Attention Span 2011 | Susana Gardner

David Kirschenbaum, ed. | The Portable BOOG Reader | BOOG LITERATURE | 2000

I acquired this anthology recently in an after reading pints and swap. From the stunning cover photo of Lee Ann Brown (taken by Allen Ginsberg no less) to the vast multitude of interior work by NYC based poets. Featuring Julie Patton, Wanda Phipps, Betsy Fagin, Sharon Mesmer and many, many more.

Dodie Bellamy | CUNTUPS | Tender Buttons | USA | 2001

This is a book I should have read right away, ten years ago today, actually. Ten years ago we all should have read it, but only now did I come to it. It is daring, a modern sort of nod to Lifting Belly. Modern and dual, bi-and all-BECOMING. It makes me WANT, it will make you WANT too. All MEN should read it NOW, all WOMEN too. Read it in one go, read it in two. Dodie Bellamy will bewitch you as she has me. Bewitched, betwixt, and tricked, all done up with all that lovely goo! An erotic love poem manifests each page. She will badger you, she will eschew you, as she wants you and you and you. So little! So Wild!!!

Sean Cole | Itty City | Pressed Wafer | 2003
Sean Cole | The December Project | BOOG | 2005

Like unexpected sound bites in rapid succession…

The moon is night alert. It’s half-nigh, strafing. Like an Alewife it slaps against the black movement of the sky. Every year I write about the moon, it’s ambitious, as if it did anything but whip the surf into dumb caps, as if it did anything but laps around the Earth.

Emily Critchley Love / All That / & OK by Emily Critchley | Penned in the Margins | UK | 2011

This is an amazing, thorough collection of British poet Emily Critchley’s publications to date. You need to read this book!

(The Avaunt Garde)

speaking in logic (or Greek) where nothing’s divided everything’s
dug up out of the dirt, bomb or butterfly, but such dirt gets stuck
(like red paint) under the nails & the world after all is not for such
violent admiring. the archaeological point may be us at the drinking
bowl us as the clouds part us offering ourselves up to ourselves in
graphic violence.to get the beauty of it hot

Frances Cruk | DOWN YOU GO OR Négation de Bruit | Punch | USA | 2011

Just in! This is a beautiful letterpress book, total gorgeousness all around. This is an amazing I-XX sequence, which begins:

Swarms!
We will bang
Into the sun Blinded
thirsty,
howling

(and continues in IX)

Again the fake garden, motionless plastic curves.
This time we are Great in our Smart
Bomb Time Machine device.
We come to fuck the mutants
We go to mutant them
I am with the mutant
firing limbs

I want to quote more. No, I want to type the whole sequence here for you now, but resist doing that…you need to order this book. And since I just received my copy, I want to digest its negation, its lyrical dreamy chasms before me.

Amy De’Ath | Erec & Enid | Salt | UK | 2010

From the title poem of De’ath’s impressive first collection:

Said Erec to Enide, the sun burst
down on my sails and glowing tore
my winnow North.
Said Enide to Erec, I don’t know how
to soothe you.
…
Said Erec to Enide,
Enide dozed, & her lips gently
popped as they parted. Erec sat on
the grass, the horse chestnut on his
chest, and the salmon who jumped,
and the curvature of his intense
guilt, his ergonomic fantasy office
and the parameter of his suburb.

j/j hastain | myrhh to re all myth | Furniture | forthcoming

‘This is a romance of fractals,’ an invigorating linguistic panoply which refuses to be any one thing. myrhh to re all myth gives us a vivid transdifferentiated poethic state—a sonic inquiry—thus feral post-gendered embodiment of ‘the infinitely ferric dress’. Multiple, layered, disarming and hauntingly worthwhile. Hastain spins a fine vocalic lyric gossamer about us, a future ethos and new grammatical treatise of fracture, rediscovery, and retelling, a myrhh re(garding) all myth.

Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: A Project For Future Children | Kelsey St. | 2009

Kapil threads together a now nearly forgotten story, as she realizes the tale of the two feral ‘wolf’ girls poetically as it is heart wrenching and hopeful.

