Posts Tagged ‘Mel Nichols’
Attention Span 2011 | Melanie Neilson
Rae Armantrout | Versed | Wesleyan | 2009
Anne Boyer | The Romance of Happy Workers | Coffee House | 2008
Rod Smith | Deed | Iowa | 2007
CA Conrad | The Book of Frank | Chax | 2009
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009
Steve Farmer | Glowball | Theenk | 2010
Eileen Myles | The Importance of Being Iceland | Semiotext(e) | 2009
Sianne Ngai | Ugly Feelings | Harvard | 2005
Jerry Lewis | The Total Film-Maker | Random | 1971
Kevin Killian | Impossible Princess | City Lights | 2009
Monica de la Torre | Public Domain | Roof | 2008
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009
Gertrude Stein | Lucy Church Amiably | Something Else | 1930 reissued 1969
Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This to Me | Wesleyan | 2008
Philip Whalen, ed. Michael Rothenberg | The Collected Poems | Wesleyan | 2007
Lew Welch, ed. Donald Allen | Ring of Bone: Collected 1950-1970 | Grey Fox | 1979
Donald Bogle | Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters | Harper Collins | 2011
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. | Race Music | California |2003
Bern Porter | Found Poems | Nightboat | 2011
Jessica B. Harris | High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America | Bloomsbury | 2011
James Lee Burke | Detective Dave Robicheaux series of 18 thrillers set in Louisiana: The Neon Rain to The Glass Rainbow | Pocket | 1989-2010
Lewis Klahr, Engram Sepals | Melodramas (sequence of seven 16mm films, 75 minutes) | 1994-2000
Elvis Presley | The Country Side of Elvis | RCA | 2001
Raymond Chandler, performed by Elliott Gould | Red Wind (1938) | New Millennium Audio | 2002
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More Melanie Neilson here.
Neilson’s Attention Span for 2009. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Nada Gordon
Stan Apps | Universal Stories with Unknown Particulars | valeveil e-book | 2009
A work of conscience and searching thought: What does poetry do in the world? What does it do for us?
Lynn Berhrendt | petals, emblems | Lunar Chandelier | forthcoming 2010
My blurb: “The affect-drenched poems in Lynn Behrendt’s Petals/Emblems leap off beauty’s edge right on to the electrified grid of being: that difficult ‘barrage/ of having been born/ at all.’ There (here) everything’s objective correlative: love and pain ‘crave form like alms’ and surely find it, sensuous, phonic, and unsettling, ‘heavy’ with ‘gyn grief’ and ‘undaunted desire.’ ‘This ache to tell you something’ shoots the poems through with yearny rhetorical force like the ‘inward arch’ of ‘nostalgic ocean’: palpable, fluid, engulfing.”
Charles Bernstein | All the Whiskey in Heaven | Farrar | 2010
Do I even need to say why?
Brandon Brown | The Orgy | self-published | 2010
I wrote on Ululations that this book “… spreads a metaphorical net onto the orgy of late capitalism in the hyper-information age (‘this crystal mall must be destroyed’); and most compellingly, to me, it seems to refer back on itself to the orgy of writing that makes itself felt in every moment of this galvanized, kind of emo (in the best possible sense: ‘My heart struggles./ It’s big as a chard, but it never learns.’) poem.”
K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge | 2009
I blurbed this one, too. [All “this shining and this _utter [!].” Terminal Humming is a very exciting book and I love it. Eavesdropping and borrowing from diverse discourses, K. Lorraine Graham has created a complex “essay on scrounging.” It is a wonderfully violent “attempt to unleash inner badness” in poems that are hot and audacious, in a girly way: “Wonder Woman boots twirl twirl.” Terminal Humming is just the right amount of weird. In it, “kinks become beautiful and obvious,” and “language [hums] as angry form.” Read this “downwind chess urine bird bathing extravaganza” of a book!]
Michael Gottlieb | Memoir and Essay | Faux | 2010
A moving, witty, precise and somewhat theatricalized bildungsroman. How he got this way.
Carla Harryman | Adorno’s Noise | Essay | 2008
Like psychedelics for the intellect.
Rodney Koeneke | Etruria | manuscript
Exquisite. Someone please publish this. This is poetry exuding the most poignant possible elegance.
K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams 1-20 | Slack Buddha | 2010
Don’t be surprised if you find yourself ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING upon reading these poems. Seriously. Kasey is my idol.
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009
Mindbogglingly delicate and audacious, all at once.
Lanny Quarles | chapbooks
He sent us an envelope of chapbooks which I loved. Gary squirreled them away somewhere so I can’t check titles. Endlessly inventive!
Ariana Reines |The Cow | Fence | 2006
I know I’m late to this one, but wow, The Cow. She packs a punch.
Monica de le Torre | Public Domain | Roof | 2008
It’s conceptual! It’s funny! It’s whip-smart! It’s art!
Dana Ward |Typing Wild Speech | Summer BF Press | 2010
All the outspilling radiance of life and death here, like a pop Proust or a more-beatific-than Kerouac Kerouac.
PLUS: live computer-facilitated performances of Danny Snelson (“Mabuse”) and Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford (“The Ballad of the Death of Spring”) Why limit ourselves to the page? This is a future of poetry.
More Nada Gordon here. Her Attention Span for 2005. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2009 – K. Silem Mohammad
Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge Books | 2008
Like Davies’ earlier Comp, this is structurally little more than a series of sound bites strung together as “verse.” Yet also like Comp, it crackles with Ecclesiastical scorn and verve. The conscious and subconscious minds are sitting together on a sofa trying to relate the big game to the latest CSPAN feed of senate hearings, and these broadcasts interrupt them.
