Posts Tagged ‘Kevin Killian’
Attention Span 2011 | Melanie Neilson
Rae Armantrout | Versed | Wesleyan | 2009
Anne Boyer | The Romance of Happy Workers | Coffee House | 2008
Rod Smith | Deed | Iowa | 2007
CA Conrad | The Book of Frank | Chax | 2009
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009
Steve Farmer | Glowball | Theenk | 2010
Eileen Myles | The Importance of Being Iceland | Semiotext(e) | 2009
Sianne Ngai | Ugly Feelings | Harvard | 2005
Jerry Lewis | The Total Film-Maker | Random | 1971
Kevin Killian | Impossible Princess | City Lights | 2009
Monica de la Torre | Public Domain | Roof | 2008
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009
Gertrude Stein | Lucy Church Amiably | Something Else | 1930 reissued 1969
Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This to Me | Wesleyan | 2008
Philip Whalen, ed. Michael Rothenberg | The Collected Poems | Wesleyan | 2007
Lew Welch, ed. Donald Allen | Ring of Bone: Collected 1950-1970 | Grey Fox | 1979
Donald Bogle | Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters | Harper Collins | 2011
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. | Race Music | California |2003
Bern Porter | Found Poems | Nightboat | 2011
Jessica B. Harris | High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America | Bloomsbury | 2011
James Lee Burke | Detective Dave Robicheaux series of 18 thrillers set in Louisiana: The Neon Rain to The Glass Rainbow | Pocket | 1989-2010
Lewis Klahr, Engram Sepals | Melodramas (sequence of seven 16mm films, 75 minutes) | 1994-2000
Elvis Presley | The Country Side of Elvis | RCA | 2001
Raymond Chandler, performed by Elliott Gould | Red Wind (1938) | New Millennium Audio | 2002
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More Melanie Neilson here.
Neilson’s Attention Span for 2009. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Kevin Killian
Martine Bellen | Ghosts! | Spuyten Duyvil | 2011
Martine Bellen is one of the poets I most often wish I had met; when I read her work I feel the thrill of making a new friend, someone just for me. Her new book Ghosts! begins with a sensational, almost flip title and never looks back. Sketched within three series of poems, a woman’s story reflects and refracts through the brackets of life and death, and the “story,” as I have called it, never manages to dry into any flat sort of wholeness. How to see her? It would be like defining what Ingrid Bergman was like through the six films she made with Rossellini. What happens in Ghosts! is, on the other hand, strikingly similar to what happens to Ingrid in Europa 51 and that one with George Sanders—we change, change utterly as the words mount up to our waists like dry leaves in a red country.
Gregg Biglieri | Little Richard the Second | Ugly Duckling | 2011
Ugly Duckling puts out some striking books and this one, without a spine or really much of anything holding it together except for a length of brown string and a trio of tiny bored holes, is one of the fairest. Biglieri’s poem is pretty short and is printed I think all on one side of a length of paper with two dozen folds in it. Every time you turn a page you’re conscious of the pages as uncut; squeeze them between your fingers and they balloon out, revealing blank folds underneath. The writing produces an uncanny, And Then There Were None feel of words eating themselves, disappearing before one’s eyes, often enough through a puns and anagrams approach Mel Taub himself might envy. Or “Captain Mnemo,” Biglieri’s mascot. “Hurt his iris/Hiss her ear.” Yes, it’s a short book, but humankind cannot stand much reality.
Brandon Brown | The Persians by Aeschylus | Displaced | 2011
Displaced Press from Michigan has put forward an awesome initiative, printing the first books of a handful of young American poets I’ve been following for some time. One of them is Brandon Brown, a figure on the San Francisco poetry scene whom I first met some years ago when I enlisted him to help me and Peter Gizzi and our work on collecting Jack Spicer’s poetry. Brown is a classicist and it shows up in his work to an almost irksome degree, but his book is a rousing reminder, not perhaps of the relevance of ancient Greek drama, but of the ways in which change is forever written into all things, a golden thread amid the dreck. I remember hearing about the poets’ production of The Persians, held outdoors at the Presidio, and I was actually present for a scene or two Brown delivered onstage at Timken Hall, where the parallels between the Persians of Aeschylus’ days, and the Iranians of ours, were made very clear through deft riffs of stagecraft, declamation, and an Olsonian take on the function of the city in poetry.
Stacy Doris| The Cake Part | Publication Studio | 2011
People know so little about the French revolution, but they do remember the cake part. Publication Studio is a sort of “print on demand” company based in Portland (Oregon) that can take on the most innovative and complicated sort of project, and has made a perfect match with Stacy Doris’ unique text application. Part found poem, part manifesto, part investigative poetry, and sometimes as silly as Ronald Firbank. In recent months she asked a whole bunch of poets and other friends to make little videos based on assigned parts of her book, so I got to know “mine” pretty well, and to launch the book she posted them all on her own Vimeo channel which please check out. This sort of history lesson is infectious, like a show and tell lesson combined with a trip in the Wayback Machine—there can be nothing, literally, more outlandish.
Jennifer Natalya Fink | Thirteen Fugues | Dark Coast | 2011
Fink is the veteran author of several books, but she keeps surprising the attentive reader. Her stories share textual strategies with prose poetry, woven together out of myriad weaves and looms, tying themselves together in what I, if I knew more about music, would ascribe to some sort of fugal structure. Here the stories slash prose passages accrete into what could almost be a novel in the hands of a lesser writer, and sometimes prose itself breaks down into the stronger and harsher mode of poetry itself, line breaks and all, when “Tanya,” Fink’s appealing and yet scary heroine, decides to stop making sense and to give her soul a little room to breathe. Fink ignores also the conventional geographies of writing, and her book transports itself with abandon from South America, to Canada, to the US suburbs of her deep affection.
Colleen Lookingbill | A Forgetting Of | Lyric& | 2011
Did you ever write something, almost a book’s worth of it, and then you put it away for one reason or another? Perhaps life intervened, perhaps something more interesting than life. In the gritty and determined world of A Forgetting Of, Colleen Lookingbill performs a complex and dangerous operation, that of reviving a forgotten body of poems. She had made a wonderful debut in the 1990s with her first book, Incognita, and then nothing. So much talent and grace, however, coupled with a health scare while she was still young, could not let the matter rest. From somewhere deep within, and accompanied by a suite of full color paintings very much in the Romantic vein of the poems, a book came to life, and a family of fans, at last, finds entertainment.
