Posts Tagged ‘Robert Fitterman’
Attention Span 2010 – Anselm Berrigan
Thomas Bernhard, trans. Sophie Wilkins | Correction | Vintage | 1975
Thomas Bernhard, trans. Ewald Osers | Old Masters | Chicago | 1985
Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey | 2009
Allison Cobb | Green-Wood | Heretical Texts | 2010
Murat Nemet-Nejat | The Structure of Escape | Talisman | forthcoming
David Markson | Reader’s Block | Dalkey Archive | 1996
Ralph Waldo Emerson | “Experience” | various | 1844
Robert Bresson, trans. Jonathan Griffin | Notes on the Cinematographer | Green Integer | 1975
Eleni Stecopoulos | Armies of Compassion | Palm | 2010
Lorine Niedecker | “Wintergreen Ridge,” in Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy | California | 2002
Fred Moten | B Jenkins | Duke | 2010
Pattie McCarthy | Table Alphabetical of Hard Words | Apogee | 2010
Jean Fremon | The Paradoxes of Robert Ryman | Burning Square/Brooklyn Rail | 2008
Jess Mynes | Sky Brightly Picked | Skysill | 2009
Alice Notley | Reason & Other Women | Chax | 2010
Karen Weiser | To Light Out | Ugly Duckling | 2010
Stanislaw Lem | Fiasco | Harvest/HBJ | 1987
Ann Lauterbach | “Or To Begin Again” | Penguin | 2009
Robert Fitterman | “This Window Makes Me Feel,” in Rob the Plagiarist | Roof | 2009
More Anselm Berrigan here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2007, 2004. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2009 – Alli Warren
Suzanne Stein | Hole In Space | OMG! | 2009
The poet’s body as a public communication sculpture.
David Larsen, trans. | Names of the Lion | Atticus/Finch | 2009
A pleasure to finally see this text in print after David’s jaw-dropping performance at the Unitarian Center in San Francisco, 2007.
Robert Fitterman | Rob the Plagiarist | Roof Books | 2009
“Why listen to my gut when I could listen to thousands of guts?”
David Brazil & Sara Larsen, eds. | Try | 2008-2009
AKA “Try!” Together with Dodie & Kevin’s “Mirage Periodical,” this little stapled, xeroxed magazine owns the Bay Area. It’s an INDUSTRY.
Lisa Robertson | The Men: A Lyric Book | Book Thug | 2006
“The funny pathos of men – I salute this.” I keep returning to this little lyric book.
Brandon Brown | The Poems Of Gaius Valerius Catullus 1-60 | Unpublished | 2009
Catullus is envious.
Abner Jay | One Man Band | Subliminal Sounds | 2003
Jay traveled around the South in a mobile home and performed as the (self-described) “last working Southern black minstrel.” Hilarious and heartbreaking.
Stephen Rodefer | Four Lectures | The Figures | 1981
News to me. Killed me. Continues to kill me.
Anne Boyer | Art Is War | Mitzvah Chaps | 2008
A new world treatise. Includes the smash hit “Difficult Ways to Publish Poetry.”
Bill Luoma | When the Pathogenic Wind Comes | Unpublished
The looping–“with crooked spring and great pouring”–is trance-making.
John Cassavetes | Films | 1959-1977
Especially “A Woman Under the Influence” and “Faces”—Gena Rowlands is my one true love.
More Alli Warren here.
Attention Span – Steven Zultanski
Some of my favorite poetry with a 2007 or 2008 copyright date.
Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008
O’Hara said that Whitman , Crane and Williams were the only American poets who were better than the movies, but today, in a world with Apocalypto and 3-D Imax Beowulf, only Kevin Davies is better than the movies. Maybe you’re in it for the giddy surprise of a turned phrase. Maybe you’re in it for the zonked formal apparatus (“floaters”?). Maybe you just want to drink a Corona and take pot shots at the government. Anyway you want it, that’s the way I need it. More than one Davies book a decade? Yes, please.
