Posts Tagged ‘Lisa Robertson’
Attention Span 2010 – Julie Carr
Nguyen Trai, trans. from Han and Nom by Paul Hoover and Nguyen Do | Beyond the Court Gate: Selected Poems of Nguyen Trai | Counterpath | 2010
Nguyen Trai lived in Vietnam from 1380-1422. The poems are direct depictions of daily life—intimate, immediate, funny, speaking of political turmoil, exile, competition, fear, desire, writing. “To a Friend”: “Your poverty and infirmity make me feel pity / Like me, you must be crazy. / Like me you’re exiled from your motherland / And have read only a few sentences out of books.” Trai is revered in Vietnam as one of the two greatest poets in the country’s history and is also known as a national hero for his role in helping to overthrow the Minh Dynasty, which had controlled Vietnam for centuries. That story is told in the shift from writing in Han to Nom.
Inger Christensen, trans. from the Danish by Susanna Nied | Alphabet | New Directions | 2001
A book-length abecedarian, structured according to the Fibonacci numerical sequence, the poem is a hymn to what is, to what “exists.” “Apricot trees exist. Apricot trees exist.” Or, for “c”: “Cicadas exist, chicory, chromium / citrus trees; cicadas exist / cicadas, citrus, cypresses, the cerebellum.” Deep engagement with the natural world does not preclude acknowledgment of (fear of) things human: loneliness exists, and “Icarus-children white as lambs / in greylight.” This is an incredible translation, which keeps the abecedarian always in view without allowing it to destroy meaning or music. The book was originally published in 1981 in Danish. It has a permanent home on my desk when it’s not in my bag or my hand.
Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin | The Poems of Emily Dickinson | Belknap | 1999
Reading all the poems in the fascicles, in order, with a group of approximately fifteen other poets, writers, and scholars. Reading very slowly, very carefully. It should take at least a year and half.
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010
Alongside The Weather this is my favorite of Robinsons’ books. I especially return to “Utopia”: “The crows are still cutting the sky in half with their freckling eastward wake.” Long lines work the sentence through a deeply lyrical intelligence. Aphoristic, enigmatic, musical, charged with a kind of desire that is never far from critique. “Money is ordinary and truly vernal.”
Matthew Cooperman | Still of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move | Counterpath | forthcoming
Language from everywhere: books, television, news, movies, web, songs, memory pulled together, thrown together, over-the-top mash-up, but with a serious reason to be. This is political work, personal work, a cultural encyclopedia driven by doubt and passion, barely under control. An amazing reading experience, feels visceral.
Anne Carson and Rashaun Mitchell | Nox (the dance) | Performed at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art | July 20, 2010
Carson read her text (or some of it) while dancer/choreographer Mitchell and the incredible Silas Riener performed an outrageously varied, spacious, and intense duet (both men dance for the Cunningham company, but the piece has none of the coolness or cerebral quality of Cunningham.) This dance allowed Carson’s text to become much more immediate and powerful than it is in the book itself, which is fascinating, but somewhat removed. Not so the dance.
Joseph Lease | Testify | Coffee House | forthcoming
Gorgeous book driven by a particular blend of disgust and compassion that only Lease can pull off. Repetition, direct statement, directed through a careful musical composition: “in my body, 4 a.m. in my body, breading and olives and cherries. Wait, it’s all rotten.” This book feels necessary, precise, demanding.
Tomaz Salamun, ed. Thomas Kane, trans. Thomas Kane et al. | There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair | Counterpath | 2009
Reading Salumun is a very particular pleasure. Hearing him read is a revelation. Publishing this book meant that I read it many times over, and it still remains a mystery (or a series of mysteries), but one that is lodged permanently in my mind.
Apollinaire | Alcools
Re-Reading by translating with Jennifer Pap. In this sense, reading for the first time.
C.D. Wright | Rising, Falling, Hovering | Copper Canyon | 2008
For me Wright is central. This work in particular has a complexity (multiple voices, narratives, positions, locales) that nonetheless stays grounded and urgent. Again, the work’s rhythms support, drive and motivate its concerns.
Attention Span 2010 – Jennifer Scappettone
Leslie Scalapino | The Dihedrons Gazelle Dihedrals Zoom | ms developed out of sound-based routes through a new dictionary; video of reading by Konrad Steiner available here | 2010
“[T]heir whole as bodies in the underground petroleum…holes spurting here and there, and the sky turned indigo, as did the ocean, now petroleum.”
