Attention Span 2011 | Tim Shaner

Slavoj Zizek | In Defense of Lost Causes | Verso | 2009 

In Defense of Lost Causes has been my favorite of Zizek’s books so far. I admit that this may be due in part to his prose’s public mode of address, but more importantly it is due to the political timeliness of his project: to establish some kind of universal, leftist response to the universality of capitalism, late or not. It’s the risk suggested in the title that makes this ambitious volume such a thoroughly engaging one. Rather than accepting Fukuyama’s thesis of “the end of history,” which Zizek claims the left has effectively done—”the task today is to resist state power by withdrawing from its scope, subtracting oneself from it, creating new spaces outside its control” (339), In Defense looks back over the failed revolutions of the not-too-distant past—from the French Revolution to the Chinese Cultural Revolution—in order to discern where they went wrong and how we might “redeem the emancipatory potential of these failures through avoiding the twin trap of nostalgic attachment to the past and of all-too-slick accommodation to ‘new circumstances’” (3). With chapters provocatively titled “Radical Intellectuals, or, Why Heidegger Took The Right Step (Albeit in the Wrong Direction) in 1933,” “Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao,” and “Why Populism Is (Sometimes) Good Enough in Practice, but Not in Theory,” Zizek argues in the “Afterword to the Second Edition” that it may be “Better to do nothing than engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, etc.). The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active,’ to ‘participate,’ to mask the Nothingness of what goes on” (476). He cites José Saramago’s novel Seeing in which the population, en masse, decide not to vote in the country’s latest election, as an example of the ways in which  “violent subtraction” can undermine the seemingly all-powerful state by refusing, like Bartleby, to participate in legitimizing rituals of power. Whether or not one agrees with Zizek’s take on things is less important than the text’s persistent provocation to thought.

Kit Robinson | Train I Ride | BookThug | 2009

Books of poetry are not usually considered page-turners (and all the better for them—isn’t all poetry slow, even fast poetry?). But this volume I found difficult to put down. I say this because the book arrived in the mail just when I was busy preparing to host a poetry reading in Eugene and was in a hurry to bone up on a poet whose work I was largely unfamiliar with at the time. In other words, I was “supposed” to be reading something else (which, needless to say, I found compelling, as well). Not that Train I Ride takes much time to read; at thirty-eight pages, it can be polished off in an afternoon or evening (if “pigging out” is your thing—I preferred to linger in the text as long as I could, not wanting it to end, yet feeling a sense of urgency to read it cover-to-cover rather then in the collage-like, disjunctive manner in which I usually read: hopping from this to that to this and that and so forth, maybe finishing this or that, maybe not, for now). The book—a low-budget gig from Book Thug (a feature that adds to its charm)—arrived in the mail with Robinson’s latest book, the more professional-looking Determination, out from the excellent Cuneiform Press, which I have yet to fully read. Formally, the two texts contrast with each other—the latter more in the minimalist mode we find in The Crave (including some his “Ice Cube”-like, one-word line poems) and the former more along the lines of the new sentence. Sentence after sentence, Train I Ride is full of gems, like these randomly chosen nuggets: “A lost week. I remember everything that happened. But nothing was said.” “The sadness of stadiums. Public life packaged.” “The space inside a lower-case e. You could set up shop there.” Of course, it’s not the cleverness and insight of such lines that ultimately stand out but the masterful way they are assembled that makes them resonate and “pop” off the page (I’ve been watching too much of the Food Network—when exactly did “pop” become part of our TV vocabulary?). Kit Robinson is writing some of the best stuff around these days, in my opinion.

