, as in the case of Lovejoy. It is also very interesting in the context of poetry itself, & chapbook publishing in particular. The ephemera that this list is part of the project of cataloguing, too—& the beautiful phrases we get to sculpt of our hours.

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Dan Thomas-Glass is a poet and teacher in the East SF Bay Area. He edits With + Stand.

Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Gina Myers

Kate Bernheimer | Horse, Flower, Bird | Coffee House | 2010

Suzanne Buffam | The Irrationalist | Canarium | 2010

Bruce Covey | Glass Is Really a Liquid | No Tell | 2010

Jennifer Denrow | California | Four Way | 2011

Matt Hart | Wolf Face | H_NGM_N BKS | 2011

Nathan Hauke | S E W N | horse less | 2011

Becca Klaver | LA Liminal | Kore | 2010

Joseph Lease | Testify | Coffee House | 2011

Patti Smith | Just Kids | Ecco | 2010

Laura Solomon | The Hermit | Ugly Duckling | 2011

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Gina Myers is the author of A Model Year (Coconut Books) and several chapbooks, including False Spring (forthcoming from Spooky Girlfriend). She lives in Atlanta, GA.

Myers’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Julie Carr

Jennifer Moxley | Coastal | The Song Cave | 2011

Brutally honest, and masterfully formed. It feels intimate and distant at once. I read it five times in a day trying to figure out how she strikes that balance.

Linda Norton | The Public Gardens | Pressed Wafer | 2011

I’ve been waiting for and needing this book for years. The voices of Boston and Brooklyn. Mixing genres sweetly, powerfully.

Dawn Lundy Martin | Discipline | Nightboat | 2011

One of the strongest uses of the prose poem I’ve seen maybe ever. Each page hits it.

John Keene | Annotations | New Directions | 1995

Gorgeous language. The sentence is played like a viola. Fast, unexpected, but deeply connected.

Michael Ondaatje | Coming Through the Slaughter | Vintage | 1976

Reading this for the first time. Stunned by the surprises of it, the shifting voices, and by its musicality.

Tim Roberts | Drizzle Pocket | Blazevox | 2011

Though I am married to the author, the book is by someone I only meet by reading it. Scary and great and unlike anything else I’ve ever read.

Noah Eli Gordon | The Source | Futurepoem | 2011

Though this is a procedural work, the poems press way beyond their method. This is my favorite of Noah’s books. It’s funny and sharp, but in many moments also quite meditative and moving.

Lydia Davis | The Collected Stories | Picador|  2010

This is the first time I’ve really gotten all the way into Lydia Davis, and I read every story in this 752 page book in three days. In my favorite ones, the speaker is estranged, lonely, and frightened. A good book to bring on a midlife crisis.

Caroline Bergvall | Reading at Naropa | Naropa SWP | 2010

Caroline’s new book, Meddle English (Nightboat, 2011), is amazing. But I am reporting on hearing her read from it. I would travel pretty far to hear her again. One of those readings that will stay with me a very long time. Life giving.

Eileen Myles | The Inferno | O/R Books | 2010

Um. Pure pleasure—and a little embarrassing to read on an airplane when someone’s looking over your shoulder.

Joseph Lease | Testify | Coffee House | 2011

I blurbed this book, so to paraphrase myself: political/personal poems that matter and sing. Tough and necessary.

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Julie Carr is the author of Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines and 100 Notes on Violence and co-publisher with Tim Roberts of Counterpath Press.

Carr’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Julie Carr

Nguyen Trai, trans. from Han and Nom by Paul Hoover and Nguyen Do | Beyond the Court Gate: Selected Poems of Nguyen Trai | Counterpath | 2010

Nguyen Trai lived in Vietnam from 1380-1422. The poems are direct depictions of daily life—intimate, immediate, funny, speaking of political turmoil, exile, competition, fear, desire, writing. “To a Friend”: “Your poverty and infirmity make me feel pity / Like me, you must be crazy. / Like me you’re exiled from your motherland / And have read only a few sentences out of books.” Trai is revered in Vietnam as one of the two greatest poets in the country’s history and is also known as a national hero for his role in helping to overthrow the Minh Dynasty, which had controlled Vietnam for centuries. That story is told in the shift from writing in Han to Nom.

Inger Christensen, trans. from the Danish by Susanna Nied | Alphabet | New Directions | 2001

A book-length abecedarian, structured according to the Fibonacci numerical sequence, the poem is a hymn to what is, to what “exists.” “Apricot trees exist. Apricot trees exist.” Or, for “c”: “Cicadas exist, chicory, chromium / citrus trees; cicadas exist / cicadas, citrus, cypresses, the cerebellum.” Deep engagement with the natural world does not preclude acknowledgment of (fear of) things human: loneliness exists, and “Icarus-children white as lambs / in greylight.” This is an incredible translation, which keeps the abecedarian always in view without allowing it to destroy meaning or music. The book was originally published in 1981 in Danish. It has a permanent home on my desk when it’s not in my bag or my hand.

Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin | The Poems of Emily Dickinson | Belknap | 1999

Reading all the poems in the fascicles, in order, with a group of approximately fifteen other poets, writers, and scholars. Reading very slowly, very carefully. It should take at least a year and half.

Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010

Alongside The Weather this is my favorite of Robinsons’ books. I especially return to “Utopia”: “The crows are still cutting the sky in half with their freckling eastward wake.” Long lines work the sentence through a deeply lyrical intelligence. Aphoristic, enigmatic, musical, charged with a kind of desire that is never far from critique. “Money is ordinary and truly vernal.”

Matthew Cooperman | Still of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move | Counterpath | forthcoming

Language from everywhere: books, television, news, movies, web, songs, memory pulled together, thrown together, over-the-top mash-up, but with a serious reason to be. This is political work, personal work, a cultural encyclopedia driven by doubt and passion, barely under control. An amazing reading experience, feels visceral.

Anne Carson and Rashaun Mitchell | Nox (the dance) | Performed at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art | July 20, 2010

Carson read her text (or some of it) while dancer/choreographer Mitchell and the incredible Silas Riener performed an outrageously varied, spacious, and intense duet (both men dance for the Cunningham company, but the piece has none of the coolness or cerebral quality of Cunningham.) This dance allowed Carson’s text to become much more immediate and powerful than it is in the book itself, which is fascinating, but somewhat removed. Not so the dance.

Joseph Lease | Testify | Coffee House | forthcoming

Gorgeous book driven by a particular blend of disgust and compassion that only Lease can pull off. Repetition, direct statement, directed through a careful musical composition: “in my body, 4 a.m. in my body, breading and olives and cherries. Wait, it’s all rotten.” This book feels necessary, precise, demanding.

Tomaz Salamun, ed. Thomas Kane, trans. Thomas Kane et al. | There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair | Counterpath | 2009

Reading Salumun is a very particular pleasure. Hearing him read is a revelation. Publishing this book meant that I read it many times over, and it still remains a mystery (or a series of mysteries), but one that is lodged permanently in my mind.

Apollinaire | Alcools

Re-Reading by translating with Jennifer Pap. In this sense, reading for the first time.

C.D. Wright | Rising, Falling, Hovering | Copper Canyon | 2008

For me Wright is central. This work in particular has a complexity (multiple voices, narratives, positions, locales) that nonetheless stays grounded and urgent. Again, the work’s rhythms support, drive and motivate its concerns.

More Julie Carr here. Back to directory.

Attention Span – Dawn Michelle Baude

Keston Sutherland | Neutrality | Barque | 2004

Upon returning from 18 years abroad, I asked two poets tens years my junior what book I should buy. They put Neutrality into my grasping hand. Hence I encountered Sutherland’s work for the first time and fell in love, literally, with the whoosh-plop-boom of that verbal cascade. It surges from its source with a delightful rhythm, to the point that  I suspect the layout on the page provides the syllogistic pretext for the argument of the poem without exerting a durable impact on prosody (this bears further consideration). I like the fact that this work doesn’t take itself too seriously, an important consideration when a lot of what’s available to read in the US seems to move from a homogenous, self-congratulatory careerism.

Mel Nichols | The Beginning of Beauty | Edge  | 2007

Nichols is one of my favorite poets and this book is full of what she does best: the insightful quotidian of being human, combined with a wacky, prickly sense of humor and inflected with a staunch political acumen—Kyger and Notley reverberate here, with a little of Hejinian and Darragh in the mix. Nichols is capable of range—The Beginning of Beauty has an acerbic wit that takes a back seat in her “Day Poem” series, where the mood is quieter and engages a flexible, compelling query into the new humanism—I’m a devoted fan of the Day Poems. Beauty is, of course, beautiful—a joy to hold, with its intimate, polysemous blue secret. That tip-in is so erotic.

Robert Creeley | The Niagara Magazine: Robert Creeley—A Dialogue | 1978

Oh Lord—what a gem—everything so deeply, irrevocably Creeley, in conversation with Kevin Power in Buffalo in 1976. If a book had arms, I’d want to crawl into them here. I found this issue which managed, somehow, to survive the pulverizing fists of time at a very cool second-hand bookshop specialized in impossibly hard-to-find poetry publications—Hermitage—in Beacon, Lower Hudson Valley.

Joseph Lease | Broken World | Coffee House | 2007

I’ve carried this book from country to country for the last year and a half, picking it up whenever I need to think—or rather hear—the poem. Lease has something of Palmer in him, something of Creeley, a bit of Spicer. The argument of the book is chilling, and sad, and somehow, redemptive. I’m into reading books where I actually feel a poet on the other side, the flesh & blood one, who knows when to cast identity upon the page like a stone tossed into the lake. I read a book like this and I want to borrow some of his moves and drink a glass of Merlot.