Craig Dworkin | Parse | Atelos | 2008
Page after page of … parsing. And the text that is parsed (an 1874 grammar manual by Edwin A. Abbott) is itself a treatise on parsing. One might think that this is a perfect example of a “conceptualist” book that asks merely to be thought about rather than read, and for some people that is probably the more attractive option. But those people will miss the metagrammatical massage that prods the reader’s brain into little shudders (not quite paroxysms) of attentiveness, of alertness, of being-in-poetry.
Robert Fitterman | Rob the Plagiarist | Roof Books | 2009
Contains the already-classic “This Window Makes Me Feel,” as well as other manipulations of public discourse and commercial sense-input. Fitterman plays the part of a Benjaminian flaneur, but one as he might exist in the world of John Carpenter’s They Live—a flaneur who is not wearing those special glasses that let you see the aliens and the capitalist dystopia they have erected for what they are.
Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place | Notes on Conceptualisms | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2009
Shallow art-theory rehash or stimulating commentary on contemporary poetics? Both? Oh, it couldn’t be both. Admit it: for a week or two, you too were reading this little blue booklet and actually trying to make sense of the proposition that conceptual writing is allegorical writing.
K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge Books | 2009
A deftly casual versish essay on different stages of social ambience (from “droll” to “malignant”). Its timbre is perfectly captured in the title pun: either a bustling public nexus, or a fatal condition of subverbal singing-along. Graham hits a perfect balance of easygoing “girlishness” and sardonic bemusement.
Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2009
There should be a periodic announcement made over loudspeakers on the main streets of major cities: Citizens! Why do so many of you seem to have neglected to notice that Kevin Killian is one of our finest poets? Because you were too busy being impressed by his fiction? No excuse. He is also (this is me now, not the loudspeaker) one of the few poets writing today who can still do transmissive (e.g., Spicerian) lyric convincingly. Heartbreakingly.
David Larsen | Names of the Lion | Atticus/Finch 2009
Go find a book that is either a more beautiful physical object or a more stunning instance of creative scholarship. Larsen’s loving translation of Ibn Khalawayh’s treatise (with commentary) should be written up in every arts and literature review section of every major newspaper and magazine worldwide as a major publishing event. Mindbogglingly, this unbearably gorgeous Atticus/Finch “chapbook” (too humble a word) costs only $10.
Chris Nealon | Plummet | Edge Books | 2009
It’s hard to think, in the world of contemporary poetry, of very many books that spawn a popular (I mean, popular among other poets, anyway) catch phrase within what seems like mere moments of their publication. I wouldn’t be surprised to see “I am not gay, I am from the future!” on T-shirts and bumper stickers soon. The obvious stylistic reference point for Nealon’s “voice” is O’Hara, but this is far from being derivative nth-generation New York School; it’s absolutely modern in all the right ways.
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge Books | 2009
Nichols asks early in this book, “can a woman compete with the city”? The question is answered in the pages that follow by a flurry of winged images and phrases like paper scraps from a shredded diary flying down busy streets, between skyscrapers, in and out of shops and offices and homes. Nichols renders both the sensually vivid and mundanely bureaucratic details of everyday life with a lyric attentiveness that constantly places the “nucleus of the individual / in productive tension with the collective expanse of white.”
Jordan Scott | Blert | Coach House Books | 2008
The author, a chronic stutterer, set out deliberately to write poetry that would be hard for him to read aloud. A pretty rudimentary concept, but the resulting verbal bumper car ride taps into essential currents of recent prosodic weather patterns. Rubbery, blubbery, heap big unheimlich fun.
Stephanie Young | Picture Palace | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2009
Sometimes I forget that Stephanie Young is not a phenomenally famous pop-soul diva. I really don’t have words to describe the complex and passionate effects her work produces. Tonally and formally, it’s all over the map, and it makes the map look fabulous. Maybe my favorite move of hers (among the many she routinely busts) is her talent for the abrupt declaration of a devastating, obvious fact, such as her observation that “of course the revolution won’t be televised! Not because the most important things don’t appear on television but because the revolution will knock out electrical plants and the TV itself will collapse under the collapsing house.”
More K. Silem Mohammad here.
Attention Span 2009 – CE Putnam
Peter Cully | The Age of Briggs & Stratton | New Star Books | 2008
Another set of walks around Hammertown with Mr. Cully. Nature and machine in conflict and decay & Smithsonian bird found-poems from 1910-1954.
& even when they make it over the line
the berm is not permanent
and the fuckraking leafblowers
papercut the air into orange froth.
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge Books | 2009
Fragmented lyric float bubbles: Day Poems. Step carefully.
“do the fish know they are not drowning but in dream photograph with dense knowing”
Takashi Hiraide, trans. Sawako Nakayasu | For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut | New Directions | 2008
111 prose poems (many in a commuter/subway context). I love living in its strange beautiful world. I couldn’t help but think of Yoshida Kenko’s “Essays in Idleness.”
“The soap that transforms in the hand of silence into a living thing. The railway where the claw marks of those approaching death lather fragrantly upon our skin”
Ruth S. Freed & Stanley A. Freed | Ghosts: Life and Death in North India | Anthropological Paper of The American Museum of Natural History | 1993
This anthropological study utilizes an unusual method for naming project informants, resulting in lines like:
“Curmudgeon, who, like all men in the village was much concerned about the perpetuation of the male line of descent, blamed the death of Little Boy on his levirate spouse, Scapegoat.”
