Posts Tagged ‘Norma Cole’
Attention Span 2011 | Benjamin Friedlander
Rose Ausländer | Gesamtwerk in Einzelbänden | 16 vols. | Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag | 1992-1995
My German, never good to begin with, has been slipping away from lack of use, and I’ve no longer got my father to call for help when the grammar tricks me up—a stroke took away all his answers. A month before the stroke he and I were in Berlin and I bought a few of these volumes; I’ve acquired the others since, reading aloud at the nursing home, where my father’s silence becomes part of the effect. It’s the late work in particular that moves me, written after Ausländer turned seventy: a metaphysical imagism, fluid as Matisse’s cutouts, cutting as a northern wind, though at whisper strength. Or seemingly at whisper strength: the late work fills nine of these volumes.
Bureau of American Ethnology | Annual Reports and Bulletins | Government Printing Office | 1879-1967
Of the 200 bulletins and 48 annual reports with papers, only a few contain material that one might call literary, but these are precious: a treasury of Native American texts in the original languages, with dictionaries and translations. It’s incredible that these are available online, and incredible to scroll through them, if a little bewildering—they encompass a wide range of philosophies and projects, and their credibility is uneven. Racism is pervasive, so suspicion is required, but it’s hard not to get excited by the material: a ghost story in which a bird puts adult skulls on child bodies, which topple over; a song with the refrain, “the entire world weeps for me”; a prayer to the sun that includes the unexpected hope, “Perhaps if we are lucky / … / A floor of ice will spread over the world, / the forests … / … will break beneath the weight of snow.” The highlight for me is The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, published only a few years after the events described, containing a number of the songs that accompanied the dance. (The translator, James Mooney, reports that they were composed in a trance, one after the other, 20 or 30 at a time). Just as interesting, and more influential as poetry: Frances Densmore’s various collections of Indian song, widely read by the moderns—just this week I found a citation by Basil Bunting.
List of BAE publications
Annual Reports
Bulletins 1-24
Bulletins 25-200
Norma Cole | To Be at Music: Essays & Talks | Omnidawn | 2010
Argument by citation, juxtaposition, repurposing—a Talmudic strategy, though based on a very different principle. Not the authority of a sacred text, but a library where authority is dispersed—where the sacred, like the untranslatable, is yet to be grasped. Making this a musical book in Cole’s sense (formulated for Robert Browning): “In the time of imagination, prosody becomes the reference system, the set of locating coordinates.”
Ann Cotten & Kerstin Cmelka | I, Coleoptile | Broken Dimanche P | 2010
Consulting a dictionary every other word impedes the reading of some poets more than others, and Cotten, alas, is one for whom speed matters. This is ironic, since her Fremdwörterbuchsonette (Suhrkamp, 2007) includes the word “dictionary” in its title. A dictionary of loan words, for Cotten—American—has borrowed her German, while incorporating an English borrowed for her readers. Wit is required to keep up, and I’m just too slow in German. Probably, I’m too slow for this English text as well—a prose-poetry hybrid with photographs—but here at least I can pretend to understand. And pretending is precisely the point. The photos (by Cmelka) reproduce stills from a film starring Mayakovsky, with Cotten in Mayakovsky’s role, while the narrative is given under the sign of a disguise: the “coleoptile” is a vegetable sheath, the covering of a shoot, hence a figure for becoming. “I am a woman as yet / in a cocoon. I am embarrassed / that one has caught me as I unfold / my first wing, still in the ‘real,-’ bag.” In context, “real” suggests “reel,” just as shoot invokes photography, so it’s fair to surmise that the metamorphosis unfolds in the manner of a film, the projection of something already been (or “bean,” as the opening discourse punningly puts it). Like a loan word transposed into poetry, it slips by too fast to be savored—or is savored at narrative’s expense.
Stephen Crane, ed. Christopher Benfey | Complete Poems | American Poets Project | 2011
In his introduction, Benfey notes that Crane’s most individual qualities have long been ignored, even by sympathetic readers: they admire his starkness of language and modernity of line, but not the compressed, parable-like narratives these serve. Yet the time may have come for reassessment: aligning Crane with a certain vein of writing from the seventies, Benfey sees a ground prepared by the influx of poetry from Eastern Europe, and by the impact of deep image. This made me think a more contemporary ground might lie with the writers of Action Books. Though Crane lacks the grotesqueries they admire, he flirts with kitsch. His angels scoffing at churchgoers, man chasing horizon, split the difference between American Renaissance allegory and New Yorker cartoon; and it’s not surprising to learn that his original publisher, Fred Holland Day, was a mentor of Khalil Ghibran. All that aside—or rather, not aside—Crane’s work is fun to read. It’s nice to have this compact edition.
Donato Mancini | Buffet World | New Star | 2011
A pringle can probably tell us more about our world than a potato: ersatz, weighed down by packaging, more pleasurable than sustaining, the lowly chip—like its lowly consumer—is the material form of a relation (economic, ecological) that stitches reality. These wonderful poems tug at those stitches, making reality dance wonkily, like a puppet show. Fun facts, childish play, damning critique: Capitalism, you are what you eat.