As recorded on 2/14/10. Enough said. Leslie, we miss you.
Etel Adnan | The Arab Apocalypse (reprinted with a foreword by Jalal Toufic) | Post-Apollo | 2007
The illegible substance of the language of childhood persists through the blasts of civil war. To be read alongside “To Write in a Foreign Language,” available here.
Tonya Foster | mss in progress including “A Swarm of Bees in High Court” (forthcoming from Belladonna/Futurepoem in 2010), “Monkey Talk,” and “A Mathematics of Chaos: Pay Attention to Where You At/From” | extracts can be heard here | ongoing/forthcoming
“Geography can be transformative—the way a bullet to the body can be transformed.”
Edouard Glissant, trans. Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël) | Poetic Intention | Nightboat | 2010
“Whence, for the individual, this simple obligation: to open and to ravish the body of knowledge.”
“The work of a poet appears…derisory: it is only ever the foam of that ocean from which he wants to extract a cathedral, a definite architecture.”
“Yes: we are each in this drama the overseas of others.”
I could go on. But that would be to abstract tracts of a text so urgent in contextual detail, or what Glissant calls (& Stephens translates as) the “thrashed truth of one’s materiality.” This book, published as L’intention poétique in 1969, needs to change the way “we” understand modernism, the sixties, postwar theory, etc.
Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: A Project for Future Children | Kelsey St. | 2009
Because it’s the latest which is bound, but everything, and latest on color. See also “Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?” and the posts preceding her choice to defect from the now defunct Harriet. On reading: “I read in order to be a writer in the time I am in, which is a closed time. I read to open myself to time, which is the time that opens in turn to writing. I read to flee taut death; to embrace wet or sinking deaths instead.”
Henri Meschonnic, trans. Lisa Robertson & Avra Spector | “The Rhythm Manifesto” | ms, they tell me it’s available here | 2010
“Against all poeticizations, I say there is a poem only if a shape of life transforms a shape of language and if reciprocally a shape of language transforms a shape of life. I say that it is only in this way that poetry, as the activity of poems, can live in society, can do what only a poem can do for people who, without poems, wouldn’t even realize that they were undoing their subjectivity and their historicity to become nothing other than products in the market of ideas, the market of feelings, and the market of manners.” Much-needed antidote to what’s modish—in poetry, I mean. Feeding a steadily-becoming-obsession of mine with a focus on rhythm and meter in the postwar epos (early 1960s, against semiotics). Further resonance with Daria Fain & Robert Kocik’s Phoneme Choir, ongoing & described at http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/04/dance/choir-praxis.
Judd Morrissey | RC_AI | http://www.judisdaid.com/rcai.php | 2010
Text—recombinatory speakings out of Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice—as panorama, 380,000 pixels—or 422 feet—long. Ends with bubbly digital schmaltz, delightsome.
Pier Paolo Pasolini | La Ricotta | part of Ro.Go.Pa.G., & supplementary material on Criterion Collection edition of Mamma Roma | 1962
I searched for this film for over a decade and recovered it accidentally when permitting myself to watch Mamma Roma for the nth time. Stracci (“rags”) is enjoined to play Christ in a restaging of the Passion directed by a Pasolini figure played by Orson Welles. Couldn’t be more of a corrective to Gibson far before the fact; censored “for insulting the religion of the state,” so that he had to remove Welles’s final line, “dropping dead was his only means of revolution.” Hypercitational: poetry, philosophy, music, film, painting of others punctures the half-hour. At one point a tableau vivant of Rosso Fiorentino’s and Pontormo’s magisterially weird Depositions, typifying this short’s neorealist mannerism or mannerist neorealism.
M. Nourbese Philip | Zong! | Wesleyan | 2008
Hauntological, as Philip notes, ululating effort to identify, localize the murdered Africans reduced by the illogic of law to cargo aboard the Zong, at the apex of Enlightenment. Alters “reading”: drowns the eye. Taught following Kamau Brathwaite’s 2005 Wesleyan title Born to Slow Horses, which also insists that the Atlantic is alive and history—despite all other proclamations and appearances—undead.