Craig Dworkin | Parse | Atelos | 2008
Like the chase scene in Apocalypto, Parse is a feat of athletic strength and technical virtuosity. And I mean that in the best sense (I’m a Yes fan, after all). This book is proof that conceptual writing deserves to be realized. Sure, the idea of parsing a grammar book by it’s own rules is clever, and many lazy McLazies would leave it at that and call it a piece—but the actual fact of the book goes way deeper than any mere suggestion. This work is ‘pataphysical’ in the truest sense—it appropriates a logic only to drag it to its limits, where the supposed rationality of its system is inverted—university discourse in the service of parody, or truth.
Rob Fitterman and Nayland Blake | The Sun Also Also Rises | No Press | 2008
Mr. Fitterman at his most tender, no kidding. Conceptualism and the lyric do meet, despite hysterical claims otherwise. In what seems at first like a closed system (all of the first person statements from Hemingway’s novel) we find instead a subjective opening: the sentences are so vague and gestural that they cry out to be grafted on to the autobiography of the reader, they serve as little memory-nuggets, each interchangeable and abstract. Which is precisely why the second part, a rewriting using material from the author’s own biography, is so necessary. Fitterman finds the ripples in Hemingway narrative (or, to be more broad, in novelistic conventions of masculinity) and, instead of a destructive gesture which breaks the original, ideologically-encrusted text apart, he adds more ripples, until eventually we can’t see to the bottom of the text. Psst—there is no bottom. Nayland Blake’s terrific minimalist coda sends us off on another open, leaky note, like the closing shot of 3-D Imax Beowulf, in which a computer-enhanced actor gets caught in the freeze-frame, or the fade-out, I don’t remember which.
Peter Gizzi | The Outernationale | Wesleyan | 2007
Peter Gizzi’s cameo in Apocalypto might have increased his star power, but it hasn’t diminished his poetic ability one bit. The opening sequence, “A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me,” is an ambitious serial work that takes Gizzi’s engagement with the complex arragement of image and statement to knottier, stranger territory. The title poem knots statement even tighter by mixing the poetic line with part-words, which can only suggest meanings, and defer the meanings made by the full sentences. This is dense poetry: not in the sense that say, Prynne is dense, nor in the sense that Oppen is dense. Instead of bludgeoning us with experimental vocab or treating us to crafted, meaningful line breaks, Gizzi’s lyric resides in the no man’s land between information management and intimate conversation. His romanticism (and I mean that in the best sense—I’m a Wordsworth fan, after all) is completely contemporary—the language of the present authors the poet. Said language is soaked in both abstract, highly mediated war-time quasi-correspondence, the dailiness of human sociality, and the sensory experience of the distance between those two things—as Gizzi says, bewilderment.
Renee Gladman | Newcomer Can’t Swim | Kelsey Street | 2007
Gladman’s writing so successfully carries the illusion of transparency that sometimes it seems like there’s not much there, in any particular sentence. But the accumulation of sentences, and especially the sense of narrative blows back that very transparency to create an effect that is more crystalline than glass-like. Identity is refracted – not invisible but manifold. The narrators of these fictions, or these poems, or whatever, are not lacking identities but exposing them, not as frauds but as real structures, and as real feelings. The sentences, likewise, are not frauds in their simplicity, in their transparency. They are part of a complex and many-sided form, somewhat akin to 3-D Imax Beowulf.
Kenneth Goldsmith | Traffic | Make Now | 2007
Kenneth Goldsmith | Sports | Make Now | 2008
Goldsmith’s “American Trilogy” is the Apocalypto of poetry—one long chase scene, the spectacularization of suffering, and a relationship to history that makes accuracy an irrelevant question. Of course, the big difference is that Mel Gibson is an anti-semite, and Goldsmith is a Jew. They would probably not get along.
Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008
Quoth Patrick Lovelace: “The fundamental question of writing is: after you write a word, do you repeat the word that you’ve just written, or do you choose another?” Quoth Beowulf: “The sea is my mother! She would never take me back to her murky womb!” Ted Greenwald has been grappling with just this problem for decades. 3 is one of my favs by him, especially the standout first poem, “Going Into School That Day,” a long poem on love and memory, in which the next word is either a new word, or the previous word, or the previous word in a new place.
Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007
Juliana Spahr | Intricate Systems | The Press Gang | 2008
The Transformation may be, by the author’s account, a novel. I’m not sure. If so it’s a little out of place on this here poetry list, but who cares? The disregard for genre is part of its charm. Spahr’s increasingly intensive connective writing brings as many things into relation that can fit into a linguistic scene. Actually that’s not quote true – the relationships she builds are precise ones, with particular contemporary and political resonances. For instance, the migration from Hawaii to NYC narrated in The Transformation brings us from a colonial scene to it’s obverse: late 2001 America. Within this broader frame, all manner of institutional effects, social contradictions and forms of natural life are brought into conversation. That’s what keeps Spahr’s work from lapsing into a hippie monism or relativism: the politicized frame always reconfigures the disparate material into a specific critique. And Apocalypto.
Kevin Thurston and Lauren Bender | Boys are Retards | Produce | 2007
Kevin Thurston answers all the questions from a Cosmo Girl quiz-book, and he answers them truthfully. Is this because Thurston is a Cosmo Girl at heart? Or is it because he has a non-patronizing relationship to mass culture which allows him to engage with it formally, in a way which respects the sincerity of feeling structured by ideology? See, Thurston’s feelings are also ideological, he doesn’t pretend not to be cry during 3-D Imax Beowulf, he doesn’t pretend to be outside. Instead of a condescending attitude, instead of mocking forms of entertainment which swell legitimate emotion in legitimate humans, Thurston offers a skeptical but honest response to manipulative ad-affects. A single tear runs down his cheek.
Rod Smith | Deed | University of Iowa | 2007
There’s a part in 3-D Imax Beowulf where Beowulf jumps out of the eye of a seamonster, presumably killing the beast. How he got into the eye remains unclear. Deed is better than that scene, and Rod Smith is more heroic than Beowulf, by far.
Rachel Zolf | Human Resources | Coach House | 2007
Like spam but better, Human Resources reworks the junk language of the internet to bring to the surface it’s conflicted relationship to desire. On the one hand, spam is work written by a bot. On the other hand, spam is work written to be an intrusion in lives of people who are not bots: to spark the reader’s interest with its outrageous subject-heading or its surprising collage of often-sexualized language. Zolf uses this language to write a book not written by a bot, a book about desire as articulated by a person who speaks the language of spam, a language which is not necessarily rational, but which as immediate as a Jaguar eating a man’s face (as seen in Apocalypto). This book is spazzy, surprising and over-the-top. Since I only like things that are over-the-top, I like this book.
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Special Mention: the comments box on Silliman’s Blog
Day after day, loyal Silliman readers fill up his comments box with: insults and whining? A terrific and totally baffling phenomenon. The misdirected anger of poets everywhere comes to a head here, in a great wash of complaining and PC finger-wagging. Silliman, to his credit, is graceful – he doesn’t seem to censor the comments, he allows all the regulars their space to be wacky or conservative, and he keeps on blogging on. A toast to Silliman, of course. But a second toast, please, to the folks who transform a poetry blog into a absolutely entertaining parade of off-beat characters.
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More Steven Zultanski here.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2010 – Matvei Yankelevich
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Maged Zaher | Portrait of the Poet As an Engineer | Pressed Wafer | 2009
This is a poet. This is an engineer. What better combination? Emotion collides with technology, programming with psychology. Lingo cohabits with angst. This is really strong work with it’s very own thing, with influences divergent enough to create something different but not unfamiliar. I like reading this book and giving it to people and then buying it again.
Graham Foust | A Mouth in California | Flood | 2009
I tried to read new poetry this year, actual books, not just chapbooks and manuscripts, and I’ve been meaning to find out—who is Graham Foust, and what’s he all about. This book is a pure depressive joy to read, like listening to Modest Mouse’s first album. Or something like that. It’s a mouth in pain, perhaps. But it’s beautiful, some of the phrases I just had to re-read and re-read. He does stuff, a kind of performative utterance, in each poem. A twist that I physically feel. I think maybe Graham Foust is a Physical Poet par-excellence.
Catherine Wagner | My New Job | Fence | 2009
I loved the “My New Job” section of this book most. It made me jump, or it jolted me—a kind of aesthetic/intellectual/visceral response I can’t quite locate or describe. Cathy Wagner startles as before, but does the job newer, leaner, better.
