Attention Span 2011 | Paul Stephens

Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. | Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing | Northwestern | 2011

For me this was the year of the conceptual, as the following titles indicate.

Craig Dworkin | The Perverse Library | Information as Material | 2010

Use with caution: if you’re a small press bibliophile, this book may do serious damage to your book budget. This could be the most compelling survey to date of Anglo-American small press poetry publishing since 1970. Even if you don’t necessarily have a specialized interest in knowing precisely what the Constrained Balks Press of Toronto was publishing in 2002, you’ll enjoy The Perverse Library’s truly rad(ical) introduction.

Simon Morris | Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head | Information as Material | 2010

Much more is going on here than may at first appear. Encountering GIJKH sent me into an all-night typing frenzy, during which I wrote a twelve page critical account of the book in relation to the complex textual and legal histories of On the Road. And you thought On the Road was just a bestselling novel about homosocial desire…

Rachel Haidu | The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964-1976 | MIT | 2010

Everyone I know is either overemployed or underemployed, which makes this overview particularly timely. Here you will find an institutional critique of the post-Fordist art economy to last a lifetime.

Tan Lin | Various Cumbersome but Ingenious Titles | Various Presses | 2007-2011

Tan Lin may be our greatest living bard of the infosphere. He is so prodigious and so multimediatic that it would inimical to his project to name a single title. Insomnia and the Aunt (in a handsome chapbook edition) might be the best point of entry for non-professionals, but the many offshoots of the Heath […] and Seven Controlled Vocabularies projects are all worth a skim. If you’re un(der)employed, you might want to download online versions available at lulu.com or at Aphasic Letters.

Rob Fitterman | Now We Are Friends | Truck Books | 2010

So are we going to migrate to Google+? After already having migrated from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook? The coda in particular is an important contribution to the ongoing legacy of creep lit.

W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, eds. | Critical Terms for Media Studies | Chicago | 2010

Scholars and non-scholars alike will find this a compelling survey of new media. Don’t be deceived by the prosaic title: this is really a collection of deeply informative essays on all aspects of contemporary new media studies.

Marcus Boon | In Praise of Copying | Harvard | 2010

It’s difficult to keep up with the reams of new criticism devoted to copyright in relation to literature and the arts (Paul K. St. Amour’s exceptional Modernism and Copyright deserves special mention in this category). Boon tackles “the madness of modern, capitalist framings of property” head on. You can procure a free online copy at the Harvard University Press web site (which will look better than the versions you’ll find on library.nu or AAAAARG.org).

Philip E. Aarons and Andrew Roth, eds. | In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 | JRP Ringier | 2010 

Literary journals could learn a lot from artists’ journals. This sumptuous collection will make your coffee table proud, as well as provide countless hours of delight and instruction.

M. NourbeSe Philip | Zong! | Wesleyan | 2008

This title briefly went out of print and jumped in price on Amazon, but fortunately it’s been reissued as an affordable paperback. No brief summary will do much to prepare you for this complex multi-generic work, which demonstrates how compelling the new conceptual/archival/procedural poetries can be in terms of content as well as form.

Ian Hamilton Finlay | Selections | California | 2011

Eagerly anticipated. Long overdue. In the meantime, I’m making due with the amazing (but out of print and expensive enough to merit inclusion in the Perverse Library) Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (MIT 1992).

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Paul Stephens‘s recent critical writing has appeared in Social Text, Rethinking Marxism, Open Letter and Postmodern Culture. He has just completed a book manuscript titled The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing. He lives in New York.

Stephens’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Laura Carter

In alphabetical order:

Robert Fitterman | Now We Are Friends | Truck | 2010

“The resulting portrait has almost a Cubist diffraction, with some features exaggerated while others go under-emphasized or completely disappear. But such portraits are also over-complete, exceeding the boundaries of momentary self-presentation in a way that can be uncomfortable: high school photos are posted and tagged, those drawings you’d forgotten on DeviantART resurface.”—from editor’s note.

A striking mirror.

Noah Eli Gordon | The Source: an investigation in constrained bibliomancy and ambient research | Futurepoem | 2011

“And now I will show you how it happened to be in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at that time knew nothing. They were like well managed horses, and could tell when to stop or turn. They said things we felt were true, things like: ‘When I came to you out of all that dust and heat and toil, I positively smelt violets.’ They kept up a constant fire of introducing each other. They thought every instrument would perform its work best if it were made to serve not many purposes but one. It was out of this that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for those values.”

A striking mirror, with an honest undertone that tells us what the problems are, how they are antithetical to what may go by truth.

Kirsten Kaschock | A Beautiful Name for a Girl | Ahsahta | 2011

“Airplanes are moveable Babels, and I
know not to reach that way for God, up—
that a god
is a small thing and comes by being quiet.”

The truth of what Kirsten says, the unreliability of birdsong, the irony that falls in and becomes something other than a way of seeing the opposite—beautiful, poignant, mature.

