Attention Span 2011 | Joshua Clover

Bruno Bosteels | The Actuality of Communism | Verso | 2011

A fantastically useful orientation guide for the recent boom in political theory: Ranciere, Moreiras, Badiou, Zizek, various others. I can’t say I share the basic supposition, regarding the virtue of formalizations of concepts which attend the non-abstract problem of state form. But I was grateful to understand a bunch of stuff much better after reading.

Silvia Federici | Caliban and the Witch | Autonomedia | 2004

We read this book in reading group in the summer; I was interested to discover that many others’ experiences of it were quite different from mine. Someone took it as a defense of witchiness, rather than a history of how the conjured threat of feminine dark magic served as pretext to dispossess and discipline women. Well okay. But I have been pretty obsessed with revisiting the Italian Marxist feminists; while it seems to me more and more that their male comrades (Negri, Virno, Marazzi) got really crucial things wrong, they themselves were making some of the great breakthroughs of the era, ones that are with us more than ever, I think.

Jean-Marie Gleize | Tarnac, un acte préparatoire | Seuil | 2011

What poetry should be doing, if one is willing to submit to the ambiguous discipline of the word “should.”

David Harvey | Enigma of Capital | Oxford | 2010

Basically a primer version of the longer and more ambitious Limits to Capital, attempting to recast it along the lines of his Brief Introduction to Neoliberalism. And indeed it is lucid, clear, systematic, and persuasive: a nice reminder that spending decades thinking about a problem set can lead to refinement and immediacy of ideas rather than the opposite. In that sense it’s like a refutation of the idea of “Late Style.” But actually I miss the grander version: in the condensation and reader-friendliness of this account, certain explanations of causality within the dynamic of capital become too clear, too one-directional, less dialectical, and even sometimes mistaken. Of little matter. The best recent guide to the most complex man-made object in the word, endlessly useful, and with luck it will lead readers to the fuller and more frustratingly suspended—and finally more adept—versions.

Uyen Hua | a / s / l (age / sex / location) | ingirumimusnocteetsonsumimurigni | 2011

Tao Lin with a soul, albeit a fascinating and strange one, provisionally new.

Ke$ha | Animal | RCA | 2010

Vomiting up tequila and glitter.

Christopher Nealon | The Matter of Capital | Harvard | 2011

It is a delight to watch this book become influential, not because it deserves it—it does—but because it is clearly advancing the conversation.

Pasolini | In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology | City Lights | 2010

Pasolini! who had to leave the communist party to be a better communist! Reading this I was reminded of “On A Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” and how we tend to think of that essay as concerning how communism ruined, wasted, and killed its blindingly beautiful writers—until we revisit the essay, and rediscover that the story it tells of Mayakovsky unfolds his misery arising from the failure of the revolution to be communist enough, the ways that it stopped short, blunted itself, made concessions, quit the promise of its total radicality. Also, a couple of the Pasolini poems are translated by Jonathan Richman, which is just the oddest thing in the world. Trying to parse the subterranean connection between the atmospheres of Friulia and the summer air of Route 128 when it’s late an night is a real mindfuck.

Arthur Rimbaud trans. John Ashbery | Illuminations | Farrar | 2011

I haven’t read this yet but I’m sure it’s great.

McKenzie Wark | The Beach Beneath the Street | Verso | 2011

There is some sense now that histories of the Situationist International are like Harry Potter fanfic; the main impulse is to sustain the imagined experience of life in that bohemian Hogwarts of the group’s milieu in a neighborhood or two in mid-century Paris. The vital difference is that there is a self-reflexive claim here about what the imagination might be for, other than self-sustaining profitability.

Ellen Willis | Out of the Vinyl Deeps | Minnesota | 2010

“Willis’s music writing was clear and direct, without gamesmanship, but never one-dimensional. No one had previously captured the nuanced double motion in which rock could generate untold pleasures, presentiments of freedom and equality and unfettered sexuality—but could never escape the gravity of the exclusions and inequities and unacknowledged labor on which it depended. This dialectical conception of the world and its workings can be as every bit as revolutionary as rock, the last great invention of the postwar boom.”

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Joshua Clover is a Professor of English Literature at University of California Davis. He is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled The Epic of Capital, bringing together the study of poetry with contemporary political economy, and finishing a poetry collection called Tranche/Syntagma.

