Posts Tagged ‘Julie Carr’
Attention Span 2011 | Pattie McCarthy
Elizabeth Willis | Address | Wesleyan | 2011
“I’m building the haystack / I’ll disappear into”
Cole Swensen | Greensward | Ugly Duckling | 2010
“It’s the future that vanishes, not thinking, and the dog sets off at a run, as it is, as it always has been, her gift and wish to bring it back to him.”
Carlos Soto Roman | Philadelphia’s Notebooks | Otoliths | 2011
“one pack one pagan one pain one panic one paper one / parachute one paradox one paragon one parade one”
Jena Osman | The Network | Fence | 2010
“Plaster, spikes, and rivets all overboard as ballast. To gain altitude, to fly high over the city like a small planet.”
Linda Norton | Public Gardens | Pressed Wafer | 2011
“She cries every night for three or four hours, and sometimes I think I’m going crazy, I’m so tired. But her shit really does smell sweet.”
Susan Howe | That This | New Directions | 2010
“That this book is a history of / a shadow that is a shadow of”
Ryan Eckes | Old News | Furniture | 2011
“you know by looking at the dunkin donuts / walt whitman is buried in camden / ben franklin is buried in philadelphia / and the delaware river is a zombie”
Julie Carr | Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines | Coffee House | 2010
“The / idea, which she knows to be illogic, but cannot let go of, is that / if she is pregnant the baby will keep her mother alive.”
Sarah Campbell | Everything We Could Ask For | Little Red Leaves | 2010
“Some bird brought you here / On foot”
Anselm Berrigan | Notes from Irrelevance | Wave | 2011
“Digging the ecstasy / of swinging? Yes. Laughing / at the tree? Is the tree / funny? Yes.”
Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat Books | 2011
“The body is ay so redy and penyble’, / the heed of advertising for Telewizja Polska, / the state-run TV network, / told the Associated Press news agency. / BBC NEWS 25 May 2006. / Here is endeth the Summer Tale.”
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Pattie McCarthy is the author of Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, Verso, and bk of (h)rs, all from Apogee Press—as well as L&O, forthcoming this year from Little Red Leaves Press. She teaches literature and creative writing at Temple University and is a 2011 Pew Fellow in the Arts.
McCarthy’s Attention Span for 2010. 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.
Attention Span 2010 – Patrick Pritchett
Julie Carr | Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines | Coffee House
Beyond beautiful—a hymn of sorrow and joy and Carr’s most intimate and powerful work yet—deeply touching, and miraculously alive in its invention.
James Belflower | Commuter | Instance
The severe angularity and audacity of postmodernity. Now, would somebody please publish “Friends of Mies van der Rohe” already?
Norma Cole | Where Shadows Will | City Lights
Norma Cole’s work is continually alert to the tiniest nuances and to the possibility for the vastness of inside that moment. The actual turns of thought, a deep thinking into language as event and the world as it seen and felt and registered continually. Objects are not merely named, but multiply-mediated. What calls our attention is seeing: and seeing into and through language. The poem never a comment, but an invitation to become enmeshed with its event; neither reductive nor overpowering, but alive to complexity.
Anne Carson | NOX | New Directions
Elegy as etymology, as colportage. But is the whole less than the sum of its scattered parts?
Ingeborg Bachman, trans. Peter Filkins | Songs in Flight | Marsilio
So I gather the salt
when the sea overcomes us,
and turn back
and lay it on the threshold
and step into the house.
We share bread with the rain;
bread, debt, and a house.
Leslie Scalapino | Considering How Exaggerated Music Is | North Point
What would you glean
mean
the long go-away-from-it plan
at hazard, sheer glass over
water
and the eking out
of syllables
ten cents-a-dozen
no rhymes
///
It would be occasion, return of the others from their something not right
I know, I could see them, moving down the aisle, that there should be
this music
This was the time when the dying brought in their wounded
///
The stippled
branch
of light
tips forward
ghosted
with pollen
and the promises of dust
stare back at us
give evidence of our having lived
the wrong questions
right
Ken Irby | The Intent On | North Atlantic
And for the dreaming, the endless
mode of occurring
as it is, as it could be, as the sleepers
keep murmuring —
for what it means
to stay alive, attuned, a moment
to this otherwise
& the sought-for, disappearing.
