Attention Span 2011 | John Sakkis

Bernadette Mayer | Midwinter Day | New Directions | 1999

If the legend is true, it’s a crime this book doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page. Written in 1 Epic day. Seriously? It took me two days to read the book, not quite on par with Mayer, but who is ever on par with Mayer? I feel like Eric Drooker’s talents would have been better spent illustrating Midwinter Day.

Gilbert Hernandez | Luba | Fantagraphics | 2009

It’s hard for me to read Los Bros Hernandez in the key of anything other than elegy, especially with middle brother Gilbert. The kind of elegy that is less about the passing of persons than the passing of time. Luba has aged since Palomar and we’ve aged with her. Telenovela as descriptor is sort of a lazy cliché. I’ve never cared more about a comic book character or the world they inhabit. The only thing missing are rockets.

Jim Goad | Shit Magnet: One Man’s Miraculous Ability To Absorb The World’s Guilt | Feral House | 2002

Controversial polemical writer Jim Goad gets very polemical in this aptly titled autobiography. Extremely raw, pissed off, beautifully disturbing soap boxing prose from PC public enemy #1. Jim Goad is a bit of a martyr/ cult figure who uses facts and stats to back his controversial castigations. I’m a JG fan, it’s not a popular stance but so what? Get lost.

Julien Poirier | El Golpe Chileno | Ugly Duckling | 2010

“I told Micah last night that my new book would be a haunted house.” Berkeley-based poet Julian Poirier’s El Golpe Chileño is filled with the ghosts of past and present. Essentially a bildungsroman, it tracks Poirier’s protagonist’s growth from youthful journeyman into adulthood though a kind of mixed-genre Theatre of the Absurd. Vaudeville, comics, memoir, film pitch, epistolary, failed novel, poetry, the carnival, and travelogue are all wielded brilliantly in the hands of Poirier, making for a phantasmagoric reading experience where the whole emerges defiantly greater than the sum of its parts. Poirier writes, “I turned my whole brain into a city and wrote down everything I saw happening there.” And indeed it certainly feels that way—the book is ripe with the names of places, of friends living and dead; with lists of dates and years; and with drawings and photographs, making up what Poirier somewhat obliquely labels “The Stolen Universe.” El Golpe Chileño is truly a success of form and content, of the high and low, of pop and elegy.

Ted Berrigan | The Collected Poems Of Ted Berrigan | California | 2007

Iconic LA radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer over uses the term God-Head to the point of parody. I have never colloquially used the term God-Head. Ted Berrigan is a God-Head. Call me corny but jeez-Louise TB is the real deal Yahweh-Dome. He makes “saturation job” as sexy a thing as it sounds, which is exactly what the Collected Poems begs of you. Hands down this is my “if you were stranded on an island and you could only have one book….”

Matthew Stokoe | Cows | Akashic | 2011

I very seriously almost puked 3 times while reading this masterpiece of gore and perversity. You know how the “dinner table scene” in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre makes you want to take a cold shower with your eyes closed while reciting the Lord’s Prayer? Well, there are multiple dinner table scenes in Cows that would give Leatherface that need-to-scrub-my-body-with-a-Brillo-Pad kind of feeling. “Hagbeast.”

Cedar Sigo | Stranger In Town | City Lights | 2010

I went to the book release party at City Lights with Lindsey Boldt and Steve Orth. Cedar read with Andrew Joron. A totally packed house with a full staircase bleed over to boot. Afterwards everyone went to Specs across the street for drinks. Sitting at the round table next to us, and totally unrelated to our after party were Jack Hirschman, Sarah Menefee and I think Neeli Cherkovoski. North Beach really felt like “North Beach” that night.

Ronaldo Wilson | Poems Of The Black Object | Futurepoem | 2009

I read this book in Miami. I was in Miami in November and I was sweating. I have a photo buried somewhere on Flickr with POTBO firmly clenched between my teeth. It’s the kind of book that induces some serious Bruxism. The kind of teeth gnashing you do at 3AM in a warehouse in Oakland with your best friends, not the kind that takes you to the dentist. Plus, break dancing poems!

Scott Walker | In 5 Easy Pieces | Ume Imports | 2006

I was talking with KUSF (in Exile) DJ Zoe Brezsny today about how you either love SW or hate him. About how I could completely understand/hear how some people hate him, and how you maybe just had to be vibing a certain kind of vibration to really dig him, and how the both of us were absolutely vibrational for Mr. Walker. I think if I knew about Scott Walker as a teenager I might have skipped the whole Jim Morrison “American Poet” thing. I recently ordered a Scott Walker t-shirt online and I’m not embarrassed by it. I’m a fan boy all over again. SW freaks me out with his brilliance, and then keeps freaking me out again and again. Have you ever heard “Lullaby By by by”? If there was ever a song for headphones this is it, an absolutely haunted masterpiece.

David Levi Strauss and Benjamin Hollander, eds. | Acts #5 | 1986

Because of this interview called “Dear Lexicon” with Michael Palmer by Benjamin Hollander and David Levi Strauss. I need to get a hold of MP/BH/DLS to see if I can republish as an issue of BOTH BOTH. An incredibly discursive conversation around the Analytic Lyric, this has been a primary source text for my poetics over the last 10 years. If you’d like a photocopied version please email me at john.sakkis@gmail.com and I’d be more than stoked to send along.