Carlos Reygada, dir. | Stellet licht | Mantarraya Producciones | 2007
A big screen is a must for this one. I had the chance to see it at the NW Film Forum earlier this year. This film tells the story of a love-triangle in a secluded Mennonite community in Chihuahua, Mexico. The film is gorgeous to look at and it moves at a very very slow & quiet pace (watching a sunrise/sunset speed), but it builds and builds and storms. The lack of a musical soundtrack & great sound editing/effects (crunching snow, an unnerving ticking of a kitchen clock, etc.) add tension / agitation. Unforgettable ending. Dialogue in German and Spanish w/ English Subtitles.
Endless Boogie | Focus Level | No Quarter Records | 2008
I STILL can’t stop listening to these NYC 50-somethings as they punch me out with “Safe as Milk” era Captain Beefheart vocals (a low-key growllllllly mumble rather than annoying) riding atop an “endless boogie” of psychedelic blues jams. Tough, rough and raw. Fire up the grill. We are “Smoking Figs In The Yard.”
Joshua Beckman | Take It | Wave Books | 2009
Starts like this:
Dear Angry Mob,
Oak Wood Trail is closed to you. We
feel it unnecessary to defend our position,
for we have always thought of ourselves
(and rightly, I venture) as a haven for
those seeking a quiet and solitary
contemplation. We are truly sorry
for the inconvenience.
Signed,
Ranger Lil
Portable Shrines Shows | Seattle, WA | Various Locations (Funhouse/Comet Tavern)
Portable Shrines is a new “psychedelic music” collective that has just started putting on shows and experimental sound events in the Seattle Area. It’s a homegrown thing, sheets on the walls for projections, etc. (really enjoyed “Yoko Ono’s Fly flim during the Oko Yono set the other week—and Treetarantula and AFCGT were pretty good too). Anyway, haven’t been as excited about a Seattle scene since pre-Nevermind Nirvana. Can’t wait to see what happens next.
Aram Saroyan | Complete Minimal Poems | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2007
“typewriter kittens”
Kenneth Patchen | Hallelujah Anyway | New Directions | 1966
Maybe it’s the effect of living with a two-year-old, but I’m especially enjoying the curly words and crazy critters in these “picture poems.” A nice old edition. The kind that you can still find (sometimes) in U-District used bookshops.
A Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies: Primary Access to Observations of UFOs, Ghosts, and Other Mysterious Phenomena Compiled by George M. Eberhart | Greenwood Press | 1980
My selection for reference book of the year (1980). Organized by geographic regions of North America it documents over 22,000 separate events in 10,500 geographic locations with a Subject AND an Observer Index.
Erratic Starfish, 261
Moving lamp fixture, 611
Mystery balls of fiber, 34
Phantom cabin, 574
Pink squirrel, 839
Water forecasting rock, 498
Weeping mounted deer’s head, 497, 865
More CE Putnam here.
Attention Span 2009 – CA Conrad
Soma)tic Reading Enhancements
:an introductory note:
(Soma)tic Reading Enhancements are an extension of my (Soma)tic Poetics and exercises, in fact they’re actually not just an extension but are the poetics themselves, as the same praxis applies, for the origin of writing is locked with the origin of reading. As the writing of (Soma)tics is an engagement with the thing of things and the spirit of things, so is (Soma)tic Reading Enhancements.
The enhancements for each book were chosen intuitively, rather than randomly, a structure derived from initial sensations upon receiving a particular book. It is my wish as a poet to encourage the readers to not be passive, and to take credit for a poem’s absorption. After all, we each bring a unique set of experiences and circumstances to filter and digest poems, making them part of ourselves in our own way. Try these (Soma)tic Reading Enhancements, and maybe you will want to alter the enhancement as you read, or create a different one for yourself. Let’s encourage one another to have full participatory poetry reading! These books are some of my favorite books published in 2009, and the year is barely half over. I imagine poetry lovers a hundred years away looking back and saying 2009 was a great year for poetry!