Of pure possibility/of the nothing
that may save it
shed of symbol, it staves off
the blighted, and so we go – into night
the blessed, the earthly
what leaks into & wrecks us
is always
never and more singular than loss
across song’s fields, folded. Inside its portals
the old book beckons and we bend
surmised of sorrow, to its rising, it turning.
What dies &
what inherits? What dissipates
and what is remnant?
If the wind is not/if the wind is here and –
its inconstancy, its minglings, its slips of
substance into light and
into beginning
for beginning is always.
Begin again.
More Patrick Pritchett here and here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Dan Beachy-Quick
Daniel Tiffany | Infidel Poetics | Chicago | 2010
G.W. Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Rescher | Monadology | Pittsburgh | 1991
Allen Grossman | True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing | Chicago | 2009
Julie Carr | 100 Notes on Violence | Ahsahta | 2010
Lucy Ives | Anamnesis | Slope | 2010
Devin Johnston | Creaturely and Other Essays | Turtle Point | 2009
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009
David Markson | Wittgenstein’s Mistress | Dalkey Archive | 2006 (reprint)
Peter Riley | A Map of Faring | Free Verse | 2005
Jack Spicer | The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer | Black Sparrow | 1980
Lyn Hejinian | Saga/Circus | Omnidawn | 2008
Attention Span 2010 – G.C. Waldrep
Gustaf Sobin | Collected Poems | Talisman | 2010
The poetry book of the year, for me. A gorgeous summation of Sobin’s lyric achievement. Should be on every American poet’s bookshelf.
Anne Carson | NOX | New Directions | 2010
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010
Andrew Joron | The Sound Mirror | Flood | 2009
He really has the best ear of any poet I know writing in English. Trance Archive (City Lights, 2010) is also worth any reader’s time who isn’t already following Joron’s work.
Evelyn Reilly | Styrofoam | Roof | 2009
Sandy Florian | Prelude to Air from Water | Elixir | 2010
In my opinion, and for what little comparisons may be worth, Florian is the most original practioner of the Anglophone prose poem in our moment. Her other 2010 title is Of Wonderland & Waste, from Sidebrow.
Yang Lian, trans. Brian Holton | Riding Pisces | Shearsman | 2008
A major contemporary Chinese poet who has not yet found his American audience. He’s better served in Britain, where his other recent collections include Concentric Circles (2006) and Lee Valley Poems (2010).
Julie Carr | 100 Notes on Violence | Ahsahta | 2010
Keith Waldrop | Several Gravities | Siglio | 2009
The perfect companion to his ever-so-slightly-earlier volume Transcendental Studies, which won the National Book Award. The collages are wonderful, and the selection of his lyric work is judicious.
Jack Collom & Lyn Hejinian | Situations, Sings | Adventures in Poetry | 2008
Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Fady Joudah | If I Were Another | FSG | 2009
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Also rereading pretty much all of Leslie Scalapino and Fanny Howe this summer—at least the lyric work—alongside some Alice Notley I’d missed hitherto. Waiting for some new/fresh time to read J. Michael Martinez’s Heredities, which looks fantastic, and the new translation of Raul Zurita’s Purgatorio from California.
More G.C. Waldrep here. Waldrep’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2006, 2004. Back to directory.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2011 | Jed Rasula
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Donna Stonecipher | The Cosmopolitan | Coffee House | 2008
Prose poems composed in Cornell-box-like “inlays,” nudging minutiae of found materials into an arresting cosmology, like peering into a Jess collage made strictly of words. One paragraph can resemble a building permit, while the next dips a thermometer into your hippocampus. It starts eerie and ends that way, having scooped its exponential insinuations over, under, and around you until you’re a bonfafide citizen of Stonecipher’s cosmopolis.
Julie Carr | 100 Notes on Violence | Ahsahta | 2010
No single book of poetry absorbed me as much last year as Carr’s, its impact reducing me to that owl gaze of a word, “Wow.” It felt like witnessing Poetry emerging from the primal cauldron, every line a masterstroke from the original smithy. Harrowing, heartening, threatening, fortifying and unnerving all at once. It will take years to absorb.
