Attention Span 2009 – Andrew Epstein

Roberto Bolano | The Savage Detectives | FSG | 2007

As many others have said, this novel has to be one of the most exhilarating, devastating, exhausting, and revealing accounts to be found of avant-garde poetry and the movements that sustain it – the avant-garde as dream, as farce, as tragedy, as inspiring coterie and impossible community, tantalizing possibility and heart-breaking, inevitable failure. “The problem with literature, like life, said Don Crispín, is that in the end people always turn into bastards.”

Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer | Wesleyan University Press | 2008

“I gave you my imaginary hand and you give me your imaginary hand and we walk together (in imagination) over the earthly ground.” Such a beautiful, and beautifully edited, book. The early work, like Spicer himself, feels suddenly indispensable. “Plague took us and the land from under us, / Rose like a boil, enclosing us within.”

Lisa Robertson | The Weather | New Star Books | 2001

“Days heap upon us,” Robertson writes. As do words, well-turned, elusive, gorgeous, consistently surprising, like days themselves. “A slight cloud drifts contrary to the planet; the day might be used formally to contain a record of idleness… It is the clear, magnificent, misunderstood morning; we pick up the connections.”

David Shapiro | New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) | Overlook Press | 2007.

A radiant gathering: always surprising and strange, mournful, playful, and wise. “Thus, in presenting sleep // The poem must leap over the cut-offs. / You see clearly in a revolution, // Look down and notice how you have slept.” … “Out of the pills and the pencils, out of toothbrushes and night guards, out of CDs and Altoids, out of feathers and staplers, out of time clocks and syllabi, out of tissues and scissors, nothing straight has ever been made.”

Gabriel Gudding | Rhode Island Notebook | Dalkey Archive Press | 2007

This is a seriously big, seriously funny book: ambitious and capacious, sharp-eyed and dangerous (at least to other drivers on the road). “Very hazy / the bug splats collect & remark / upon the butterscotch light / of the sun directly / ahead. The corn stands in lines of / musketeers row upon rank / : It is late corn. It is late. / At 5:47 PM the sun is a / sharper orange, juicier. Then it pales.// What strange fate light is here: as if / a pig is coming out of the sun instead of / sunlight. what white, fat, changing light.”

Alice Notley | Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems: 1970-2005 | Wesleyan University Press | 2006.

Like the other large selecteds here, this volume is such a welcome, generous bringing together. “Your Dailiness, / I guess I must address you / begin and progress somewhat peculiarly, wanting / not afraid to be anonymous, to love what’s at hand / I put out a hand, it’s sewn & pasted hingewise & / enclosed in cover. I’m 27 and booked …”

Katie Degentesh | The Anger Scale | Combo Books | 2006

Flarf is trying to break your heart. “I hated my mother for hating cats / but I wanted her to live, and I knew that // in this era of navel gazing, / it was my navel she was always gazing at. // After mastering the rules of grammar / she was like a ghost to all my friends // No one felt they had the right to have her committed / while baking cookies.”

Ron Silliman | The Age of Huts (compleat) | University of California Press | 2007
Ron Silliman | The Alphabet | University of Alabama Press | 2008.

A remarkable, inexhaustible achievement. “Ketjak,” like the rest of the works in these books, has a rare quality: addictive and good for you at the same time. “The form itself is the model of a city, extension, addition, modification.”

Carole Maso | The Art Lover | New Directions | 2006 [reprint, 1991]

“I am a lover of detail, a marker—it’s a way of keeping the world in place. One documents, makes lists to avoid becoming simply petals. I am like you, Max: a looker, an accountant, a record keeper, a creator of categories, a documenter. For evidence, I rip flyers from telephone poles, save every scrap of paper I get. Listen carefully. Organize. Reorganize.”

James Schuyler | Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951-1991 | Turtle Point Press | 2004

A wonderful trove of chatter, wit, news, and aperçus. “December in New York is one big mess. Everybody gets drunk too much: Mike Goldberg looks gray and shaky; New York looks bright and shaky; Frank, I’m sorry to say, looks gray and shaky. Write him plenty heap big buck-up notes and postals; Xmas is depressing for some of us deracine Christians.”

Joshua Clover | The Totality for Kids | University of California Press | 2006

Under the paving stones, the city! But it’s another city, a shattered and shattering place which Clover discovers to be where we already are living: “City which is / A love letter. Interior to that, / City emerging naked from the white / Indifferences of winter. City / Once hidden in the library and now / Drowsing in the sleep of the collective.” “Say hello to the generation that burned itself in effigy.”

