Attention Span 2010 – Erín Moure

Chus Pato | Secesión | Galaxia | 2009

Pato’s “biography” in a kind of poetic prose, and long meditation on what it is to write poetry. A huge section of it in English translation appeared last year in Hayden’s Ferry Review, issue 44. Makes me think of my own life and what it is to make a mark on a page and call it poetry. (in Galician)

Judith Butler | Frames of War | Verso | 2009

Mostly books or exhibitions that have Americans agonizing over their own national excesses tire me out. Do something, people! This book I haven’t yet fully absorbed but Butler has trenchant analyses and in some ways goes through and further than Agamben’s bare life. The grief element and the question of whose lives are grievable is part of my own work these days too.

Mark Goldstein | Tracelanguage | BookThug | 2010
Myung Mi Kim | Penury | Omnidawn | 2009
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | U of California P | 2010

These are three books of poetry I have read and read and carried and examined in the past year and which make me glad for poetry.

Rachel Zolf | Neighbour Procedure | Coach House  | 2010

One of the most publicly important books of poetry of the year, in my view. There are spots where it uses forms in ways that seemed a bit easy (there were openings for more pressure) but overall a stunningly provocative and incisive book.

Shimon Redlich | Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919-1945 | Indiana  | 2002

A book that has been important for my own work in the last year, and to my trying to understand the tri-national or tri-ethnic culture that the 20^th century destroyed in the place where my mother was born.

Uljana Wolf | Falsche Freunde | KOOKbooks | 2009

Of course I can’t read German but the form and intent of the book are clear to me, its armature and the way it is executed, and I can tell the language is acute. I did translate a few of the pieces into English for a reading of Uljana’s, to read with her, and though my translations were also alterations of sense, they were based on sound and I was quite liking what her poetry was giving me. A young German poet to watch! (in German)

Jean-Luc Godard | Film Socialisme | POL | 2010

The film hasn’t come to Montreal yet but the text and photos awe and break me. “Et ça existe la volonté des peuples.” Analyzes without analysis, just with movement in space and text: socialism is what makes us human in the face of all else. Seminal. (in French)

Chus Pato | Fascinio | Galaxia | 2010

This book first appeared in 1995, five years before Pato’s groundbreaking m-Talá, and is now reissued in the Dombate series (which combines seminal poetic works in Galician with new works). The surprising thing is that reading this book after m-Talá, after Charenton, and (for me as I read Galician), after Hordes of Writing (to appear in 2011 from Shearsman in English!), after Secession (translation in progress) – all groundbreaking and explosive books in their way –Fascinio reads anew, as if it were published today and actually comes after the books that it originally preceded. A peculiar example of time going backwards and poetry exceeding whatever grasp one first imagined for it. (in Galician)

Iannis Xenakis (drawings), Ivan Hewett, Carey Lovelace, Sharon Kanach, Mâkhi Xenakis (essays) | Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary (series Drawing Papers, number 88) | The Drawing Center, NY | 2010

Carrying this book around with me now after seeing and hearing the exhibition at the CCA in Montreal (it will also be at MOCA-LA from Nov 7 2010 – Jan 30 2011) and its use of space and laws of curvature and displacement in nature is blowing my mind. Oh poetry, I think! I went to the exhibit with Chus Pato, who already knows Xenakis’ work. Funny how someone from a small town in an obscure part of Spain can have a fabulous education and know of these things, whereas I stumble along…anyhow: talk about conceptual, procedural work, in two dimensions, in three, in four.

More Erín Moure here. Her Attention Span for 2008. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Elizabeth Robinson

Laura Sims | Stranger | Fence Books | 2009

This reflection on the early death of the author’s mother could have been bathetic, but instead it is quirky, perceptive and, while affectively convincing, strange.

Keith Waldrop | Transcendental Studies | University of California | 2009

A terrific, substantive collection.

Thomas A. Clark | of Woods and Water | Moschatel Press | 2008

Inheritor of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s mantle, Clark writes deceptively simple lyrics whose modulations creep up on the reader.

Eileen Myles | The Importance of Being Iceland | Semiotexte | 2009

This book of essays is really funny, but also astute, pointed, full of characteristic Myles dynamism.

Barbara Guest | Forces of Imagination | Kelsey St. Press | 2003

I just keep reading and rereading this one, and every time find Guest’s poetics sharp, often humorous, haunted, compelling.

Truong Tran | Four Letter Words | Apogee Press | 2008

These poems are formally lively, while the content here zings.