Thomas Mann, trans. John E. Woods | Doctor Faustus | Vintage International | 1999
From the Mann-Adorno correspondence I learn that portions were taken verbatim from source texts—a precedent (yet another) for our contemporary practice. I feel especially close to Mann’s version: plundering one milieu to recreate another, he historicizes the avant-garde while making it the vehicle for a counter-history. In conceptual writing, however, a concept is nothing without execution. Here, as it should be, the devil is in the details.
I poeti della scuola siciliana | Vol. 1: Giacomo da Lentini | Vol. 2: Poeti della corte di Federico II | Vol. 3: Poeti siculo-toscani | Ed. Roberto Antonelli (vol. 1), Costanzo Di Girolamo (vol. 2), and Rosario Coluccia (vol. 3) | Mondadori | 2008
It’s silly to list these long-coveted volumes when I’ve only managed to make my way through a half dozen poems (under Carla’s tutelage, of course), but because they’ve already sent me on a fruitful detour through Rosetti, I feel, if not justified, then at least honest: my attention is directed where it takes new inspiration, though it can’t go forward on its own.
Laura Riding | Omitted Poems and Superseded Versions, 1927-1938
I spent a fair portion of the year tracking down fugitive publications and original editions by A. R. Ammons, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Laura Riding, with gains in each case. The biggest surprise came with Riding, whose bibliography contains perhaps a hundred pages of uncollected poetry and a wealth of material for a variorum, a companion to First Awakenings (the uncollected work through 1926) and Collected Poems (Riding’s “self-determining canon”). What lies beyond, in the archive, I can’t say, but the unpublished writing strikes me as a separate issue. It’s the successive stages of Riding’s public presentation that interests me—a story well worth preserving.
Andrew Schelling | From the Arapaho Songbook | La Alameda | 2011
It feels good to be in synch with a friend: little did I know when I took up The Ghost Dance Religion that Andrew was already studying one of its principal languages, Arapaho, an Algonkian tongue that flourished where he now lives. The aim: “to get closer to plant, animal, rock, weather, or hydrological cycles, by way of the Native words that held them.” The resulting work has an objectivist compression, which, despite the economy, finds space for all that the eye can see, or ear hear, all that deepens a day. Living up to the demands of Arapaho as expressed in his book’s epigraph, from Edward Sapir: “Single Algonkian words are like tiny Imagist poems.”
Elisabeth Workman | Maybe Malibu Maybe Beowulf | Dusie Kollectiv | 2011
Through experiments on a rodent (namely myself), I can say that these poems all hit the goody place, the pleasure center of the brain, which laps up the lines like so many pulses: “pink tufa dust / of the Golden Girls,” “Caucasian dawgs,” “a probe, a hole, a ‘Burger King,’” “SpongeBob / ejaculates brief histories of time.” All meaningless, of course, but perfectly directed, electric.
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Beyond these, let me cite without comment two books I blurbed this year: Stan Apps, The World as Phone Bill (Combo Books, 2011), and G. P. Lainsbury, Versions of North (Caitlin Press, forthcoming). Also, two broadsides that gave me great pleasure: Tim Atkins, Pet Soundz (Crater Press, 2011), and Rodney Koeneke, At the Small Bar in the Embassy (Cuneiform Press, 2011).
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More Benjamin Friedlander here.
Friedlander’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Peter Quartermain
Robert Duncan , ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman | The HD Book | California | 2011
At last! Even if you don’t like Duncan (and quite a few don’t), this is still not to be ignored. Its publication a major event of the year.
Tony Judt | Ill Fares the Land | Penguin | 2010
I lament his death, he’s irreplaceable. Not to heed his work, these essays, would be sheer folly.
Norma Cole | To Be At Music: Essays & Talks | Omnidawn | 2010
Brilliant, pithy, full of news.
George Bowering | My Darling Nelly Gray | Talonbooks | 2010
Bowering in top form.
Robert Pogue Harrison | The Body of Beatrice | Hopkins | 1988
An oldie but goodie, still opening doors.
Meredith Quartermain, drawings by Susan Bee | Recipes From the Red Planet | Book Thug | 2010
I’m not exactly impartial here, but hey, this is really a very interesting and indeed good book. The publisher calls it fiction; it’s more like poetry to me, and resourceful.
Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 | Station Hill | 2010
Dense, difficult, bracing—can I say these wide-ranging poems are obsessed with words? They’re sure instructive to anyone who cares about them, and really are exhilarating in their astonished thought.
Guy Birchard | Further Than The Blood | Pressed Wafer | 2010
This is Birchard’s sixth or maybe seventh book of poetry, but nobody seems to have noticed. Maybe his poems are too subtle and careful, perhaps the mode at casual glance too familiar, the skill too unobtrusive.
Michael Boughn | Cosmographia: A Post-Lucretian Micro-Epic | Book Thug | 2010
Issued in fascicles over the last few years, and at last collected together. Boughn is a terrific poet, who actually thinks as he writes. He can be very funny; sometimes he’s very angry. He’s always without fail interesting, so long as you’re paying attention.
Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Barbara Johnson | Divagations: The Author’s 1897 Arrangement | Belknap / Harvard | 2007
Delighted to find this still in print.
