Attention Span 2011 | Nathaniel Otting

Amanda Nadelberg | Bright Brave Phenomena | Coffee House | 2012

It’s been another Year of the Song Cave & it’s hard to believe that Nadelberg’s Building Castles in Spain, Getting Married, the second book in this peerless series, emerged in November 2009. The Age of the Song Cave is too long (it’s ongoing) to properly document here but it seems wrong not to sing some books: Amaranth Borsuk’s Tonal Saw (“tremble | fire | A | kind | of | fire” & “o | o | o | stumble” & “mmandm | Append”), Jane Gregory’s Some Books (“Instead of this book I set out to prove the birdnoise to the bird as my mind was in my office and my office was in my mind.”) Jared Stanley’s How The Desert Did Me In (“Uh! Principia, uh, I’ll think about it.”), Macgregor Card’s The Archers (“There there, manual severity / of being, bonus being, being general / general poet—”), and Graham Foust’s To Graham Foust on the Morning of His Fortieth Birthday (“Tiny hawks of poetry all over you, you sit at screens to punch a book into the world.”), Lisa Jarnot’s Amedillin Cooperative Nosegay (“odyssia’s very original boobs and the warm apt facts of john thaw”) to list just half the 2010 titles. Songcavewise, 2011 has been nonstop, too. To name only the first few (well, half): Andy Fitch’s solo Island, Rod Smith’s whatwow What’s the Deal, Peter Gizzi’s purplegreen Pinnochio’s Gnosis, Jennifer Moxley’s worldly Coastal, and Dana Ward’s doubleheader, The Squeakquel. When I visited the Cincinnati of The Squeakquel, I told Dana that my dad had left Erga kai hemerai in the car back in Kentucky, so he lent me Bill Luoma’s Works and Days (with a graceful note from Michael Gizzi: “Dear Mr. Ward”) which probably would have just been this list if I hadn’t left it in a car bound for Kentucky. One of the greater Song Caves, Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s Hesiod (“All song at once, isn’t this / like balancing the needs of friends?), a working over of Hesiod’s ‘Days,’ is as beautiful as the original chruson genos, the Golden Age. Like Luoma’s, O’Brien’s Works is as ageless as H’s. (And an H is not even an H.) All of this just to say that Amanda Nadelberg is our age’s poet in an Age of Poets. Awaiting Bright Brave Phenomena is like waiting for the things themselves to appear, brighter and braver and phenomenally more than ever before.

Brandon Brown | The Persians by Aeschylus | Displaced
Farrah Field & Jared White | Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Book Shop | Est. 2011

Bookstores need to get brighter and braver in the Post-Border’s Age and Brooklyn is the beacon. Jon Beacham’s Hermitage presses on, as The Brother in Elysium, on Bedford Ave. Around the bend, Book Thug Nation maintains a sill full of Book Thug (no relation). Above all, may Adam Tobin’s unbeatable Unnameable Books, in Prospect Heights, outlast all of us. Into the fray, enter poets Field and White, whose Berl’s, growing so well it may have a roof before Fall. When I made a pilgrimage to their table at the Brooklyn Flea, I found the only thing one can ask, exactly the one book I was looking for in the whole world. No small feat considering they display around 20 books on any given day. Tyrone Williams’ beautiful, everything-breaking elegy, Pink Tie (Hooke Press, 2011). Chapbooks to seek at Berl’s: Wondrous Things I Have Seen (Mitzvah Chaps, 2010) by Herodotus, jk by Brandon Brown (aka Aeschylus aka Catullus) & Preserving The Old Way Of Life (Factory Hollow Press, 2007) by Shannon Burns.

James Copeland | Fax II | self | 2011
CAConrad | MUGGED Into Poetry | Cannot Exist | 2011.

Copeland knows, and how, his Hölderlin. Does Coolidge (circa THIS 6) know his Copeland, writ large? Fax II exists, tho it doesn’t say so. Andy Gricevich’s Cannot Exist (Issue 7 has Conrad + Coletti, Copp, Hauser, Higdon, Larsen, Ward, &c) exists chapbooks! Besides Conrad’s: Roberto Harrison’s Bridge of the World, Sara Larsen’s The Hallucinated, Jess Mynes’ How’s the Cows. Conrad continues being amazing. His devastating reading of “MUGGED Into Poetry” (written after he was mugged en route to a reading by new CE co-editor Lewis Freedman) at the Supermachine 3 launch awed my mom. Cannot wait to get her A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012). Until then, I got her Heather Christle’s The Trees, The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011).

Tim Dlugos | A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos | Nightboat | 2011
Patrick James Dunagan | A Gustonbook | Post-Apollo Press | 2011

“It’s hard enough to find a parachute / in New York City, I remember thinking, / but finding one the right shade / of canary is the accomplishment / of the sort of citizen with whom / I wish to populate my life.” Dlugos’ “Parachute” (and Conrad’s devastating reading of it) is one of the saddest, and most beautiful, wakes, and makes me cry every time. And “G-9”, with its double wake, is the great elegy of our time. If Steve Carey was the news of 2010, and to me, too, he was, Dlugos is, to me (with Carey, still, too) the news of 2011. Except to me (tho nothing new is in print) the news was, and will be for some time, Peter Seaton, who would not have existed so suddenly and indispensably in my life without Craig Dworkin’s Eclipse. A Book + Craig Dworkin = Eclipse. (Dworkin’s own The Perverse Library, like all of his books, is to be owned.) I’ve only started settling into Dunagan’s There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn’t Talk: A Gustonbook, but already it’s taken its place next to Coolidge’s Guston’s Collected Writings (UC, 2010). Banes’ (copy of) Rodefer’s Four Lectures aside, “Writers paint, they don’t speak.”

