Posts Tagged ‘Peter Culley’
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 – 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 – Benjamin Friedlander
Anne Boyer | Art Is War | Mitzvah | 2008
I’m not a believer in the Holy Spirit, but the fact that some poets make every sentence flutter with life while others merely kill brain cells does give me pause.
Peter Cole, ed. and trans. | The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 | Princeton | 2007
A half-millennium of poetry sifted with patient labor from the sand of history, then weighed and melted and wrought anew. To appreciate the wonder of this labor, imagine the David Shields anthology listed below rewritten in contemporary idiom, with tonal differences flattened out, but with a corresponding gain of coherence. A book to set beside Pound’s Provencal, which is only fitting since the poets involved were writing at roughly the same time.
Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton | New Star | 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.
Tony Harrison | Collected Poems | Penguin | 2007
Modernism scarcely registers here, but in Harrison’s case that’s not a defensive posture. His poems are episodes from a class war in which language is the battlefield: those who know it best are best favored to strike with impunity, and deadly surprise, and live to strike again.
Susan Howe | Souls of the Labadie Tract | New Directions | 2007
She makes other poets sound forced who strive to say one-quarter as much. Her secret? If you work your material until it’s in tatters, until it stains your thoughts and permeates your dreams, any stray word can be Sibylline.
Andrea Lauterwein | Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory | Thames & Hudson | 2007
A handsomely illustrated book about Kiefer, whose encounter with Celan’s work triggered a profound change, but not, it seems, a profound reading. Which makes this a fascinating study of reception, surprisingly close to another book I admired last year—Christoph Irmscher’s Longfellow Redux (U of Illinois P, 2008).
Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo | 2008
It’s impossible to read these poems without wanting to share the lines out loud. Silence is helpless here: even when I’m alone with this book, I break the silence, laughing. Is there anything more poignantly utopian than that? If ideology is the presence of society in our heads, then laughing out loud when we’re alone is the very summoning of that society, an involuntary assertion of communion.
George Oppen | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | ed. Stephen Cope | California | 2008
The pensive poet at his vanity (where beautiful poems were so often made up), appealingly deshabille.
Mark Scroggins | The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofksy | Shoemaker & Hoard | 2007
Sometimes, all you need is a firm grip from a friend to make it across slippery ground. With Zukofsky, Scroggins is that friend.
Frank Sherlock and Brett Evans | Ready to Eat Individual | Lavender Ink | 2008
The black bars framing each page reproduce the characteristic look of an empty food pouch, of the sort distributed in New Orleans after Katrina—marking this poem as a kind of shared meal, each portion of which once filled the empty space between need and excrement. Sustenance temporarily, debris for posterity.
David S. Shields, ed. | American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries | Library of America | 2007
The new edition of the Oxford anthology of American verse gives a mere twenty-seven pages to poets born before Emerson—clearly, the earlier years are due for a reappraisal. Here, the editor’s particular interest lies in the emergence of literary culture, so popular culture is actually less evident than in John Hollander’s companion volume of the nineteenth century, which surprised me. Surprising too is the canon that slowly emerges. Measured in pages, the top five poets are all familiar names: Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor, Philip Freneau, Anne Bradstreet, Timothy Dwight. But after Dwight the discoveries come fast and furious, pushing Ebenezer Cook (of “The Sot-Weed Factor”) down to ninth place, and Phillis Wheatley all the way down to fourteenth. Whether these new rankings create new reputations remains to be seen (the Scottish-born West Indian James Grainger is already gaining ground among scholars), but since the test of a book like this one rests ultimately on the poems, one reads more for choice moments than careers. And here I’ve found more than enough to justify a reapportionment of pages in the next Oxford. I’m especially fond of the following lines by Hannah Griffitts:
My Sense, or the Want of it—free you may jest
And censure, despise, or impeach,
But the Happiness center’d within my own Breast,
Is luckily out of your reach.
(From a short poem against marriage, written around the time of the Revolution—found in a commonplace book.)
*
More Benjamin Friedlander here.