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

Attention Span 2011 | Stacy Szymaszek

Etel Adnan | The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay | dOCUMENTA (13) | Hatje Cantz | 2011

Pier Paolo Pasolini, trans. Norman MacAfee & Craig Owens | “Observations on the Long Take” | October 13 | 1980

Robert Kelly | Uncertainties | Station Hill | 2011

George Albon | Ryman Room | Albion | 2011

Anne Waldman | The Iovis Trilogy | Coffee House | 2011

Roberto Bolano | Antwerp | New Directions | 2010

Gail Scott | The Obituary | Coach House | 2010

Donna J. Haraway | When Species Meet | U of Minnesota P | 2008

Edric Mesmer, ed. | Yellowfield Issues 1 & 2 

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Stacy Szymaszek is Artistic Director at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. She is the author of Emptied of All Ships and Hyperglossia (both with Litmus Press). She is the editor of Gam, coeditor of Instance Press, and was one of the editors of the “Queering Language” issue of EOAGH.

Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Jennifer Scappettone

Leslie Scalapino | The Dihedrons Gazelle Dihedrals Zoom | ms developed out of sound-based routes through a new dictionary; video of reading by Konrad Steiner available here | 2010

“[T]heir whole as bodies in the underground petroleum…holes spurting here and there, and the sky turned indigo, as did the ocean, now petroleum.”

As recorded on 2/14/10. Enough said. Leslie, we miss you.

Etel Adnan | The Arab Apocalypse (reprinted with a foreword by Jalal Toufic) | Post-Apollo | 2007

The illegible substance of the language of childhood persists through the blasts of civil war. To be read alongside “To Write in a Foreign Language,” available here.

Tonya Foster | mss in progress including “A Swarm of Bees in High Court” (forthcoming from Belladonna/Futurepoem in 2010), “Monkey Talk,” and “A Mathematics of Chaos: Pay Attention to Where You At/From” | extracts can be heard here | ongoing/forthcoming

“Geography can be transformative—the way a bullet to the body can be transformed.”

Edouard Glissant, trans. Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël) | Poetic Intention | Nightboat | 2010

“Whence, for the individual, this simple obligation: to open and to ravish the body of knowledge.”

“The work of a poet appears…derisory: it is only ever the foam of that ocean from which he wants to extract a cathedral, a definite architecture.”

“Yes: we are each in this drama the overseas of others.”

I could go on. But that would be to abstract tracts of a text so urgent in contextual detail, or what Glissant calls (& Stephens translates as) the “thrashed truth of one’s materiality.” This book, published as L’intention poétique in 1969, needs to change the way “we” understand modernism, the sixties, postwar theory, etc.

Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: A Project for Future Children | Kelsey St. | 2009

Because it’s the latest which is bound, but everything, and latest on color. See also “Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?” and the posts preceding her choice to defect from the now defunct Harriet. On reading: “I read in order to be a writer in the time I am in, which is a closed time. I read to open myself to time, which is the time that opens in turn to writing. I read to flee taut death; to embrace wet or sinking deaths instead.”

Henri Meschonnic, trans. Lisa Robertson & Avra Spector | “The Rhythm Manifesto” | ms, they tell me it’s available here | 2010

“Against all poeticizations, I say there is a poem only if a shape of life transforms a shape of language and if reciprocally a shape of language transforms a shape of life. I say that it is only in this way that poetry, as the activity of poems, can live in society, can do what only a poem can do for people who, without poems, wouldn’t even realize that they were undoing their subjectivity and their historicity to become nothing other than products in the market of ideas, the market of feelings, and the market of manners.” Much-needed antidote to what’s modish—in poetry, I mean. Feeding a steadily-becoming-obsession of mine with a focus on rhythm and meter in the postwar epos (early 1960s, against semiotics). Further resonance with Daria Fain & Robert Kocik’s Phoneme Choir, ongoing & described at http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/04/dance/choir-praxis.

Judd Morrissey | RC_AI | http://www.judisdaid.com/rcai.php | 2010

Text—recombinatory speakings out of Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice—as panorama, 380,000 pixels—or 422 feet—long. Ends with bubbly digital schmaltz, delightsome.

