Posts Tagged ‘Mark Scroggins’
Attention Span – Benjamin Friedlander
Anne Boyer | Art Is War | Mitzvah | 2008
I’m not a believer in the Holy Spirit, but the fact that some poets make every sentence flutter with life while others merely kill brain cells does give me pause.
Peter Cole, ed. and trans. | The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 | Princeton | 2007
A half-millennium of poetry sifted with patient labor from the sand of history, then weighed and melted and wrought anew. To appreciate the wonder of this labor, imagine the David Shields anthology listed below rewritten in contemporary idiom, with tonal differences flattened out, but with a corresponding gain of coherence. A book to set beside Pound’s Provencal, which is only fitting since the poets involved were writing at roughly the same time.
Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton | New Star | 2008
Momentum, ease, and a gift for gab are never sufficient for a book to be as enjoyable as this one. But when the poet is also a collector and historian of minor experience, these qualities begin to seem pretty foolproof. “A walk / on gilded splinters / in terrycloth / slippers,” with birdsong loud and clear when the TV is turned off.
Tony Harrison | Collected Poems | Penguin | 2007
Modernism scarcely registers here, but in Harrison’s case that’s not a defensive posture. His poems are episodes from a class war in which language is the battlefield: those who know it best are best favored to strike with impunity, and deadly surprise, and live to strike again.
Susan Howe | Souls of the Labadie Tract | New Directions | 2007
She makes other poets sound forced who strive to say one-quarter as much. Her secret? If you work your material until it’s in tatters, until it stains your thoughts and permeates your dreams, any stray word can be Sibylline.
Andrea Lauterwein | Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory | Thames & Hudson | 2007
A handsomely illustrated book about Kiefer, whose encounter with Celan’s work triggered a profound change, but not, it seems, a profound reading. Which makes this a fascinating study of reception, surprisingly close to another book I admired last year—Christoph Irmscher’s Longfellow Redux (U of Illinois P, 2008).
Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo | 2008
It’s impossible to read these poems without wanting to share the lines out loud. Silence is helpless here: even when I’m alone with this book, I break the silence, laughing. Is there anything more poignantly utopian than that? If ideology is the presence of society in our heads, then laughing out loud when we’re alone is the very summoning of that society, an involuntary assertion of communion.
George Oppen | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | ed. Stephen Cope | California | 2008
The pensive poet at his vanity (where beautiful poems were so often made up), appealingly deshabille.
Mark Scroggins | The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofksy | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007
Sometimes, all you need is a firm grip from a friend to make it across slippery ground. With Zukofsky, Scroggins is that friend.
Frank Sherlock and Brett Evans | Ready to Eat Individual | Lavender Ink | 2008
The black bars framing each page reproduce the characteristic look of an empty food pouch, of the sort distributed in New Orleans after Katrina—marking this poem as a kind of shared meal, each portion of which once filled the empty space between need and excrement. Sustenance temporarily, debris for posterity.
David S. Shields, ed. | American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries | Library of America | 2007
The new edition of the Oxford anthology of American verse gives a mere twenty-seven pages to poets born before Emerson—clearly, the earlier years are due for a reappraisal. Here, the editor’s particular interest lies in the emergence of literary culture, so popular culture is actually less evident than in John Hollander’s companion volume of the nineteenth century, which surprised me. Surprising too is the canon that slowly emerges. Measured in pages, the top five poets are all familiar names: Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor, Philip Freneau, Anne Bradstreet, Timothy Dwight. But after Dwight the discoveries come fast and furious, pushing Ebenezer Cook (of “The Sot-Weed Factor”) down to ninth place, and Phillis Wheatley all the way down to fourteenth. Whether these new rankings create new reputations remains to be seen (the Scottish-born West Indian James Grainger is already gaining ground among scholars), but since the test of a book like this one rests ultimately on the poems, one reads more for choice moments than careers. And here I’ve found more than enough to justify a reapportionment of pages in the next Oxford. I’m especially fond of the following lines by Hannah Griffitts:
My Sense, or the Want of it—free you may jest
And censure, despise, or impeach,
But the Happiness center’d within my own Breast,
Is luckily out of your reach.