“Lucidly, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next to your body; then my eyes clicked the photo into place. Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed.”

Marianne Morris | SolacePoem (afterParvine‘Tesami) | Tusk Records | UK | 2011

Listen to this link and be bewitched by this UK/CAN sylph in her gorgeous words and sound work. Seeing Morris perform is the only way to trump the poetic sound experience.

Tom Pickard | MORE PRICKS THAN PRIZES | Pressed Wafer | USA | 2010

This little book is packed with kicks & punches as it delivers a great poetic memoir of sorts, seriously small enough to fit in your pocket! While recounting a particular period of his experiences as a young poet, Pickard’s story also recounts the difficulty of ‘being’ a poet, father and citizen in the 60’s. Also, just received some beautiful postcards from Tom. He is an amazing photographer as well, and now I have many images of his far off corner in ‘Blighty’ (he taught me that!) The pic of him and Allen Ginsberg is tacked to my study wall.

Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | USA | 2009

I was pleased to meet Douglas this past summer at the Boston Poetry Marathon and then again in NYC for a Zinc reading. I am still digging into Dug’s Theogony. For some reason, when I meet poets I instantly fabricate (in my dense head) what kind of poems they write…Rothschild, for me was a poet of the long poem category…so at first I was surprised to see all of these small(ish) poems throughout the book…but then I realized it is all one poem we are all writing, right? One long fabulous poem! Here is one I particularly like… I also want to quote UNEXPOSED here, but no, I will not expose it. No, I will not expose it! Go find it!

PANZY 

& then another
first one & then a flock
of snow bells

Jaime Robles | foundlings | EXETER | UK | 2011

Receiving this book was a real treat—like a foundling itself, beautiful and austere in its form. And heart-wrenchingly prescient! It is works like this that bring me to poetry. It is many things, an inventory, a recalling of the past, an articulation of sorrow and even the beauty therein…a book of lost children, lost mothers, of hope.

from foundling 2275, a boy

                        This Silver Ribbon is
                            Desired to be preserved as
          The Childs mark for distinction

This ribbon binds but also reaches,
Observes the shortest distance between me and her,
Maps the call of a bird—
Tinsel and silky: each stitch a feather.

Michael Ruby | Window on the City | BlazeVOX | 2006

This is a beautiful book, another fabulous contribution to publishing from BlazeVOX! & a Dusie Kollektiv participant at that! It was also a great pleasure to hear Michael read his work at the Dusie Zinc Reading this past summer, I sent him away with his pockets full of chocolate.

Kathrin Schaeppi | Sonja Sekula: Grace in a Cow’s Eye: a memoir | Black Radish | 2011

An amazing book project convergence, re-seeing / investigation, and collaboration with the late Swiss visual artist and writer Sonja Sekula. When Schaeppi performs works from this book, I am inspired to write it to the score of one-woman musical. Vielleicht einmal!

Gertrude Stein | Lifting Belly | The Naiad Press Inc. | 1989

Lifting belly confounds me, entrances and enchants me.
Lifting belly what is earnest. Expecting an arena to be monumental.
Lifting belly is recognized to be the only spectacle present. Do you mean that.
Lifting belly is a language. It says island. Island a strata. Lifting belly is a repetition. (17)

§

Susana Gardner‘s Herso: An Heirship in Waves was published earlier this year by Black Radish.

Gardner’s Attention Span for 2010, 2007. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Cathy Wagner

Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman, ed. | Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology | Oxford | 2009

Beautifully polemical anthology that situates Latin American poetry in its complicated historical and cultural matrices. Alongside work by poets we’ve heard of (or should have), represented here are Aztec and Mayan poems addressing the European invasion; astonishing oral poetry, old and new; and a selection of visual and concrete poetry that connects the midcentury concrete poetry revolution to indigenous traditions. The anthology draws attention to the influence of indigenous poets on avant-garde internationalistas: “The poet is a God. Don’t sing about rain, poet. Make it rain!” an Aymara poet told Vicente Huidobro. Many poems here reflect what Vicuña calls “a poetics of resistance.” I was elated by Gabriel Gudding’s translations of the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario, whose poems Englished had never shaken me before.