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Peter Quartermain has just (July 2011) submitted “Poetic Fact,” a collection of his essays, to an interested publisher. His edition of Robert Duncan’s Collected Early and Collected Later Poems and Plays is currently at the U of California P. The introduction to the first volume appeared in The Capilano Review, Fall 2009.
Quartermain’s Attention Span for 2010, 2008, 2006. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Eric Baus
Fred Moten | B Jenkins | Duke | 2010
“come from some of everywhere, somewhere so deep that some of everywhere come with you. to become for our occult belongings, // worldly in that other way”
Dorothea Lasky | Black Life | Wave | 2010
“You are reading the work of a great poet, possibly one of the greatest ones of your time. If I am standing in from of you right now, you are listening to the voice of one of the greatest poets of your time.”
Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: A Project For Future Children | Kelsey St. | 2009
“I am not interested in animals. Return to the work as memory. Say it is a wolf becoming a girl, the action in reverse.”
Tan Lin | Seven Controlled Vocabularies | Wesleyan | 2010
“People are basically animals that know how to read.”
Steven Zultanski | Pad | Book Thug | 2010
“My dick cannot lift the walls. My dick cannot lift the ceiling. My dick cannot lift the floor.”
Will Alexander | The Sri Lankan Loxodrome | New Directions | 2010
“such swans / staggered by microbial reasoning / their aggressive nests / anatomical with anomaly”
Paul Killebrew | Flowers | Canarium | 2010
“It’s better than Atlanta, where they treat people like cars / in a city that combines the rustic elegance of Newark / with the quiet dignity of a beer bong.”
Edouard Glissant, trans. Nathalie Stephens | Poetic Intention | Nightboat | 2010
“When the poet travels to the ends where there is no country, he opens with the more deserved relation, in that space of an absolute elsewhere in which each can attempt to reach him.”
Lisa Robertson | R’s Boat | California | 2010
“Say I’m a beautiful animal who has mastered laziness / In reddened clearing in the occidental forest / In the album / Purse of goddess clicking / I long to see how it will continue to behave”
Norma Cole | Where Shadows Will | City Lights | 2009
“Here the subject thinks ‘there could be flowers’ or ‘the water was a bit disturbed when the ring fell in.’ All that, painted from said things, pleases it.”
Attention Span 2010 – Patrick Pritchett
Julie Carr | Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines | Coffee House
Beyond beautiful—a hymn of sorrow and joy and Carr’s most intimate and powerful work yet—deeply touching, and miraculously alive in its invention.
James Belflower | Commuter | Instance
The severe angularity and audacity of postmodernity. Now, would somebody please publish “Friends of Mies van der Rohe” already?
Norma Cole | Where Shadows Will | City Lights
Norma Cole’s work is continually alert to the tiniest nuances and to the possibility for the vastness of inside that moment. The actual turns of thought, a deep thinking into language as event and the world as it seen and felt and registered continually. Objects are not merely named, but multiply-mediated. What calls our attention is seeing: and seeing into and through language. The poem never a comment, but an invitation to become enmeshed with its event; neither reductive nor overpowering, but alive to complexity.
Anne Carson | NOX | New Directions
Elegy as etymology, as colportage. But is the whole less than the sum of its scattered parts?
Ingeborg Bachman, trans. Peter Filkins | Songs in Flight | Marsilio
So I gather the salt
when the sea overcomes us,
and turn back
and lay it on the threshold
and step into the house.
We share bread with the rain;
bread, debt, and a house.
Leslie Scalapino | Considering How Exaggerated Music Is | North Point
What would you glean
mean
the long go-away-from-it plan
at hazard, sheer glass over
water
and the eking out
of syllables
ten cents-a-dozen
no rhymes
///
It would be occasion, return of the others from their something not right
I know, I could see them, moving down the aisle, that there should be
this music
This was the time when the dying brought in their wounded
///
The stippled
branch
of light
tips forward
ghosted
with pollen
and the promises of dust
stare back at us
give evidence of our having lived
the wrong questions
right
Ken Irby | The Intent On | North Atlantic
And for the dreaming, the endless
mode of occurring
as it is, as it could be, as the sleepers
keep murmuring —
for what it means
to stay alive, attuned, a moment
to this otherwise
& the sought-for, disappearing.
Of pure possibility/of the nothing
that may save it
shed of symbol, it staves off
the blighted, and so we go – into night
the blessed, the earthly
what leaks into & wrecks us
is always
never and more singular than loss
across song’s fields, folded. Inside its portals
the old book beckons and we bend
surmised of sorrow, to its rising, it turning.
What dies &
what inherits? What dissipates
and what is remnant?
If the wind is not/if the wind is here and –
its inconstancy, its minglings, its slips of
substance into light and
into beginning
for beginning is always.
Begin again.