To the muscle that bends language,
CAConrad
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Stacy Szymaszek | Hyperglossia | Litmus | 2009
Boil 4 tablespoons of whole cloves in a quart of water. Boil on high flame for 5 minutes. Shut flame off and let the infusion cool to a hot/warm drinkable temperature. Now, VIGOROUSLY brush your teeth and gums for a full five minutes. Brush, brush, brush hard, brush, YEAH, REALLY BRUSH tooth by tooth and GUMS, especially give the gums an intense, hard brushing. Now, sit down and take a mouthful of the clove infusion, but don’t swallow, just let it soak into the freshly brushed teeth and gums. Then SPIT IT INTO an empty pan or bucket. Start reading, feeling the clove treatment TINGLE and soothe, and move your lips deliberately, and tongue, whisper the poems, speak them, whisper. Take another mouthful of your clove infusion, AND THIS TIME VIGOROUSLY swish it in your mouth, between your teeth, and from cheek to cheek, really swish it around, then SPIT IT INTO your bucket. Whisper the next poem, then read it again with a louder voice. Stop midway, maybe at page 55, the poem ending, “hemorrhage / of / air / into everyone’s / sky ” and make some more clove infusion, but this time for a nice footbath. Scrub your feet VIGOROUSLY before dipping them into the hot clove infusion. Ah, now continue. Occasionally flip to the cover and say aloud “BETTY’S REVENGE!” which is the name of the painting on the cover! Are you FILLING with the sensations of poetry and clove infusion? “a threat designated me at birth / attuned to close-calls / and violent eruptions of selfhoods / built on faults / to treat with a homeopathic / sibilant whisper / sssss / achieve / a hatred sealant”
Nathaniel Siegel | Tony | Portable Press @ Yo Yo Labs | 2009
You need a can of whipped cream, as we’re working with the lower chakras. Put a plastic garbage bag under a chair and get naked. Don’t be shy, I’m not asking you to do this on stage, you’re alone, you’re safe, IT’S GREAT! Shake your whipped cream and squirt a good lather of it on the seat of your chair, and the back of the chair. Sit down gently, gently into the whipped cream seat. Did you ever sit on a lather of whipped cream before to read poetry? If not, an entire new file of memory will be created in your brain. Every once in awhile spray a little more whipped cream here and there, and move your limbs and back into it, READ ALOUD while doing so, and READ LOUD AS YOU CAN as a matter of fact. Midway through the book, somewhere near the stanza ending, “manager driving me home / putting music on / not getting he’s trying to tell me something” stand and feel the whipped cream like a luxurious and strange garment. If you’re adventurous, as I hope you are, try gently sticking the whipped cream nozzle into your asshole and inject the creamy dairy product up there. Go ahead, remember, no one’s looking. NOW sit back down. How is that? It’s really good, isn’t it? Admit it, it’s good, right? Whipped cream enema, something everyone would love if they gave it a shot. You’ll never forget this marvelous book, “be caught off guard in a pool hall a naked guy / hold my friend all night until she goes for her AIDS test / hold my friends hand 48 hours in a coma no sleep / a vision of her the sand: light lifting up a reflection a lake”
Frank Sherlock | Over Here | Factory School | 2009
Is there a shopping mall near you? I went to one in Philadelphia called The Gallery for this book. Shopping malls are filled with the strangest opportunities to engage poems anew. The elevator in this mall was clear glass, and I would get on, stand facing the mall below, and read. People would get on, and it would move up, then down, then be still for a little while as I read, “It is difficult to / provide anything / more than skeleton / for the peace / though this skin / is seeded w/ nerve / endings flinching / at the prospect / of touch” Have you ever hid in the middle of a round rack of pants for sale? The busy department store was perfect for hiding, reading, smelling the fresh cotton and polyester, possibly made by very tired hands, “The genocide / comics / are lullabies / a rest / from hearts / from fatigues” In the furniture department there are very comfortable chairs to read in, “The void is here the invisible distance that makes this aesthetic boom / Shatters dispersal of selves figure into a common finger tongue brain” Near the pet food you can always find poisons and traps for other animals, unwanted animals. Have prepared on a roll of tape such messages as STOP THE KILLING AND PET YOUR CAT, and such, then sit on a sparkling new bicycle for sale, and read, “I am a passenger sitting in a suspicious / way w/ a yearn for the new to be older / Strangers become friends even if they are sometimes objects / The white star is on the blue field / There is a black eagle on a red sea / Crates have brought w/ them the dead people & the letters / sent from loved ones when the dead people were alive” Buy some bubble gum and ride the escalator up, up, up, and down, and back around, reading, “So it is decided that / men who pose for pictures w/ guns have terrible taste / in eyewear Some faces reflect the light of others Every lake / tastes different & even at the end the land / remains a place to fall in love”
kathryn l. pringle | Right New Biology | Factory School | 2009
Do this on a hot, humid day, like I did, it’s an especially sublime experience on such a day. Wrap your naked body in maps, atlas pages, or even imaginary maps you draw yourself. Scotch tape your suit of PLACES the lines as highways, lines as borders, takes us by car, plane, solely imagined. THEN put your OTHER clothes on over your DIRECTIONS TO SUIT THE WORLD. Remember to bring drinking water, because if you pass out you’ll miss the best parts of the poems. Don’t pass out. Where do you want to go out there with your fellow citizens? They’re not noticing the bulk under your normal human clothes, don’t worry about it. On your way to your public location to read, if you shoplift, or commit other crimes, and they strip search you: MAPS! Let them find their own way. If you arrive at the location THIS book senses location(s), note she wrote with her own body at the start, “This book could not have been written without the influence of many Presidents of the United States of America and Sigmund Freud.” Are you sweating into your maps? Isn’t it divine? Your sweat permeating mountain chains FEED the Mississippi FEED the sea! What is over your heart? Go to a public restroom to open your shirt if you don’t remember. Reading this poet, rub that artery of highways while reading to send along what you read, “a gift is the city and the setting of work / a gift of the foreherein Organism old also / these phantasms spin / around, they drive / absurd universes” Take the directions when they come INHALE she writes “INHALES / mind is two lines, or stands / a singing oracle / a swinging oracle, able sung” We’re the book, we are. It’s amazing.