Deborah Meadows | Saccade Patterns | BlazeVOX | 2011
She has published ten books of poetry since 2003, and here comes an eleventh. I’m sure that, like Leslie Scalapino used to, she will forgive you if you haven’t read all of her oeuvre. (RIP Leslie!) Saccade Patterns are apparently the movements of your eyeballs in your heads, back and forth, up and down, the rotations eyes make continually until pattern recognition momentarily soothes that restless urge to know. Meadows has been good at evoking patterns (of loss, of recognition, of right and wrong) for a decade, and here she steps back from the powers of her own sight and applies what she’s learned to the social and political problems that engorge our times.
Jennifer Moxley | Coastal | The Song Cave | 2011
Steve, you thought you could box in Jennifer by referring to her then-ongoing long poem “Coastal” as “your 9/11 poem”? Ha ha, she responds with a quick twist of her poniard. But I sympathize with you because to all intents and purposes I agree a little. “Coastal” is a continuous unfolding of a book that contrasts the southern Maine of Moxley’s present surround, with the Southern California in which she grew up, and in the telling, Maine comes to stand in synecdochically for middle age itself, San Diego for youth. And the poem organizes itself along these lines (there’s also a James Schuyler/Rae Armantrout dialectic) until the artist reveals that despite obvious differences, the similarities that link worlds together—poetry and painting—the East and the West—the heterosexual and the lesbian—the past and the present—are more provocative, more enigmatic. I’m sure you were just testing this theory when you made your now famous faux pas.
Olumide Popoola | This Is Not About Sadness | Unrast Verlag | 2010
The reverberations of African revolution shake up a mixed neighborhood in a working class backwater of London. This is the first full-length book by the Nigerian-German author Olumide Popoola, published in English in Munster. Wait, is that the same as Munich? When “Olu” came to San Francisco recently, introduced to me and Bob Glück by UK novelist Shaun Levin and by Olu’s advisor the poet Tim Atkins, we had the feeling that a necessary voice was being heard, and that the world had expanded from within. “We don’t measure in impossibility/ in anguish or that which sliups/ through our hands,” writes Popoola. Two women, one old, the other young, meet in London—two different Africas in their pasts, and the secrets they have kept begin to break down under London’s weak and tenuous sun.
Jane Sprague, ed. | Imaginary Syllabi! | Palm Press | 2011
This has got to be the funnest book I’ve read in eons. Editor Sprague’s opening statement tells us that she has made up a book by multiple authors “that aims to collect writings which […] essentially challenge pedagogical strategies pursuant to the work of teaching writing and other disciplines.” The book has some utopian syllabi, but not all of them are as imaginary as others, and some have actually been taught in classes in college programs in official “and mongrel” schools. An expansiveness fills the volume, even when the courses offered have a touch of our 21st century despair to them; Sprague must have felt like, oh who was it put out that “curriculum of the soul” and assigned all his favorite poets to writer on all those topics in the 1970s? Anyhow I think you get the gist. OK, not all of the contributions are of equal value, but I can see myself as an eternal student making use of them all for my own edification. And if I ever teach a poetry course I’ll be thinking primarily not of my own students, but of how to make my syllabus thrilling enough to get into Sprague 2.0.
Nicholas James Whittington | Slough | Bird & Beckett | 2010
I read the whole book several times and only now, as I struggle to type out the author’s name and the name of his book for the demanding readers of “Attention Span” have I realized that the book is not called Slouch, but Slough. It is the sort of California-landscape poetry, honed and polished to a few memorable lines per page, that I think of as the province of sloughmaster Joseph Massey of Arcata, but no, in fact it is written by someone totally different, and someone with his own sort of dreamy and visionary consciousness, a man with more air in his slough, with more than a trace of Beat DNA in his blood. And Jabès too. It is a wellshaped book, not quite small enough to fit in your hip pocket, but you could slip it into a trenchcoat pocket without protest and with a certain synchronicity. “Tell me where you live,” Whittington writes, “light’s particles shall settle in/ troughs of your voice.” I’m saying he ain’t no slouch.
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Kevin Killian is a San Francisco writer His books include Bedrooms Have Windows, Shy, Little Men, Arctic Summer, Argento Series, I Cry Like a Baby, and Action Kylie. His new book of stories is called Impossible Princess (from City Lights Books).
Killian’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to 2011 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 – Kevin Killian
Steven Farmer | Glowball | theenk | 2010
Farmer is one of those writers who just don’t get published enough, for often when I look at current events I long to find out what Steve Farmer’s take on it will be, and then ten years later, in a book like Glowball, it’s still the news that makes news. He is always inventive, and his long poems have a shapely quality to them denied to some of his peers. Even in a traditional attraction such as the metaphor, his are exceedingly gorgeous: I like the “greater Los Angeles area” as a “manuscript in a parking lot.” You can tell he takes the long view: the cover is a Robert Fisk photo of US bomb activity in Iraq, and makes it seem like the “return to immensity” nasty old George Bataille was cheerleading for in his cold-war take on de Sade. Well, a sort of jewel box awaits you, courtesy of Palmyra New York and its mighty little theenk Books, and when you read Glowball, that it came from Palmyra will seem so apropos.
Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, eds. | Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque burlesque poetics | Saturnalia | 2010
Lost in the gritty and fabulous world of Gurlesque, it’s easy to forget the whole rest of the world that doesn’t have unicorns with green tails. So many talented writers, all of them working the same vein. Yet as Judith Halberstam assures us, it’s more of a sensibility than a similarity of content; well, that’s true but it seems like a genre too—can a genre and a sensibility equate to the same thing? After reading Gurlesque I have new thoughts about New Narrative of all things, for the two whatevers share more than a coincidental number of common concerns surely: the fixation on shame and embarrassment, the use of gossip to promote social upheaval, the deployment of kitsch, porn and pop to soak the very texture of the poem with discomfort. I’m just upset because Tina Brown Celona’s poem “Event History” shows me up as being sort of a dick. Apparently I snubbed her at a poetry reading, and what’s scary is, I might do so again having never met her and not realizing she’s a Madame Defarge with an elephant’s memory.
