Attention Span 2011 | Michael Scharf

Bernadette Mayer | Studying Hunger Journals | Station Hill | 2011

Brian Kim Stefans | Bank of America Online Banking: A Critical Evaluation | Citoyen | 2010

Douglas Piccinnini | Crystal Hard-On | Minute | 2010

Douglas Piccinnini | Soft | The Cultural Society | 2010

 Josef Kaplan | Peace | Poem Trees + Squash | 2010

 Julian T. Brolaski | Gowanus atropolis | Ugly Duckling | 2011

 Lawrence Giffin | Sorties | Tea Party Republicans | 2011

 Susan Howe | That This | New Directions | 2011

 Tsering Wangmo Dhompa | My rice tastes like the lake | Apogee | 2011

 Uyen Hua | a\s\l | ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni | 2011

 Vahni Capildeo | Undraining Sea | Eggbox | 2009

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Michael Scharf is the author of For Kid Rock/Total Freedom. His collection of critical work, The Res Poetica, is forthcoming. He lives in New York, where he works in natural language processing, and in Shillong.

Scharf’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Josef Kaplan

Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2008

They said they would never put any photos of cats in Artforum.

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

Re-read this after the post-’08 election euphoria (and my money) had been plowed into corporate handouts. Scharf refracts the claustrophobic political atmosphere of 2002/2003 through an equally stringent pyramid of de rigueur poetics to show that “total freedom” is, of course, totally not. The book’s appulsion of liberal aesthetics and furtive atrocity reads both cogent and anxiously sympathetic, a “bourgeois panic” that is mordant, lucid, the relentlessness of its critique entirely correct.

Gordon Faylor | 5 6 | Self-Published | 2009

The Mechanical Turk meets Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.

Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter, eds. | Issue 1 | For Godot | 2008

The fall of the house of usher.

Roberto Bolaño | 2666 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2008

It’s nice how this post-modern novel is almost totally unconcerned with the meta, how it instead just ruthlessly tails the fractal, internal details that spin off from stuff like… ordering a coffee, or a city’s (sub)conscious conspiracy to murder every woman living in it. The Baudelaire epigraph: “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom”; Sonora stretching out its infinite ends.

Anne Boyer | odali$qued | Blogspot | ongoing

Poetry’s Battlestar Galactica: humans create little machines which create other little machines and they all blow each other to pieces, over and over again. Also a response, doing Kafka one better by cutting out the Max Brod-style middleman. An anti-bureaucratic literature that inverts and immolates against pretty much every authoritarian context in sight.

Tan Lin | HEATH (PLAGIARISM/OUTSOURCE) | Zasterle | 2009

Poetry’s The Blob. Less a “book” than an open source platform for critical reimagining. Strikingly handsome for being that, too—like the titular man himself? Or the shrub?

Rachel Loden | Dick of the Dead | Ahsahta Press | 2009

“This machine” / you know / “kills hypocrites”

Marie Buck | Life & Style | Patrick Lovelace Editions | 2009

“People! Cool personalities!” These burrowings into consumerism, vanity, gender cultures, celebritydom (both literary and pop-culture-y), social networking, social damage, flagellism and futurity are often as gentle as they are disturbing. Not a small feat. The absence of irony doesn’t come off as pedantic, but instead gives everything a tragic, keen(ing) sheen.

Brad Flis | Peasants | Patrick Lovelace Editions | 2009

The Lottery-esque scratch-and-win cover reveals a severed head, which is kind of how the whole book works. Also worth noting that the severed head looks like a combination CNN image capture/Chuck Close portrait, which, again, is kind of how the whole book works.

David Lau | Virgil and the Mountain Cat | University of California Press | 2009

Stately state mash-ups. Lau redistributes allusion across a field of junked discourses, declares a new decadence based in the reification of history. The tone of this book is just so oddly, wonderfully grandiloquent, like wigs worn to the King’s beheading: “a domed frieze phrased in freedom, / extra moiety signum // as time’s / dipterous nonextension / deemphasized dispatches to come– // incurable, its miserable son.”