Jacques Lacan, trans. Bruce Fink | On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (Book XX: Encore 1972-1973) | Norton | 1998

“‘Usufruct’ means that you can enjoy (jouir de) your means, but must not waste them. When you have the usufruct of an inheritance, you can enjoy the inheritance (en jouir) as long as you don’t use up too much of it. That is clearly the essence of law—to divide, distribute, or reattribute everything that counts as jouissance.”

A necessary text, one I took a course on in graduate school. Also noted is Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose’s commentary on the seminar, among other readings, Bruce Fink’s included.

Sabrina Orah Mark | The Babies | Saturnalia | 2004

“Can you describe for me Walter B. after the desertion?
Too much architecture, not enough rain.
How do you recognize Walter B. in their abandoned homes?
He is the only one, among drifts of white hair, who knows several things at once.
Why, at the end of the Goat Song, does Walter B. stop feeding the babies?
At the end of the Goat Song, it becomes impossible to grow this old.”

A beautiful book, and one can’t help but wonder about Walter B.[enjamin?’s] appearance. Clearly, we are no longer truly modern.

Ange Mlinko | Starred Wire | Coffee House | 2005

“The syrup’s frozen on the north side.
The bear is not just as scared of us.
Insert the cherries in the earth,
read the manual for escapes,
sunscreen under the pillow,
rain scratching glasses.
Between Sir William Harvey and John Dewey the circulation of books.”

This book is one I have continually returned to since its release several years ago.

Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman | Notes on Conceptualisms | Ugly Duckling | 2009

“Radical mimesis is original sin.”

A primer.

Vanessa Place | Only Yahweh | Ood Press | 2011

“if I’m any judge of the Almighty, the Lord God has seen fit in His Infinite to keep a steady supply of bricks and bracks on Hand, so design, goddishly, of bullfights and god-temples, I forgot gods pare only their nails and forced my creations to contort around what should instead of what would, isn’t it that degree of unfathomability which keeps us smacking of the divine, the dew of divine authority, a future conditional, Lord knows”

Poet be like Vanessa Place.

Mathew Timmons | The New Poetics | Les Figues Press | 2010

“Where are we with the New Birds?”

Poets on Twitter—watch out. Where are we, again?

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Laura Carter lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is recommencing studies toward a PhD in English and literary studies. She earned her M.F.A. in 2007, also in Atlanta. Carter’s Attention Span for 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2009 – K. Silem Mohammad

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge Books | 2008

Like Davies’ earlier Comp, this is structurally little more than a series of sound bites strung together as “verse.” Yet also like Comp, it crackles with Ecclesiastical scorn and verve. The conscious and subconscious minds are sitting together on a sofa trying to relate the big game to the latest CSPAN feed of senate hearings, and these broadcasts interrupt them.

Craig Dworkin | Parse | Atelos | 2008

Page after page of … parsing. And the text that is parsed (an 1874 grammar manual by Edwin A. Abbott) is itself a treatise on parsing. One might think that this is a perfect example of a “conceptualist” book that asks merely to be thought about rather than read, and for some people that is probably the more attractive option. But those people will miss the metagrammatical massage that prods the reader’s brain into little shudders (not quite paroxysms) of attentiveness, of alertness, of being-in-poetry.

Robert Fitterman | Rob the Plagiarist | Roof Books | 2009

Contains the already-classic “This Window Makes Me Feel,” as well as other manipulations of public discourse and commercial sense-input. Fitterman plays the part of a Benjaminian flaneur, but one as he might exist in the world of John Carpenter’s They Live—a flaneur who is not wearing those special glasses that let you see the aliens and the capitalist dystopia they have erected for what they are.

Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place | Notes on Conceptualisms | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2009

Shallow art-theory rehash or stimulating commentary on contemporary poetics? Both? Oh, it couldn’t be both. Admit it: for a week or two, you too were reading this little blue booklet and actually trying to make sense of the proposition that conceptual writing is allegorical writing.

K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge Books | 2009

A deftly casual versish essay on different stages of social ambience (from “droll” to “malignant”). Its timbre is perfectly captured in the title pun: either a bustling public nexus, or a fatal condition of subverbal singing-along. Graham hits a perfect balance of easygoing “girlishness” and sardonic bemusement.

Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2009

There should be a periodic announcement made over loudspeakers on the main streets of major cities: Citizens! Why do so many of you seem to have neglected to notice that Kevin Killian is one of our finest poets? Because you were too busy being impressed by his fiction? No excuse. He is also (this is me now, not the loudspeaker) one of the few poets writing today who can still do transmissive (e.g., Spicerian) lyric convincingly. Heartbreakingly.

David Larsen | Names of the Lion | Atticus/Finch 2009

Go find a book that is either a more beautiful physical object or a more stunning instance of creative scholarship. Larsen’s loving translation of Ibn Khalawayh’s treatise (with commentary) should be written up in every arts and literature review section of every major newspaper and magazine worldwide as a major publishing event. Mindbogglingly, this unbearably gorgeous Atticus/Finch “chapbook” (too humble a word) costs only $10.