(From a short poem against marriage, written around the time of the Revolution—found in a commonplace book.)
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More Benjamin Friedlander here.
Attention Span – Tim Conley
Gunnar Olsson | Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason | Chicago | 2007
The map is a territory, just not the territory in question.
Mark Scroggins | The Poem of A Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007
Illuminating and exemplary. To those writers I know who cannot even imagine why one would read a “literary” biography, I say: read this and see.
Daniel Heller-Roazen | The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation | Zone | 2007
This book isn’t just about that itch you’ve always had but could never quite scratch; it is that itch.
Javier Marías | Your Face Tomorrow, Volume One: Fever and Spear | New Directions | 2005
Robert Kelly | Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 | Black Sparrow | 1995
Kelly’s work has been a recent, embarrassingly late, and joyous discovery for me. “Can you forgive us all? We / who were your alphabets.”
Rebecca Solnit | Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics | California | 2007
Clearing the air. A mind to walk with.
Jean-Michel Rabaté | 1913: The Cradle of Modernism | Blackwell | 2007
Let there be more such histories, a discreet span studied from every angle, profound and multifaceted contemplations of a month in Spain, a single day in an African village, a late afternoon shared by the world.
Jonathan Williams | Jubilant Thicket: New and Selected Poems | Copper Canyon | 2005
John Peel and Sheila Ravenscroft | John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes | Chicago Review | 2007
When radio was something you did, an activity for both listener and programmer. Unexpectedly poignant is how Ravenscroft takes over the narrative when her husband dies: this is a memoir in stereo.
David Graeber | Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology | Prickly Paradigm | 2004
Jay Millar | Mycological Studies | Coach House | 2002
One of my students asked me whether this book was “for real.”
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More Tim Conley here.
Attention Span – Kit Robinson
Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley | Ficciones | Penguin | 2008
Marcel Proust, trans. Lydia Davis | Swann’s Way | Penguin | 2002
Alejo Carpentier, trans. Harriet De Onis | In the Kingdom of This World | Farrar | 2006
Ned Sublette | The World that Made New Orleans | Lawrence Hill | 2008
Mark Scroggins | The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007
Lorenzo Thomas | Dancing on Main Street | Coffee House | 2004
Laura Moriarty | A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975-2007 | Omnidawn | 2007
Jean Day | Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium | Adventures in Poetry | 2006
William Fuller | Watchword | Flood | 2006
Rodrigo Toscano | To Leveling Swerve | Krupskaya | 2004
Joanne Kyger | About Now: Collected Poems | National Poetry Foundation | 2007
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More Kit Robinson here.
Attention Span – Joel Bettridge
Richard Deming | Let’s Not Call It Consequence | Shearsman Books | 2008
Rachel Zolf | Human Resources | Coach House | 2007
Sophocles, trans. John Tipton | Ajax | Flood | 2008
Mark Scroggins | The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007
Jonathan Edwards | “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections” | in A Jonathan Edwards Reader |Yale | 2003
Marcel Proust | Swann’s Way | Random House | 1934
Ted Pearson | Encryptions |Singing Horse | 2007
Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space | Palm Press | 2008
Ulf Stolterfoht, trans. by Rosmarie Waldrop | Lingos | Cuneiform Press | 2007
Linda Russo | Mirth | Chax | 2007
Elizabeth Arnold | Civilization | Flood | 2006
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2009 – Stephen Cope
with one comment
Joseph Donohue | Terra Lucida | Talisman House | 2009
Donohue’s singular economy of reticence and revelation is in evidence here throughout. Why is he not more widely read and celebrated?