More about Josef Kaplan 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.

Attention Span 2009 – Michael Scharf

Ange Mlinko | assorted reviews in The Nation

Best Seidel takedown ever.  Better than the Possum Pouch essay claiming Seidel for Flarf.

Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | subpress | 2009

Truer than Williams or Olson. Half a Hesiodic Janus-face (with Luoma’s Works & Days). The great book of turn-of-the-century New York.

Jane Dark’s sugarhigh! | October 1, 2008 thru June 13, 2009 | janedark.com

Joshua Clover | poems read on May 13, 2008 at Princeton

Compiled the above set of entries into a PDF (minus a few things), resulting in le livre de la crise, a book of exquisite exposition. The poems, some written before Fall 2008, promise definitiveness of a different order.

Jeet Thayil, ed. | The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets | Bloodaxe | 2008

Great love and side-taking. Can sense many poems behind the choices even if I can’t see them, and can also catch sight of the social formations behind them (in a way that I haven’t for 20th C. Canada, Britain, Australia and related diasporim). Not the place to read Kolatkar and others for the first time, but for me the place, transformatively, to read Gopal Honnalgere for the first time.

John Ashbery | Collected Poems 1956-1987 | Library of America | 2008

The 12 poems of Rivers and Mountains take on a momentous scale and aspect, with “Clepsydra” and “The Skaters” as oeuvre prisms: light enters them in spectra, and leaves in lines (of what is to come). Double Dream as the best book of Fall 2008 (“Soonest Mended”; “Decoy”; “Definition of Blue”).

Jordan Davis | Reading at the Zinc Bar with George Stanley and Chris Nealon | May 15, 2009

This seemed to take place in bullet time.

Josef Kaplan | Our Heavies | chapbook | 2009

T-Pain presents The 1990s, a bildungsroman.

Juliana Spahr | “The Incinerator” | Lana Turner | 2008

Total destruction of the pathetic fallacy.

Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni | 2008

She stands, at 5′ 1”, like Donatello’s David, hand on cocked hip, sword resting at waist, hat pulled low. Seconds until the voice comes in, on, over. Each death and loss adds to its saturate. It sings through (“spell it ‘galaxie'”) life, this unbearably beautiful book its form. Icon incarnations as multiply era-synechdochic; metamorphoses as mirror; close encounters as abrasions, as identifications, interstices, and interpellations (“the magnificent instability of the sign”). Attack, Sustain, Decay, Release.

Kunwar Narayan, trans. from Hindi by Apurva Narayan | No Other World: Selected Poems | Rupa | 2008

Xi Chuan, trans. from Mandarin by Arthur Sze | “On Wang Ximeng’s Blue and Green Horizontal Landscape Scroll, A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains” | Boston Review 34.3 | May-June 2009

Hans Varghese Mathews | “Words and Picturables: Image and Perlocution in English Verse” | Phalanx 3 | http://www.phalanx.in

The Almost Island conference in Delhi this past February (curated by Bei Dao, Sharmistha Mohanty, and Vivek Narayanan) brought together poets from China and India for a multi-day set of dialogues, visits, and retreats. (Gist: movement, led by Ashis Nandy, toward some meanings for India and China as “civilizations,” in senses that avoided much that is either discursively co-opted or out-of-bounds.) Kunwar Narayan and Xi Chuan read together the first night. I’ve lent away my copies of No Other World, but Narayan is considered to be, and felt like, a Stevens-caliber figure, a poet whose subtlety matches the stakes of the Hindutva era. Xi Chuan, part of the circle of poets associated with Bei Dao’s journal Jintian (founded in 1978), read a selection of poems that included “Wang Ximeng”; the poem seemed a reply to “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” with society as self. I agreed with Hans Mathews, one of the respondents, that it seemed to destroy the framing of the event; Mathews’s own essay contains a phenomenal phenomenology of the poetic image.