Chris Nealon | Plummet | Edge Books | 2009

It’s hard to think, in the world of contemporary poetry, of very many books that spawn a popular (I mean, popular among other poets, anyway) catch phrase within what seems like mere moments of their publication. I wouldn’t be surprised to see “I am not gay, I am from the future!” on T-shirts and bumper stickers soon. The obvious stylistic reference point for Nealon’s “voice” is O’Hara, but this is far from being derivative nth-generation New York School; it’s absolutely modern in all the right ways.

Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge Books | 2009

Nichols asks early in this book, “can a woman compete with the city”? The question is answered in the pages that follow by a flurry of winged images and phrases like paper scraps from a shredded diary flying down busy streets, between skyscrapers, in and out of shops and offices and homes. Nichols renders both the sensually vivid and mundanely bureaucratic details of everyday life with a lyric attentiveness that constantly places the “nucleus of the individual / in productive tension with the collective expanse of white.”

Jordan Scott | Blert | Coach House Books | 2008

The author, a chronic stutterer, set out deliberately to write poetry that would be hard for him to read aloud. A pretty rudimentary concept, but the resulting verbal bumper car ride taps into essential currents of recent prosodic weather patterns. Rubbery, blubbery, heap big unheimlich fun.

Stephanie Young | Picture Palace | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2009

Sometimes I forget that Stephanie Young is not a phenomenally famous pop-soul diva. I really don’t have words to describe the complex and passionate effects her work produces. Tonally and formally, it’s all over the map, and it makes the map look fabulous. Maybe my favorite move of hers (among the many she routinely busts) is her talent for the abrupt declaration of a devastating, obvious fact, such as her observation that “of course the revolution won’t be televised! Not because the most important things don’t appear on television but because the revolution will knock out electrical plants and the TV itself will collapse under the collapsing house.”

More K. Silem Mohammad here.

Attention Span 2009 – Melanie Neilson

Stacy Doris | Cheerleader’s Guide to the World | Roof Books | 2006

Classic texts over the top Mayan, Tibetan, New Jerseyan for the reader-gamer. Also enjoyed re-reading Doris’ Knot, Conference, and Paramour recently.

Manny Farber | Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies | Da Capo Press | 1998

“this exciting shake-up movie is made up in progressive segments, each one having a different stylistic format, from fixed camera close-up of a comic-porno episode (‘…and then she sat in a saucer of milk…’) through the very Hawkslike eye-level dollying past a bumper- to-bumper tie-up on the highway…”

Rob Fitterman | Rob the Plagiarist | Roof Books | 2009

Brilliant. Conceptual Mardi Gras and the big hijack extraordinaire.

Benjamin Friedlander | American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and Dickinson | Blog |  2009

Ben’s findings, archiving and overflow “on their way to a book” give immense reading pleasure. I’m staying tuned to read what BF has to say on how keyword searching has changed our relationship to literature, redefining “canonicity.”

Nada Gordon | Folly | Roof | 2007

I laughed, I cried, I came, I went, I like it, I like it, I like it.

Jane Grigson | Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book | Antheneum | 1982

Apple strudel to watermelon sherbet, recipes plain and fancy for forty-six different fruits. Rediscovered and reunioned with this book in June, on blueberry stained pages is a favorite berry pie recipe (adapted from Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz’s Mango Pie), poetry of lowbush and highbush blueberries.

Jessica Grim | Vexed | Online from ubu editions since 2002; recently published in print by BlazeVox | 2009

Brian Kim Stefans: “sensual reverie with documentary relevance. The musicality of Grim’s poems is understated, the words delicately gathered, such that the poems occasionally seem given over to indeterminacy and chance, but in fact each one has a formal perfection that illustrates an underlying lyrical integrity.” Amen.

Todd MacCarthy | Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood | Grove Press | 1997

The engineer as poet. Started reading this after weeks of watching HH pictures with my sons in our family Movie Club. McCarthy focuses with great and admirable detail on the films. Fresh discussions of overlapping dialogue in the romantic comedies though ultimately I enjoyed Joseph McBride’s Hawks on Hawks more.

John Ruskin | The Poetry of Architecture | Wily and Sons | 1873

“Shelley has caught the feeling finely the house is penetrated to its corners by the insolence of the day”. More reading about “negative space” this time in the chapter about Giotto and his works in Padua.

Kim Rosenfield | re: evolution, with an introduction by Sianne Ngai | Les Figues | 2008

There will be repercussions after reading this book. I really like the noirish spawning and smooth switcherooing in technique and style. Tabula rasa/Population cage/Withstanding the wear and tear of modern “tempos”/Natural heredity of the body/Inheriting the wisdom/Of people who’ve never met in the first place.

More Melanie Neilson here.