More Andrew Epstein here.

Attention Span – Philip Metres

Walt Whitman | Leaves of Grass | Norton Critical Edition | 2002

This summer, I read the 1892 Leaves from cover to cover, and then the 1855 version, and did not want either to end.  Despite its repetitiousness, its occasionally reprehensible poems, and its many awful lines— (“limitless limpid jets of love” being one of the most hilariously bad representations of male orgasm)—I found myself completely in love with Whitman’s project—its grandiosity, its attunement to his time, its largesse.

Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Fady Joudah | The Butterfly’s Burden | Copper Canyon | 2007

A collection of his most recent books translated by Fady Joudah into a supple and lush English — The Stranger’s Bed (1998), A State of Siege (2002), and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done (2003) — aptly represents the range of Darwish’s mature style. From the courtly and ecstatic love lyrics of The Stranger’s Bed, to the diaristic and penetrating political poem of A State of Siege, to the colloquial meditations on mortality, history, and the future in Don’t Apologize, The Butterfly’s Burden bears witness to the generous breadth of Darwish’s poetic and cultural achievement.

Marisol Limon Martinez | After You, Dearest Language | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2005

I can’t shake this book, composed as an index.  Little haunter, dream house, index of night.

C.D. Wright  | One Big Self | Copper Canyon | 2007

Wright culls statements and stories from the poet’s interviews of Louisiana prison inmates, conducted with photographer Deborah Luster (following in the tradition of Muriel Rukeyser’s trip to Gauley Junction with photographer Nancy Naumburg). Wright juggles these voices and images in ways that create “one big self” that contains author, reader, and prisoner.

Michael Magee | My Angie Dickinson | Zasterle | 2006

What happens with Flarf finds/fights traditional form, when Emily meets Angie. Ron Silliman has already called it a classic, but this is no museum piece.

H.L. Hix | God Bless: A Political/Poetic Discourse | Etruscan Press | 2007

God Bless comes almost entirely from speeches made by George Bush and Osama Bin Laden, which Hix transforms into poems in various traditional Western and non-Western forms, from the sestina to the ghazal. It is a fascinating project, demonstrating an aesthetic attention that becomes a kind of ethical and political attention, a close reading of the first order. A document of close listening, God Bless aptly demonstrates the profound lack of listening at the heart of this administration’s decision-making process. Documentary poetry, in Hix’s rendering, becomes a kind of history lesson for the poet and his readers, a way of reading into the archive and thus extending the archive into poetry, poetry as “extending the document.”

Katie Degentesh | The Anger Scale | Combo Books | 2005

Flarf meets the MMPI, and they have a baby. If lyric tends toward the neurotic, and flarf toward the psychotic, then this book demonstrates a healthy split-personality.

Bob Perelman | Iflife | Roof | 2006

Rangy both formally and tonally, Perelman’s latest is framed by poems that situate us in the War on Terror, this book by a langpo vet moves us through elegies, investigations, re-considerations, muddlings of all sorts. He’s still lost his avant-garde card somewhere in the wash; I hope he never finds it.

Robert Hass | Time and Materials | Ecco | 2007

I’ve always had something of a lover’s quarrel with Hass’ poetry, for the ways in which it occasionally luxuriates in its own pleasures, and veers into the prose of privilege. Yet poems like “Winged and Acid Dark”—among some others here—demonstrate the terrifying limits of poetry in the face of the dark side of human imagination. In the tradition of a narrative lyric poetry conscious of its own imperial leanings.

Hayan Charara, ed. | Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry | U of Arkansas Press | 2008

Charara gathers the new and established voices of Arab American poetry confronting the post-9/11 landscape. Poets like Lawrence Joseph and Fady Joudah shake me to the core; poets like Khaled Mattawa and Naomi Shihab Nye bring me comfort.

Daniil Kharms, ed. and trans. Matvei Yankelevich | Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms | Overlook | 2007

Named by Marjorie Perloff as one of the books of the year in the Times Literary Supplement, reviewed in The New York Times by George Saunders, and with poems published in The New Yorker, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (translated by Matvei Yankelevich) doesn’t need my negligible imprimatur. It is unnecessary for me to say that everyone must own a copy of this book, but I will. You should. An anti-poet of the first order.

*

More Philip Metres here.

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.