Attention Span 2011 | Román Luján

Raúl Zurita | Purgatory: A Bilingual Edition | California | 2009

Raúl Zurita | Song for His Disappeared Love / Canto a su amor desaparecido | Action | 2010

Manuel Maples Arce | City : A Bolshevik Superpoem in 5 Cantos / Urbe : Poema bolchevique en 5 cantos | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Myriam Moscona | Negro marfil / Ivory Black | Les Figues | 2011

Uljana Wolf | False Friends | Ugly Duckling | 2011

Carlos Oquendo de Amat  | 5 Meters of Poems / 5 metros de poemas | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Michael Palmer | Thread | New Directions | 2011

Marosa di Giorgio | The History of Violets / La historia de las violetas | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Jose Kozer | Stet: Selected Poems | Junction | 2006

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

Jen Hofer | One | Palm | 2009

Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat | 2011

Charles Bernstein | Attack of the Difficult Poems | Chicago | 2011

Gonzalo Rojas | From the Lightning: Selected Poems | Green Integer | 2006

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

Robert Walser | Microscripts | New Directions / Christine Burgin | 2010

Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon Grosman, eds. | The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry  | Oxford | 2009

Brian Kim Stefans  | Viva Miscegenation | Make Now | Forthcoming 2011

Marjorie Perloff | Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century | Chicago | 2010

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Román Luján is a Mexican poet and translator currently living in Los Angeles, where he is studying for his Ph.D. in Latin American Literature at UCLA. His books of poetry include Drâstel (Bonobos, 2010), Deshuesadero (FETA, 2006), Aspa Viento in collaboration with painter Jordi Boldó (FONCA, 2003) and Instrucciones para hacerse el valiente (CONACULTA, 2000). Some of his poems and translations can be found at Eleven Eleven, Mandorla, Aufgabe, and Jacket2.

Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Marjorie Perloff

Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat | 2011

The title poem is Bergvall’s brilliantly satiric version of Chaucer, anatomizing the current socio-cultural scene, but this rich collection also includes the experimental verse of “Goan Atom,” and (my favorite) “Cropper,” Bergvall’s multilingual exploration of sedimentation—of “borders, rules, boundaries, edges, limbos at historical breaches.”

Craig Dworkin | Motes | Roof | 2011

Minimalist procedural lyrics that uncover the secrets within given words and morphemes. Dworkin’s version of Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise, it’s a totally delightful and pleasurable but also intellectually rigorous book.

Peter Gizzi | Threshold Songs | Wesleyan | 2011

This may be Gizzi’s best book to date: the mood is elegiac (the poet’s brother Michael had just died) but also jaunty: whenever the darkness becomes too hard to bear, a colloquial—even funnynote brings us back to the everyday world: “Don’t back away. Turtle into it / with your little force.”

Christian Hawkey | Ventrakl | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Hawkey’s surreal lyric sequence, prompted by the life and work of Georg Trakl. Using a great variety of verse forms and prose interludes, Hawkey produces a terrifying and moving poem about legacy, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves so as to avoid self-recognition.

Heinrich Heine, trans. into Portuguese and with an introd. by André Vallias | Heine, hein? – Poeta dos contrários | Sao Paulo: Perspectiva | 2011

Heine, one of the great lyric poets of all time, is still very little known in the US and translations have been partial and problematic. But Vallias, himself a fine poet, has produced an amazing book, including all the major poems as well as essays, letters, and bibliographical material. My Portuguese is very rudimentary but I marvel at what can—and is being—done elsewhere to bring one nation’s poetry into the present of another’s.

Christian Marclay, dir. | The Clock | a film | 2010

To my mind, the finest conceptual work ever produced: this 24-hour montage of film clips played in real time (featuring an infinite variety of clocks, watches, and verbal signals indicating that exact time in each shot) is endlessly enchanting—a Waiting for Godot for the 21^st Century where we are always waiting—for the event that never happens and which is immediately eclipsed and displaced by another event. Can life be this dramatic? The Clock is nerve-wracking, funny, moving: and when you come out of the gallery (I saw about 8 hours worth at LACMA) you think you’re still in the picture, about to witness the bank robbery or the wake-up call, even as the music bleeds unaccountably from one scene into the next.