Akilah Oliver | A Toast in the House of Friends | Coffee House | 2009
Maybe it was the trees on the cover, or the NEED for something MOVING around me, but I took this book out to the protected wildlife parks around Philadelphia and found a secluded stream, first for my feet, then…. Bring a battery-powered radio, turn it to a talk radio station, but put it far enough away from you that you can hear it, but can’t make out what it is they’re saying. Faint, keep it faint, go and adjust it if you can understand them, as we want the voices to be clearly voices, but the words unattainable with our senses. Get your feet in the moving water and start reading, “language is leaving me: ahhhhh—this victimization shit / is not stable and the victors: / when are we going to safari / we: [astounded exclamation] / nancy reagan out of my head” This is a book, and it feels like it is written right into your skin when you read it. I found an old scuba mask, and if you have one, please wear it and rest your head in the stream, submerging your ears at least for the reading of one poem, “well the point is, things were calm down / here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i / want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am / so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to / hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home. give me a chance to say / welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat. what do you wear / out there?” That was the one I read underwater, under running water. This book needs time to be alone between poems. How is the water? How is today for you, reading Akilah’s poems? “i’d like all the stone butches to wave their hands in the air right now, wave em / like they just don’t care / (it seems to be unfortunate but true; corporate spell check does not recognize you / we are all too young to remember this”
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009
Make A LOT of ice cubes in your freezer the night before. Make an ice sling, it’s very easy: use 2 plastic bags from the grocery store, fill them with ice, put these in a towel, tie the towel around your neck, but make certain that the ice is near your face at all times. Naked is best, of course. So get naked. Put your feet in a bucket of hot water and crushed garlic (4 or 5 cloves). Be ready to add more hot water and ice as you read, “I like the letters of the alphabet that slide downhill / somehow we all expected to become exasperated little gods” WHOA, this book gets you gets you gets you! WHY THE ICE YOU ASK? Why ask?, it’s ice, it’s poetry, it’s all good, no one’s getting hurt, right? Can you TASTE the garlic through your bare feet? It’s nice, it’s like eating through your feet while reading, right? What weird and lovely creatures we are! Rest your chin on the ice, SMELL the ice, inhale the cool air. It’s summer while I’m doing this, now, and lovely, the poems make me happy, “if I’m going to have to bite heads off they / damn well better taste good / it occurs to me” I mean REALLY, can you TASTE IT, “the bad guys were there in their bad guy uniforms / our bus driver was wearing a fake bad guy uniform / so he could go inside to get us food and cigarettes / [commercial break] / back at the mansion water sprinklers / water the lawn in the pouring rain” From time to time it’s good to read, then close your eyes and take a DEEP BREATH of the ice, a big ice sniff. Touch your tongue to them, hold one in your bared teeth through the reading of one poem, then SPIT it back into your ice sling and read the poem aloud, have you ever felt such things while reading? It’s beautiful to feel.
Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey | 2009
There really are patches of grass in Philadelphia where the yuppie pure bred dogs have NOT made their pure bred toilets. That’s where I went for this book, that patch I know of, a DELICIOUS patch of dirt, weeds, bugs, pebbles and bits of glass and metal, plastic bag tumble weeds. Wherever you are, whatever climate, whatever the earth, be in it for this book. I buried my bare feet after digging a hole with a sharp stone. It’s good to have water out there. It is very hot and humid in Philadelphia in August, and I LOVE hot and humid weather, LOVE to FEEL the air, and pour the water into my face while reading. “And I do think it’s true that men stole / the magical instruments of women / & we were too busy / with ordinary life / to worry about this” If eating dirt is too much for you then smell it at least, SMELL the grass. The grass sweats chlorophyll, or I’m smelling myself in the grass, but it’s kind of nice. But I ate a little of the dirt with some water, AH, gritty and weird while reading, “I might literally shut down / like a bug little legs / curled in the air” Feel OK about stopping midway to dig around, digest the poems and dirt, dig around, digest, dig into the earth and make little dirt castles for whoever is small enough to move in. There were enough beer can tabs for me to make a little table with four chairs. Remember this book with the earth covering your feet, “The ‘perfect red king’ / is a man becoming a woman / and bleeding every month / ‘Fixed with a triple nail’ / This is hard work / becoming a woman” and you will believe everything in here with the best parts of you working for it.
Jenn McCreary | : AB OVO : | Dusie | 2009
Bring all of this: bread, nuts, seeds, honey, water with lemon and orange slices. Take a chair some place in your house or apartment where you NEVER sit, some place you would never even CONSIDER sitting. Like in a hallway, in a corner facing the corner, in the bathroom, or UP on a table, let’s do it! This enhancement, and this book, contain a variety of different pregnancies. So sit in a place you would NEVER sit, sit there with your plate of food, and water, make something new of the body you’ve known your home to be. Eat some of the food, drink some of the water, slowly, chew a long, long time. This is about being the poems of this book now, “…what the gardens can / do is import the world outside. when borders / are undefined, lines may be lost or may cease / to be. the ground beneath your feet becomes / or does not.” Let’s let it become beneath our feet. Where you are, put a plant there after you’re finished reading the book. A new plant, a small, young plant. Not a lot of light? A philodendron for low light then. “the walls of this room have become the world / all around.” This book, the plant, the reading, it’s all going to SHIFT you, unless you’re unmovable, but I bet you can be jarred as only good poems can jar. “It’s almost like the ocean. it’s nothing / like the ocean. in that space / where no one else / is. it’s such a long way / down. & strange. / my ears revolve for wolves. I find my footing / & walk across the air / to where you are.”