Attention Span – John Latta
Tim Atkins | Horace | O Books | 2007
Tonal mischief is the thing. “ODES II / 20”:
Although lack of theory prevents me from perceiving
The true nature of my oppression, Maecenas
Women of my age usually put on weight
This is the last time I appear in an avant-garde movie
What I’d really like to do is direct
My hands are shaking and my knees are weak
What, Jerry Lee Lewis meets Frantz Fanon? Atkins makes Horace’s six quatrains revert to six lines—brilliant move. Thus “Women of my age usually put on weight” descends fleetly out of: “Even now the rough skin is settling around / my ankles, and now above them I’ve become / a snow-white swan, and soft feathers are / emerging over my arms and shoulders.” (A. S. Kline’s version.)
Or Atkins Mauberleys up Horace (“Odes II / 28”) with a pinch of Housman: “Owing to a shortage of cocaine, / I turned my back on public life / And live in Market Harborough / With Robert Lowell’s widow, Caroline / / 50 Gauloises after Ezra / A pound of lip up fatty / And an anecdote featuring / Mein Kampf / / . . . / / I joined the school of quietude / & ended up with a beard, / Scones, towelling, and the flying day fixed. / Jeremy we could have done worse.” Smashing.
Stephen Collis | Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism | ELS Editions | 2006
Put it amongst a select bunch: Zukofsky’s Bottom, Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, Howe’s own My Emily Dickinson, Williams’s In the American Grain, H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, Pound’s Spirit of Romance, and Duncan’s H.D. Book—all “poets’ attempts to write their response to other poets,” all “Janus-faced works—part exegesis, part original expression,” all “singularities”—works writ in a mode of what Collis calls “anarcho-scholasticism,” dabblers and enthusiasts working the archival holes, bridging the rifts. Such writing a kind of writing into the archive, the “world poem,” writing against the archive’s regulated keepers.
Howe, in “Melville’s Marginalia”: “I thought one way to write about a loved author would be to follow what trail he followed through words of others.” Eliding itinerancy (Howe: “I cling to you with all my divided attention. Itinerantly.”) and name dispersal (Collis: “If identity is fixed order can be imposed. Resistance to singleness is a resistance to the enclosure of capital and empire.”) Collis’s terrific phrase: “scattering identity to the four corners of the page”: “We are traveling as relations through words of others to the lost origins of our other selves.”
Collis, on the nefarious “reach” of notions of “enclosure and privatization” of the commons: “To shut up speech. To shut up documents in archive’s exclusion. To shut up land so that it many be ‘improved’ and become profitable. To shut up definition in dictionary versions.”
Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton (Hammertown Book 2) | New Star Books | 2008
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.
. . . where rising fuel costs
temporarily trump
the fear of creosote & coalsmoke
to re-enable the choking fogs
that had disappeared
with the industrial base—
that all of this is safely tracked
from space, indeed,
to be lost is ultimately
economic, those people
under the rubble assumed
their cell phones
would save them, an island
held in place
with mirrors, they
can hear you, they
can see you, they
just can’t help you.
Trevor Joyce | What’s in Store | The Gig / New Writers’ Press | 2007
Reading around in its strange and bold and marvelous pieces, pieces that seemingly sprout out of nowhere, that exhibit incredible variety, that often enough seem spoke by ancient voices up out of the boggy penetrable earth, I think how what one cannot speak of, one calls genius, or quotes too lengthily. Joyce’s range is phenomenal. The book opens with a lovely set of tiny things, the “Folk Songs from the Finno-Ugric and Turkic Languages,” work’d up out some rudimentary literal versions. Here’s one:
A birch tree
bends on the hill.
For a plough, girls chop
a handle.
That moustache,
is it your first?
For caps, girls braid
fine tassels.
Which seems to catch that particular moment of adolescence when the girls’re outstripping the boys and there’s a combo of taunting and impatience and self-reliance going on amongst them. Too, Joyce reworks a series he calls “Love Songs from a Dead Tongue,” out of fifteenth c. (and earlier) Irish originals, and a series of “some of the surviving poems by Juan Chi (pinyin Ruan Ji, 210-263).” The upshot of the threading through of translations and versions is a splendid estrangedness, where the alien flips into customary, and one’s happiest reading the song of a horse:
How happy the life of a horse! Hey!