Hannah Arendt | Men in Dark Times | Mariner | 1968

I first came across Arendt’s writing when reading her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations back in the mid-80s. I remember at the time thinking that I was as inspired by the introduction as I was the writings of Benjamin himself. But it wasn’t until, years later, when, thanks to a friend and colleague in graduate school, I was recommended The Human Condition (1958) that Arendt became a critical component of my theoretical thinking. Her discussion of labor, work, and action was crucial to my dissertation on poets and their jobs. There was thus a real sense of urgency when I learned, while listening to a recording of Kathy Acker’s talk at Charles Bernstein’s poetics seminar in Buffalo (available at her web page at the EPC), that Men in Dark Times was one of Acker’s favorite books (along with Deleuze and Guatarri’s Anti-Oedipus). The title, which is somewhat misleading since the book is composed of essays on women as well as men (though mostly the latter), comes from the excellent opening essay “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing” which offers up some important advice for our own dark times: “Pleasure, which is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it. Not even the knowledge that man may be destroyed by the world detracts from the ‘tragic pleasure’” (6). But it is her discussion of Lessing’s valorization of friendship (our desire to “share the world” with others) over fraternity (our allegiance to a truth that binds us to like-minded thinkers) that makes this chapter (and the book) so relevant to our increasingly polarized society. Noting that “for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse” (24) about the world (the “world” being that which “lies between people” [4]) rather than “the intimate talk in which individuals talk about themselves” [24]), Arendt writes that when it came down to choosing fidelity to truth (doctrine) over friendship, Lessing critically chose the latter: “Any doctrine that in principle barred the possibility of friendship between two human beings would have been rejected by his untrammeled and unerring conscience” (29). I tried to keep this in mind while visiting with my (Tea Party) in-laws over the summer in Indiana.

Eileen Myles | Inferno: A Poet’s Novel | Or | 2010

Reading Inferno: A Poet’s Novel during my daughter’s soccer season, her team’s name “The Inferno,” the parents at the games commenting on the irony of it, not that they’d think to read it—we complain of our children not reading, but where do we find adults today who take reading seriously (outside of academia)

The print is not justified, hence the prose’s jagged right margin gives off a hint of poetry with its line breaks—this is a “poet’s novel”

The vagina passage is what draws the most attention, perhaps, and certainly the most laughs at readings, but it’s just one thing

Myles prose is sometimes deliberately awkward, disjunctive, even though mostly it’s quite fluid and loose

I love novels about poets, especially the kind of poets Myles writes about; it’s all so much fun

So much of my reading comes from what I’m reading, where Myles will mention Acker who will mention Arendt who mentions Broch and so forth

Zizek will mention Agamben who will mention Robert Walser and so forth

I’d list the two Kathy Acker novels I’m reading—My Mother: Demonology, a novel and Empire of the Senseless—but they’re currently on hold (for some reason); my favorite so far is Blood and Guts in Highschool, which I mistakenly recommended to the pregnant bartender at The Bier Stein in Eugene—she was reading Bukowski at the time and so I thought she might like Acker (not that I meant to suggest an equivalency) what with her tattoos and the punk-like air she projected

Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | Tinfish | 2010

Remember to Wave is an inspired book and Tinfish Press has done an equally inspired job of publishing it, which is no easy task, considering the formal inventiveness of the text. It’s like a cross between Susan Howe and Muriel Rukeyser, combining the documentary spirit of the Proletarian poets with the Situationists’ derives. Sand’s poetics is grounded in ethics and in the idea that poetry cannot but be political. In Remember to Wave, this means mapping the ground she literally walks on: Portland, Oregon with its buried histories of Japanese-American Internment camps during WWII and institutionalized racism. As we learn from the book, it was only in 1925 that Oregon “repealed from its constitution: ‘No free negro, or mulatto, not residing in this State at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this State.’” Yet, if we learn a lot from Sand’s investigative poetics, we do so as much through the information Sand digs up as through the artistic play she brings to her construction of the book. Just flipping through Remember to Wave is a visual delight.