Lauren Shufran | The Birds | self-published chapbook | 2010
Riddled with antient rid-’ems: “Prior to this tryst my debt was pretty damn van- / Illa; kinkless, even—like interject- / Ing damns between my speech to impound flavors, or / Jouncing into fountains up in Rome in / Simplex Latin:.…” Just received, still trying to divine the architectonics of this padded echo chamber. “Ery spoken word performance hankers for its pri- / Vate Melos to corroborate that Venuses / De Milo and Baghdadi artifacts can still / Be looted—I mean, disinhumed—from loci all / Entombed by massacres your gifted homeboys mount- / Ed.” Close kin to Brandon Brown’s amazing translations of Catullus, another one for my short-list: but where are they? Shelves are a chaos and I can’t find ‘em. The awkward encrustations of tempo in this work—the making, the deriving—rebuke the voiding of historicity that is such the rage at present. Taking a cue from Mallarmé via Meschonnic via Robertson/Spector: “to mysteriously work toward lateness or neverness.”
Emilio Villa, ed. Claudio Parmiggiani | Emilio Villa: poeta e scrittore | Edizioni Mazzotta | 2008
Catalog of a retrospective of poetry, criticism, and artworks surrounding this crucial but elusive-by-choice border-crosser. Includes some of the poet’s concrete and visual poems, multilingual texts, collaborations with artists such as Alberto Burri, translations from various ancients, and notes toward an etymological dictionary of Italian that would do away with “positivist linguistics” and the “Romance fervor” by plumbing the roots of words in the archaic zones of Mesopotamia, the Syro-Babylonian coasts, and the pre- and protohistoric Mediterranean. So much food for thought and further work.
More Jennifer Scappettone here. Her Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Benjamin Friedlander
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Lawrence Rosenwald | Selected Journals 1820-1842 and 1841-1877 | Library of America | 2010
Memory is the ultimate power, it “holds together past and present, beholding both, existing in both, abides in the flowing, and gives continuity and dignity to human life.” The slackening of that power tells the story—or rather, withholds the story—of Emerson’s final years, in which he suffered from dementia, and which he passed, in part, by rereading these journals.
Herman Melville, ed. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising, G. Thomas Tanselle; historical note by Hershel Parker | Published Poems: Battle-Pieces, John Marr, Timoleon | Northwestern UP | 2009
Though you wouldn’t think so from their prose, Emerson is the more sensational poet; Melville, the more metaphysical. Even in Battle-Pieces, he attempts to worry the essence of a truth. Which isn’t quite right: his poetry is too adept, too carefully worked, to be a mere attempt; it’s we who do the worrying. Assured as a sailor’s knot. And just as unlovely—unless you love knots.
K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams | Slack Buddha | 2009
From one point of view—mine increasingly—craft is the ability to shape a meaningful context for interesting words. And it’s in this sense that Mohammad lives up to his model. The Bard he takes apart letter by letter, leaving everything changed except the form, had a mammoth vocabulary, and little fear (at least on stage) of the vulgar. But Mohammad has less fear. And more laughs.
Aífe Murray | Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language | U of New Hampshire P | 2009
For a hundred years biographers have overturned stones looking for Emily’s lovers while the ones who knew all the secrets stood invisibly in the shadows. This lovingly researched book helps to part those shadows. A story worthy of James: the hiring of Margaret Maher, fought over by two rich families. Worthy of Tillie Olsen: the poet’s funeral, her white casket hefted by Irish servants. Out the back door and across the fields, a final concession to visibility.
The Charles Olson Research Collection | Thomas J. Dodd Research Center | University of Connecticut Libraries | Storrs
Free with visitors and unimaginably wealthy in unpublished material, the Olson Archive, like the Rembrandt Museum, or Stonehenge I suppose, is well worth a trip across the world. Even with a finding aid, there are plenty of surprises—the papers are organized in service to their editing, which is to say their own logic is subordinated to hierarchies of genre. Which are often arbitrary, even whimsical: notebooks are scattered all through the collection, sometimes marked as notebooks, sometimes as prose, sometimes as poetry. I even found a heavily annotated copy of a John Wieners book marked as poetry, because of a few lines of verse on the inside cover. All of which makes reading into a kind of archaeology. Do you like digging? You will dig it.
Tom Raworth | Windmills in Flames: Old and New Poems | Carcanet | 2010
I wish I could be satisfied with a poem, but what I really seek to know is the mind that made it. And minds I like as little as poems when there’s no body to hold them, no world for the body, no history for the world. Some poets give you their world, or give you their response to it, and some call you into the world, or from it, with a voice that has as much meaning or matter as any discourse. Raworth is the former, but in a manner so unique as to seem the latter. Almost a sonar, sending you back minute-by-minute information, his narration is almost never enough, but has to be heard, a ping-ping-pinging … a sounding that gives you an object and its motion, with little time to react.