Till the end when they mock him
and whip him and kick him,
and for Purgatory sell him to gypsies.
Thirty years I served one man,
hauled his harness like a colt,
now I’m old I’m down and done for,
corn-stalks hurt my gums.
Smiths and farriers rot in hell!
Your tackle was the death of me,
they broke my head, they stole my skin,
now sheep dogs sniff my meat.
Caroline Knox | Quaker Guns | Wave | 2008
The temptation to go off into completely giddy self-effacery and nonsense stands down against deeply-soak’d-in and censorious habit (in the case of most of us): Caroline Knox defeats just that with moments of vocalic sprezzatura shying into ur-language, or post-speech, or pre-speech. I suspect that she’ll eventually become a marker of the “era”—she is consistently restless, inventive, unalign’d. Two pieces in a contrapuntal (bilingual) face-off:
DREYKEN
Dreyken fabe, wer ingete dreyken
(dor droy rittavittastee orn canar).
Preb. Refen ingete inget. Preb.
Santona nofa Xeroc;
Ter quittz mivin movip.
Morm faria greel Florida
faria greel pandeck.
BATHROBES
We took our bathrobes ad stuck them in the washer.
(Ritta put hers in the blue laundry machine.)
I said, “Refen ingete inget.”
Nocturnes are hard to Xerox;
birds follow the glare of water.
We prepare tax returns for people in Florida,
People in Florida whom we have never met.
(Translated by the author and Carline Knox)
Carl Martin | Rogue Hemlocks | Fence Books | 2008
My immediate sense is that Martin’s earlier work (Genii Over Salzburg) owes less to Ashbery: immoderate, sui generis, awe-inducing. No matter: there’s plenty of heart-stopping mischief here, effects identifiably Martin’s own. “White Cargo”:
As the adverse account shoos flies
there are still remnants of the dynastic fan.
Golf balls are tinder in the muzzle of art.
Camels like glittering ashtrays in the barber’s mirror
sink to their knees with domino teeth:
an advert for a fleshy deck of cards. Only
a straight razor separates hell from marriage.
And if camels are marriageable they adorn
the stern of this ancient bateau-citerne: The captain
smiling like a mule. How fitting for the French coast!
Noël, old boy, pass the oxygen—would you?
The highly palpable sense that that is verging on a logical (paraphraseable) sense—is not “merely” surreal—puts it into the territory of the uncanny. (Surrealism rarely does so: in the hands of most of its adherents it becomes tedious, mechanical, predictably “zany.”) Look how he rewrites Stevens, comes out looking like the King of the Ghosts!
NO SOP, NO POSSUM, NO JIVE
We must pit ourselves brutally,
testing the tar and pitch
of immaculate forefathers. Ditto, etc.
X-temporizing, scrounging luxuriously
as we climb intricate cobs, nipples
and rosy vellums inscribed with an oriole.
I see no further than this, though
I’ve been lower, into hell’s orifice;
popped back in like a rabbit!
Chris Martin | American Music | Copper Canyon Press | 2007
Martin writes: “Words lead double lives: anonymously adrift and tethered to authorship,” admits to how “One of the things that opened the world of American Music to me was plagiarism, ” and provides a splendidly variously listing of some of the “voices in the chorus.” In spite of (or because of) the approach, Martin’s voice is remarkably present, sardonic, toying, sheepish, mischievous, full of exceeding wonder—indeed, the “chorus” barely impinges at all. The poems are models of velocity and containment—they fly short-linedly down the page, they scoop together a whole range of things, worlds of simultaneity.