Paul Lafargue | The Right to be Lazy | Kerr | 1989

Speaking of visual delights, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company’s paperback edition of (Karl Marx’s son-in-law) Paul Lafargue’s The Right to be Lazy, “Produced by 100% Union Labor,” is a sight that sores the eyes, at least its cover. (I’ll explain shortly.) I stumbled upon this book, though I had been meaning to read it in its entirety (which is not much, running at approximately fifty pages) for some time, while trying to track down Arendt’s Men in Dark Times and anything by Robert Walser, a writer (greatly admired by the likes of Kafka, Musil, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, as it says on the back of The Assistant) I had never heard of until I read Agamben’s The Coming Community, and finally Foucault’s The Care of the Self at Eugene’s Smith Family Bookstore, which reminds me of the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan. (We’re fortunate to have a number of quality used bookstores in this town.) This was one of those good days when everything I was looking for I found, with the added bonus of Lafargue’s little text which I came upon unexpectedly, the goofy, cartoonish lettering of this paperback standing out amid the spines of the larger hardbounds. This last little find made my day; it’s not often you walk into a bookstore these days and walk away with such a treasure. Now, as alluded to in the comic book-like lettering found on its spine, the front cover, with its cartoon drawing of a worker laying in a hammock strung between two factory smokestacks, snoring away (“zzzzz”s bubbling out of his mouth) with an open book dangling in his hand below the hammock, his boss, with his fist raised, ineffectively shouting something up at him, makes you think you’re reading a comic book, like something from the comic strip Andy Capp. But once you get past the cover and open the book, you find that the aesthetics have changed quite dramatically. Above the print, which consists of a quote from Lafargue’s pamphlet, is a naturalist drawing of a Meadow Lark, its genus name italicized beside it in parentheses. The quote below it reads:

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds sway. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work. The proletariat, the great class embracing all the producers of civilized nations, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work.

It turns out that these naturalistic drawings of birds are littered throughout the text, which includes both an introduction called “The War on Leisure” by Joseph Jablonski and a “bio-bibliographical” essay by Fred Thompson. Yet, from my examination, there’s no explanation to be found for the inclusion of these naturalistic drawings. I love this aspect of the book. In fact, the entire book is worth reading, not least Lafargue’s essay. I enjoyed delving back into the Marxist, revolutionary rhetoric I read so much of when combing the old, crumbling editions of The New Masses and other Depression era publications at SUNY-Buffalo’s main library. You just got to love the confidence of such statements as: “Social discords will vanish. Bond holders and capitalists will be first to rally to the popular party, once convinced that far from wishing them harm, its purpose is rather to relieve them of the labor of over-consumption and waste, with which they have been overwhelmed since their birth.”

Giorgio Agamben | The Coming Community | Minnesota | 2007

I started The Coming Community (originally published in 1990) a couple years ago but wasn’t ready for it. For some reason, this time around I found it, like Kit Robinson’s Train I Ride, difficult to put down, which is perhaps due to having been primed by my reading of Agamben’s The State of Exception, an important book but one I found somewhat burdened by the necessity of historicizing and hence theorizing its subject. (The gist of the book can be discerned from reading the first chapter.) In contrast, The Coming Community reads like poetry, much of it centered around the task of reconstructing our notion of subjectivity away from the specificity of identity toward what Agamben, in a somewhat unfortunate, though unavoidable translation, calls “whatever being,” a mode of “being-in-language” (and in the world: “being-such”) that moves beyond singularity and, its opposite, the abstract universal:

The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being French, being Muslim), but only in its being such as it is. Singularity is thus freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal. The intelligible . . . is neither a universal nor an individual included in a series, but rather “singularity insofar as it is whatever singularity.” (1)

This rather difficult concept, which, admittedly, I have not done a very good job of explaining here, inevitably leads to the discussion of its political significance in the final chapter—though not the last, which consists of an appendix—of this short, though dense, book called “Tiananmen.” Suggesting that identity works to the advantage of the State in terms of controlling people, Agamben writes: “What the State cannot tolerate in any way . . . is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)” (86).

Peter Clark | The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200-1830 | Longman | 1983

“One does not need to adopt an alcoholic interpretation of history to appreciate the contribution of drinking houses to the social development of premodern Europe and North America.”

If poets and their jobs—the dilemma livelihood presents for the writer—was the focus of my dissertation, which is also the focus of Wig, the magazine I edit with Kristen Gallagher, my real interest has always been leisure, or, as I prefer to call it, loafing. As such, I decided that I’d spend the summer break (financed, I should add, by my industrious wife) working on a project begun last summer called “The Institute of Loafing.” Seated one day in mid-June, at my favorite bar in Eugene, the Bier Stein, thinking and talking about loafing to one of my Bier Stein friends, who being a Eugenian, naturally shared an interest in loafing, it suddenly occurred to me that bar life is most certainly a part of the loafing life. And, in fact, this is confirmed by Peter Clark’s book. Over and over again we read of workers heading to the bar at day’s end. While the alehouse—to be distinguished from the Inn and the Tavern in regards to class, with the former at the top of hierarchy and the alehouse at the bottom—was first and foremost a drinking establishment, it served many other purposes, as well, from lodging to commerce to reading room to what amounts to an employment agency. As Clark writes in the introduction, the alehouse was also a prime source of revenue for the government, noting, ironically that “the American War of Independence was fought by British troops and mercenaries heavily financed by a tax on domestic alehouse drinkers against colonists whose military headquarters, as at Boston in 1774-75, were often taverns” (3).