Roberto Calasso | The Forty-Nine Steps | Minnesota | 2001

Brilliant on Nietzsche. Devastating on Brecht (while preserving the poems). Stirner, Schreber, Wedekind all also here, and Benjamin. The best possible antidote for George Steiner. Calasso’s Ka also a great restorative following unreadable translations of the Mahabharata.

More Michael Scharf here.

Featured Title – The Age of Briggs & Stratton by Peter Culley

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton | New Star | 2008 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 3 mentions in Attention Span 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. (Benjamin Friedlander)

A poem or series of poems that here, in its second “installment”—the mind behind the writing is too restless and indefatigable and curious for the word—seems suddenly and absolutely capable of most defiantly rippling out through the various juggernauts of the twentieth century’s collapse and into the present to encompass the brute history and giddy trials of a whole finicky continent, and beyond. Culley explores recent (and not-so) American history with the tamp’d down precision of Lorine Niedecker, the rumpled reach of Charles Olson. (John Latta)

Plowing on Sunday. Plowing North America. (Michael Scharf)

Featured Title – Selected Prose by George Oppen

George Oppen, ed. and introd. Stephen Cope | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2008 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 5 mentions in Attention Span 2008

“Lay it on the line—” (page 203). (Tom Devaney)

The pensive poet at his vanity (where beautiful poems were so often made up), appealingly deshabille. (Benjamin Friedlander)

“But taking as a whole the phase of the world’s history which we have reached, it has become a commonplace remark to say that we have crossed the threshold of the Apocalypse.” (Michael Scharf)

Also mentioned by John Palattella and G.C. Waldrep

Featured Title – Golden Age of Paraphernalia by Kevin Davies

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 7 mentions in Attention Span 2008

Sharp, witty, incisive—this book has a lot to keep me busy. The prosody (the driving issue for this reader) catches my eye because Davies has a lot of textured variation. The main thrust, so to speak, of the poet’s concerns is contemporary social commentary, and this commentary is rich and informed. But it’s the reoccurring pig image/references that hooked me! Since I’ve been out of the country for so long, Davies is a wonderful discovery. (Dawn Michelle Baude)

Lovers of late JA meanderings through pre-code detritus who look to counter other lovers’ complaints about cut & pasteability will find, here, that reading each section ‘in order’, or continuously across the breaks and gaps, makes the book lose part of its meaning. The obsessive superfineries of the arrangement, shorn against undoing, and the intricate intactness of “Lateral Argument” underscore the point perfectly: within a supersaturate, none of the pieces fit. The author also wishes to inform you that Stephane was wrong about the book/bombe; the blank page 68 is a comment on the French. (Michael Scharf)

O’Hara said that Whitman , Crane and Williams were the only American poets who were better than the movies, but today, in a world with Apocalypto and 3-D Imax Beowulf, only Kevin Davies is better than the movies. Maybe you’re in it for the giddy surprise of a turned phrase. Maybe you’re in it for the zonked formal apparatus (“floaters”?). Maybe you just want to drink a Corona and take pot shots at the government. Anyway you want it, that’s the way I need it. More than one Davies book a decade? Yes, please. (Stephen Zultanski)

The benefit of Edge being a little shambling in their publication schedule is that I have gotten to put some version of this book on the Attention Span list for eleven consecutive years. For all the magnificent of the parts (with Lateral Argument still magnificentest), the book is the thing: an overlapping structure which asks you ceaselessly to reevaluate the scale of parts and wholes, to read every passage as an ambiguous instance shifting within a structure within a circuit. In this sense it’s a triumph of thinking globalization/late capitalism/the lives within it, comparable only to the markedly different Kala, M.I.A.’s album which nonetheless takes up very much the same problem, about the representability of part and whole in the world-system. Or: it’s basically the soundtrack for Mike Davis’s World of Slums. In making a mystified situation experienceable —in this case the circuits of economy, terror, epidemic, and culture that form what we call globalization—it stands with any work of art this millennium. (Joshua Clover)

Also mentioned by Rod Smith, Dana Ward, and David Dowker.