Natalie Knight | Archipelagos | Punch | 2009
I heard of her first in connection with her poets theater work and her collaboration with Rodrigo Toscano, but I have been lucky enough to see a fair amount of her poetry too. Richard Owens from Punch Press put out this lovely little book late last year. It ends with a preface—why don’t more books do this?—and begins with one too. In fact it’s a book that meets itself in the middle, or throws itself out like a boomerang and spins itself back in, an able angler. The poem, like a mirror, throws its light back and forth from subject to object. Images of thirst, inertia, desiccation suggest not only a crisis of nature, but an economic arrhythmia troubling the desert like the serpent monster in that Tremors movie with Kevin Bacon long ago. “We mastered weather while soldiers manned uranium rigs in the depths of this unconscious planet.”
Rachel Levitsky | Neighbor | Ugly Duckling | 2009
Neighbor has the feel of a book I will return to often over the next years, and it has also a back story that Levitsky outlines in her back matter that just floors me. I knew writing poetry was hard, but I never thought that I could get a village to help me through! What one comes away with in Neighbor is the sense of a sharply individuated voice, mediating all sorts of very charged political and emotional material, but also the sense, a comforting sense, of the power that a likeminded cohort of massed energies (“many in solitary”) can bequeath to a long project. The upshot is that Neighbor begins well and just gets better and better and better—well, there’s a poets theater type of piece which not everybody is going to love as much as I do—but I can’t picture anyone not swooning over—like bobbysoxers at the Paramount when Sinatra took the microphone—over the final section “The Desire of the Writer,” in which practically every line is great, for how often does that happen, really happen?
Sawako Nakayasu | Texture Notes | Letter Machine | 2010
With characteristic abandon, Sawako Nakayasu named her book after her long-ago blog, retaining that insouciant “notes” flavor that, when I see it in a book title, always makes me think, maybe I should wait for the real thing? “Notes” has a throwaway or at any rate provisional quality to it, though I suppose since Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” has attained more and more that feeling of terminal status that it was meant originally to deflect. Needless to say, Texture Notes is to texture as a Handbook to Surfing was to surfing, i.e., perhaps the last words on the subject. Oysters, she writes, to Paul Foster Johnson, embody the wet more than any other food or beverage, even water. You might wipe your eyes with one, “or rather, desperate for something that could act as a tonic, I would feed it to the next person who was in danger of drying out, yes you.” In other entries she considers the texture of danger, the texture of a raw red cow tongue in her mouth, the “physicality of intelligence” she detects in sumo. Left side right side of the brain: there’s nothing on the left side of each pair of pages, but a title and a dedication; on the right side is all the poetry. I had almost said “meat” because I’m getting so textural. Meat—the traffic of the internal plumbing.
Stan Persky & Brian Fawcett | Robin Blaser | New Star | 2010
I’m a sucker for any book called Robin Blaser, but this one is especially tasty, being that it was written by two of the former protégés of Robin Blaser, the American-born Canadian poet who left us last year. It’s not a collaboration per se, but rather a canny editor’s linking of two lengthy articles; however I find the conjunction very intriguing. Persky met Blaser in North Beach in the late 1950s, during his immersion in the Duncan/Spicer circle that proved an in-depth education for the young seaman. Fawcett’s encounter with Blaser was rather different, he was a young student right off the farm when he wound up in one of the first classes polymath Blaser taught in a formal setup (at Simon Fraser University in B.C. Funny thing is neither man writes poetry nowadays. In fact, Fawcett turns his half of the book into a blistering J’Accuse against the follies of the New American Poetry. I’m like, oh really? And yet the book has, of course, a depth of philosophical inquiry that will help many unravel the mysteries of Blaser.
Tom Raworth, trans. and ed. Gabriela Jauregui | El Tiempo Se Volvio Cuero | Sur +/avra ediciones | 2009
Gabriela Jauregui of Mexico City, who wrote one of my favorite books of poetry of 2008 (Controlled Decay) told me of her long immersion in the work of Tom Raworth and got me all excited when she said she had been translating his work into Spanish. And now here the book is, in a bilingual edition that, as I read through it, may I realize be the best selection of Raworth’s writing that we have. What comes to mind is the speed with which Raworth plows through his readings, so fast he’s huffing and puffing through the end, and the speed of Spanish, the multiple vowels and syllables so that there’s even more to hear and more to experience. Maybe a year back I went down to Glendale to hear Raworth and Juaregui read together for this book’s launch at the Poetics Research Bureau; sometimes he’d read, sometimes she would, but when they stood side by side and erased simultaneously it was better than the Kentucky Derby or Seabiscuit! I should also say that Juaregui’s notes (footnotes) in El Tiempo deserve their own five stars.
Sarah Rosenthal | A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area | Dalkey Archive | 2010
Sarah Rosenthal’s idea of the Bay Area writing community is hardly mine, but how I envy the poets who got to sit down and glory in all those sharply focussed, attentive and ultimately liberating questions she asks. She seems to have read everything each of her subjects has written, and to have it all at the tip of her tongue. It must be heaven to be so understood! At times such depth of knowledge leads to comic effects: Barbara Guest, faced with a multipart reading of her difficult work, seems so pleased that all she responds with is, “Yes,” or “What you’re saying is true.” I’m happy to see the New Narrative ably represented by Bob Glück and Camille Roy, but after a promising appearance in Rosenthal’s introduction, the Language poets seem to be disappeared from the bulk of the book, save by Bob explaining that life here in SF has become less bellicose in recent years, now that Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten and Bob Perelman have all moved along.
Nathaniel Siegel | Tony | Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs | 2009
In short, sharp little lines that resemble the bursts of memory and shame of a young man’s journey towards gay self-acceptance, Nathaniel Siegel’s psychological acuity and his skill prevent him from ever getting too sappy about it. It is the sort of poem I wish I could have written, a montage of scenes appearing quickly, then flash, you’re in another awkward, sexy place with a musical soundtrack, and even sweeter, the names of boys and men like a litany of broken promises. He gets everything right, even the moment of steeling up your courage to come out to your brother, like he didn’t already know years ago. Each stanza I would have worked up into a touching short story, but here it’s the speed and the accuracy of the notation that matter, like what’s his name, like listening to an old Art Tatum session and shaking your head in wonder and envy. By the end, you have lived a stranger’s life so intensely he’s become your comrade, your rabbi, your favorite boyfriend.