§

Tim Shaner’s work has appeared in Word for/Word, Jacket, Kiosk, P-Queue, Shampoo, 88: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, The Portable Lower Eastside, Ambit (UK), The Rialto (UK), and other magazines. He is the co-editor of Wig, a magazine devoted to poetry written on the job, and curates A New Poetry Series in Eugene, Oregon. He has a Ph.D. from SUNY-Buffalo’s Poetics Program and works as a full-time part-timer at Lane Community College and Umpqua Community College.

Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Susana Gardner

aRb (ar)/ARB (Rb) | joy as Tiresome Vandalism | if p then q then others | 2008

Definitely acquired from James Davies up in Manchester. I have had these two beautifully wax-sealed documents. I didn’t want to open them, that is a shame because I finally broke the seal of one today to find a wondrously spineless collaboration with public spaces both poetic and photographic. As chance would have it I opened them incorrectly (2nd first, etc) This has the feeling of poetic grab-bag, especially in the confusion of my opening them wrong. This is a wonderful response project.

Elizabeth Bryant | (nevertheless enjoyment | Quale | 2010

Fantastic book—an inquisition of what if or what were in that space of nevertheless? Where it not this, were it not what it is in this temporal state. Clever in what is not said as it is in what is. The title, (nevertheless enjoyment crafts the book and utilizes the itself to its utmost possibility, denoted by space itself, the reader must remind themselves of the title again and again—with each new page and poem. Deliberate wanton poetic spaces, hapless and wondrous, with numerous possibility toward further want and understanding.

Harry Gilonis | North Hill | Free Poetry | December 2009

A syntactic consequence or take on two classical Chinese Poets, Tu mu and Yu Hsüan-chi —Gilonis makes the ancients new again. Each poem begins, or quite a way after Tu Mu (c. 803-852 AD) (or Yu Hsüan-chi 844-869 AD)

drinking alone

open window winds in snow
embrace embrasure   open wine
yawning like a yawl in the rain
unreefed  asleep  solitude  a star

for Peter Manson bis Mallarmé

Danielle Pafunda | iatrogenic: their tesitmonies | noemi | 2010

Wicked. Pafunda is at her best. Even had you dared to get iatrogenic with her, well it’s no surprise she beat us all in her craft and cunning. Though I do wonder if their is a poetic possibility of iatrogenic disorder we as poets could, say inherit or intuit from our poet forbears? Perhaps this is what Pafunda is trying to get at, versus owning the role of palpitating patient? Hypnotically hip and positively derisive!

Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | Tinfish | 2010

Here, the poet (Sand) crosses into new genre or territory of poet toward that of poet-journalist. Remember to Wave should be read as testimony, a position of witness in a time the world we live in simply want to forget. Tracing the city on foot, Sand unveils the lost story, a story that is told more through the landscape of archives as it is through the contemporary retelling of the Japanese-American POW camp experiences, and subsequent devastation of a people and culture. An incredible beauty is also unveiled in the city’s foot-journey and Sand’s mapped coordinates, and it is this: Every city needs a poet like Sand. In her own way, Sand challenges every poet to take on the city in which they live and perhaps bear the witness or voice of those that can no longer tell the story.

David Wolach | OCCULTATIONS | Black Radish | 2010

Wolach’s Occultations is at once bawdy, beautiful and electrifying. No stops are missed, whether it be textural vispo imagery sidling other occultations and palimpsestic frameworks of a new body-poetic taxonomy. If ever a book needed to stand for a poet as they are daily as much as they are poetic, Occultations meets that challenge as it speaks plainly as well as being concurrently laden with contradictory fire and in your face farce— ‘in the forest in the dilated pores of firenight/ I dare you to devour me’.