More Patrick Pritchett here and here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2009 – Kevin Killian
David Buuck | The Shunt | Palm Press | 2009
David Buuck’s first book is relatively slim—well it’s normal size, not one of the 110 page behemoths that pass as regulation fare nowadays—but it is exquisitely focused and honed in on the torment of being alive in the world we live in, a citizen of the evil state of America. And a vulnerable human cell heavily implicated in capitalism. As a summary of the different formal experiments Buuck has tried out in the past ten years this book is marvelously effective, for he is the most impatient of poets and the one most disgusted with his own efforts. “Stanzas in Mediation 15-20” (“The Suck”) is my favorite of these dramatizations of self loathing. “Sure–I am/ a poet—against/ the war & a poet/ against “poets”/ “against the war” & I’m a poet against the post-/ war & well/ I’m not really/ much of a poet/ either, but & yet/ I’m just trying to do my part/ by Iraqifying/ my CD collection ]…]”–it just goes on like this taking strips of his flesh with it. When I first met him his Hamlet nature fascinated me, his mercurial balance of air and water, and now years later he steps forth, a Hamlet with balls.
Garrett Caples | Complications | Meritage Press | 2007
Garrett’s my editor—at City Lights, where we will publish my new book Impossible Princess in the fall—so by rights I should leave him off this list, but if I couldn’t write about my friends’ books my list would be tiny indeed, and Steve Evans, if you enforced that rule on “Attention Span” then you could show all the books reviewed on one screen. As I cast my gaze on the books I’m writing about this time around I see to my shame that indeed they are practically all by my friends, except for one girl whom I have never met, and one guy whom I only met once and yet was captivated by his dark intense Nijinsky grace. Does that count? Garrett Caples wrote Complications during a time of worldwide grief and mourning, and during a time when the culture figures he admired were too slipping away, as though they knew—and the elegiac factor in Complications is high. Thom Gunn, Barbara Guest, Robert Creeley, Philip Lamantia, all ghosts now, are invoked without sentiment and with plenty of wry humor. Caples’ experiments with sound and the slipping image are well known, and here they really get a workout: those of you who have read “Dub Song of Prufrock Shakur” know what I’m talking about. And there are also lovely straight essays here (if I could apply for a second the dubious adjective straight to this writing) which I always enjoy in a book of poetry.
Norma Cole | Natural Light | Libellum Press | 2009
Norma also has a new book from City Lights, a book of selected poems called Where Shadows Will, 1988-2008, which makes my mouth gape, as though to remember that I met her before she had written any books and was just starting to publish after a career as a painter. Well, I don’t have the space here to do more than recommend this one wholeheartedly— though I wonder why there’s nothing in Where Shadows Will from Norma’s greatest work, the epic verse drama Art Colony Survivor (2002), the play I wrote with her over months and months of laughter and tears? In the meantime I have thought often about another new book by her, Natural Light. Cole strikes out as she has in all of her books in a new direction, and several at once— her mind is like a weathervane that spins in a hurricane, unerringly finding the rough underlining to any solace. “Where Shadows Will” does a decent job of excerpting from Natural Light, but it leaves out the majestic centerpiece, the final serial piece Collective Memory. Collective Memory is a book of mnemonic that lavishes attention on the smallest elements of our tongue— on the individual alphabetic character. Like bp nichol her countryman, Cole understands why petulant pixies clamor for Frosted Flakes. Who is JJ? What happens when a little inverted c is placed over the actual c in the proper name Bavčar? Well, she is a wonder and I’ve anagrammed her own name endless times, clear moon, name color, coral omen, elm corona, need I say more.
Kate Greenstreet | Case Sensitive | Ahsahta Press | 2006
Kate Greenstreet’s first book came as a surprise to me, having been burned by a few other Ahsahta publications in earlier years. Now I see thanks to a handy list in the back of the book, that there have been just as many Ahsahta titles I’ve enjoyed as the ones I remembered dismissing. Just goes to show me how easily stereotype draws me in. I wonder how many folks think of Krupskaya in the same way. Tried one, didn’t care for it, the rest are probably all shit as well. In Kate Greenstreet’s case, the book itself is physically lovely with that thick lustrous yellowy paper that’s like a cross between buttermilk and cheesecloth. Above all else her book reminded me of the classic work from Kathleen Fraser I first learned to love in the early 80s, and it even comes with Fraser’s own [brackets] and signs of domestic life made fraught by a highly tuned consciousness, and her overheard scrap[s of enigmatic Antonioniesque fragments of conversation— and with a blurb by Fraser on top of it all. But she is more than— I mean other than—a poet in the How/ever mode, she has her own prosody (seen at its best in a small poem like “phone tap,” so perfect it must have been written with a diamond on glass—and her own trips to take and dare.
Kate Greenstreet | This Is Why I Hurt You | Lame House | 2008
In five sections, This Is Why I Hurt You acts as a severe corrective to the pingings of consciousness featured in Case Sensitive, Greenstreet’s previous book. The flatness and foundness of the material here allows for all sorts of interpretation, but it beats a path away from the numinous, into a celebration of the reflexivity of ordinary USA syntax. “He had these big sharp claws on his hooves, and sometimes he’d put one u[p on me.” Didn’t I read this, in Little House in the Big Woods? “I understood it as the part of our mind where art comes from.” That’s from William James via Gertrude Stein. “And I hoped he wouldn’t scratch me with them, because that would really hurt.” I don’t know, Bastard Out of Carolina? American sigils fill this little book to the point of bursting, like fifteen sweeps down my chimney. That’s the fairy tale of the US—it will leave a mark.