David Meltzer | Beat Thing | La Alameda | 2004
The “beat thing” has been done to a crisp, done in, done to death, yet somehow Meltzer does it again with deep dish dazzle, heartfelt allover glow and wry surmise, recounting “all those guys / all those disguises.” A bop prosodic sprawling riff sails along unchecked for 150 pages, graced with a handful of delectable photos, putting hipster “moves & mudras” in a context where Hitler, Joe McCarthy and Bird rub haunches in what’s inexorably public yet somehow privately recalled: “how impulsively memory organizes into a choir,” the poet reflects at the end.
Joanne Kyger | About Now: Collected Poems | National Poetry Foundation | 2007
In the domain of titles, Kyger nails it time and again. Going On, Just Space, Again and As Ever are her four ‘selected’ books preceding this collection, its 769 pages unfurling the poems in six chronological sections. Wonder after wonder, though I can’t help but wonder about the missing structures. Consecutive arrangement obliterates the fetching portfolios of All This Every Day and The Wonderful Focus of You, books Harvey Brown introduced me to thirty years ago with his characteristic right on reverence. Still, why harp about such a lodestone, humming with sapience, sentience, exigence, and devotion.
Kenneth Irby | The Intent On: Collected Poems, 1962-2006 | North Atlantic | 2009
Another New World wonder, documenting Irby’s consistency from the get go. His gnarly syntax and unique polymathic sensibility radiate throughout a body of work as essential and unrepeatable as that of Thelonious Monk. It’s a relief to find the arrangements of the (very scarce) original books are preserved here, augmented with nearly 100 pages of unpublished poems.
Jonathan Williams | Jubilant Thicket: New & Selected Poems | Copper Canyon | 2005
Now that he’s gone, it’s chastening to realize how much he took with him, not least his wizened curiosity for hijinx and mayhem scraped off every gurgle of the American vernacular, transcribed resourcefully in eagle eye poems that read like reports from an unfunded intergalactic voyage. “Start as near the end of a poem as you can” is an adage he quotes: an unfailing guide to his invariable skill at hitting every bullseye in sight.
Andrew Schelling | From the Arapaho Songbook | La Alameda | 2011
Between the tale of a broken foot and prolonged close encounter with the Arapaho language, Schelling has managed to get useful kinks working inside these serpentine poems. The book, his best, feels open ended yet also compacted. Numinous ruffles abound, and the fur on the back of the neck bristles.
H.D. | Tribute to Freud | Godine | 1974
Reread after thirty years, then reread again the same week—it was that gripping. Struck this time by the bifocal power of this edition, which includes “Writing on the Wall” (the original book published in 1956) and “Advent,” the earlier notes written while H.D. was seeing Freud. A nimbus of creative love suffuses the whole, revealing a very different Freud than the stern Viennese magus of . This magus—with H.D. as privileged initiate—was host of a study was filled with heraldic figurines from antiquity: “a museum, a temple,” she calls it, venturing into a unique pas de deux.
Juan Bonilla, ed. | Aviones Plateados: 15 Poetas Futuristas Latinoamericanos, 2nd ed. | Puerta del Mar | 2009
A revelation, leading me to some mesmerizing (if very period-dated) works in which modernolatria wears its enthusiasm on its sleeve, its forelocks, and everywhere else it can pin a decal celebrating speed, airborne loop-the-loops, and the futurist program transposed along the spine of the Andes. Juan Marín, Marcos Fingerit, Luis Vidales, Luis Aranha, and Luis Cardoza y Aragón are now fixtures in my constellation of modernist poetry, plunging me into feverish bouts of translation over consecutive summers (some of which will soon appear in my anthology Burning City, in press with Action Books, co-edited with Tim Conley, whose new book, Nothing Could Be Further [Emmerson Street Press] is a wealth of minute fictions inscribed with the care of a tattoo artist working on an eyelid; think, Lydia Davis on helium.)
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More Jed Rasula here.
Rasula’s Attention Span for 2008, 2006. Back to 2011 directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 28, 2011 at 11:12 am
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with Andrew Schelling, David Meltzer, Donna Stonecipher, H.D., Jed Rasula, Joanne Kyger, Jonathan Williams, Juan Bonilla, Julie Carr, Kenneth Irby