Jeff Hilson, ed. | The Reality Street Book of Sonnets | Reality Street | 2008

This is an amazing, must have collection of sonnets. I am a bit embarrassed that I did not have a copy until now. The amazing breadth and inclusion even of very anti-sonnet sonnets is fantastic. Notably for me, Sean Bonney’s, Astrophil and Stella, Bern Porter’s Sonnet for An Elizabethan Virgin (imagine oA oA oA oA oA in a sonnet), or Mary Ellen Solt’s Moon Shot Sonnet, Paul Duton’s sonic so’net (s), Alan Halsey’s Discomposed Sonnets, John Gibbens’ leaf matter sonnets, from Underscore, or Philip Nikoayev’s Letters from Aldenderry, for which I must add I once asked, what is the opposite of an erasure…I think Nikolayev has given me the answer here. Props to Hilson and Reality Street for getting this beauty into the world.

Recently acquired goodies which I am very excited about reading…

Cara Benson | (made) | book thug | 2010

Francesca Lisette |As the Rushes Were (chapbook) | Grasp  | 2010

Tom Jenks | * | if p then q | 2010

Tom Jenks | a priori | if p then q | 2008

Brenda Iijima | If Not Metaphoric | Ashanta | 2010

Zoe Skoulding |You will have your own Cathedral (with cd) | Seren | 2008

Scott Thurston | Internal Rhyme | Shearsman | 2010

Scott Thurston, ed. | The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk | Salt | 007

want list:

I got to see Byrne, Myles and Wagner read this summer, sadly did not get my hands on their books (yet). But all gave amazing readings and I will get their books before the new year.

Mairéad Byrne | The Best of (what’s left of) Heaven (first edition) | Publishing Genius | na

Eileen Myles | Inferno: ( a Poet’s Novel | OR Press | 2010

Catherine Wagner | My New Job | Fence | 2009

More Susana Gardner here. Here Attention Span for 2007. Back to directory.



Attention Span 2010 – Joel Bettridge

Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | Tinfish | 2010

Roberto Tejada | Exposition Park | Wesleyan | 2010

Nancy Kuhl | Suspend | Shearsman | 2010

Graham Foust | A Mouth in California | Flood | 2009

Kate Greenstreet | The Last 4 Things | Ahsahta |  2009

John Williams | Stoner | New York Review Books | 1965

Gino Segrè | Faust in Copenhagen | Viking | 2007

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. Sidney Monas | Crime and Punishment | Signet | 1968

Jane Sprague | The Port of Los Angeles | Chax | 2009

Richard J. Pioli, editor | Stung by Salt and Water: Creative Texts of the Italian Avant-gardist F. T. Marinetti | Lang | 1987

Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi & Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer | Wesleyan | 2008

More Joel Bettridge here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Pattie McCarthy

Anselm Berrigan | Free Cell | City Lights | 2009

“I do take relentless / as a compliment. All this work / dealing with making it work.”

Allison Cobb | Green-Wood | Factory School | 2010

“But every age has its ghosts, a kind of rage. The language.” “The word ‘forest’ itself forms a fence.”

CA Conrad & Frank Sherlock | The City Real & Imagined | Factory School | 2010

“‘Of / course they talk about genocide. / They’re Polish.’ The show ends. / Everything burns. A new set / is built for tomorrow.”

Sarah Dowling | Security Posture | Snare | 2009

“Makes a movement of hand toward // clothing that intervenes / and conforms exactly.”

Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Pitch: Drafts 77 – 95 | Salt | 2010

“Reduplicate the awkwardness. // If given text in a dream, try extra hard to read it.”

Susan Howe | Poems Found in a Pioneer Museum | Coracle | 2009

“It was the only thing she had left / from the journey across.”

Chris McCreary | Undone: a fakebook | furniture | 2010

“You recover / from upside // down & demand a bigger / engine.”

Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey | 2009

“Up nursing       then make tea / the word war is far”

Lisa Robertson | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House | 2009

“And you are a rare modern painting in the grand salon / And you are a wall of earth.”

Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | Tinfish | 2010

“Inexpert, I / investigate // Inexpert, I / walk, and walk.”

Kevin Varrone | g-point almanac: Passyunk Lost | Ugly Duckling | 2010

“she said she grew up // when dodos were ubiquitous, / when snyder avenue was rome”

Karen Weiser | To Light Out | Ugly Duckling | 2010

“the chapel of a bird’s body / is any body / breathing with ink”

More Pattie McCarthy here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Stephen Collis

Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | TinFish | 2010

Site-specific poetry at its best—collages, documents, and roller derby—what more could you ask for? Sand continues to produce some of the most earnest, delicate, and pointed political poetry out there.