Kreg Hasegawa | The New Crustacean | Green Zone | 2008
This young man is writing flash fiction that sits right on the chasm between the prose poem and the traditional short story. Is it parody? Not quite, though Hasegawa delights in his puns and his wordplay, enough to allow it to direct the action from the inside out. “What poetry,” he asks, “can you quote from that can’t possibly poison you back?” So there’s an awareness of the risk involved in writing, a picnic phenomenology. One long story—I use the word “long: in quotes because most of these stories could be written on the surface of an aspirin with a laser beam—one long story is the title piece, “The New Crustacean,” in which a traveler, meeting with a terrible accident (or other trauma?) becomes the victim of a pair of bad Samaritans in khaki. I’m still scratching my head about how beautiful it is. On another front he uses his close watch over words as a strategy for characterization, or the sensuality that leads from it. “Her life was something I had glazed myself with, or poured myself over, slowly, like gravy. I was something to make meat moist.” You don’t often hear people reveal so much of themselves, not even in fiction, and definitely not in poetry. Grosbeaks fly in and out of the stories like the moths in Robin Blaser’s Moth Poem. This guy Hasegawa has it, as my little nephew says, going on.
Donato Mancini | Æthel | New Star Books | 2007
At Naropa, Allen Ginsberg spoke of Gertrude Stein’s project as “building little sculptures out of words.” I thought of his, well perhaps rather patronizing description when trying to describe to a former student just what Donato Mancini’s book Wilcox Æthel is all about. It’s a little difficult to show you what he’s doing without illustrations, but luckily Johanna Drucker has written it up on the back of the book and I can crib from her. She avers that Æthel is based on Mancini’s “appropriation of typefaces” and that he uses type we’re used to in other contexts to stand on its head our conventional wisdom on them. In practice even I can see that Mancini twists, stretches, reverses and entwines these fonts into garlands and blobs to satirize our preoccupation with reading itself, for one can barely make out a single word, though each poem has suggestions of words in it. Rather like birds building nests from particles that top scientists might be able to identify individually. Dodie and I printed some selections of Æthel in our zine, Mirage #4/Period[ical]. We’re baby boomers so we recognized the font Jim Morrison and the Doors used again and again as their logo, but what Mancini did with it is provocation in the highest.
Filip Marinovich | Zero Readership| Ugly Duckling | 2008
I had this book and couldn’t remember how I had it, even though the inscription was a warm one. Then it came to me like a flashback in a Resnais film—me, like Emmanuelle Riva, distracted, at Canessa Park the city’s most unreliable art gallery, at a poetry reading. Him, Filip Marinovich, perfectly pleasant and gamin offering me his book in good faith I imagine, but me preoccupied by professional problems hardly gave him the time of day. A curtain of shame falls across Emmanuelle Riva’s piquant features. She lies to friends, pretends she doesn’t care. In the meantime the book grows bigger every day in her hands. Well it is, as he had told her, “an epic,” a massive, oversized account of poetic activity in Montenegro, Belgrade, New York, the savage capitals of torn and bruised faith. Marinovich’s soulful, notebooky lyrics etch out the struggle of the artist in hard times and the refugee making his way from palace to soup kitchen with an élan invincible. You can feel the slushy snow, you can smell the smoke, you can certainly take or leave the hardboiled Serbian refugee family with their sage advice and their magic realism and Grammas Nada and Mercy. The epic is structured in roughly the same proportions as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, as an accumulation of mass leading to apocalyptic takeoff, but in Marinovich’s hands this progression turns into a “new tune in the oxygen mix.” Well done дечко!
Lisa Robertson | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House Books | 2009
Alana Wilcox has again designed what seems like a perfect book, and it’s not magenta but rather a yellowish greenish chartreuse halfway between pear and olive—thus the suggestion of the magenta fairly pops out like one of those old Jasper Johns’ paintings of the Canadian flag. Robertson’s seventh book of poetry works differently than some of her others, and it mostly nearly approaches the way other people make up books of poetry, by accretion, a drifting into the harbor of the book the isolated moments of a lifetime of work. But hers are not like yours or mine, instead this is the work of one who can say with some pride, “My fidelity is my own disaster.” Its a heraldic book, but as its title suggests, a sassy, almost a Debbie Allen sort of book too. It might be her best book! If not, I predict that it will vie with a few others as many people’s favorite book by her. Robertson is coming from a place in which a tormented silence insists, “When women are exiled it seems normal,” and these poems are the tufts of marsh grass on which, like Eliza, the exile finds her footing in the rush of the restaurant/river.