Joseph Massey | Areas of Fog | Shearsman | 2009
These poems for me came from lower chakras, they’re so marvelously spare they need our flanks to shake the storage of memory files loose. Take a string, not a sewing thread, something a little thicker and more durable, and something which is made of fiber, not plastic. Make certain the string is long enough to reach into your pants, around your crotch and ass, and out the back. You should have a good 12 inches of string hanging out the front of your pants, and the exact same amount hanging out the back of your pants. Make sure you lubricate the string that’s against your skin, and be generous in lubricating it, we don’t want to get rope burns from reading Joe’s book, we want it beautiful instead. NO ONE is going to notice the string, so don’t worry, and even if they do, they’re busy, and won’t let it stay in their minds for more than a minute. Go out into your town or city, or wherever you live where there are people. Test the string before leaving, pull it from the front, then pull it from the back. How is that? Is it nice? Of course it is, it’s perfect for poems! Find a place to lean and read, “There are seasons here / if you squint. And there’s / relief in the landscape’s / sloughed off cusps of color / fallen over the familiar / landmarks, the familiar / trash–things that last.” There’s something beautiful about being with these quiet poems jarring our insides, while in public. Now pull your string, then reach to the other side and pull your string again, and read, “dusk dims / between leaves / on the tree / whose name / I refuse to find.” I put the string RIGHT IN my ass crack, which made me totally aware of my surroundings, “Enough to make / the foliage / flinch, / wind slits. / Music sifts / out of a house.” Music not just coming out of things around us, but from these poems as well, “how the light / makes do. / A thrust of / things– / a world– / words– / crush / against / the margin of you.”
Erica Kaufman | Censory Impulse | Factory School | 2009
Go to the middle of an overpass and stare down at the traffic without blinking for as long as you can. As soon as you blink open the book. Let the traffic and road below frame the book as you read. Open yourself to FEELING urges to spout off words, lines, entire poems as loud as you want whenever you want. You’re reading poetry, you have the world’s permission to feel URGES and FEEL urges. Smells, sounds, even taste’s sensations come up with the cars. The filth of exhaust, do you get it? Stop from time to time, to close your eyes and hum a hummmmming all your own, lifting to high hummmm, low hummm, hummmmmm your hum. It’s getting into you out here, the poems, the pulsing travel of words and cars? “this is a vocabulary of possession / this is why i won’t meet you / in the road a curb under an insect / shaped fountain i bring / a trampoline to the park / offer up a bench / say my blood is somewhere / it’s not important / like distance the how long / of intimate the panic / that shuts any mind down / conquer the hill feel it / please use these anecdotes / as an introduction”
Rob Halpern | Disaster Suites | Palm | 2009
Does it storm where you live? If it doesn’t, try sitting in the shower under an umbrella with a VERY LOUD recording of a thunderstorm playing. In Philadelphia we have the real thing, and I checked the weather reports for the PERFECT SUMMER STORM. Ah, and did I find it! Suites they are, and reading them in the middle of a torrential downpour with frightening lightning and thunder made the music OMNIPRESENT like few experiences of reading have done for me. Sit in an outdoor shelter. I chose the steps of a pre-revolutionary war building near Benjamin Franklin’s house. Bring a recording of a thunderstorm. If you have an MP3 player, ONLY have it playing in one ear. If you have an old fashioned tape recorder like I used, place it so one ear will absorb the bulk of the crackling. At times, when reading, it was as if the storm was answering the recorded storm, “Everyone out there listening knows / My body feels so way off the ground / As all the big stores go reaching for me” And sit a cup JUST OUTSIDE your shelter, let the cup absorb the storm’s water. I brought a metal cup, and set it FAR away from me, hoping to catch more than water. But it only caught water, a delicious cup of storm water. Drink and read, “Of being being sucked absorbed into ever vaster / Networks where history’s still being taped and re / -ality tested oh y’re just suffering the old imperial / Nostalgia he said but the neo-con retards fucked- / Up my spin without me and I guess I don’t know / How to criticize democracy value or to just say no!” And place a slice of bread in the storm to absorb the nitrogen from the lightning, and of course the delicious water; eat, and let them become your body, “Now let’s recount ourselves in terms of crisis dynamics / Depict the ends of state where history and the seas / Choose me since I see you there my dreamy fuck.”
David Buuck | The Shunt | Palm | 2009
Take your laundry to the laundromat, even if you’re fortunate enough to have these machines at home. This is about reading poems while feeling machines in public. Set washer to the longest possible cycle. Sit on it, or have a chair beside it so you can lean into it, press into it. Stare at the book’s cover and stare at it even when you think you’re tired of staring at it, as it’s possible you’re trying to trick yourself into thinking you’re tired when you’re actually disturbed. Imagine those bloody arms and hands belong to someone you love more than anyone else in this world. What’s this person’s name? Say their name out loud while looking at the book cover. Be disturbed, you deserve it. We all deserve it. This is a cover to refer to while reading. PRESS a cheek into the washing machine, then pause while reading to open the lid, and place a hand inside the soapy water. Just keep it there for a few minutes while reading. Reading, your hand in filthy water trying to get clean. Midway through the book, pause to go outside and STRETCH your body, give a good stretch and yawn if you can yawn, this would be around page 54 with the stanzas, “We will be naming / the dead and injured / and reading anti-war / poetry. Email but put / “Anti-War Poetry / Book” in the subject / line to make sure / you’re not deleted.” The dryer, sit in front of it if it’s got a round glass window, sit as close as you can. While reading have the rolling heated clothes with the water sucking from their fibers be the image that frames the book. At some point OPEN THE DRYER and stick your head inside with your eyes closed and FEEL the intense heat and humidity, then close it and go back to reading. You would be surprised that no one really notices you, in case you worry about such things. Everyone’s busy, they don’t even care to know that you’re in the middle of experimenting with your reading. If you feel comfortable enough, invite someone in the laundromat to listen to you read from the book for them, “I think there / are theres here / in my devices / the rigorous buffoonery / the fleshy statistics / the secret minutes / the cathected works.”