Kenneth Goldsmith, ed. | Poetry Magazine: July/August 2009 | Poetry Foundation | 2009
Still trying to find the right acronym for Flarf: Faux Libertines Against Real Feeling, perhaps? Feminists, Libertarians, Antinomians, Revolutionaries, and Fakes? False Lyricists Appropriating Real Fascism? Finally Liberated Artists. Recouping… etc. These are not the most interesting Flarf poems I’ve encountered, but still remain more interesting than the vast majority of poems published in this esteemed organ over the last, say, two decades. As for conceptual poetry: I recently ran across a copy of Goldsmith’s “Baseball” in the “sports” section of a used bookstore. Nuff said.
Fanny Howe | The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation | Greywolf | 2009
Perhaps the most important piece of advice I received in graduate school was the simple exhortation: “you should listen to Fanny.”
Adonis | Sufism & Surrealism | Saqi | 2005
Been a concern of mine for awhile – seems time may be ripe to explore Sufic modernisms (and explode thereby the oft exclusively Eurocentric – even when colonial or postcolonial – narratives of modernism still so prevalent). Plus, I’ve needed a lucid discussion of ‘ibn Arabi since I first went through Corbin’s book a decade ago.
Carl Rakosi | The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi | NPF | 1986
The least critically acclaimed—or critically attended-to anyway—of the Objectivists. Having had occasion to revisit this collection for a seminar, I found myself by turns delighted, enlightened, bedazzled, bewildered, inspired—and at every turn engaged. Rakosi still awaits his full share of critical reception and recognition: I wonder why?
Lytle Shaw | Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie | Iowa | 2006
Someone had to write this book, and I suspect Shaw’s discussion of “coterie” will have applications beyond this particular poet—beyond, perhaps, the New York School—for some time to come.
Ariana Reines | The Cow | Flood Editions | 2006
This one floored me. Visceral, vital, clinical, conceptual—it strikes a dissonant chord in the nerves. Precisely, I think, what I’ve been needing.
C. T. Funkhouser | Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms | Alabama | 2007
Best book on the subject, bar none.
Mark Scroggins | Louis Zukofsky: The Poem of a Life | Counterpoint | 2007
Scroggins’s approach is novel, as he mixes narrative with criticism in alternating chapters. Biographies rarely capture my attention the way that this one did, and I found myself repeatedly returning to the poems to find resonance and resource where before I encountered only the opacity of technique. An absolutely necessary book.
Ming-Qian Ma | Poetry as Re-Reading: American Avant-Garde Poetry and the Poetics of Counter-Method | Northwestern | 2008
A dense and pleasurably complex book. Following on Bruce Andrews’s theory of “re-reading,” Ma suggests that “poetry, to the extent that it is a critical-analytical reengagement with method as a problem, is the “rereading [of] the reading that a social status quo puts us through.” But this is no mere rehashing of stock-in-trade Lang Po theory; Ma’s trajectory is unique in engaging philosophical (and not just literary or aesthetic) modernism (and not just that of the trendy sort), At this point, I’m content to have my mind in the book, if not fully wrapped around it.
Wildcard selection: I’ve been known to add music to my lists before—this time I’ll offer relevant text instead. Liner notes to the following recording:
Balla et Ses Balldins | The Syliphone Years | Stern’s | 2008
In this era of iTunes digital downloads, the inclusion of such booklets as this may become more and more necessary. It’s nothing new, of course, and I could name dozens of other collections with equally impressive notes—this is only the most recent. But as cds go the way of lps before them, one can only hope that the paratext doesn’t vanish with them…(a note on this: I recently downloaded my first two albums in MP3 format. Great sound, easier storage, certainly—but the lack of detailed information on instrumentation, composition, context, etc. has me leaning towards purchasing the actual cd at some later date (i.e. when I can afford the $50 or so…)).
More Stephen Cope here and here.
Written by Steve Evans
September 11, 2009 at 9:52 am
Posted in Attention Span 2009, Commented List
Tagged with Adonis, Ariana Reines, Balla et Ses Balldins, C.T. Funkhouser, Carl Rakosi, Fanny Howe, Joseph Donahue, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lytle Shaw, Mark Scroggins, Ming-Qian Ma, Stephen Cope