Pier Paolo Pasolini | La Ricotta | part of Ro.Go.Pa.G., & supplementary material on Criterion Collection edition of Mamma Roma | 1962

I searched for this film for over a decade and recovered it accidentally when permitting myself to watch Mamma Roma for the nth time. Stracci (“rags”) is enjoined to play Christ in a restaging of the Passion directed by a Pasolini figure played by Orson Welles. Couldn’t be more of a corrective to Gibson far before the fact; censored “for insulting the religion of the state,” so that he had to remove Welles’s final line, “dropping dead was his only means of revolution.” Hypercitational: poetry, philosophy, music, film, painting of others punctures the half-hour. At one point a tableau vivant of Rosso Fiorentino’s and Pontormo’s magisterially weird Depositions, typifying this short’s neorealist mannerism or mannerist neorealism.

M. Nourbese Philip | Zong! | Wesleyan | 2008

Hauntological, as Philip notes, ululating effort to identify, localize the murdered Africans reduced by the illogic of law to cargo aboard the Zong, at the apex of Enlightenment. Alters “reading”: drowns the eye. Taught following Kamau Brathwaite’s 2005 Wesleyan title Born to Slow Horses, which also insists that the Atlantic is alive and history—despite all other proclamations and appearances—undead.

Lauren Shufran | The Birds | self-published chapbook | 2010

Riddled with antient rid-’ems: “Prior to this tryst my debt was pretty damn van- / Illa; kinkless, even—like interject- / Ing damns between my speech to impound flavors, or / Jouncing into fountains up in Rome in / Simplex Latin:.…” Just received, still trying to divine the architectonics of this padded echo chamber. “Ery spoken word performance hankers for its pri- / Vate Melos to corroborate that Venuses / De Milo and Baghdadi artifacts can still / Be looted—I mean, disinhumed—from loci all / Entombed by massacres your gifted homeboys mount- / Ed.” Close kin to Brandon Brown’s amazing translations of Catullus, another one for my short-list: but where are they? Shelves are a chaos and I can’t find ‘em. The awkward encrustations of tempo in this work—the making, the deriving—rebuke the voiding of historicity that is such the rage at present. Taking a cue from Mallarmé via Meschonnic via Robertson/Spector: “to mysteriously work toward lateness or neverness.”

Emilio Villa, ed. Claudio Parmiggiani | Emilio Villa: poeta e scrittore | Edizioni Mazzotta | 2008

Catalog of a retrospective of poetry, criticism, and artworks surrounding this crucial but elusive-by-choice border-crosser. Includes some of the poet’s concrete and visual poems, multilingual texts, collaborations with artists such as Alberto Burri, translations from various ancients, and notes toward an etymological dictionary of Italian that would do away with “positivist linguistics” and the “Romance fervor” by plumbing the roots of words in the archaic zones of Mesopotamia, the Syro-Babylonian coasts, and the pre- and protohistoric Mediterranean. So much food for thought and further work.

More Jennifer Scappettone here. Her Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Sarah Riggs

I realize that this is a bit chatty, laced with biography and autobiography—I’m trying to find my way back into a critical reviewer mode I learned long ago, but that may be gone for good . . . well, no apologies, here are some philosophy, novels, along with of course poetry—that’s always been the trio, in intersection film and visual arts—and I see here, a near-decade of living also in and around French. As an aside, It would be nice also to review the wilderness, I should like to give a report on Jenny Lake in Wyoming.

Julia Strachey |  Cheerful Weather for the Wedding |  Hogarth |  1932

Lytton Strachey’s niece wrote this novel, and it’s brilliant in the way that Douglas Sirk films are, bitingly ironic in the brightest most vivid of British aristocratic settings. I never would have read it with such a title, but that I found it on my bedside table, simply because Keith Waldrop mentioned it to Jacques Roubaud who mentioned it to Marie Anne Guérin who mentioned it to Omar Berrada, who left it on that table. Apparently that’s more or less all she wrote. Dommage.

Gemma Corradi Fiumara | The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening | Routledge | 1990

Basically the notion, repeated in infinite ways, in an Italian-turned-English philosophic density and delicatesse is this:  the west does not listen, we speak. And since the west is becoming everywhere, it’s getting very noisy. I loved listening to this repeated, the philosopher’s form of the Zen embrace of silence. And further the possibility of the profundity of listening as the other side of how to live, would that we receive it.