Macgregor Card | Duties of an English Foreign Secretary | Fence | 2009
This is a book of adventures that always bring the author and the reader back to one’s friends, for high-tea maybe, or for a heart-felt reunion. The words themselves become Macgregor Card’s friends, too; he sees them—and says them—again and again. My friend Ellie Ga’s cover photo is a pretty great reason for loving it, too. See, friends again. But, though many of the poems are dedicated (or feature as characters) real live friends (and also aesthetic-friends of the authors that are long gone, like the Spasmodic poets), it never feels like an in-thing or a closed circle. It’s a book that nourishes the reader with its hospitality. And hospitality bears repeating.
Robert Fitterman | Sprawl | Make Now | 2009
LOL. Do actually read trough it. The Mall of the Subconscious. Very subtly done. Consumer review: I was impressed by the variety this store has to offer, and the prices are reasonable.
Danielle Dutton | Sprawl | Siglio | 2010
Yes, same title. Totally different, though read in tandem… could be quite interesting. Sprawl is one of the best new novels of our time, no question. Diane Williams hovers nearby, as does Markson in its disassociations, and maybe Abish in its obsessions. As does Douglas Sirk. Discomfort in Suburbia.
Ish Klein | Union! | Canarium | 2009
Surprises abound. I like the way the logic twists slowly over the time of the long-ish poems. The centering of the lines put me off at first, but then I got into it. Ish Klein has a unique sympathy for everything her language touches even when it’s in despair. Nice title!
Kristin Prevallet | I, Afterlife: An Essay in Mourning Time | Essay Press | 2007
Been meaning to read it since it came out… Finally did. And glad I did. Resonated with me personally. Ideas about elegy here were not only compelling but very useful, both to life and to poetics. It’s a beautiful use of essay, narrative, and poetry interwoven, without being some kind of forced “hybrid.”
William Carlos Williams | Spring & All | Frontier Press (reprint of the 1923 Contact Press edition) | 1970
It is a pleasure to read this in its own edition as a separate little book. I keep doing it. Spring and Fall.
(When will we get the original Lost Lunar Baedeker in a reprint edition, or a new one of Spring and All…? Any takers…? Is New Directions gonna do it?)
Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | 2009
How do you pronounce that again? In any case, it suit this book to follow Williams in this little list. Politics, yes. “Minor Arcana” is of course a canonical text as far as digestion of the Bush-years goes. And it’s laugh-out-loud, as the kids say. But there’s much more here. Very delicate stuff made with a persevering hand. A light trace of knuckle on these pages. Something I can come back to.
Mac Wellman | Miniature | Roof | 2002
Weird and wonderful poems. Defamiliarize yourself.
Mac Wellman | The Difficulty of Crossing a Field | Minnesota | 2008
Wow… Especially awesome forward by Helen Shaw, and Wellman’s ongoing essay: “Speculations: An Essay on the Theater.” Great thinking, great writing, plus wry humor! Could be read alongside R. Foreman’s Unbalancing Acts as the big turn in turn of the century poetic theater (not poet’s theater). (With all the current buzz about poet’s theater, one must wonder why we poets, as a rule, aren’t reading plays or going to the theater to see what we have to learn from the other “dying” art-form. On that note…)
Sibyl Kempson | Crime or Emergency | 53rd State | 2009
I loved the fireball production of this at PS122. The text is like a mash-up of soap opera and action thriller and Bruce-Springstein-cabaret. Or maybe… Knife on the Water + The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant + Warhol’s Cowboys. Yikes.
Raymond Queneau | Witch Grass | NYRB Classics | 2003
Some confusion: the old edition of the same (great) translation is titled The Bark-Tree. (The translator, the incomparable Barbara Wright, explains why she changed the title.) But I think the translation in this re-issue is the same. This has to be the craziest (first) novel ever… 1933! So beautiful. So Pascal. So funny. So melancholy. Dig the ending(?). Nothing compares.
More Matvei Yankelevich. His Attention Span for 2007. Back to directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 14, 2010 at 9:59 am
Posted in Attention Span 2010, Commented List
Tagged with Barbara Wright, Catherine Wagner, Danielle Dutton, Douglas Rothschild, Graham Foust, Ish Klein, Kristin Prevallet, Mac Wellman, Macgregor Card, Maged Zaher, Matvei Yankelevich, Raymond Queneau, Robert Fitterman, Sibyl Kempson, William Carlos Williams