Jared Stanley | Book Made of Forest | Salt Cambridge | 2009
If I ever publish another book I want Graham Foust and Bhanu Kapil to write blurbs for it! Jared Stanley, on top of winning the Crashaw prize that resulted in the publication of this book, Foust and Kapil wrote these great blurbs on top of it. Now as for Crashaw, I’m looking and looking and it took me nearly a week of re-reading the entertaining and exciting poems of Book Made of Forest, and I just wasn’t feeling the “Crashaw” reference, but then it came to me… The historical Crashaw, who lived nearly 400 years ago, wrote as many poems after turning Roman Catholic as he did before it—poems of objects joked together in the metaphysical style, poems in which a simple comparison balloons out concentrically into a dirigible capable of lifting the planet off its hinges. Thus the play Foust makes out of Stanley’s title, the book made of forest which Foust examines in the Crashevian style, relinquishing his hold on the metaphor to Arshile Gorky’s notorious boast of destruction. “I love it,” reads one of Stanley’s poems, in its entirety, “it’s so dead/ it’s straightforward.” I admire this continual stretching for it, and for the most part Stanley succeeds in the form of his creation. The only thing he can’t do, or hardly ever, is finish a poem as resoundingly as it begins. Maybe that’s the point, in which case, OK.
Suzanne Stein | Hole in Space | OMG! | 2009
“You went to the conference speculating on the expanded field of writing, and I went to work.” The truth is, some of us have to go to work, but Suzanne Stein’s little chapbook, produced by Brandon Brown’s ingenious OMG! press, punches a hole in space and into the formulation. You might call this a conceptual piece of writing, certainly it winds up with a eerie J B Priestley hole in time, for Stein takes us to a November 2008 event at the Poetry Project in New York, where she is delivering a talk in cold Manhattan, while in southern California fires are burning down whole coastal regions. The talk apes ordinary human speech, but it has an aspect of prophecy to it, Edgar Cayce the Sleeping prophet, for Stein announces that in four months time she will repeat every word of the talk a Manhattan tech is now recording, in an art gallery space in San Francisco. The second half of the book gives us the text of her San Francisco talk, and for those of us who were there at Canessa Park, the book presents an eerie souvenir of one occasion when the past completely predicated the present. We all know there are scripts we are doomed to repeat, but Hole in Space makes it all come real, the tangle at the end of the mind. And yes, that was the gallery space in which young Filip Marinovich and I shared one stolen moment of brief encounter.
More Kevin Killian here.
Attention Span 2009 – David Dowker
Elizabeth Bachinsky | Curio: Grotesques and Satires from the Electronic Age | BookThug | 2009
Laynie Browne | The Scented Fox | Wave | 2007
Norma Cole | Natural Light | Libellum | 2009
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko | Dust | Dalkey Archive | 2008
Alan Halsey | Term as in Aftermath | Ahadada | 2009
Andrew Joron | The Sound Mirror | Flood | 2008
Geraldine Monk | Ghost & Other Sonnets | Salt | 2008
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009
Michael Palmer | Active Boundaries | New Directions | 2008
Lisa Robertson | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House | 2009
Lisa Samuels | The Invention of Culture | Shearsman | 2008
More David Dowker here.
Attention Span 2009 – Keith Tuma
Stephen Rodefer | Call It Thought: Selected Poems | Carcanet | 2008
This is a generous selection from Rodefer’s work, introduced by Rod Mengham. It’s too short on selections from Four Lectures, but other than that most of what you need is here. Reading the first and presumably earliest poems in the book, which I’d not seen, confirmed my suspicion that Rodefer emerged full-grown from the head of Apollo to set up as the last secretary of modernism. The poet is both hero and anti-hero in that tradition: leave it to Rodefer to remake “lives of the artists” as “lies of the artists.” We already knew that Rodefer is Villon, or might as well be, and some years on he’s translating Baudelaire as Zukofsky. There’s not a better poet alive.
Robert von Hallberg | Lyric Powers | The University of Chicago Press | 2008
This will ruffle a few feathers: “My argument is that the most distinctive authority of lyric rests still on its affirmative function, whereas the intellectual disciplines derive from doubt.” Praise rather than complaint as the central lyric impulse, criticality a subset of rationality, the limits of which lyric reveals. “Musicality authenticates poetry, a crucial function in a discourse that strains against social conventions.” Von Hallberg links poetry or rather an “orphic tradition” with structures of belief that persist beyond irony and skepticism in a secular culture, and answers those concerned that the “affirmative effect of form . . . might discourage an intelligent warrior class from the struggle to preserve the autonomy of the republic” with a question about “whether the pleasures of fully realized art do not encourage one to achieve a peace so well crafted that it seems divinely sanctioned.” Chapters on authority, praise, civility, thought, musicality, and universality: much to ponder throughout. This is a powerful defense of poetry at a moment when the academy could care less.
William Fuller | Three Replies | Barque | 2008
This is a chapbook containing “replies” to Parson Platt, Thomas Traherne, and Experience, dedicated to “the New Mystagogues.” Fuller has been reinventing the prose poem since Sugar Borders (1993), and his recent full-length collections, Sadly and Watchword, contain both prose and verse. But what these new poems are doing with the verse line and prose is pretty wild, a step beyond that earlier work. Does it make sense to speak of it as a prosody? As ever, the writing is both meditative and deadpan, fast as a disappearing proposition, thought emptying itself of pretension: “Compare this statement to the gas pump, seen from behind the steering wheel, late at night.”