Christopher Wagstaff, ed. | Paul Alexander: On Black Mountain College and the San Francisco Scene | Rose Books | 2010
I know that I promised Brian Fawcett I would have no more truck with the evil New American Poetry, and yet this beautiful transcription of three mid-1980s interviews with the painter Paul Alexander broke my vow right away. (This book is #3 in a Rose Books series called “Painters of the San Francisco Renaissance.”) Paul Alexander, happily still alive and working in northern California, was a student in the late, decadent flowering of Black Mountain and came west with the others once the college closed in 1956. He worked closely with Olson, Duncan, Keilty, Borregaard, Jess, Adam, maybe not so much with Jack Spicer, though his younger brother Jim was one of the key figures in Spicer’s artistic development. Alexander, Tom Field and a few others found themselves at odds with the artistic trends of their time, ignored both by New York and by the SFAI/”6” Gallery artists like Deborah Remington and Wally Hedrick, but they persevered despite it all. Their uncanny work is ripe for full rediscovery.
David Wolach | Occultations | Black Radish | 2010
I come to this work thinking of the meetings I’ve attended of the Nonsites Collective here in San Francisco, a movement that has certainly inflected Bay Area writing practice over the past couple years. Wolach seems one of the most talented of a phalanx of talented participants, but I will have to read Occultations many more times to tell you how I really feel about it. He must have given his designers hell, as do many performance artists-turned-book poets, for nearly every page has some visual stunt going on to amplify or complicate the already dense and Halpernian movement of the words. This is a writing attuned gingerly to a certain amount of pain, proposing itself in a world where it’s always 3:30 in the morning. I admire what he does with his body, and the advocacy with which Occultations speaks for (or to, perhaps) the victims of brutality, government indifference or policy, the heteronormative dictatorship, and disease. It’s a long book, but it’s been a long war.
More Kevin Killian here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 . Back to directory.
Attention Span 2010 – John Sakkis
Alastair Johnston | Zephyrus Image A Bibliography | Poltroon | 2003
George Oppen | The Collected Poems Of George Oppen | New Directions | 1976
David Brazil and Sara Larsen, eds. | Try Magazine | 2010
Micah Ballard and Patrick James Dunagan | Easy Eden | Push | 2009
Daniel Clowes | Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron | Fantagraphics | 1998
Gad Hollander | Walserian Waltzes | Avec | 1999
Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This To Me The Collected Poetry Of Jack Spicer | Wesleyan | 2008
Sean Cliver | Disposable A History Of Skateboard Art | Warwick | 2005
Jason Morris | Spirits And Anchors | Auguste | 2010
Steve Lavoie and Pat Nolan | Life Of Crime Documents In The Guerrilla War Against Language Poetry | Poltroon | 2010
Rodney Koeneke | Rules For Drinking Forties | Cy Press | 2009
More John Sakkis here. His Attention Span for 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Peter Quartermain
Victor Coleman | Icon Tact: Poems 1984-2001 | Book Thug | 2006
Sardonic and sometimes savagely funny, other times just plain pissed-off; now and again tender, or screwball. Coleman, who reads widely, should be better known and warrants wide readership—and if the last three words make me sound like Elmer Fudd, well, Coleman would enjoy that.
George Deem | Let George Do It | Post-Apollo | 2009
Paintings and drawings; prose and verse. George Deem, who died in 2008, was a language artist, as well as a painter. As Ulla Dydo says in her introduction, this book “is not about painting, it is about writing.” A modest treasure. I’ve turned to it more than once, since I got it a few months back.
Lorne Dufour | Jacob’s Prayer | Caitlin | 2009
Simple prose is hard to write, and even harder to sustain. Dufour does it brilliantly, evoking the hardships of life in a British Columbia aboriginal village where he was schoolteacher, and the people who saved his life during and after a freak storm on hallowe’en in 1975. Sheer unpretentious good writing; generous, warm, loving—and political as Dickens.
George Economou | Ananios of Kleitor: Poems & Fragments and Their Reception from Antiquity to the Present | Shearsman | 2009
A wonderful romp through the petty, predatory and even campy squabbles and pedantry of certain scholars of Ancient Greek texts, at the same time funny and informative. Economou has a terrific parodic ear for the grave tones of scholarship, and an equally terrific poetic ear for the real delights of ancient Greek lyric. A tour de force.
Susan Holbrook and Thomas Dilworth, ed. | The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation | Oxford | 2010
Long needed, superbly edited, indispensible.
Kevin Killian and David Brazil, ed. | The Kenning Anthology of Poet’s Theatre1945-1985 | 2010
Generous (so many plays! so many really good ones!). Eye-opening. Inspiring. Useful. A great read. Let’s hope for a follow-up volume.
Ammiel Alcalay, general editor | Lost And Found: The CUNY Poetics Documentary Initiative Series I | CUNY | 2009
Five issues, each with a different editor, issued in seven fascicles: selected correspondence of Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn; selected correspondence of Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara; Muriel Rukeyser on Darwin; selections from Philip Whalen’s Journals; Robert Creeley and Daphne Marlatt at the Vancouver Poetry Conference 1963. Series II, promised for Fall 2010, will include Muriel Rukeyser, Jack Spicer, and others. Need I say more?
Gérard de Nerval, trans. Richard Sieburth | The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbé de Bucquoy | Archipelago | 2009
Nerval’s cheeky and indeed risky Tristram-Shandyish response to the crazy law in the Second French Republic (July 1850) which through exorbitant stamp-tax made impossible the publication of fiction in newspapers. Nerval’s quest, serialized in Le National, for the memoir of the man who actually escaped from the Bastille, which he once glimpsed on a bookstall but did not buy, has its occasional longueurs, but the whole thing is a nicely comic demolition of easy distinctions between fact and fiction. Not previously published in English, in excellent translation, with valuable introduction and relevant annotations.
Jacques Roubaud, trans. Jeff Fort | The Loop | Dalkey Archive | 2009
The second installment of The Great Fire of London, Roubaud’s highly resourceful and deeply moving Oulipean struggle with memory and loss; to read this is to skirt terrible despair, yet strangely enough to come out of it refreshed, strengthened.
José Saramago, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Death With Interruptions | Houghton Mifflin | 2009
“The following day no one died” opens this story in which Death takes a vacation. Saramago’s gift here is a clear-sighted logic which exposes and ridicules (with hilarious ingenuity) the profound and absurd ineptitude of all expediency. The novel turns out to be a passionate defence and celebration of love and compassion—but to say that is to sound clichetic. If there is a cliché in the book, then it’s a fresh one.