Vanessa Place | Tragodía: 1: Statement of Facts | Blanc | 2010

This compendium of court testimonies and police reports—all of them taken from Place’s own files (she is an appellate criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles) has raised enormous controversy: Place has been accused of being soft on rapists. But the fact of this Statement of Facts is that she has simply arranged her material so as to tell it like it is—no sides taken, no points made, and yet an unforgettable image of how events in the contemporary city play themselves out. The book reads like a Henry James novel: what, we ask at every turn, really happened?

Srikanth Reddy | Voyager | California | 2011

Reddy’s writing-through of Kurt Waldheim’s memoir (3 times in 3 different ways) is a devastating exposé of political mendacity and maudlin self-justification. It’s a brilliantly rendered work that literally “speaks for itself.”

Jonathan Stalling | Yingelishi | Counterpath | 2011

Yingelishi (pronounced yeen guh lee shr) sounds like an accented pronunciation of the word “English,” even as, for the Chinese reader, its characters spell out “chanted songs, beautiful poetry.” Spalding combines homophonic translatation, with the dictionary meaning of the different phrases as well as their Chinese characters so as to demonstrate what the new language of some 350 million people looks and feels like. Comes with a website so that we can hear these sounds spoken and chanted. It’s a brilliant tour de force.

Uljana Wolf, trans. Susan Bernofsky | False Friends | Ugly Duckling | 2011

These DICHTionary poems are based on so-called “false friends” in German and English—words that look and/or sound familiar in both languages but differ in meaning.  The comedy that results is full of surprises—a lovely sequence for our multilingual moment. And Ugly Duckling’s production is, as always, a pleasure.

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Susan Howe | THAT THIS | New Directions | 2010

I list this last and separately because Howe’s very important book won the Bollingen Prize and I was one of three judges so my comment on it is a part of the award citation.

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Marjorie Perloff‘s most recent book is Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Her Wittgenstein’s Ladder has just been translated into Spanish and is soon coming out in French. She is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.

Perloff’s Attention Span for 2006, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Vanessa Place

Riccardo Boglione | RITMO D feeling the blanks | gegen | 2009

In a work of abstract literature Richard Kostelenatz would surely admire, in Ritmo D. Feeling the Blanks, Riccardo Boglione has stripped away every last bit of text from Giovanni Boccaccio’s contentious 14th-century body of 100 novellas, Decameron. All that remains is the rhythm, spacing and punctuation.

François Fonteneau | L’Ethique du silence. Wittgenstein et Lacan | Seuil | 1999

D’un côté, une éthique indicible (Wittgenstein), de l’autre, une éthique du mi-dire (Lacan). L’expérience éthique serait-elle liée à l’expérience de la limite dont le silence ferait partie ?

Marcel Proust, trans. Mark Treharne | The Guermantes Way | Viking | 2004

After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons.

Edgar Allen Poe | Poetry and Tales (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) | Library of America | 1984

Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym seems to me excellent art criticism and prototype for rigorous “non-site” investigations.

Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin, eds. | Against Expression | Northwestern | 2011

Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing.

Marjorie Perloff | Unoriginal Genius | Chicago | 2011

It is a virtue of Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius that it leaves nothing settled. Rather, it provokes new questions that help to unsettle modernism and its artistic aftermath, and itself performs an important arrière-garde re-animation of neglected or taken-for-granted avant-gardes.

JoAnn Wypijewski | Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art | California | 1998

Wypijewki and Nation art critic Arthur Danto explain well the context of Komar and Melamid’s unique project and chart its odd, zigzag path between comedy and seriousness. . . . An im-portant reference point on the map of late-20th-century taste

Eric Lott | Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class | Oxford | 1995

As readers we come to understand for the first time how blackface performance imagined and addressed a national community and we realize the extent to which we still live with this legacy.

Bruce Fink | The Lacanian Subject | Princeton | 1996

The Lacanian Subject not only provides an excellent introduction into the fundamental coordinates of Jacques Lacan’s conceptual network; it also proposes original solutions to (or at least clarifications of) some of the crucial dilemmas left open by Lacan’s work.

Andrea Fraser | Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser | MIT | 2007

A stunning book—Andrea Fraser turns the art museum inside out, time and again, in her incisive and mercilessly witty deconstructions. A rare combination of committed artistic practice working hand-in-hand with the insights of cultural theory.

Leo Steinberg | The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion | Chicago | 1997

After centuries of repression and censorship, the sexual component in thousands of revered icons of Christ is restored to visibility.

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Kenneth Goldsmith has called Vanessa Place’s work “arguably the most challenging, complex and controversial literature being written today.”

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