Norma Cole | Natural Light | Libellum | 2009
Especially for its first sequence or grouping, “Pluto’s Disgrace,” as it works the Pluto/Persephone myth in fragments about “iron disorders” and everyday violence. Notes on metal and wealth. As ever, Pluto is in the dark, and Persephone altogether beyond him, “nobody”: “the smallest telescope / reveals a golden glow / coming from her neck.” Her presence calls up Cole’s fiercely ethical response: “if you can, wave–a / woman holds / binoculars to / her eyes.”
Joseph Macleod | Cyclic Serial Zeniths from the Flux: Selected Poems | Waterloo Press | 2009
Andrew Duncan selects and introduces the great Anglo-Scottish modernist, author of the book-length The Ecliptic (1930), which was of considerable interest to Pound, Bunting, and Rexroth and has been highly valued by poets in Cambridge (UK) since. Only two sections of that book are here, but there is plenty more poetry until now nearly impossible to find, including works from the 1940s, when Macleod published some of his finest poetry as Adam Drinan, and lengthy selections from Macleod’s verse drama, which Duncan rates highly, as he also views Macleod’s career in the theater as crucial. It’s time we move beyond considering what it is that the strange and (as far as poetry is concerned) sad history of Macleod’s career tells us about modernism and British poetry and start reading his poems closely. The poems are marvelous and the unpacking is worth doing. One strophe from “Enterprise Scotland” (1946): “The hard ingine of a mother love / sorts and snowks, fichers and favours, / wales the best of the braw stuff, / sprushes with carved paper / tissues that scintillate and undulate / into and furth of her bairn-multitudes / that enlighten and illuminate / the minds and eyes of her bairn-multitudes.”
Rodrigo Toscano | Collapsible Poetics Theater | Fence Books | 2008
I have seen a few of the texts collected here performed at conferences: they’re fun to watch. One text, “Eco-Strato-Static,” which might have been written by Albert Camus had Albert Camus Toscano’s sense of humor, is up at the Meshworks YouTube site, in two parts, the first of which is here. This one might as well be—would work well as—radio drama. The physical theater of poetics theater is not always important, I think, though I’m hardly an expert, and it matters more to some of these works than others. A “collapsible” poetics theater might be one that you can fold and carry in your pocket, like a book. Toscano is very funny and his writing lively, playful—Sitwellian or Steinian and shaped by popular and local idioms and several languages—and these texts move easily if sometimes a little self-consciously among the discourses and problems of post-identity and labor politics, philosophy, and (alas) experimental poetry. It’s interesting to think of what the poetics theater format adds on the page, which is where most will find this work, and arguably where it is most realized. Consider the opening of Part 2 of “Truax Inimical,” for instance, where the format allows Toscano to get away with lines he’d never get away with in poems: “I fly in the deep of the night. I fly toward the source of the light.” That’s cheesy but only because I’ve stripped away numbers that precede each word (there’s one word per line) and slow the reading and make it something else. One of the few books I’ve read recently that is truly “innovative.”
Tim Atkins, ed. | Onedit 13 | http://www.onedit.net/issue13/issue13.html | 2009
This is one of my favorite webzines, its selections mixing familiar and less familiar names mostly from the UK and USA, each number short enough to allow for focus, avoiding the sprawl that the web encourages. Austere production nods to the typewriter, and Atkins keeps finding interesting new work. Number 13 includes “Proposals” by Allen Fisher, which features images of Fisher’s paintings (diptychs) giving on to texts (diptychs of verse and prose). There aren’t many images of Fisher’s paintings easy to find, so I was grateful for this simply for the view of Fisher’s practice it allows, and here the web format is perfectly considered. In what ways is Fisher Blakean? “As if anyone really knew what existence links to ecstatic life.” Work by Sophie Robinson, Rebecca Rosier, Emily Critchley, and others.
Caroline Bergvall | Alyson Singes | Belladonna Books | 2008
Pseudo-Chaucerian idioms romp through the history of women and post-feminist discourse: “Everything was different / yet pretty much the same. / Godabove ruled all / & the Franks the rest. / Womenfolk were owned ne trafficked / nor ghosted, and so were / most workfolk enserfed. / Sunsets were redder then, / legs a little shorter.” Light fare and the better for it, at its best when least self-conscious of an avant-garde, where sex trumps theory.
John Wilkinson | Down to Earth | Salt | 2008
The date and title of his last book, Lake Shore Drive, might suggest otherwise, but this is John Wilkinson’s first American book following his arrival at Notre Dame, because of its subject matter and in some ways its prosody. It makes sense that the book takes its epigraph from Ed Dorn. The longer poems catalog the devastation of the psychic and material landscapes encountered: “dawn / recurs with its terrible systems of belief, / whose proceeds kill in all good faith . . . .” The turbines involved are global, but the focus is on local exhaust fumes, which is to say North America. Since landing in the USA Wilkinson has also emerged as one of the sharpest critics writing about poetry, American and British both. A note describes Down to Earth as one book-length project, though there are titles for individual poems: the haunting “Like Feeling” and “The Indiana Toll” are probably my favorites. Anthony Walton’s Mississippi and Luis Urrea’s Across the Wire, together with an exhibition about Mexican migration at Notre Dame’s Snite Museum, are mentioned as important to the work. English idioms (“hoovered up”) survive and Wilkinson’s impressive vocabulary, but the sentence rhythms have been punched up, phrases clipped. Odd to have the burning tires and trashed cars of North America catalogued by such a poet, trimming his impossible eloquence. Traces of the earlier syntax remain, of course, and he’s capable of smuggling in Eliot or Bunting (who would after all make more sense to a new compression as it meets this catalog of horrors: “Words! A light-pen is too /compromised,” which is funny in more ways than one). I might add without pretending that it means very much that it seems to me likely that American readers will find this Wilkinson’s most “accessible” volume.
