Attention Span 2011 | Paul Stephens

Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. | Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing | Northwestern | 2011

For me this was the year of the conceptual, as the following titles indicate.

Craig Dworkin | The Perverse Library | Information as Material | 2010

Use with caution: if you’re a small press bibliophile, this book may do serious damage to your book budget. This could be the most compelling survey to date of Anglo-American small press poetry publishing since 1970. Even if you don’t necessarily have a specialized interest in knowing precisely what the Constrained Balks Press of Toronto was publishing in 2002, you’ll enjoy The Perverse Library’s truly rad(ical) introduction.

Simon Morris | Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head | Information as Material | 2010

Much more is going on here than may at first appear. Encountering GIJKH sent me into an all-night typing frenzy, during which I wrote a twelve page critical account of the book in relation to the complex textual and legal histories of On the Road. And you thought On the Road was just a bestselling novel about homosocial desire…

Rachel Haidu | The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964-1976 | MIT | 2010

Everyone I know is either overemployed or underemployed, which makes this overview particularly timely. Here you will find an institutional critique of the post-Fordist art economy to last a lifetime.

Tan Lin | Various Cumbersome but Ingenious Titles | Various Presses | 2007-2011

Tan Lin may be our greatest living bard of the infosphere. He is so prodigious and so multimediatic that it would inimical to his project to name a single title. Insomnia and the Aunt (in a handsome chapbook edition) might be the best point of entry for non-professionals, but the many offshoots of the Heath […] and Seven Controlled Vocabularies projects are all worth a skim. If you’re un(der)employed, you might want to download online versions available at lulu.com or at Aphasic Letters.

Rob Fitterman | Now We Are Friends | Truck Books | 2010

So are we going to migrate to Google+? After already having migrated from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook? The coda in particular is an important contribution to the ongoing legacy of creep lit.

W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, eds. | Critical Terms for Media Studies | Chicago | 2010

Scholars and non-scholars alike will find this a compelling survey of new media. Don’t be deceived by the prosaic title: this is really a collection of deeply informative essays on all aspects of contemporary new media studies.

Marcus Boon | In Praise of Copying | Harvard | 2010

It’s difficult to keep up with the reams of new criticism devoted to copyright in relation to literature and the arts (Paul K. St. Amour’s exceptional Modernism and Copyright deserves special mention in this category). Boon tackles “the madness of modern, capitalist framings of property” head on. You can procure a free online copy at the Harvard University Press web site (which will look better than the versions you’ll find on library.nu or AAAAARG.org).

Philip E. Aarons and Andrew Roth, eds. | In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 | JRP Ringier | 2010 

Literary journals could learn a lot from artists’ journals. This sumptuous collection will make your coffee table proud, as well as provide countless hours of delight and instruction.

M. NourbeSe Philip | Zong! | Wesleyan | 2008

This title briefly went out of print and jumped in price on Amazon, but fortunately it’s been reissued as an affordable paperback. No brief summary will do much to prepare you for this complex multi-generic work, which demonstrates how compelling the new conceptual/archival/procedural poetries can be in terms of content as well as form.

Ian Hamilton Finlay | Selections | California | 2011

Eagerly anticipated. Long overdue. In the meantime, I’m making due with the amazing (but out of print and expensive enough to merit inclusion in the Perverse Library) Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (MIT 1992).

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Paul Stephens‘s recent critical writing has appeared in Social Text, Rethinking Marxism, Open Letter and Postmodern Culture. He has just completed a book manuscript titled The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing. He lives in New York.

Stephens’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.

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 2009 – Juliana Spahr

I keep thinking to myself that it has been a really amazing year of reading for me. I have loved so much of what I have read. I have no complaints. I’m not sure I have read a book I thought was a waste of my time all year. I think I feel this way because I have had trouble reading because I have a two year old who is at that stage where if I am reading in his presence, he comes up and grabs the book and says no, no, no. Reading feels a little illicit right now when I get to do it. Thus all the more sweet. So I should also confess that I think I might write this very differently if I was reading more inclusively. There are many books that came out this year that I have not yet gotten to read. I have an exciting large stack to read.

Mark McGurl | The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing | Harvard | 2009

I confess that I have at moments gotten bogged down in the long readings of Thomas Wolfe and Flannery O’Conner. Mainly because I’m not a super huge fan of that work and so not very well read in it. But the money shot, if one can say that, is the analysis of what he calls “program fiction.” So much here that feels right. Mainly that the university system has shaped US writing dramatically in the last half of the 20th century. Also really interested in his talk about how this fiction has a sort of generic localism (my term not his). But at same time I find McGurl’s respect for “program fiction” super frustrating. He keeps talking about how he likes it! And I’m so suspicious of the writing that this system has produced (not the teaching of writing, that is another complicated story). Primarily because it is a sort of generic local writing that has isolated writing from more activist and urgent concerns.

M Nourbese Philip | Zong! | Wesleyan | 2008

Super obsessed with this book. It has everything. Anti-imperial righteousness, avant garde extremity, ghosts or channeled beings, lists, etc. I love how she “recovers” the names of those lost on the Zong.

Ian Baucom | Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History | Duke | 2005

Also about the Zong and the development of credit around the slave trade. He talks a little about Philip’s book. I was reading it just as the financial markets were collapsing.

Renee Gladman | To After That | Atelos | 2008

Gladman at her best.

Aaron Cometbus | Cometbus | na | na

Joshua Clover gave Chris Nealon the issue of Cometbus on the Berkeley bookstores. And I had to go out and get my own copy. And then I started buying more and more copies to give to people because it such a lovely history of the complications around Telegraph Avenue.

Felix Feneon | Novels in Three Lines | NYR Classics | 2007

Reznikoff-style. Or I should say Reznikoff is Feneon-style. Classic playful social realist writing.

Mark Nowak | Coal Mountain Elementary | Coffee House | 2009

It surprised me! I don’t need to say anymore. I am so in love with this book right now.

Roberto Bolano | 2666 | Farrar, Straus, Giroux | 2008

I know, everyone else has already said all that needs to be said. I will add this though: there is no other male writer of women that is better than Bolano. Plus I keep rereading the sermon in the third book.

David Buuck | The Shunt | Palm Press | 2009

Juggling, with disgust.

Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009

I want to say something about beauty and lyric but I feel that would piss her off. But really, the book made my heart happy.

C. D. Wright | Rising, Falling, Hovering | Coffee House | 2008

How the world defines the personal. Also a really beautiful book. With hope for poetry despite its claim “What is said has been said before / This is no time for poetry.”

More Juliana Spahr here.

Was the Policy

M. NourbeSe Philip – Zong 26 (1’17”). Text via Google Books. Recorded February 17, 2007 as part of the Segue Series at Bowery Poetry Club and archived on her PennSound page, where one can hear another version of the same poem (1’09), recorded on April 23, 2008 in Toronto. Philip’s homepage. Zong at Wesleyan, and on Goodreads. An appreciation, at The All-Purpose Magical Tent.