. . . the way the boy
Impatiently cultivates
His inviolate sheen, combing
The grates with his eyes, his fists
Hidden but surely
Balled, not often am I
Prepared for violence, though I find it
Natural, in me as in
The world, and it remains
Revolting, the brief
Desire to trample something
Living, loving certain
Registers of collapse, tiny pockets
Bereft of grief, it reminds me how Henry
Miller spent three years
Inside a slide
Trombone and I have
Found myself too
Sane, and sullen, and suddenly
I feel just like Bonnie
Raitt on the cover of Streetlights
Her mouth unself-consciously
Open, a little
Question in her
Eyes as if
To say, “I am so
Full of this . . .
This . . . what is this?”
Alessandro Porco | Augustine in Carthage and Other Poems | ECW | 2008
At bottom, a sense of language in excess, skittering (gleefully) out of control, uncontainable, dictating its own terms: manhandling its handler, mocking, fun. Porco’s work isn’t all so neologistically “ripe” as “Tugnutt” is—though the beasts Lewis Carroll (“winkel and wame” bastard son of “gimble in the wabe”), John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, and James Joyce himself do hold heavy sway.
In Boschland
did Tugnutt knock nock,
and in hogeye bacchi
winkel and wame
the quimwig quimbush;
fuzzymuzzy yawns
of the city, world-wary—
too, too much so
to ginch, zither or futz
with any impression of dee-
light: jutsum just some,
I would weary, bid
thingamy, and good-blite!
[. . .]
Down
whelk zouzoune,
the Musée des Poontenanny
schmoya of Goya fl-
unked by
gammon of Lautreamont and
Matisse mapatasi,
twat blivvets—the like
of which dollup off cooch rides
whipped by gimcracks
oosy-doosy
Yum-yum, Pum-pum,
Spadger, and Stinkpot streets.
Elisabeth Workman | Opolis | tÿpøgrafika / Dusie Kollektiv 2007
There’s something otherworldly about it: thinnish canary-yellow paper, imprint’d in green inks, covers of identical stock—it’s audaciously flimsy, an honest pamphlet and shot through (accompanying each of the twenty-six prose-looking texts) with photographs, architectural, signage, Arabic, a Michelangelo David against a brick wall, minaret silhouettes, a Bush-vampire fanging Lady Liberty, pines, debris, print’d every which way, and bleeding spectacular ghost images “behind” each piece. Graphic work and images by Erik Brandt. An slippery (hid) alphabetical scheme to the doings, the pieces chameleon’d, one’s focus going in and out in the reading, emphases shifting. Here’s “Notion of Arts as Frivolity” (01:14):
mercenary, maverick, or missionary—one of the three. Apparently, aside from the alcoholic, oil-eyed narcissist who hasn’t left the sealed villa in three weeks, you should submit to classification. Live on the street with a concrete-slab vista, among amiable guards you always make a point of waving to and the mechanical gushes of water over plastic rocks, marking the entrance. Live as a number under the name, most likely a neologism of capitalist & eastern ideals. There’s the over-chlorinated pool and the water that induces balding. Live a refrigerated existence. On the other side of the walls, the nature of the shifting desert, snakes, and the yellow school bus full of indentured navvies lurk. The nefarious cranking and tapping of industrial machinery define nocturnal white noise. You find yourself wanting to complain about local ways though you’re not really certain how much is local or how much you’ve become a non sequitur
Everywhere in Workman’s piece is uncertainty, failure, blockage, threat. Opolis seems wholly and profoundly of its era (an “era” partially defined by statements like Workman’s “heaven is as hell is a hoax I decide so I make up multiple eras all at once and so overwhelming one wants to explode out of sheer inherited longing”). The unnamed global city consciousness-miasma we imperialists’ve inherited (made) versus the longing for elsewhere. Workman, in a lovely line (there are many): “we dream omnisciently of there, which oscillates between never and now, operatic and open-mouthed.”
C. D. Wright | Rising, Falling, Hovering | Copper Canyon Press | 2008
A polis norteamericano in crisis, a citizen unmoor’d, a calling out (in two senses—for aid, to accuse). The center of the book is largely split between the terrific title poem and its “Cont.,” its continuation. Essentially a fractured (and gut-wrenching, and maddening) narrative of the immoral and illegal preemptive “excursion” into Iraq, it is itself punctuated by “to be cont.,” by contradictory reversals (“Not so; instead”), by doubts as to the efficacy of writing, period (“Nary a death arrested nor a hair of a harm averted / by any scrawny farrago of letters” and “This is no time for poetry”).