More Peter Quartermain here. His Attention Span for 2008, 2006. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2009 – K. Silem Mohammad
Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge Books | 2008
Like Davies’ earlier Comp, this is structurally little more than a series of sound bites strung together as “verse.” Yet also like Comp, it crackles with Ecclesiastical scorn and verve. The conscious and subconscious minds are sitting together on a sofa trying to relate the big game to the latest CSPAN feed of senate hearings, and these broadcasts interrupt them.
Craig Dworkin | Parse | Atelos | 2008
Page after page of … parsing. And the text that is parsed (an 1874 grammar manual by Edwin A. Abbott) is itself a treatise on parsing. One might think that this is a perfect example of a “conceptualist” book that asks merely to be thought about rather than read, and for some people that is probably the more attractive option. But those people will miss the metagrammatical massage that prods the reader’s brain into little shudders (not quite paroxysms) of attentiveness, of alertness, of being-in-poetry.
Robert Fitterman | Rob the Plagiarist | Roof Books | 2009
Contains the already-classic “This Window Makes Me Feel,” as well as other manipulations of public discourse and commercial sense-input. Fitterman plays the part of a Benjaminian flaneur, but one as he might exist in the world of John Carpenter’s They Live—a flaneur who is not wearing those special glasses that let you see the aliens and the capitalist dystopia they have erected for what they are.
Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place | Notes on Conceptualisms | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2009
Shallow art-theory rehash or stimulating commentary on contemporary poetics? Both? Oh, it couldn’t be both. Admit it: for a week or two, you too were reading this little blue booklet and actually trying to make sense of the proposition that conceptual writing is allegorical writing.
K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge Books | 2009
A deftly casual versish essay on different stages of social ambience (from “droll” to “malignant”). Its timbre is perfectly captured in the title pun: either a bustling public nexus, or a fatal condition of subverbal singing-along. Graham hits a perfect balance of easygoing “girlishness” and sardonic bemusement.
Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2009
There should be a periodic announcement made over loudspeakers on the main streets of major cities: Citizens! Why do so many of you seem to have neglected to notice that Kevin Killian is one of our finest poets? Because you were too busy being impressed by his fiction? No excuse. He is also (this is me now, not the loudspeaker) one of the few poets writing today who can still do transmissive (e.g., Spicerian) lyric convincingly. Heartbreakingly.
David Larsen | Names of the Lion | Atticus/Finch 2009
Go find a book that is either a more beautiful physical object or a more stunning instance of creative scholarship. Larsen’s loving translation of Ibn Khalawayh’s treatise (with commentary) should be written up in every arts and literature review section of every major newspaper and magazine worldwide as a major publishing event. Mindbogglingly, this unbearably gorgeous Atticus/Finch “chapbook” (too humble a word) costs only $10.
Chris Nealon | Plummet | Edge Books | 2009
It’s hard to think, in the world of contemporary poetry, of very many books that spawn a popular (I mean, popular among other poets, anyway) catch phrase within what seems like mere moments of their publication. I wouldn’t be surprised to see “I am not gay, I am from the future!” on T-shirts and bumper stickers soon. The obvious stylistic reference point for Nealon’s “voice” is O’Hara, but this is far from being derivative nth-generation New York School; it’s absolutely modern in all the right ways.
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge Books | 2009
Nichols asks early in this book, “can a woman compete with the city”? The question is answered in the pages that follow by a flurry of winged images and phrases like paper scraps from a shredded diary flying down busy streets, between skyscrapers, in and out of shops and offices and homes. Nichols renders both the sensually vivid and mundanely bureaucratic details of everyday life with a lyric attentiveness that constantly places the “nucleus of the individual / in productive tension with the collective expanse of white.”
Jordan Scott | Blert | Coach House Books | 2008
The author, a chronic stutterer, set out deliberately to write poetry that would be hard for him to read aloud. A pretty rudimentary concept, but the resulting verbal bumper car ride taps into essential currents of recent prosodic weather patterns. Rubbery, blubbery, heap big unheimlich fun.
Stephanie Young | Picture Palace | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2009
Sometimes I forget that Stephanie Young is not a phenomenally famous pop-soul diva. I really don’t have words to describe the complex and passionate effects her work produces. Tonally and formally, it’s all over the map, and it makes the map look fabulous. Maybe my favorite move of hers (among the many she routinely busts) is her talent for the abrupt declaration of a devastating, obvious fact, such as her observation that “of course the revolution won’t be televised! Not because the most important things don’t appear on television but because the revolution will knock out electrical plants and the TV itself will collapse under the collapsing house.”
More K. Silem Mohammad here.
Attention Span 2009 – Josef Kaplan
Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2008
They said they would never put any photos of cats in Artforum.
Michael Scharf | For Kid Rock/Total Freedom | Spectacular Books | 2007
Re-read this after the post-’08 election euphoria (and my money) had been plowed into corporate handouts. Scharf refracts the claustrophobic political atmosphere of 2002/2003 through an equally stringent pyramid of de rigueur poetics to show that “total freedom” is, of course, totally not. The book’s appulsion of liberal aesthetics and furtive atrocity reads both cogent and anxiously sympathetic, a “bourgeois panic” that is mordant, lucid, the relentlessness of its critique entirely correct.
Gordon Faylor | 5 6 | Self-Published | 2009
The Mechanical Turk meets Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.
Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter, eds. | Issue 1 | For Godot | 2008
The fall of the house of usher.
Roberto Bolaño | 2666 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2008
It’s nice how this post-modern novel is almost totally unconcerned with the meta, how it instead just ruthlessly tails the fractal, internal details that spin off from stuff like… ordering a coffee, or a city’s (sub)conscious conspiracy to murder every woman living in it. The Baudelaire epigraph: “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom”; Sonora stretching out its infinite ends.
Anne Boyer | odali$qued | Blogspot | ongoing
Poetry’s Battlestar Galactica: humans create little machines which create other little machines and they all blow each other to pieces, over and over again. Also a response, doing Kafka one better by cutting out the Max Brod-style middleman. An anti-bureaucratic literature that inverts and immolates against pretty much every authoritarian context in sight.
Tan Lin | HEATH (PLAGIARISM/OUTSOURCE) | Zasterle | 2009
Poetry’s The Blob. Less a “book” than an open source platform for critical reimagining. Strikingly handsome for being that, too—like the titular man himself? Or the shrub?