Julian Brolaski | Buck in a Corridor | flynpyntar | 2009
Button mushrooms are what I bring to this. Any mushroom you want, but button mushrooms are the only mushrooms I enjoy raw. ENJOYMENT is essential! Please do not wash them, they absorb water. Brush them off with a clean, dry towel, that’s all. Go out into the fresh air and sun. Take these fungus which have grown in quiet darkness, bring them OUT into the lit world with you. Find a place to relax. Lie flat on your back, place a mushroom on crotch of your pants or dress or whatever. If you’re naked, GREAT, but be clean, as you have to eat these morsels. Spend a little time with your eyes closed, meditating on your genitals, on the mushroom on your genitals. Then move that mushroom up to your breast for the heart chakra point. Put a new one on your genitals. Rest and meditate again. Then move the first one to middle of your forehead, the second one to your heart, and yet a third one on your genitals again. Now start reading, but be aware that you are MOVING through the mushrooms a channel of energy UP from your genitals to your mind. Read, “to act in opposition to one’s genitals / turn your cock inside out and get a cunt like a prius / vs. take some cuntflesh and get a cock like the wright flyer I / @ kitty hawk / with adverse yaw / wingwarped / circumnavigated / how to fashion / a canard” After reading a little while, pause and take the mushroom off your forehead. Pull the stem off and eat it. Run your thumbs along the feathery gills on the underside of the cap. Press it inside out a bit. Cuntflesh into Cock, back again, back again, then EAT IT! It’s delicious, right? Move the mushrooms UP, from heart to forehead, etc., with a new one on genitals. Read, “going around adding –ess to nouns / “lion-ess” / “poet-ess” / that’s such a load / so that the daffydill yawns back / the one who taught me grk is dead / you want to put them in your lap” Pause and study the mushroom from your forehead, EAT IT, move them up, and keep reading until the delicious book is finished, the delicious mushrooms are finished, “we’ve all crossed thresholds we don’t brag about / iphigenia oxling / when arbolaf dies / one is hailed to arden / as one goes hitherto / asphyxiating along the gowanus / in spite of that rat light / in the gutted yardland / or where jackadaws coo / in concrete galoshes”
Anselm Berrigan | To Hell with Sleep | Letter Machine Editions | 2009
GET IN THE DARK. Bring a flashlight into a closet and take pillows and shirts and socks and panties and whatever the fuck you can find to CLOSE all the cracks of light from getting IN there. And put a fan in there, and bring water, and put the fan on low. THIS is now the atmosphere for THIS. It’s a good time to praise with utmost gratitude SIGHT! Is anyone going to be looking for you? Make sure you plan on telling everyone you’re going out, to a movie, somewhere, BUT to really have THIS as THIS atmosphere, having it as all your own, don’t tell anyone where you are. It’s none of their business how you absorb poems. These line breaks are more like line cuts, cutting across the page, a good thing the flashlight can trace. Do you have binoculars, do you? I tried this and it was marvelous: so put the book on the other side of the closet, which I did by suspending it with clothes hangers. Then flash the light on the book while reading the page through the binoculars, it’s great. It’s kind of hard actually, which is great. Every once in awhile SHUT OFF the light and sit there in the pool of pitch black quiet. Then SUDDENLY flick the flashlight back on and read quickly for a little while to make the reading in your head THE SOUND that comes, the light, the reading. “I’m glad for waste, its / ascension, its emotional arc / into the prose of governance. / Dumb hostilities issue forth / from all the movements of yester- / morrow; am I liberal when it / comes to prostitution? No.” How is this for you, you know you like dark poetry reading, “At the used frame shop / the cruel chase a world. Dan / Marino from Nutrisystem / tells good carbs from bad.”
Eric Baus | Tuned Droves | Octopus | 2009
Be fully dressed for this one. Fill a tub with a nice hot bath, bubbles TOO, and a good amount of it. Climb in, shoes and all, shirt, pants, even a coat if you want. It’s nice to FEEL the warm water soak into the fabric, and fill the shoes, soak into the socks, then, then it hits the skin, ah, time for poetry. Make yourself pee before doing this by the way or your bladder will pressure you out of the tub, unless of course you just want to pee yourself in the tub, it’s your choice, don’t let me interfere. This book is perfect for a submerged body, but don’t get suds on it, or water, and don’t doze off and drown, I’m sure Eric Baus would feel terrible, and I would have to console him and tell him that it wasn’t his fault you’re so stupid to fall asleep with such a book in hand. In fact you deserve to drown if you fall asleep while reading it. But you’re not stupid, you’re OK, you’re fine, but midway through reading the book STAND UP SUDDENLY, maybe just before “THE CONTINUOUS CORNER” section. Enjoy the water falling out of your clothes, drip drip, it’s dripping off of you, you have a body made MOSTLY OF water, but when it’s outside you it drips off, unless of course you peed yourself in the tub, then it’s dripping out of you. Enjoying this marvelous book? “When the work was finished, there were no chapters. / The name of the child was It Is Not Here. / It is unlikely this is precise. / To reproduce his mother’s voice, hydrogen was added to the body. / For all this activity, the sound was flat.”