Orlando White | Bone Light | Red Hen Press | 2009

White is a young writer and this is his first book. Its intense focus interrogates language letter by letter.

Tyrone Williams | On Spec | Omnidawn | 2007

Completely engrossing.

James Laughlin | The Way it Wasn’t | New Directions | 2006

Notes toward a memoir that Laughlin never wrote, this book is vastly entertaining (JL refers to Bill Clinton as “Smiley”) and full of good literary gossip. It is also heartbreaking to get hints at how hard it is to keep a literary press alive, especially as Laughlin struggles to retain authors who are lured away by larger presses (e.g., John Hawkes, Anne Carson).

Myung Mi Kim | Penury | Omnidawn | 2009

Painful content, exquisitely sculpted writing.

More Elizabeth Robinson here.

Attention Span 2009 – Meredith Quartermain

Thomas Bernhard | Frost | Vintage | 2008

Translated by Michael Hofmann, this novel, which involves a despairing artist in a gloomy Austrian town, contains some of the most poetic, painterly prose I’ve come across.

Aaron Peck | The Bewilderments of Bernhard Willis | Pedlar | 2008

Pure poetry, even though it’s called a novel.

Lisa Roberston | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House | 2009

Who would not want to be whipped by such a magenta soul?

Margaret Christakos | What Stirs | Coach House | 2008

Christakos’s poetry is one of those best kept secrets I want to tell everyone.

George Stanley | Vancouver: A Poem | New Star | 2008

Stanley’s response to Paterson and Maximus—he never lets you forget how city thoughts are made.

Daphne Marlatt | The Given | McClelland & Stewart | 2008

This is the third novel/poem in Marlatt’s trilogy that began with the groundbreaking Ana Historic. It won the BC Book Award for poetry.

Louis Cabri | —that can’t | Nomados | 2009

Cabri is extremely inventive at recombining clichés, advertising slogans, corporate capitalist blague and popular sentiment so that they deconstruct each other with great humour and irony.

Michael Boughn | Dislocations in Crystal | Coach House | 2003

I read Boughn for, among other things, his syntax.

Michael Boughn | 22 Skidoo | BookThug | 2009

Boughn is to sentence as Miles Davis is to trumpet.

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs and Stratton | New Star | 2008

One of the subtlest, drollest poets in Canada.

Myung Mi Kim | Commons | U of California | 2002

A very political book without being polemic, which explodes language away from its comfortable links to things and shows how violent it can be.

More Meredith Quartermain here.

Attention Span – Elizabeth Treadwell

Sarah Vap | Dummy Fire | Saturnalia | 2007

“Sitting around in paper gowns, in deep study.”

This book twirls faithfully its own slippy vernac.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson | Collected Poems | Shearsman | 2008

“Folded & re/folded the/map of the/town is pass/ed through/our lives/& hands ac/ross the table.”

A conjure board for the recent nearby.

Kim Hyesoon, trans. Don Mee Choi | Mommy Must Be A Fountain of Feathers | Action | 2008

“she hammers away till the keyboard is bloodied”

“I want to shove a finger into the silence and make it vomit.”

Etel Adnan | In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country | City Lights | 2005

“There should be only one school, the one where you learn the future…without even any students. Located in the guts of the species.”

Ines Hernandez-Avila, ed. | Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representations | Altamira | 2005

“This is not a treaty!”

Myung Mi Kim | Under Flag | Kelsey St | 1991

“These men these women chant and chant”

Rereading in anticipation of her new book Penury. As Sarah Anne Cox said to me recently, “it’s hard to find something that truly moves you.”

Diane Glancy | Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears | Harcourt Brace | 1996

Rereading. A recent article in the New Yorker, mired per usual in the vast inaccuracy of the ruling class, jokingly compared a boycott of the Beijing Olympics on account of Tibet to a boycott of those in Salt Lake City on account of the Cherokee. I wish more people would read this luminous, frightening, deeply informative book, which to me has an affinity with Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Christian Wiman, ed. | Poetry: the Translation Issue | Poetry Foundation | April 2008

The first issue I’d read. I liked it.

Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin | 2007

Sarah Anne Cox | Truancy | Dusie | 2007

VA | board books, picture books, & chapter books | various | various

I could live without some of the tropes, others I probably could not.

Caroline Bergvall & C.S. Giscombe | Reading at Small Press Traffic | November 2008

I am eagerly awaiting this event.

Yedda Morrison | girl scout nation| Displaced | 2008

“and yet/a doe”

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More Elizabeth Treadwell here.