Tom Raworth | Earn Your Milk: Collected Prose | Salt | 2009
Turning to Raworth’s prose from his poetry is a little like clicking on the plus sign on Google maps, watching the world grow larger within a shrinking horizon, ever more knowable. At one point, there are even street names. Hell, there are even directions available. It’s the same world, but close up. I’d call it comfy, but that’s going way too far.
T. D. Rice, ed. W. T. Lhamon Jr. | Jim Crow, American: Selected Songs and Plays | Harvard UP | 2009
Blackface minstrelsy has always been disreputable, but before it became synonymous with racial domination it formed the cutting edge of popular culture—and Rice, if anyone, held the blade. Hard to believe this is the first collection of writings to bear his name on the cover.
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | U of California P | 2010
Robertson’s poetry is tactile; and dense, but pliable. Reading it is a little like pressing one’s way through a spongy medium, like a fly in marmalade. Alive in a substance that nourishes, or suffocates; that has to be escaped. Except that this is language, not jam, so Robertson abets our escape, guiding our senses beyond the medium, toward a world of imagination, possibility, desire.
Gianni Vattimo with Piergiorgio Paterlini, , trans. William McCuaig | Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography | Columbia UP | 2009
The story of a professor’s life, which is to say: a life of the mind lived as something other than the spirit of history. “Although a decent knowledge of languages has helped me along in life, I confess that vis-à-vis Gadamer I felt like a worm. As far as I could tell, the only one who understood less than me was a beautiful prince from some African tribe, whom I tried to seduce. Unsuccessfully, because of the language barrier.” A bit of a feint, since Vattimo understood well enough—he was the first to translate Truth and Method. Thus: “Gadamer in the end is a watered down Hegelian, like me.” Which is only deprecatory if you want to be God—modesty is Vattimo’s own truth and method. Making him a good seducer; and this, a thoroughly likeable book.
Albery Allson Whitman, ed. Ivy G. Wilson | At the Dusk of Dawn: Selected Poetry and Prose | Northeastern UP | 2009
The most ambitious African American poet of the nineteenth century, formally speaking, and the most prolific up until Dunbar (with whom he shared a stage at the Chicago World’s Fair), A. A. Whitman is hardly known, even to experts. Born a slave in Kentucky, he became a pastor in the A.M.E. church, publishing six volumes of verse between 1871 and 1901, the first of which is no longer extant. But despite his church affiliation, there is little religion in his poetry. For the most part, he’s a cultural nationalist, a little like Tolson, who shares Whitman’s narrative scale and sense of form. Not to give any false impression of Modernism: this is a poetry indebted to Bryant’s neoclassical side. It’s a shame that all four long poems appear in extract—that this could not be a Collected (especially since the book is already too expensive for casual purchase)—but what a gift to have any edition at all, especially one so scrupulously researched. Opening this book makes the nineteenth century a little larger.
More Benjamin Friedlander here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Eric Baus
Fred Moten | B Jenkins | Duke | 2010
“come from some of everywhere, somewhere so deep that some of everywhere come with you. to become for our occult belongings, // worldly in that other way”
Dorothea Lasky | Black Life | Wave | 2010
“You are reading the work of a great poet, possibly one of the greatest ones of your time. If I am standing in from of you right now, you are listening to the voice of one of the greatest poets of your time.”
Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: A Project For Future Children | Kelsey St. | 2009
“I am not interested in animals. Return to the work as memory. Say it is a wolf becoming a girl, the action in reverse.”
Tan Lin | Seven Controlled Vocabularies | Wesleyan | 2010
“People are basically animals that know how to read.”
Steven Zultanski | Pad | Book Thug | 2010
“My dick cannot lift the walls. My dick cannot lift the ceiling. My dick cannot lift the floor.”
Will Alexander | The Sri Lankan Loxodrome | New Directions | 2010
“such swans / staggered by microbial reasoning / their aggressive nests / anatomical with anomaly”
Paul Killebrew | Flowers | Canarium | 2010
“It’s better than Atlanta, where they treat people like cars / in a city that combines the rustic elegance of Newark / with the quiet dignity of a beer bong.”