Jane Sprague | The Port of Los Angeles | Chax | 2009

What Sand does with Portland, Sprague takes up in Los Angeles, only with more thorough-going lyricism. Ikea products come ashore, drug dealers get busted, and the commons once again raises its head amidst new enclosures—”this / in the how now moment sullied biosphere.” One of my favorite poetry books to come along in a while.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Pitch: Drafts 77-95 | Salt | 2010

The next installment of DuPlessis’s major life-long poem, now getting up over 800 pages all told. I’m finding the increasing pleasure is in following the Drafts back “down the ladder,” as it were, along the line of 19, as there are now 5 poems in each 19-poem cycle which pass over each other once again, picking up on stray elements, deepening and contorting themes.

Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light | Station Hill | 2010

Long one of the best under-recognized poets, Wolsak’s new “collected” includes everything from The Garcia Family Co-Mercy and Pen Chants to her amazing prose-poem/essay, An Heuristic Prolusion. Precise thought, compressed imagery, and a deeply human sense of the universe and our fragile place in it. A book to keep close by at all times.

Jeff Derksen | Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics | Talon | 2009

Selected essays from one of his generation’s seminal poet-critics. Need to know what neoliberalism is and how poetry (as it must) bites the hand that feeds it? This is your book. I know of no other writer who can so seamlessly move from complex analyses of political economy to wry readings of avant-garde poetry.

Rachel Zolf | Neighbour Procedure | Coach House | 2010

Poems from a stay in Palestine, the opening section, “Shoot & Weep,” is alone worth the price of admission—some of the most powerfully affective statistics (!) I have ever read, as Zolf weaves magic out of Butler’s Precarious Life.

Jules Boykoff | Hegemonic Love Potion | Factory School | 2009

Along with Derksen, Rodrigo Toscano, and Kevin Davies, one of my favorite guides to the perplexing terrain of late neoliberal mayhem—and what poetry might be doing there. Sharp, sharp wit. News that indeed stays news.

Josely Vianna Baptista | On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids | Manifest | 2003

A late discovery for me, and the press might not exist any more, but Baptista’s poems, in Chris Daniels’ painstaking translations, certainly satisfy Dickinson’s requirement that poetry take the top of your head off. South American concrete, material lyricism—this is language as I want to meet it—a net thrown over another world.

Erín Moure | My Beloved Wager | NewWest | 2009

Essays from some 30 years of a writing life, reading Moure on translation—amongst other things—is a marvel, instructive and electrifying. I have deeply enjoyed this book.

More Stephen Collis here. Back to directory.

A Deserter Reporting Why

Kaia Sand – Best Regards (1’24”). Recorded early October 2006 at the Contemporary Women’s Experimental Poetry in Cambridge, England. More Sand at Archive of the Now and on Leonard Schwartz’s radio program Cross Cultural Poetics (open mp3 here, or scroll to show 132 on this page). • Tracklist here. Mirrored here.

Attention Span – Tom Orange

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space | Palm Press | 2008

The smartest demonstration and open invitation I’ve seen of what a poetics off the page and engaged with the world does, can and might look like.

Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | Subpress | 2007
Laura Moriarty | A Semblance: Selected Poems: 1975-2006 | Omnidawn | 2007

Overviews from two of our most important poets at mid-career, presenting new opportunities to see where they’ve come from and where they’ve now brought us.

David Harvey | A Brief History of Neoliberalism | Oxford University Press | 2007
Naomi Klein | The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | Picador | 2008

Particularly instructive when read together.

Maggie Nelson | Women, The New York School and Other True Abstractions | University of Iowa Press | 2007

It’s about time someone like Nelson has come along to explode the conventional wisdom on these matters! Her refusal to accept the terms of debate on their own terms is utterly refreshing.

Michael Pollan | The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World | Random | 2002
Michael Pollan | The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals | Penguin | 2007

“Everything’s connected” goes the ecological credo, but Pollan’s exemplary studies show that credo operating with new subtleties and depth, a true parti pris des choses that is at once a profoundly important politics and ethics as well as ecology.