More CA Conrad here.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2010 – Brent Cunningham
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Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009
The title of Nichols’s book, to my ear, indicates a kind of linguistic density that actually the poems inside don’t much have—instead you get poems of such emotional authority and seriousness of purpose that immediately I was ready to go anywhere with them. There’s lightness and levity as well, lots, but it’s in the refreshing context of feeling like the poet really, deeply knows what she’s doing, I mean really. Even the formal moves, the spacing, leaving phrases off in space, composition by field and the like, has a kind of rightness and intentionality to it that I don’t often accept so unquestionly. This is the kind of book I take around with me to remind me how to write as well as how to read. What else can I say? I know it came out last year and was mentioned often then, but I just love this book
Aaron Kunin | The Sore Throat & Other Poems | Fence | 2010
A lot of writers are influnced by philosophy, but Kunin is one of very few living poet I know where I feel like I’m reading someone with truly philosophical sensibilities and skills, i.e. who really lives in a Kantian or maybe in this case more a Spinozian reality. What his work shows, I think, is in part how much feeling there is in thinking, and also how much pleasure there is in the artistic distanciation of self-conciousness
Khaled Mattawa | Tocqueville | New Issues Poetry & Prose | 2010
I’m not entirely persuaded by all the elements of Mattawa’s work, but I like to mention him since I think he’s completely worthwhile yet almost completely off the radar of most self-identified experimental writers. This makes sense if you read his early, more conventional and overly-wringing writing, or if you look at those who blurb his books, etc., but this book is serious and thoughtful about its politics, courageous in its formal experimentation, and fervent in its contempt for false emotion. If you read one book blurbed by Yusef Komunyakaa this year, it should be this one, etc.
Brenda Iijima, ed. | eco language reader | Nightboat | 2010
To the properly sceptical this book probably won’t, and probably shouldn’t, prove there’s a new movement or even a new sensibility afoot, but whatever Iijima’s anthology is or isn’t claiming in those terms it is certainly very well edited, filled with a great group of contributors, and embarrasingly rich with new ideas and new passions.
Laura Moriarty | A Tonalist | Nightboat | 2010
I should perhaps recuse myself here since I’m one of Laura’s “A Tonalists,” but whether the pseudo-movement/anti-movement/non-movement of the title has any reality or not, Moriarty has used the idea of groups and groupings to make a fierce, delicate, layered text that stands as a work, and an art, of its own.
Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | 2009
Rothschild has, basically, a classical sensibility (where “classical” is considered as running the gamut from the unadornedness of certain ancient greek writers to the unadornedness of Ted Berrigan), which is then shot through with a whole lot of eccentric, baroque intelligence. I may have been a little less taken with the long middle section about NYC than some: it’s what seem to be framed as the more “minor” poems that really have stayed with me. And in a way that makes perfect sense because the significance of the minor is what Rothschild himself is so productively interested in.
Tan Lin | Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) | Zasterle | 2009
There’s something fascinating about limit cases, and Lin has been exploring those frontiers for a few books now, but this is the first time I really & completely got it. I like to carry around what I’ll call Heath (the title is a subject of debate by the way) just to show aspiring conceptualists how tepid and obvious their plans often are, by comparison. Really I can’t think of another book that seems to have gone farther off the grid of our presumptions about “the book” and “poetry” than this pleasantly transgressive text. It’s a further mystery that it remains, inexplicably, rather readable (with the right kind of approach). Everything in it—images, computer code, emails, texts—have the feeling of being placed, not overly systematically, but such that they beg for your own thinking to complete them.
Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, Kyle Schlesinger, eds. | ON: Contemporary Practice, Issue #2 | Cuneiform | 2010
Some will say the structure of this magazine, where poets talk about the work of poets, will only add to the feeling that experimental poetry is a small coterie with a secret knock to get in. Others, including me, find ON to be just what was lacking, and will find it far less about in-group backslapping than one might presume (very much like the Attention Span project, which has a lot in common with ON). Coterie is a sword of the two-edged variety, and ON is a much needed venue for poets to not only talk about works by their contemporaries but to fashion a renewed sense of basic, shared critical values.
Yedda Morrison | Girl Scout Nation | Displaced Press | 2008
This is the oldest book on my list but I only just got to read it. I had the pleasure of hearing a lot of the poems in this book for a few years at various readings, but the effect of reading them all together is fierce and splendid and at an entirely other level. Anger and love seem to be Morrison’s twin obsessions here and in other works—the love that both lies and lies in every anger, maybe. These concerns dovetail into her starkly eco/feminist/activist/understandably-pissed-off approach in ways that I find enviously original. She’s doing some great work and to me this book is both sweeping and, despite or because of the intensity, suprisingly personal.
Tyrone Williams | The Hero Project of the Century | The Backwaters Press | 2010
Unlike a decade ago Williams is not a secret anymore, but he’s still one of those poets I always read no matter what. I’d say I liked this book just a sliver less than On Spec, but it’s still terrific. Compared to On Spec it’s driven a bit more by content than form, but regardless TW is always, to me, most compelling in the way he works with linguistic density, counterpunctuating it with sudden moments of simple anger and direct content. I never thought enjambed aesthetic complexity could come across as so persuasive and natural, but it is here.
More Brent Cunningham here. Back to directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 17, 2010 at 10:53 am
Posted in Attention Span 2010, Commented List
Tagged with Aaron Kunin, Brenda Iijima, Brent Cunningham, Douglas Rothschild, Khaled Mattawa, Kyle Schlesinger, Laura Moriarty, Mel Nichols, Michael Cross, Tan Lin, Thom Donovan, Tyrone Williams, Yedda Morrison