Emily Pettit | Goat in the Snow | Birds, LLC | 2012
Ben Estes | Alan Felsenthal | The Song Cave | Sea Ranch

I’ve been in love with Pettit and her poems since I first read three of them, in the second issue of Seth Landman’s Invisible Ear, in October 2008. Her poetry workshop at Flying Object is a laboratory for making poets, and no wonder why: reading her poems taught me how to write. There are so many great Bens (at least ten), and Ben Estes, whose Cymbals (“Like a container for a flower inside of a flower.”) opened The Song Cave, is beyond exception. If Estes’ Lamp Like L’Map (Factory Hollow Press, 2009) is every indication, and it is, his The Strings of Walnetto Arrangements (Flowers and Cream, 2011) will be every sensation.  There are a few Alans, too, but only one this one. The ultimate symmetry would be an ultimate Song Cave; until then, the inaugural Sea Ranch, a split with his co-editor, is the best start imaginable. Long live, Song Cave, up with the Sea Ranch. P.S. Dos-a-dos are the new split 7”s. Flying Object paired James Copeland w/ Alex Phillips. I would like to hear Will Edmiston’s effing great Effie (3 Sad Tigers Press, 2011) b/w Lewis Freedman’s Freedman’s font-glossed Non-Symbolic Non Symbolic Non-Symbolic (for Catherine Malabou)

Renee Gladman | Event Factory | Dorothy, A Publishing Project | 2010
Rachel B. Glaser | Pee on Water | Publishing Genius | 2010

Prose by poets, does saying that make this not bending my own one-from-2011 rules? Whatever, Glaser is killing it in 2011: poems plenty, “Turid,” the soon famous “Ellen” story. Gladman, of course, is one of the Greats, and who wouldn’t have started a press, as Danielle Dutton (whose Sprawl, Siglio, 2010 fits right in here) did, to publish Gladman’s Ravicka trilogy? That the sequel, The Ravickians (Dorothy, 2011), is to be published on the same day as Gary Lutz’s Divorcer (Calamari Press, 2011) will make deciding what two books to read on that day very easy.

Attention Span 2011 | Jordan Stempleman

Joseph Bradshaw | In the Common Dream of George Oppen | Shearsman | 2011

This collection is the imagining of Oppen’s time away from poetry in Idaho, after Idaho. The listening hard to those poems that never came from that time: thoughts unwritten as poems; actual poems; talks with the Elephant Man and Jack Spicer; Bradshaw talks with Bradshaw himself through the form of the essay; a sifting through the silences found in biography and verse.

Rachel B. Glaser | Pee On Water |Publishing Genius | 2010

A collection of short stories that encourage you to sit on the wet lawn near a dog in a sweatshirt with your tongue in the mouth of someone becoming somewhat special, some history books open in your lap as you hold the Nintendo controller in both of your hands pressing a+b+a+b+a+b+a+b+select+start then, just before you start feeling “woozy” because of the smell of your somewhat special person’s deodorant, you begin to grow increasingly excited for tip off of game six of the NBA Finals.

Daniel Borzutzky | The Book of Interfering Bodies | Nightboat | 2011

This is what I wrote to Daniel in a FB exchange regarding this book: “One of the most important books of poetry I’ve been in for months. Rarely seen an American poet able to write about our U.S. underbelly without sacrificing the poem or giving way to lyric gloss. This book is so important and I’ll tell everyone who loves poetry and anyone who’s unsettled about what they sense is out there to read it slowly. I can’t help but to think this book is what Stevens had in mind when he talked of the imagination being grounded in reality. But of course, Stevens so often brought the world so far into his head, and you seem to acknowledge the messiness of the world. This book gets at the paralysis created by tragedy. You’ve done it.”

Michael Kimball | Us | Tyrant Books | 2011 (First Tyrant Books edition)

Oh, death. This is as available as language can get on the subject of watching the person you love get sick, get a little better, and then not. This is how slow I imagine letting go will be. Caring for as long as someone can care, then strained like never before to pull back.

Mathias Svalina | Destruction Myth | Cleveland State University Poetry Center | 2010

Mathias Svalina knows in the beginning both the imagination and the actual world began their forms together, roughly alike. Humor accumulated. Waste was accounted for. Sadness instructed, forgot, told stories and carefully pulled the lid off the ant farm before starting all over again, uncomplicated and aware as humanly possible.

Heather Christle | The Trees The Trees | Octopus | 2011

There is a workshop (not a poetry workshop, silly; the dusty, dirty alone kind) where all the things like airplanes and falsely blue skies are sent, so they can lose their dreadful statistics, so they now grow eggs that could pass for scissors, and celebrate birthdays that straighten out our lives, speaking up in a honest enough voice, without question.

Mark Leidner | Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me | Factory Hollow | 2011

Mark Leidner knows that what is most offensive is what we are capable of saying we are like, only to say were are not like that at all. These poems may prove O’Hara downright wrong about what he said concerning romantic comedies. These poems make me feel like I have nothing to lose – that I am stupid, that I am so so wasteful when I don’t return home from belt shopping with an image and an idea locked in a shootout with a room full of heartless people convinced they are falling in love.

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Jordan Stempleman’s most recent collections of poetry are Doubled Over (BlazeVOX Books, 2009) and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press, forthcoming). He co-edits The Continental Review, teaches writing and literature at the Kansas City Art Institute and curates A Common Sense Reading Series.

Stempleman’s Attention Span for 2010, 2007. Back to 2011 directory.