Rod Smith | Deed | University of Iowa Press | 2007

What the small press poetry world has known for years now finally garners national attention: this is a poetry to be reckoned with.

Charles Gayle (alto sax), Sirone (bass) & Rashied Ali (drums) | Stadtsaal, Burghausen (Germany) | 8 March 2008 | audience recording circulated via dimeadozen.org

With this formidable rhythm section behind him, Gayle trades in his trademark scorched-earth tenor saxophone for a lighter and sweeter horn. Be assured, his alto tone is still incredibly biting and intense, but it’s somehow more soulful, warmer, more human. He has blended the blusey wail of Ornette Coleman, the flurrious attack of John Coltrane and the ecstatic leaps of Albert Ayler with his own genius to become a true master of the idiom.

Harmony Korine | Mister Lonely | IFC Films | 2008

An expatriate Michael Jackson impersonator alone in Paris finds the company of kindred spirits when he is invited by a Marilyn Monroe to join a commune of other impersonators in the Scottish highlands. The trailer for this film made it look overly sentimental and sappy  — in stark contrast to the shock tactics of Korine’s previous efforts (Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy). To my surprise, however, and with the addition of flying nuns under guidance by Werner Herzog in cameo, Korine has put together a truly touching mediation on freedom, marginalization and utopia, and what it means to discover and be yourself in all its joyous possibilities and painful limitations. Attending the Nashville premier, which featured a special appearance and Q&A session by hometown hero Korine, was an added bonus.

*

More Tom Orange here.

Attention Span – Joel Bettridge

Richard Deming | Let’s Not Call It Consequence | Shearsman Books | 2008

Rachel Zolf | Human Resources  | Coach House | 2007

Sophocles, trans. John Tipton | Ajax  | Flood | 2008

Mark Scroggins | The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007

Jonathan Edwards | “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections” | in A Jonathan Edwards Reader |Yale | 2003

Marcel Proust | Swann’s Way | Random House | 1934

Ted Pearson | Encryptions |Singing Horse | 2007

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space  | Palm Press | 2008

Ulf Stolterfoht, trans. by Rosmarie Waldrop | Lingos | Cuneiform Press | 2007

Linda Russo | Mirth | Chax | 2007

Elizabeth Arnold | Civilization | Flood | 2006

Attention Span – Rodney Koeneke

K. Silem Mohammad & Anne Boyer, eds. | Abraham Lincoln issues 1-3 | NA | 2007-2008

Nascent American sensibility change in easy-to-staple trading card form.

Hannah Weiner | Hannah Weiner’s Open House, ed. Patrick Durgin | Kenning | 2006

Each room has many mansions. More doors, please, soon.

Gary Sullivan | PPL in a Depot | Roof | 2008

Brecht shutting cell phone to mustachio Mozart with Caucasian circle chalk. “Between the dark and the thyme soufflé … mmmm …”

Philip Whalen | The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, ed. Michael Rothenberg | Wesleyan | 2007

New eyes for old wineskin yclept “Beat.”

Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo | 2008

Dear Poetry: Please can you be like this sometimes always?

Kevin Killian | Selected Amazon Reviews, ed. Brent Cunningham | Hooke | 2006

The nation speaks through its stars—Reviewer #80 is America’s Most Wanted detourniste.

Maryrose Larkin | The Book of Ocean | i.e. | 2007

Newton’s apple fallen and washed to Eve’s, sent into re-orbit: poems for a world like that.

Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | subpress | 2007

Transatlantic two-step for treated Bösendorfer. My feet slip over at ends of lines, like when you trip in dreams. Your catching yourself’s the poem.

Alicia Cohen | Debt and Obligations | ms | forthcoming, 2008

To make Temecula and connected earth systems versus all reason sweet and green. “Actual people breathe the ghost.”

K. Silem Mohammad | Breathalyzer | Edge | 2008

That thing Greil Marcus said about buying an album of Dylan breathing hard? That. Esp. when breath moves like this. “There’s no way we’re not going to start a ruckus in a country town.”

Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerilla Poetry and Public Space | Palm | 2008

Field manual for the practice of not sitting on hands, pitched against “the almost imperceptible social octave known as normality.”

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More Koeneke here.