Rachel Loden | Dick of the Dead | Ahsahta Press | 2009
“This machine” / you know / “kills hypocrites”
Marie Buck | Life & Style | Patrick Lovelace Editions | 2009
“People! Cool personalities!” These burrowings into consumerism, vanity, gender cultures, celebritydom (both literary and pop-culture-y), social networking, social damage, flagellism and futurity are often as gentle as they are disturbing. Not a small feat. The absence of irony doesn’t come off as pedantic, but instead gives everything a tragic, keen(ing) sheen.
Brad Flis | Peasants | Patrick Lovelace Editions | 2009
The Lottery-esque scratch-and-win cover reveals a severed head, which is kind of how the whole book works. Also worth noting that the severed head looks like a combination CNN image capture/Chuck Close portrait, which, again, is kind of how the whole book works.
David Lau | Virgil and the Mountain Cat | University of California Press | 2009
Stately state mash-ups. Lau redistributes allusion across a field of junked discourses, declares a new decadence based in the reification of history. The tone of this book is just so oddly, wonderfully grandiloquent, like wigs worn to the King’s beheading: “a domed frieze phrased in freedom, / extra moiety signum // as time’s / dipterous nonextension / deemphasized dispatches to come– // incurable, its miserable son.”
More about Josef Kaplan here.
Attention Span 2009 – Kevin Killian
David Buuck | The Shunt | Palm Press | 2009
David Buuck’s first book is relatively slim—well it’s normal size, not one of the 110 page behemoths that pass as regulation fare nowadays—but it is exquisitely focused and honed in on the torment of being alive in the world we live in, a citizen of the evil state of America. And a vulnerable human cell heavily implicated in capitalism. As a summary of the different formal experiments Buuck has tried out in the past ten years this book is marvelously effective, for he is the most impatient of poets and the one most disgusted with his own efforts. “Stanzas in Mediation 15-20” (“The Suck”) is my favorite of these dramatizations of self loathing. “Sure–I am/ a poet—against/ the war & a poet/ against “poets”/ “against the war” & I’m a poet against the post-/ war & well/ I’m not really/ much of a poet/ either, but & yet/ I’m just trying to do my part/ by Iraqifying/ my CD collection ]…]”–it just goes on like this taking strips of his flesh with it. When I first met him his Hamlet nature fascinated me, his mercurial balance of air and water, and now years later he steps forth, a Hamlet with balls.
Garrett Caples | Complications | Meritage Press | 2007
Garrett’s my editor—at City Lights, where we will publish my new book Impossible Princess in the fall—so by rights I should leave him off this list, but if I couldn’t write about my friends’ books my list would be tiny indeed, and Steve Evans, if you enforced that rule on “Attention Span” then you could show all the books reviewed on one screen. As I cast my gaze on the books I’m writing about this time around I see to my shame that indeed they are practically all by my friends, except for one girl whom I have never met, and one guy whom I only met once and yet was captivated by his dark intense Nijinsky grace. Does that count? Garrett Caples wrote Complications during a time of worldwide grief and mourning, and during a time when the culture figures he admired were too slipping away, as though they knew—and the elegiac factor in Complications is high. Thom Gunn, Barbara Guest, Robert Creeley, Philip Lamantia, all ghosts now, are invoked without sentiment and with plenty of wry humor. Caples’ experiments with sound and the slipping image are well known, and here they really get a workout: those of you who have read “Dub Song of Prufrock Shakur” know what I’m talking about. And there are also lovely straight essays here (if I could apply for a second the dubious adjective straight to this writing) which I always enjoy in a book of poetry.
Norma Cole | Natural Light | Libellum Press | 2009
Norma also has a new book from City Lights, a book of selected poems called Where Shadows Will, 1988-2008, which makes my mouth gape, as though to remember that I met her before she had written any books and was just starting to publish after a career as a painter. Well, I don’t have the space here to do more than recommend this one wholeheartedly— though I wonder why there’s nothing in Where Shadows Will from Norma’s greatest work, the epic verse drama Art Colony Survivor (2002), the play I wrote with her over months and months of laughter and tears? In the meantime I have thought often about another new book by her, Natural Light. Cole strikes out as she has in all of her books in a new direction, and several at once— her mind is like a weathervane that spins in a hurricane, unerringly finding the rough underlining to any solace. “Where Shadows Will” does a decent job of excerpting from Natural Light, but it leaves out the majestic centerpiece, the final serial piece Collective Memory. Collective Memory is a book of mnemonic that lavishes attention on the smallest elements of our tongue— on the individual alphabetic character. Like bp nichol her countryman, Cole understands why petulant pixies clamor for Frosted Flakes. Who is JJ? What happens when a little inverted c is placed over the actual c in the proper name Bavčar? Well, she is a wonder and I’ve anagrammed her own name endless times, clear moon, name color, coral omen, elm corona, need I say more.
Kate Greenstreet | Case Sensitive | Ahsahta Press | 2006
Kate Greenstreet’s first book came as a surprise to me, having been burned by a few other Ahsahta publications in earlier years. Now I see thanks to a handy list in the back of the book, that there have been just as many Ahsahta titles I’ve enjoyed as the ones I remembered dismissing. Just goes to show me how easily stereotype draws me in. I wonder how many folks think of Krupskaya in the same way. Tried one, didn’t care for it, the rest are probably all shit as well. In Kate Greenstreet’s case, the book itself is physically lovely with that thick lustrous yellowy paper that’s like a cross between buttermilk and cheesecloth. Above all else her book reminded me of the classic work from Kathleen Fraser I first learned to love in the early 80s, and it even comes with Fraser’s own [brackets] and signs of domestic life made fraught by a highly tuned consciousness, and her overheard scrap[s of enigmatic Antonioniesque fragments of conversation— and with a blurb by Fraser on top of it all. But she is more than— I mean other than—a poet in the How/ever mode, she has her own prosody (seen at its best in a small poem like “phone tap,” so perfect it must have been written with a diamond on glass—and her own trips to take and dare.