Patrick James Dunagan | There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn’t Talk: A Gustonbook | Post-Apollo | 2011

Me and Micah and Logan Koreber and Patrick Dunagan were planning on making a skateboard movie called Pushing Mongo. It will be a day-in-the-life of movie. We’ll skate from the Safeway curb, to SOMA down Market on the clickity-bricks, down to the EMB, up and along the Piers all the way to AT&T Park back up to the Mission for burritos then off the skateboards hiking up the hill to grab a beer in Bernal Heights at Wild Side West. Then bombing back down the hill heading towards 16th, almost getting hit by a USPS carrier van, Logan and I will get separated from Micah and Dunagan, but we’ll all end up somehow at Kilowatt for more beers, bros and brouhaha. It’s going to be an epic movie with a happy ending.”

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John Sakkis is the author of Rude Girl. His translation of Demosthenes Agrafiotis’s Maribor won the 2011 Northern California Book Award (NCBA) for poetry in Translation. Under the moniker BOTH BOTH he has curated various projects including: blog, reading series, music collaboration and since 2005 a magazine. He lives in the Oakland, CA.

Sakkis’s Attention Span for 2010, 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Stan Apps

Harold Abramowitz | Dear Dearly Departed | Palm Press | 2008

A book about the difficulty and sadness of speaking to someone who is no longer present. Somewhere between an elegy and a guide to epistolary conventions, it contains every emotion that could possibly go in a letter:  “And that was looking around. It was a very serious business and tomorrow was another day, but not a day of torment. Not a day of torment.”

Steve Aylett | Lint | Thunder’s Mouth Press | 2005

An absurdist biography of a fictional science-fiction writer (based loosely on Philip Dick). This book is very funny and written in a complexly mannered and overloaded prose that resembles poetry:  “His very awareness of words’ limitations made him run around like some nutter with a blowpipe, creating a career described variously as a triumph, a benchmark for defeat, a systemized kitsch torus, hell on a stick, a ferocious bluff, the revenge of the Alexandrian library, a strange honking sound, not too shabby, glyph contraband, nutty slack, exhausting, a catalog of fevers, and ‘gear.’”

Micah Ballard | Parish Krewes | Bootstrap Press | 2009

Lyric poems about the beauty of those who are dead. A displaced erotic energy takes the shape of mysterious ritual:  “the theme of death is our thiefhood.”

David Buuck | The Shunt | Palm Press | 2009

Ten years of poems charting the ups and downs of our collective crisis mentality. A poetry of puns and outrage, prying at the scab of our public discourse:  “thus – this – these – / Stanzas in Medication // (spits) // whose side / effects are you / — on?”

Lawrence Giffin | Get the Fuck Back into that Burning Plane | Ugly Duckling Press  | 2009

A prison-house of linguistic complexity. Giffin studies how consumerist discourse encloses and subordinates other discursive modes:  “your comprehensiveness is undercut / by the purchasing power of others.”

Renee Gladman | To After That (Toaf) | Atelos | 2008

The story of an unfinished book, carefully chronicling the book’s drafts and why it was repeatedly dropped and abandoned. Ultimately, the book-about-the-book takes the place of the book per se. A wonderful articulation of the rhythms of a writer’s life and the sensation of nursing along an inchoate book:  “it was devastating. . . to have written a book and to have lost it and to be holding it there all at once.”

Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood Editions | 2009

This poetry has the political intensity and representational clarity of mid-career Auden. Moxley uses allegorical tableau to frame her progressive critique of liberal political orthodoxy. I admire her embrace of direct statement:  “I remember feeling / a hollow failure at the particularity / of these pleasures.”  Or “The / private-sector mercenaries / ride roughshod over espousers / of eroded nobility as well as the / merely weak.”

Julien Poirier | Back On Rooster | Gneiss Press | 2007

A chapbook length poem, published in an edition of 52. A study of mental process, the inexorable bob-and-weave of consciousness carrying on:  “it’s an accident / when it / happens I like it / it changes me / I appear”

Michael Nicoloff and Alli Warren | Bruised Dick | no press | no date (probably 2007)

A polymorphously perverse collaborative collection. I think it’s sold out but hopefully will be re-released someday with the same silly picture of the two author’s faces blended on the cover. This is probably the most fun book on my list—I read it probably 20 times:  “stake a claim in there / where the damp and emotional / rust builds up all disco / on your balls and ass”

Erika Staiti | Verse/Switch & Stop-Motion | no press | 2008

Just a Xeroxed booklet of very good poems. I expect these will be published in a less ephemeral form eventually. A loving study of aggression as a social dynamic. “when you’ve got nothing to give, you give someone a shiner // dot blogspot dot com”

Stephanie Young | Picture Palace | ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni | 2008

A fascinating dislocation of the biographical impulse. Work that charts subjectivity’s accumulation and erosion:  “Many things must be made new for a tonal shift to stick.”

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