Edouard Glissant, trans. Nathalie Stephens | Poetic Intention | Nightboat | 2010
“When the poet travels to the ends where there is no country, he opens with the more deserved relation, in that space of an absolute elsewhere in which each can attempt to reach him.”
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010
“Say I’m a beautiful animal who has mastered laziness / In reddened clearing in the occidental forest / In the album / Purse of goddess clicking / I long to see how it will continue to behave”
Norma Cole | Where Shadows Will | City Lights | 2009
“Here the subject thinks ‘there could be flowers’ or ‘the water was a bit disturbed when the ring fell in.’ All that, painted from said things, pleases it.”
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”
Attention Span 2010 – David Dowker
Will Alexander | The Sri Lankan Loxodrome | New Directions | 2009
Laynie Browne | The Desires of Letters | Counterpath | 2010
Mark Goldstein | Tracelanguage | BookThug | 2010
Karen Mac Cormack | Tale Light | BookThug / West House | 2010
Camille Martin | Sonnets | Shearsman | 2010
Steve McCaffery | Verse and Worse | Wilfrid Laurier University | 2010
Laura Moriarty | A Tonalist | Nightboat | 2010
Alice Notley | Reason and Other Women | Chax | 2010
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010
Leslie Scalapino | Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows | Starcherone | 2010
Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light | Station Hill | 2010
More David Dowker here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Erín Moure
Chus Pato | Secesión | Galaxia | 2009
Pato’s “biography” in a kind of poetic prose, and long meditation on what it is to write poetry. A huge section of it in English translation appeared last year in Hayden’s Ferry Review, issue 44. Makes me think of my own life and what it is to make a mark on a page and call it poetry. (in Galician)
Judith Butler | Frames of War | Verso | 2009
Mostly books or exhibitions that have Americans agonizing over their own national excesses tire me out. Do something, people! This book I haven’t yet fully absorbed but Butler has trenchant analyses and in some ways goes through and further than Agamben’s bare life. The grief element and the question of whose lives are grievable is part of my own work these days too.
Mark Goldstein | Tracelanguage | BookThug | 2010
Myung Mi Kim | Penury | Omnidawn | 2009
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | U of California P | 2010
These are three books of poetry I have read and read and carried and examined in the past year and which make me glad for poetry.
Rachel Zolf | Neighbour Procedure | Coach House | 2010
One of the most publicly important books of poetry of the year, in my view. There are spots where it uses forms in ways that seemed a bit easy (there were openings for more pressure) but overall a stunningly provocative and incisive book.
Shimon Redlich | Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919-1945 | Indiana | 2002
A book that has been important for my own work in the last year, and to my trying to understand the tri-national or tri-ethnic culture that the 20th century destroyed in the place where my mother was born.
Uljana Wolf | Falsche Freunde | KOOKbooks | 2009
Of course I can’t read German but the form and intent of the book are clear to me, its armature and the way it is executed, and I can tell the language is acute. I did translate a few of the pieces into English for a reading of Uljana’s, to read with her, and though my translations were also alterations of sense, they were based on sound and I was quite liking what her poetry was giving me. A young German poet to watch! (in German)
Jean-Luc Godard | Film Socialisme | POL | 2010
The film hasn’t come to Montreal yet but the text and photos awe and break me. “Et ça existe la volonté des peuples.” Analyzes without analysis, just with movement in space and text: socialism is what makes us human in the face of all else. Seminal. (in French)
Chus Pato | Fascinio | Galaxia | 2010
This book first appeared in 1995, five years before Pato’s groundbreaking m-Talá, and is now reissued in the Dombate series (which combines seminal poetic works in Galician with new works). The surprising thing is that reading this book after m-Talá, after Charenton, and (for me as I read Galician), after Hordes of Writing (to appear in 2011 from Shearsman in English!), after Secession (translation in progress) – all groundbreaking and explosive books in their way –Fascinio reads anew, as if it were published today and actually comes after the books that it originally preceded. A peculiar example of time going backwards and poetry exceeding whatever grasp one first imagined for it. (in Galician)
Iannis Xenakis (drawings), Ivan Hewett, Carey Lovelace, Sharon Kanach, Mâkhi Xenakis (essays) | Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary (series Drawing Papers, number 88) | The Drawing Center, NY | 2010
Carrying this book around with me now after seeing and hearing the exhibition at the CCA in Montreal (it will also be at MOCA-LA from Nov 7 2010 – Jan 30 2011) and its use of space and laws of curvature and displacement in nature is blowing my mind. Oh poetry, I think! I went to the exhibit with Chus Pato, who already knows Xenakis’ work. Funny how someone from a small town in an obscure part of Spain can have a fabulous education and know of these things, whereas I stumble along…anyhow: talk about conceptual, procedural work, in two dimensions, in three, in four.