VA | The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography | Mode A | 2006-

Basically anywhere that Barrett Watten’s brain has been I want to check out. It’s like going in for an oil change—are we thinking? Really thinking? As someone who’s had a voyeur’s view of the Language Poets from the get-go, I like to keep an eye on them, all of them. And the Grand Piano series is not a disappointment. If I can recuperate the word “panoptic” to employ in a pre-Foucaultian/Bentham sense, I would. But the quantum viewpoint might be better to describe this document in collective autobiography. At any rate, for a movement that has consistently faced accusations of mannerism (and a lot worse), the embodied narratives of Grand Piano provide the waves that those hard-copy particles need. Give a Language Poet a hug.

Buck Downs | Let It Rip | Washington, DC | 2007

I came across these poems this summer and I had to re-read. Downs’ line is so tight, the torque between words so high, the potential energy would seem a bit dangerous, were it not for lyric commitments. Tenderness, especially. The focus on juxtaposition of grammatical units functions differently from the trajectories we’re accustomed to follow, given the predictable paratactic idioms of our age. You have to read these poems slowly, word by word, as if the conditions of their making required more than a casual performative reconstruction. There’s wit here, in abundance, and keen social commentary, and a kind of revelatory intimacy, too.

Andrew Schelling | Wild Form & Savage Grammar | La Alameda | 2003

I didn’t know the US had any kind o f Ecological movement in poetry until I recently came across this book. The question that Schelling poses—how can we have a writing that also commits to the compelling issues of Ecology—is certainly worth considering, even (or especially) at this belated standpoint. Since Ecology is not, as far as I can ascertain, anywhere near the heart of contemporary poetics, Schelling turns often to Asia for ideas that were waylaid in history, a tendency that endears me to this book since many US poets have truncated their connection to the past as a source of meaningful information and finally end-up looking awfully provincial. Schelling is a good, clear essayist, so he took me places I hadn’t been before.

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008

Sharp, witty, incisive—this book has a lot to keep me busy. The prosody (the driving issue for this reader) catches my eye because Davies has a lot of textured variation. The main thrust, so to speak, of the poet’s concerns is contemporary social commentary, and this commentary is rich and informed. But it’s the reoccurring pig image/references that hooked me! Since I’ve been out of the country for so long, Davies is a wonderful discovery.

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More Dawn Michelle Baude here.

Attention Span – G.C. Waldrep

I read dozens of poetry books, dozens of journals every year. The list that follows isn’t necessarily a list of recent books I “liked best,” but it is a list of the books I dreamed about, after.

Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin | 2007

Gennady Aygi, trans. Peter France | Field-Russia | New Directions | 2007

Gabriel Gudding | Rhode Island Notebook | Dalkey | 2007

Bin Ramke | Tendril | Omnidawn | 2007

Zachary Schomburg | The Man Suit | Black Ocean | 2007

Rosmarie Waldrop | Curves to the Apple | New Directions | 2006

Michael Burkard | Envelope of Night | Nightboat | 2008

George Oppen | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2007

Catherine Corman, ed. | Joseph Cornell’s Dreams | Exact Change | 2007

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

Joseph Lease | Broken World | Coffee House | 2007

Some others: Anne Boyer, The Romance of Happy Workers; Fanny Howe, The Lyrics; Johannes Goransson, A New Quarantine Will Take My Place; Cecily Parks, Field Folly Snow; Rusty Morrison, The Truth Keeps Calm Biding Its Story; Kristi Maxwell, Realm 64; Fredrik Nyberg, A Different Practice; Craig Morgan Teicher, Brenda Is in the Room; David Mutschlecner, Sign; Priscilla Sneff, O Woolly City; Tony Tost, Complex Sleep; Donald Revell, Thief of Strings; Noah Eli Gordon, A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow; C.S. Carrier, “Lyric”; Julie Doxsee, “Fog Quartets”; Jack Boettcher, “The Surveyic Hero”; etc.

Attention Span – Rae Armantrout

Ben Lerner | Angle of Yaw | Copper Canyon | 2006

This book isn’t new, but it’s new to me. I think Ben Lerner is brilliant.

Katie Degentesh | The Anger Scale | Combo | 2006

Like Ben Lerner, Katie Degentesh is new to me (I guess I’m a little slow) and really exciting. This is my favorite flarf.

Joseph Massey | Out of Light | Private | 2008

Joseph Massey is a relatively new arrival, but his minimalist, Zen-like poems seem like old friends.

Ron Silliman | The Age of Huts (compleat) | California | 2007

Ron Silliman is, of course, an old friend. It’s terrific to have his seminal early work back in print.

Fanny Howe | The Lyrics | Graywolf | 2007

As always, Fanny Howe blends the personal and the political into poems that sing.

Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007

Spahr’s poetic memoir blends the personal and the political in a different way.

Naomi Klein | The Shock Doctrine | Metropolitan | 2007

This is a clear, scathing history of the depredations of the Neocons.

Graham Foust | Necessary Stranger | Flood | 2007

I’ve been a Foust fan for awhile. His spare, skewed version of the lyric appeals to me.

Joseph Lease | Broken World | Coffeehouse | 2007

This is the first Joseph Lease book I’ve read. He’s got a funny way with desperation and anger that I appreciate.