. . . And so I have come to want them—
them being, those people, the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania,
I can’t even bear to say their [expletive] monosyllabic surnames
for dread of it calling up their bland [expletive] faces; yet I have come
to want them, almost obsessively come to want them, to exist in this dread:
for the nondescript car to pull up and disgorge the uniformed men
with their generic words tapped out of their well-drilled heads;
for the blunted bodies of this couple to be riveted to this dread,
for their blunted minds to stick on this expectation as if driven into
their bones of the natural order upended—that their twins are dead. No,
that their twins are blessed to give of themselves so selflessly in this struggle
for our way of life as it is so correctly, so vulgarly called; though I do not want
them to actually receive this news to actually have the twins be dead,
nor for their eyes to be blacked out, nor their earthly functions
be stopped, nor their blood to quit flowing to their temporal lobes,
but I sincerely do want this couple this very couple, the current occupants,
to exist solely, wholly in this dread. Because we do.
An [expletive] lovely and fastidious apery of the lingual buncombe of war and its masters, the “current occupants.” Wright assuming the debased lingo of el otro lado (“the other side,” another recurring phrase) in an attempt to “get through”—though recognizing, too, that any addressee’ll see in “current occupants” a sign of junk mail, and likely toss it. No doubt “Rising, Falling, Hovering” is the most ambitious U.S. anti-war poem of the twenty-first century.
*
More John Latta here.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2010 – Marcella Durand
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George Albon | Empire Life | Littoral | 1998
“Mass resets interior.” Tight.
Kamau Brathwaite | SAVE COWPASTOR | www.tomraworth.com/wordpress
The complete archives of this Web site, spanning many years, are word-in-and-as-witness to CowPastor’s destruction.
Peter Culley | Hammertown | New Star | 2003
A double writing this, but within sevens, form springs beauty.
Emily Dickinson | Selected Letters | Harvard | 1986
There’s probably a better and fuller edition out there somewhere, and if not, there should be. All the same, life-changing.
Paul Foster Johnson | Refrains/Unworkings | Apostrophe | 2008
We may be “immoderate,” but this book says it beautifully moderately.
Rachel Levitsky | Neighbor | Ugly Duckling | 2009
This book illuminated the complex workings of my 30-unit tenement building within the larger political and social systems within which we exist.
Michèle Métail | La route de cinq pieds | Tarabuste | 2006
Another example of Métail’s innovating form around content around form (going way past Oulipo): in this case, a route through China in five-syllable form drawn from Chinese classical poetry.
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009
Bought at and devoured after her reading at the Poetry Project this spring. (And The Middle Room shortly thereafter.)
Charles Olson | Call Me Ismael | Johns Hopkins | 1997
Some necessary ecology to which I was way too long delayed.
Kristin Prevallet | [I, Afterlife] [Essay in Mourning Time] | Essay Press | 2007
Gets into, beautifully, the disconnects between land, life, death, action, “me” and “world.”
Karen Weiser | To Light Out | Ugly Duckling | 2009
Communiqués from the gorgeous static of growing things.
Honorable mentions: Lyx Ish’s essay in Avant-Gardening, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place; C.S. Giscombe’s Prairie Style; Maurice Maeterlinck and L.L. Langstroth’s books on bees; Kevin Varrone reading from passyunk lost at the Poetry Project (and now the book has finally arrived!).
More about Marcella Durand here. Her Attention Span for 2008, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 5, 2010 at 9:56 am
Posted in Attention Span 2010, Commented List
Tagged with C.S. Giscombe, Charles Olson, Emily Dickinson, George Albon, Jennifer Moxley, Kamau Brathwaite, Karen Weiser, Kristin Prevallet, L.L. Langstroth, Lyx Ish, Marcella Durand, Maurice Maeterlinck, Michèle Métail, Paul Foster Johnson, Peter Culley, Rachel Levitsky