More Erín Moure here. Her Attention Span for 2008. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2010 – G.C. Waldrep
Gustaf Sobin | Collected Poems | Talisman | 2010
The poetry book of the year, for me. A gorgeous summation of Sobin’s lyric achievement. Should be on every American poet’s bookshelf.
Anne Carson | NOX | New Directions | 2010
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010
Andrew Joron | The Sound Mirror | Flood | 2009
He really has the best ear of any poet I know writing in English. Trance Archive (City Lights, 2010) is also worth any reader’s time who isn’t already following Joron’s work.
Evelyn Reilly | Styrofoam | Roof | 2009
Sandy Florian | Prelude to Air from Water | Elixir | 2010
In my opinion, and for what little comparisons may be worth, Florian is the most original practioner of the Anglophone prose poem in our moment. Her other 2010 title is Of Wonderland & Waste, from Sidebrow.
Yang Lian, trans. Brian Holton | Riding Pisces | Shearsman | 2008
A major contemporary Chinese poet who has not yet found his American audience. He’s better served in Britain, where his other recent collections include Concentric Circles (2006) and Lee Valley Poems (2010).
Julie Carr | 100 Notes on Violence | Ahsahta | 2010
Keith Waldrop | Several Gravities | Siglio | 2009
The perfect companion to his ever-so-slightly-earlier volume Transcendental Studies, which won the National Book Award. The collages are wonderful, and the selection of his lyric work is judicious.
Jack Collom & Lyn Hejinian | Situations, Sings | Adventures in Poetry | 2008
Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Fady Joudah | If I Were Another | FSG | 2009
*
Also rereading pretty much all of Leslie Scalapino and Fanny Howe this summer—at least the lyric work—alongside some Alice Notley I’d missed hitherto. Waiting for some new/fresh time to read J. Michael Martinez’s Heredities, which looks fantastic, and the new translation of Raul Zurita’s Purgatorio from California.
More G.C. Waldrep here. Waldrep’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2006, 2004. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Meredith Quartermain
Thomas Bernhard, trans. Richard and Clara Winston | Gargoyles | Vintage | 2006
A poem/novel that takes it all in: man & nature; man & industry; man & art—generations of the human animal.
Thomas Bernhard, trans. Ewald Osers | Old Masters: a Comedy | Quartet | 1989
This droll piece consists of the narrator’s thoughts as he stands in a particular room in a gallery waiting for his friend, a distinguished music critic, who on a daily basis, likes to come to this room to contemplate the image of a white-bearded old man (like himself it would seem). The museum attendant is the only other character.
Lisa Roberston | R’s Boat | California | 2010
Rousseau’s boat has extended itself, with Robertson’s customary wit and inventiveness, which inevitably turns comfortable subjectivity on its head.
Robert Walser, trans. Susan Bernovsky | The Tanners | New Directions | 2009
An early, autobiographical novel, but then all of his work is autobiographical. Life’s journeys torqued by a deeply feeling and crazily, stubbornly, beautifully resistant mind.
Robert Walser, trans. Susan Bernovsky | Microscripts | New Directions | 2010
At last the microscripted manuscripts (lengthy stories drafted entirely on one side of a post card) are available in English. Even crazier, more deeply feeling, more stubbornly beautifully resistant. We also learn much from the accompanying introduction, such as that Walser wrote out his novels non-stop, without correction, in a matter of six weeks, simply for the pleasure of fine handwriting.
Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | All Souls | HarperCollins | 1992
Set in Oxford and concerning the sojourn of a Marías-like Spanish professor, the tale spins around translation, both linguistic and cultural. His send-up of dining at high table is side-splitting.
Javier Marías, trans. Esther Allen | The Dark Back of Time | New Directions | 2001
In this novel Marías amuses himself by examining the relation between “real” characters and the ones in his novel All Souls. Very witty, post-modern foldings and refoldings.
Javier Marías, trans. Esther Allen | Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico | New Directions Pearl | 2010
Impersonation takes on a whole new meaning in this Elvis encounter.
Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear | New Directions | 2005
Obviously I’m hooked on Marías. This one examines othering—when do we see the other as evil—when do we cross that line?