cris cheek | part: short life housing | The Gig | 2009
An impressive selected poems spanning some twenty-five years, revised and introduced or reframed for this substantial, sharply produced volume. For me the best of it might be the longest, central section, titled fogs, written in Lowestoft, England over ten years: “The initial year’s procedure was to go for a walk in a fog and to talk into a voice recorder whilst walking. Speaking fogs, phatic models for embodied creative consciousness, intensified formal quirks of my curiosity with these engagements.” Here’s the ending of one of the poems in that series, sans format (the poems are all in boxes, for starters) and line and word breaks: “rains for a blithering pink in the shape of collective drunk mated who milks buckled moons from a stick waves a clouding root stun-planted shivering dress of sheet lightning ink plotted witness and span.”
Paul Craig Roberts at Counterpunch, and Nouriel Roubini at his RGE Monitor site, among three or four economists who are worth reading as it all falls down.
More Keith Tuma here.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2011 | Sawako Nakayasu
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Juliana Leslie | More Radiant Signal | Letter Machine | 2010
The poems feel diaphanous, and like they wouldn’t fare too well in a bar fight, except for the fact that we are all thrown off our stools by a strange and beautiful light that disappears when you turn away, or does it.
Don Mee Choi | The Morning News Is Exciting | Action | 2010
There is so much I love here. If this is postcolonial literature I want to write postcolonial literature too, though I can’t, being Japanese and/or American.
Zachary Schomburg | The Man Suit | Black Ocean | 2007
Zachary Schomburg | Scary, No Scary | Black Ocean | 2009
Love is when a boat is half-buried by all the cobwebs of eyelashes in the ocean.
Kiwao Nomura, trans. Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander | Spectacle & Pigsty | Omnidawn | 2011
Hiromi Ito, trans. Jeffrey Angles | Killing Kanoko | Action | 2009
Nomura’s poems are just as hypnotizing as they are in the original Japanese–darkly gorgeous and radiant, as the ‘orgasm-monger plods past/ nerve ants plod past.’ Norma Cole in her book of essays compares the expansiveness of theater-making to that of her experiences with group translation, and I think she is onto something there–perhaps the future is in collaborative translation.
One of the first things I heard about Hiromi Ito was that Japanese women in the 80s were trembling in the closet reading her work with a flashlight. Some have chalked up her work to an aesthetics of the shocking (as in, Kanoko is the name of her own daughter), but it’s been a very important part of Japanese feminist poetry these last few decades.
Frances Chung | Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple | Wesleyan | 2000
Chinatown is a place to go eat chinks. It’d be kind of silly to label this work something like the Chinese-American New York School, but I just did and yet it’s much more than that–in fact the last thing I want to do is to wrap it up under some Chinese-American bubble because it cuts across these lines, similar-different to Teresa Hak Kyung Cha. Walter Lew sent it to me this summer when I was bugging him about Yi Sang. Thank you, Walter. Thank you, Frances. I have always loved the color celadon, but now joining it on the palette is duck shit green.
Norma Cole | To Be at Music: Essays & Talks | Omnidawn | 2010
A guided tour of Norma Cole’s readings, thinking, and practice…including some excellent writings on translation, Mina Loy, and color. Now the heartbreak of the rational.
Lily Hoang | The Evolutionary Revolution | Les Figues | 2010
Their bodies begin as uncooked noodles, stiff and starchy, but as their heads wander, they limpen, soften, become saturated with dream.
Miryam Sas | Fault Lines: cultural memory and Japanese surrealism | Stanford | 1999
It’s true that I’m working on a Japanese Modernism project right now, but as I go back into this book, I am finding that it offers a conversation about more than just that particular time and place–examples of how to think about cultural transactions, or write about writing, or consider Surrealism inside and outside of its original and secondary contexts.
Marisol Limon Martinez | After you, dearest language | Ugly Duckling | 2005
This analogue version of hypertext is a wonderful way to house a narrative, and makes me think about more analog-digital potentials in poetry. (I also recently realized that I am married to a technophile-technophobe.)
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More Sawako Nakayasu here.
Nakayasu’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to 2011 directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 29, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with Don Mee Choi, Forrest Gander, Frances Chung, Hiromi Ito, Jeffrey Angles, Juliana Leslie, Kiwao Nomura, Kyoko Yoshida, Lily Hoang, Marisol Limon Martinez, Miryam Sas, Norma Cole, Sawako Nakayasu, Zachary Schomburg