Kate Greenstreet | This Is Why I Hurt You | Lame House | 2008
In five sections, This Is Why I Hurt You acts as a severe corrective to the pingings of consciousness featured in Case Sensitive, Greenstreet’s previous book. The flatness and foundness of the material here allows for all sorts of interpretation, but it beats a path away from the numinous, into a celebration of the reflexivity of ordinary USA syntax. “He had these big sharp claws on his hooves, and sometimes he’d put one u[p on me.” Didn’t I read this, in Little House in the Big Woods? “I understood it as the part of our mind where art comes from.” That’s from William James via Gertrude Stein. “And I hoped he wouldn’t scratch me with them, because that would really hurt.” I don’t know, Bastard Out of Carolina? American sigils fill this little book to the point of bursting, like fifteen sweeps down my chimney. That’s the fairy tale of the US—it will leave a mark.
Kreg Hasegawa | The New Crustacean | Green Zone | 2008
This young man is writing flash fiction that sits right on the chasm between the prose poem and the traditional short story. Is it parody? Not quite, though Hasegawa delights in his puns and his wordplay, enough to allow it to direct the action from the inside out. “What poetry,” he asks, “can you quote from that can’t possibly poison you back?” So there’s an awareness of the risk involved in writing, a picnic phenomenology. One long story—I use the word “long: in quotes because most of these stories could be written on the surface of an aspirin with a laser beam—one long story is the title piece, “The New Crustacean,” in which a traveler, meeting with a terrible accident (or other trauma?) becomes the victim of a pair of bad Samaritans in khaki. I’m still scratching my head about how beautiful it is. On another front he uses his close watch over words as a strategy for characterization, or the sensuality that leads from it. “Her life was something I had glazed myself with, or poured myself over, slowly, like gravy. I was something to make meat moist.” You don’t often hear people reveal so much of themselves, not even in fiction, and definitely not in poetry. Grosbeaks fly in and out of the stories like the moths in Robin Blaser’s Moth Poem. This guy Hasegawa has it, as my little nephew says, going on.
Donato Mancini | Æthel | New Star Books | 2007
At Naropa, Allen Ginsberg spoke of Gertrude Stein’s project as “building little sculptures out of words.” I thought of his, well perhaps rather patronizing description when trying to describe to a former student just what Donato Mancini’s book Wilcox Æthel is all about. It’s a little difficult to show you what he’s doing without illustrations, but luckily Johanna Drucker has written it up on the back of the book and I can crib from her. She avers that Æthel is based on Mancini’s “appropriation of typefaces” and that he uses type we’re used to in other contexts to stand on its head our conventional wisdom on them. In practice even I can see that Mancini twists, stretches, reverses and entwines these fonts into garlands and blobs to satirize our preoccupation with reading itself, for one can barely make out a single word, though each poem has suggestions of words in it. Rather like birds building nests from particles that top scientists might be able to identify individually. Dodie and I printed some selections of Æthel in our zine, Mirage #4/Period[ical]. We’re baby boomers so we recognized the font Jim Morrison and the Doors used again and again as their logo, but what Mancini did with it is provocation in the highest.
Filip Marinovich | Zero Readership| Ugly Duckling | 2008
I had this book and couldn’t remember how I had it, even though the inscription was a warm one. Then it came to me like a flashback in a Resnais film—me, like Emmanuelle Riva, distracted, at Canessa Park the city’s most unreliable art gallery, at a poetry reading. Him, Filip Marinovich, perfectly pleasant and gamin offering me his book in good faith I imagine, but me preoccupied by professional problems hardly gave him the time of day. A curtain of shame falls across Emmanuelle Riva’s piquant features. She lies to friends, pretends she doesn’t care. In the meantime the book grows bigger every day in her hands. Well it is, as he had told her, “an epic,” a massive, oversized account of poetic activity in Montenegro, Belgrade, New York, the savage capitals of torn and bruised faith. Marinovich’s soulful, notebooky lyrics etch out the struggle of the artist in hard times and the refugee making his way from palace to soup kitchen with an élan invincible. You can feel the slushy snow, you can smell the smoke, you can certainly take or leave the hardboiled Serbian refugee family with their sage advice and their magic realism and Grammas Nada and Mercy. The epic is structured in roughly the same proportions as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, as an accumulation of mass leading to apocalyptic takeoff, but in Marinovich’s hands this progression turns into a “new tune in the oxygen mix.” Well done дечко!
Lisa Robertson | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House Books | 2009
Alana Wilcox has again designed what seems like a perfect book, and it’s not magenta but rather a yellowish greenish chartreuse halfway between pear and olive—thus the suggestion of the magenta fairly pops out like one of those old Jasper Johns’ paintings of the Canadian flag. Robertson’s seventh book of poetry works differently than some of her others, and it mostly nearly approaches the way other people make up books of poetry, by accretion, a drifting into the harbor of the book the isolated moments of a lifetime of work. But hers are not like yours or mine, instead this is the work of one who can say with some pride, “My fidelity is my own disaster.” Its a heraldic book, but as its title suggests, a sassy, almost a Debbie Allen sort of book too. It might be her best book! If not, I predict that it will vie with a few others as many people’s favorite book by her. Robertson is coming from a place in which a tormented silence insists, “When women are exiled it seems normal,” and these poems are the tufts of marsh grass on which, like Eliza, the exile finds her footing in the rush of the restaurant/river.
Jared Stanley | Book Made of Forest | Salt Cambridge | 2009
If I ever publish another book I want Graham Foust and Bhanu Kapil to write blurbs for it! Jared Stanley, on top of winning the Crashaw prize that resulted in the publication of this book, Foust and Kapil wrote these great blurbs on top of it. Now as for Crashaw, I’m looking and looking and it took me nearly a week of re-reading the entertaining and exciting poems of Book Made of Forest, and I just wasn’t feeling the “Crashaw” reference, but then it came to me… The historical Crashaw, who lived nearly 400 years ago, wrote as many poems after turning Roman Catholic as he did before it—poems of objects joked together in the metaphysical style, poems in which a simple comparison balloons out concentrically into a dirigible capable of lifting the planet off its hinges. Thus the play Foust makes out of Stanley’s title, the book made of forest which Foust examines in the Crashevian style, relinquishing his hold on the metaphor to Arshile Gorky’s notorious boast of destruction. “I love it,” reads one of Stanley’s poems, in its entirety, “it’s so dead/ it’s straightforward.” I admire this continual stretching for it, and for the most part Stanley succeeds in the form of his creation. The only thing he can’t do, or hardly ever, is finish a poem as resoundingly as it begins. Maybe that’s the point, in which case, OK.