Kate Eichorn & Heather Milne, eds. | Prismatic Publics | Coach House | 2009
Featuring interviews and work by Nicole Brossard, Margaret Christakos, Susan Holbrook, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Karen Mac Cormack, Daphne Marlatt, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Gail Scott, Nathalie Stephens, Catriona Strang, Rita Wong, Rachel Zolf. In other words, a ground-breaking collection in Canadian letters.
Sina Queryas | Expressway | Coach House | 2009
I read Queryas for her panache, her in-your-faceness, her tightly woven structures.
More Meredith Quartermain here. Quartermain’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2010 – Dana Ward
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Patti Smith | Just Kids | Ecco | 2010
I read this as the sun went down during a three hour layover at the Philadelphia airport turning what looked to be three of life’s most tedious hours into three of its most magical.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi | The Soul at Work | Semitotext(e) | 2010
“The mobile phone makes possible the connection between the needs of semio-capital and the mobilization of the living labor of cyber-space. The ringtone of the mobile phone calls the workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flows”
Word to Bifo.
David Brazil | Spy Wednesday | TAXT | 2010
David Brazil | 1-18-09 | @ A Voicebox | 2009
“One is not permitted to forget that/this world is ordered as it is/according to protocols of violence/& exploitation. On which we/batten.” (from Spy Wednesday)
Anne Boyer | The 2000s: A History of the Future in Advance of Itself
“I wrote yet another revolutionary email. The revolutionary email said: ‘Culture is a barbarism against the soul’ & ‘because I have loved so many others the stakes are not myself.’”
Laura Moriarty, ed. | A Tonalist Poetry Feature | Jacket #40 | 2010
Laura Moriarty, ed. | A Tonalist Poetry Feature | Aufgabe #8 | 2010
“Some people write lyric poetry because they just want to and think it’s great. Some write it though they think it’s impossible. The latter are A Tonalists.”
So much incredible writing in these two sections that I can’t even begin to name favorites. Both sections have been inexhaustible resources of pleasure & inspiration this year.
Thom Donovan | Wild Horses of Fire | whof.blogspot.com | ongoing
Thom’s blog is an incredible ever evolving constellation of art writing, poems (his own & others), proposals, calls for action, & always, more generally, a call for re-thinking. Astonishing intelligence is mated here to astonishing warmth.
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010
Lisa Robertson | The Lisa Robertson Issue; ed. Dan Thomas Glass | With+Stand #4 | 2010
Glass’ great editorial work in the Lisa Robertson issue of With + Stand made for a beautiful & diverse companion while reading through R’s Boat this spring in one long extended sigh of happy envy.
Lisa Howe | Sensible Sensations | unpublished manuscript | 2010
This long poem of Lisa’s is a work of ekphrasis (written after a show by Cincinnati artist Matt Morris), & also a celebration of community, written with a special consideration for the artists & writers & musicians in Cincinnati’s Brighton neighborhood. I had the pleasure to hear Lisa read it twice this spring, & each time the dynamism & loveliness of the writing linked me up to the loveliness & dynamism of our local experience together.
Lauren Dolgen, concept | Teen Mom | MTV | 2010
Too powerful, complex & problematic to say a lot about here, but this is the first reality series I’ve ever loved, if that’s what I should say about how this show makes me feel.
Mark Fisher | Capitalist Realism | Zero Books | 2010
“So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.”
Helene Cixous | Three Steps of the Ladder of Writing | Columbia | 1993
Brandon Brown | The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catallus | Unpublished ms | 2010
A friend sent me the Cixous thinking I’d like it & boy oh boy was he right! With the Patti Smith thing this book has been the calibrating writing of my summer. I’ve read it twice & keep going back, & every time I end up exhilarated, dying to read all the books she’s attending, & dying to write more books of my own. Outstanding! As to Brown’s translation of Catallus I’ve been reading this book off and on through out the year& it’s as big, as stupefying & wondrous as the universe itself. Don’t sleep.
More Dana Ward here. His Attention Span for 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 16, 2010 at 11:18 am
Posted in Attention Span 2010, Commented List
Tagged with Anne Boyer, Brandon Brown, Dana Ward, David Brazil, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Hélène Cixous, Laura Moriarty, Lauren Dolgen, Lisa Howe, Lisa Robertson, Mark Fisher, Patti Smith, Thom Donovan