Christopher Nealon | The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century | Harvard | 2011

Brilliantly makes its case: that contemporary and recent poetry has all along been influenced by and actively investigating the workings of capital. I didn’t agree with every one of Nealon’s interpretations of individual poems, but I rarely find myself reading criticism with this much note-taking gusto. I have been telling everyone about this book.

Srecko Kosovel, tr. from Slovene by Ana Jelnikar and Barbara Siegel Carlson | Look Back, Look Ahead: The Selected Poems of Srecko Kosovel | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Contemporary of Rilke’s. Imagine Rilke with lashings of John Wieners and Khlebnikov.

Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian | The Wide Road | Belladonna | 2011

An enviably intellectually-fecund friendship set itself the important work of trying to think and write sex, collaboratively, as women. I wish I’d had this book years ago. “We eroticize our earthly situations and conditions and likewise they eroticize us…Our vagina accommodates the proverbial railway station it has sometimes been compared to. To be enormous is a wish that comes over us in our hot desperation. Then, miraculously, everything on earth swells to our proportions.” Yup that’s how it works. Crazy smart and crazy sexy.

Dana Ward | The Squeakquel, pt. 1 & pt. 2 | The Song Cave | 2011

In this and in Typing Wild Speech and his newer work Ward is making something new with poetic narrative. Blows forward fast in dawn glow. Bliss to be with.

Ryan Walker | You Will Own It Permanently | regs times | 2010

Charming dorky conversational smart friendly, just adorable; I don’t know how you can get hold of this one, as it’s self-published—try bathybius.com/duh, or Lulu.

Sommer Browning | Either Way I’m Celebrating: Poems and Comics | Birds, LLC | 2011

Again charm, and serious wit, plus arch and goofy drawings. Somebody sent me this and I opened it after a hard day and was lightened. Thanks.

Juliana Spahr | Well Then There Now | Black Sparrow | 2011

Ethical effort is the engine of Spahr’s poems. (I am using an anti-ecological metaphor on purpose, because self-consciousness about the harm a contemporary subject does to the world is central to Spahr’s writing.) Sometimes the effort feels embarrassing, as if the poem’s tires have gone flat because it didn’t want to use up too much air while driving—the effort feels effortful. But then the effortfulness twists before my eyes so that I see that it is part of the poem (it becomes an aesthetic method), and that she is brave for allowing the effort to be part of the poem’s armature, and that an enormous risktaking intelligence is guiding the poem and organizing its anxious pleasures. I like to feel my suspicions of this work, and I like the thinking I have to do when I think about its challenges poetic and extrapoetic.

William Fuller | Hallucination | Flood | 2011

There is something hilarious about the way William Fuller’s profession (chief fiduciary officer at a trust company) is fetishized by his fans, as if he knows something other people don’t—he’s got the secret. Maybe he does. Wry mystical intelligence and pleasure in the word-hoard throughout, and the last poem “The Circuit” is worth the price of the book.

Evie Shockley | The New Black | Wesleyan | 2011

Witty and sharp. Uses many playful forms (often versions of acrostics) to examine the injustices, racist and otherwise, that manifest in the ways we address and describe one other. The formal play means that our attention keeps on being drawn to surface. As the Oulipians saw, surface reconfigured has the potential to disrupt what plays over our thought-screens; these poems are North American instances of Vicuña’s “poetics of resistance.”

Marianne Morris | Commitment | Bad Press & Critical Documents | 2011

Shiny gold-paper-covered chapbook from a younger Canadian poet living in London who grabs all of us, especially the banks, by the hairy scruff and shakes till falling money turns to fumes that light up the shit we’re in. Chris Nealon might want to check it out. A lot of pissed-off marvelously riotous poetry is coming out of the islands off Europe right now. Just got hold of Frances Kruk’s Down We Go chapbook, which is like a cracked white china bowl of shiny nails, and Chris Goode’s new anthology of young (all under 30) English poets, Better than Language: An anthology of new modernist poetries, also worth reading.

§

Catherine Wagner teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her latest book is My New Job.

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