Virginia Woolf, trans. Anne Wicke |  Au Phare |  Stock | 2009

Reputedly an excellent new translation of To the Lighthouse (1927), and since I’ve read English versions of it for the last many summers running, and accidentally forgot it during the lighthouse holiday this time, had the idea to try it in French. The movement of the mind across, and in, and through landscapes & people is what’s been nudging me toward making a film poem based on two novels—this one and The Waves, the latter of which was the basis for Vita Sackville-West comment that VW was a poet writing in prose. Woolf’s essays on “Cinema,” “On Being Ill,” and the portraits of her in Joan Russell Noble, Recollections of Virginia Woolf, William Morrow & Company, 1972, and the recent collection from the Smith College 2010 exposition are among the jewels sparkling the brightest in the Woolf/Bloomsbury constellation.

Peter Gizzi |  Artificial Heart |  Burning Deck | 1998

Sometimes you’re drowning in a surfeit of poetry books, where nothing speaks to you, it’s just words turning, twisting, far away from you, obligations to their authors whom are awaiting keen responses. This is where listening to actual poets, Penn Sound, or UBU web come in. I fell in love with a poem, and turned to its book. It’s not your conversion experience, it’s mine: all these years of atheism, I’m now . . . agnostic!  It’s sounds like nothing, but it’s a lot for a poetry book. The heart beats, without artifice sometimes, à force de l’entendre.

Liliane Giraudon |  La Poétesse | P.O.L. |  2009

Spunky, multi-styled book of French poetry, one of the best I’ve read lately. As usual with poetry, hard to tell you exactly what it’s about, here perhaps sequences of attitudes. This late-career Marseille-based poet is phenomenal, trying everything since surviving a cancer diagnosis a few years ago, including collaborations with film, photo, music, trying her hand at drawing, collage. She lives with two poets, Jean-Jacques Viton and Henri Deluy, a sort of Marseille-Paris threesome on the move, she’s putting the “esse”nce  back in poétry, now working with theater on a theme of Amazons.

Stéphane Bouquet |  Nos Amériques | Champ Vallon |  2010

Follows the brilliant Un Peuple which Cole Swensen and I are currently translating by an unusual dictation swapping technique that seems to be working at first go, and gives us the sense of being at times the amazing writer himself!!  Bouquet is mid-career, has worked in and around film, dance (with Mathilde Monnier), also for many years as a film critic, currently a translator of Creeley and Blackburn. Whereas A People acts like a poetic meditative encyclopedia of artists who reappear in astonishing mimetic bouquets—Keats, Whitman, Woolf, Pasolini, others—this latest follows his earlier five-part sequences, philosophic manqué sexy pondscapes and I’m still trying to figure out what.

Pier Paolo Pasolini | Tal cour di un frut | Actes Sud |  1953

The facing page French translations plus my glancing knowledge of Italian, and the Latinate roots of Friulian dialect, mean I get to invent my own English versions, which suits me better than reading English translations of these tiny, fiercely adolescent poems. For all that Pasolini did in lifetime—living as if there were no walls—what came first was writing poems in his maternal dialect, already a political act. I love how this was the movement that led into all the others.

Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Henry Weinfield  | Collected Poems | California | 1996

I chose this edition of Mallarmé for my NYU-in-France students because it was treated with such reverence back when I was getting my doctorate at U. of Michigan. It is a beautiful large-format book to finger and caress, with much beige margin space, the mellifluous, scant rhymes often impressive, sometimes disappointing, but the missing gutter, which is to say the choice to do facing page French-English instead of keeping the arrangement of words across the fold as Mallarmé had chosen, does not survive the translator’s apology in the postface. I am now on the lookout for other translations of Mallarmé.

Steve Evans | Attention Span | Third Factory  | 2003- 2010++

Curators who invent forms are creators, and the results are strangely shaped, semi-intangible at times. Examples include the Parisian salons of Stein, Mallarmé, the Hogarth Press of the Woolf’s, Burning Deck of the Waldrop’s, Naropa of mostly Anne Waldman of long late, Pierre Joris & other bloggers of zest and wide knowledge. America has always been a creative place for bringing people together, also because the distances are so great. Evans here finds a way to make the virtual distances great ones in the great sense.

Doris Lessing | Prisons We Choose to Live Inside | Anasi | 1991

Watch out, this book is dangerous. It suggests there’s no independent thinking. And that the information we need to live well we already have, but we ignore most of it. In the form of university lectures, but it makes you feel as if you’re in the room with her. Which is perhaps what made me want to go to London to meet her, though this hasn’t happened. It’s a book I feel at present I cannot live without.

More Sarah Riggs here. Back to directory.