Suzanne Stein | Hole in Space | OMG! | 2009
“You went to the conference speculating on the expanded field of writing, and I went to work.” The truth is, some of us have to go to work, but Suzanne Stein’s little chapbook, produced by Brandon Brown’s ingenious OMG! press, punches a hole in space and into the formulation. You might call this a conceptual piece of writing, certainly it winds up with a eerie J B Priestley hole in time, for Stein takes us to a November 2008 event at the Poetry Project in New York, where she is delivering a talk in cold Manhattan, while in southern California fires are burning down whole coastal regions. The talk apes ordinary human speech, but it has an aspect of prophecy to it, Edgar Cayce the Sleeping prophet, for Stein announces that in four months time she will repeat every word of the talk a Manhattan tech is now recording, in an art gallery space in San Francisco. The second half of the book gives us the text of her San Francisco talk, and for those of us who were there at Canessa Park, the book presents an eerie souvenir of one occasion when the past completely predicated the present. We all know there are scripts we are doomed to repeat, but Hole in Space makes it all come real, the tangle at the end of the mind. And yes, that was the gallery space in which young Filip Marinovich and I shared one stolen moment of brief encounter.
More Kevin Killian here.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2011 | Jeanine Webb
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Joshua Clover | Fragment on the Machine | Handmade chapbook, 4 poems plus translations into French by Abigail Lang | 2011
“Gilded Age”’s throwdown aphorisms: “The best poetry will have contempt for its era but so will the worst” ; “it must align itself with work—meaning hatred/of work—it must desire/change so much it is accused of being in love/with annihilation.” Dante’s Francesca in the whirlwind of the Inferno’s 5th Canto illumed as the subject of circulation of capital, of love’s inability to fully remove us from this peregrination (Yeats, yes), where we are caught “sweet with longing” as “downwards to darkness/on extended credit” we fall, the industries of the empire abandoned massively still shining on the farther shore of the crisis—
Brian Ang | Paradise Now | grey book | 2011
Lenin horizontal, orgies on acid, free education Pavlovas, FLCL metabeer, bankrupt Chocobos anniliate the banks, and you know, cats. Receive +3 Intellect. Bitey. Ang,: “My poems disturb myself.” Perhaps an increasingly worthy aspiration.
Claude Closky | Les miens suivi de Biennales | Éditions Al Dante | 2009
Conceptual French poet uses celebrity names as raw material for sonnets in alexandrines, then juxtaposes them to poems formed in the same way from the names of artists from the Biennales. Surprising wit and pleasure quotient gained in reading them.
Uyen Hua | a/s/l | ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni | 2011
Age, sex, location. Melancholy, dendrital, funny-ass remix that understands our divided hearts, and keeps our constellations while avoiding mere glibdom (Lil Wayne approached like a pietà, heartfelt dreams involving Kevin Spacey, bombs in Kandahar mixed with tabloid hot or not sorrows). The “fee” one “pays to Mary J. Blige.” These are “songs about us.” “sometimes you just have to shrug/ put the record on repeat.” Dude, it’s so like that. Everyone I know is already imitating her, she’s that good. ❤
Chris Nealon | Plummet | Edge | 2009
Dear Chris Nealon, I can read this book again and again. And have this year. You make my trips to the drugstore so much better because I think of your lines on “pure despair.” It’s a groove. “If you treat the day as a melody, is that a kind of friendliness? Or text – is genre friendly?” I’m happy to dance to this workable theory up in da club. “Future anterior, hey/I’m running a little late” The system (thankfully) is still breaking down.
Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young | A Megaphone | ChainLinks | 2011
Welcome outpouring of shiny ludic incisiveness and awful fact. Rhizomatic tentacled global hybridity and voices of women on their poetry communities and projects. Expansive, best read in doses, to my mind. Feels productively circular. Includes Spahr’s and Young’s great essay from 2007, “Numbers Trouble,” the importance of which 2010’s VIDA study again affirmed, to our dismay and ongoing critique.
K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge | 2009
Honeycombs of zircon bureaucracy and power beeswax in the passive servomechanisms and pentagons. “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled/wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was funfunfun.” Ready to bloodlet (blow up) through lacrosse (soup and salad) and an axe (automatic shredder) and go with produce bounce (get potassium). “Schizoid and hermetic.” Incandescent anger illuminates a lot for the ALIVE. “Missing trains, feeling wild in empty transit gates.”; “Female/until further notice.”
Tu Fu, tr. David Hinton | The Selected Poems of Tu Fu | New Directions | 1989
For when the crows come in from far capitals and tumbleweeds skip over the wells. “Mountain yellows fall. Startled I call out to my son Are there northern winds?” We are facing snow. “There isn’t time for new dikes. Enlisting /Mu Wang’s turtles and crocodiles is impossible.” The moaning of painted horns, will it ever stop? “Let’s talk things over, little buds—open delicately, sparingly.”
Frank O’Hara | manuscript translation of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) | unknown date
Wouldn’t you like to know! The text’s a continuous block with no forced carriage returns or lineation, though Mallarmé’s capitals are retained. It is my conviction that this intrapoet formal denial experiment produces a new kind of beauty all compact. Writing about it, when I can. It’s like two of the hot poets I love having sex in my mind because and well furthermore that’s what is IS.
Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni | 2008
Glitter hymn and invocation to the “secret understanding” of fan and diva, touched by “cold, hard” tears. A “secret understanding” that is also like “E.M. Forster’s concept of homosexuality as a willed gift.” Also, more, you know, cats.
Sandra Simonds | Warsaw Bikini | Bloof | 2008
I read at least one half of this on the beach in Kona in a bikini. The semantics are aggregrated gloriously and constantly threaten to deforest themselves. Or hammerhead shark-attack themselves. Plathian and Beckettish in the most brainy and sinister sense: manic nursery rhymes and the social contaminations, water wasps, the awful Doctor Dura Mater undercarriage.
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Jeanine Webb’s poems have appeared in many journals, most recently in ARMED CELL, with two poems forthcoming in Lana Turner. Her essay on celebrity and poetics will appear in Tripwire. She helps organize San Diego’s Agitprop reading series and edits the cartonera-style journal TACOCAT.
Back to 2011 directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 26, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with Brian Ang, Chris Nealon, Claude Closky, David Hinton, Frank O'Hara, Jeanine Webb, Joshua Clover, Juliana Spahr, K. Lorraine Graham, Kevin Killian, Sandra Simonds, Stéphane Mallarmé, Stephanie Young, Tu Fu, Uyen Hua