Attention Span 2009 – Michael Gizzi

Keith Waldrop | Transcendental Studies | California | 2009

Brian Evenson | Fugue State | Coffee House | 2009

Brian Evenson | Last Gasp

Robin Kelley | Thelonious Monk | Free Press | 2009

Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009

Lisa Jarnot | Night Scenes | 2008

Kit Robinson | Train I Ride | Bookthug | 2009

Robert Pogue Harrison | Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition | Chicago | 2008

William Carlos Williams | White Mule

Richard Holmes | The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science | HarperPress | 2008

More Michael Gizzi here.

Attention Span 2009 – Kit Robinson

Clarice Lispector | The Stream of Life | University of Minnesota | 1989

Benjamin Moser | Why This Life: A Biography of Clarice Lispector | Oxford University| 2009

Carla Harryman | Adorno’s Noise| Essay | 2008

Anne Tardos | I Am You| Salt| 2008

Lyn Hejinian | Saga/Circus | Omnidawn | 2008

Rodney Koeneke | Rules for Drinking Forties | Cy Press | 2009

Michael Gizzi | New Depths of Deadpan| Burning Deck | 2009

Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer | The Cave| Adventures in Poetry | 2009

Andrew Joron | The Sound Mirror | Flood Editions | 2008

Lewis Warsh | Inseparable: Poems, 1995-2005 | Granary Books | 2008

David F. Garcia | Arsenio Rodriguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music | Temple University | 2006

More Kit Robinson here.

Attention Span 2009 – Rodney Koeneke

Kit Robinson | The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems 1976-2003 | Adventures in Poetry | 2009

“When I was a musician’s musician / I used to be a poet’s poet / then a black box” is the story of American poetry, postwar to next war to the one after that, rendered to clean Dolchese. ‘76 daps 2003: “Hey, poetry lovers! / It’s good to see you / here on the page.”

Julian T. Brolaski | A Buck in a Corridor | flynpyntar press | 2008

Saunter Gowanus with enough English in your pocket and it curls to its Middle like this, a new-gender’d Cockaigne “wher no bivalves gurgle at our kushing.”

Norma Cole | Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 | City Lights | 2009

City Lights brought back to life via “the whole story of the light” set to music of “enormous rotating blades.” Poetry as algebra proving the theorem “that dictionary may be a companion to art but life/is the most sentimental thing there is.”

David Larsen | Names of the Lion | Atticus/Finch | 2009

Truth in advertising: all 500 hundred of Ibn Khalawayh’s names for the lion (“Whose Complaint Sets Others Moving,” “Whose Coat is the Color of Papyrus,” “He Who Looks for Trouble in the Night”) shined and seductively annotated “in the procedural spirit of recent avant-garde tradition.” “If Names of the Lion reads like an elegiac text, it is because we of the twenty-first century mourn the lion’s lost mastery over the earth.”

Barbara Guest | The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest | Wesleyan | 2008

Jupiter no longer so invisibly pulling so many of ‘09’s moons.

Douglas Oliver | Whisper ‘Louise’ | Reality Street | 2005

Louise Michel, “Red Virgin” of the Paris Commune, turned Revolution into paper-mâché and held sick horses in the street. Oliver makes her contradictions a piñata for his own life to fit into, the better to study the candy of our shared political dreams.

Stephanie Young | Picture Palace | ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni | 2008

Memoir goes to the movies and comes back as Parker Posey in a script by Yvonne Rainer. “That we could come of age inside another person’s coming of age story, or come to political consciousness inside another person’s coming to political consciousness story, haven’t people been doing that forever?”

Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009

Say it forty times fast and watch “little ships / of sensitive data” leave magic dimes behind everyone’s seats.

Michael Gizzi | New Depths of Deadpan | Burning Deck | 2009

Gizzi’s the Moses of tablets turned to sound, then dropped from the cliffs to hit ‘C’. This new Sinai’s pure Barbasol, all wobble and aloe and swing. When “blessings descend but no one knows how to redeem them,” then “grammar cracks eggs as best it can.”

Brandon Downing | bdown68’s Channel | YouTube | 2009

Disjunction soaked in the world’s B-movies and pulled out as syntax again. Jung never looked so harajuku, subtitles so lyrically green.

David Brazil & Sara Larsen, eds. | Try! Magazine | self-published | 2008-2009

Periplum to a party that would never have Pound as a member. Proof positive that toner and staples can make a Bay Area anywhere.

More Rodney Koeneke here.

Attention Span 2009 – Suzanne Stein

Anne Tardos | I am you | Salt | 2008

“Let go of the idea that we’re not sitting on the Beach of the Future. We are.”

Steve Benson | Open Clothes | Atelos | 2005

What would it have been to have been myself and to have already have known this?

Michael Gizzi | New Depths of Deadpan | Burning Deck | 2009

Jérôme Bel | Pichet Klunchun and Myself  | YBCA and Dancers Group present: Bay Area debut — One show only! Tue, Mar 3 | Novellus Theater

“French conceptual choreographer Jérôme Bel restages his first encounter with Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun, a master of the classical khon form.” The two sit on chairs on a bare stage, Bel with white MacBook on his lap, Klunchun with nothing. They re-enact. I was drunk with a great seat and a good friend. The curiousness of watching dancers’ bodies attuned for several hours to the performance of redelivering a story of speech, mainly by speaking, was compelling, and speech itself carried movement & physicality of a very other kind than I am used to witnessing in poetry.  I wondered how choreographed the chairs were. What was additionally revealed by the—brief and very occasional—demonstrations of practice was quite moving.

William H. “Holly” Whyte | The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces  | Project for Public Spaces | 1980

David Brazil and Sara Larsen, eds. | TRY! | Every two weeks, ALL YEAR LONG

Michael Anderson | Prate City | working notes of february | 1993
Michael Anderson | Vrille | State One | 1984

These two count as one, partly because I can’t remember which thrilled me more. Please someone tell me what ever happened to Michael Anderson. Many, many thanks to Steve Farmer for the gift of these.

Kit Robinson | A Day Off |  State One | 1985

When I read this book, I feel the same texture of pleasure I experience leaving my workplace early on a pretty day midweek, and going to meet a friend or lie down by the lake, just because I want to; or when I lie down in my cubicle, just because I want to. Also a gift from Steve Farmer.

Michael Scharf | For Kid Rock, Total Freedom | Spectacular Books | 2007

Read this at the end of August 08, at the nude hippie NoCal paradise/freakshow, Harbin Hotsprings, during the first two days—literally, actually—I’d had off in over nine months. This was exactly the return to reading my exhausted, disheveled, alienated little heart needed. Brilliant. I’m going to read it again this August.

Agnes Varda | Le Bonheur | France | 1965

Colorful animals.

More Suzanne Stein here.