Attention Span 2011 | Román Luján

Raúl Zurita | Purgatory: A Bilingual Edition | California | 2009

Raúl Zurita | Song for His Disappeared Love / Canto a su amor desaparecido | Action | 2010

Manuel Maples Arce | City : A Bolshevik Superpoem in 5 Cantos / Urbe : Poema bolchevique en 5 cantos | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Myriam Moscona | Negro marfil / Ivory Black | Les Figues | 2011

Uljana Wolf | False Friends | Ugly Duckling | 2011

Carlos Oquendo de Amat  | 5 Meters of Poems / 5 metros de poemas | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Michael Palmer | Thread | New Directions | 2011

Marosa di Giorgio | The History of Violets / La historia de las violetas | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Jose Kozer | Stet: Selected Poems | Junction | 2006

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

Jen Hofer | One | Palm | 2009

Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat | 2011

Charles Bernstein | Attack of the Difficult Poems | Chicago | 2011

Gonzalo Rojas | From the Lightning: Selected Poems | Green Integer | 2006

Juliana Spahr | Well Then There Now | Black Sparrow | 2011

Robert Walser | Microscripts | New Directions / Christine Burgin | 2010

Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon Grosman, eds. | The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry  | Oxford | 2009

Brian Kim Stefans  | Viva Miscegenation | Make Now | Forthcoming 2011

Marjorie Perloff | Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century | Chicago | 2010

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Román Luján is a Mexican poet and translator currently living in Los Angeles, where he is studying for his Ph.D. in Latin American Literature at UCLA. His books of poetry include Drâstel (Bonobos, 2010), Deshuesadero (FETA, 2006), Aspa Viento in collaboration with painter Jordi Boldó (FONCA, 2003) and Instrucciones para hacerse el valiente (CONACULTA, 2000). Some of his poems and translations can be found at Eleven Eleven, Mandorla, Aufgabe, and Jacket2.

Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – James Wagner

Tan Lin | Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) | Zasterle | 2009
Tan Lin | Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] | Wesleyan | 2010

My review of Seven here.

Vanessa Place | The Guilt Project | Other | 2010
Vanessa Place | Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts | Blanc | 2010
Vanessa Place | Pussy Codes | Ubu Editions | forthcoming 2010

My interversation with Vanessa here.

Robert Walser | The Microscripts | New Directions | 2010

Anne Boyer | The Two-Thousands, a history of the future in advance of itself | Scribd | 2010

My review here.

Amina Cain | I Go To Some Hollow | Les Figues | 2009

My review here.

K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams 1-20 | Slack Buddha | 2009

My review here.

Steve Timm | Un storia | BlazeVOX | forthcoming 2010

My blurb here.

More James Wagner here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Meredith Quartermain

Thomas Bernhard, trans. Richard and Clara Winston | Gargoyles | Vintage | 2006

A poem/novel that takes it all in: man & nature; man & industry; man & art—generations of the human animal.

Thomas Bernhard, trans. Ewald Osers | Old Masters: a Comedy | Quartet | 1989

This droll piece consists of the narrator’s thoughts as he stands in a particular room in a gallery waiting for his friend, a distinguished music critic, who on a daily basis, likes to come to this room to contemplate the image of a white-bearded old man (like himself it would seem). The museum attendant is the only other character.

Lisa Roberston | R’s Boat | California | 2010

Rousseau’s boat has extended itself, with Robertson’s customary wit and inventiveness, which inevitably turns comfortable subjectivity on its head.

Robert Walser, trans. Susan Bernovsky | The Tanners | New Directions | 2009

An early, autobiographical novel, but then all of his work is autobiographical. Life’s journeys torqued by a deeply feeling and crazily, stubbornly, beautifully resistant mind.

Robert Walser, trans. Susan Bernovsky | Microscripts | New Directions | 2010

At last the microscripted manuscripts (lengthy stories drafted entirely on one side of a post card) are available in English. Even crazier, more deeply feeling, more stubbornly beautifully resistant. We also learn much from the accompanying introduction, such as that Walser wrote out his novels non-stop, without correction, in a matter of six weeks, simply for the pleasure of fine handwriting.

Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | All Souls | HarperCollins | 1992

Set in Oxford and concerning the sojourn of a Marías-like Spanish professor, the tale spins around translation, both linguistic and cultural. His send-up of dining at high table is side-splitting.

Javier Marías, trans. Esther Allen | The Dark Back of Time | New Directions | 2001

In this novel Marías amuses himself by examining the relation between “real” characters and the ones in his novel All Souls. Very witty, post-modern foldings and refoldings.

Javier Marías, trans. Esther Allen | Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico | New Directions Pearl | 2010

Impersonation takes on a whole new meaning in this Elvis encounter.

Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear | New Directions | 2005

Obviously I’m hooked on Marías. This one examines othering—when do we see the other as evil—when do we cross that line?

Kate Eichorn & Heather Milne, eds. | Prismatic Publics | Coach House | 2009

Featuring interviews and work by Nicole Brossard, Margaret Christakos, Susan Holbrook, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Karen Mac Cormack, Daphne Marlatt, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Gail Scott, Nathalie Stephens, Catriona Strang, Rita Wong, Rachel Zolf. In other words, a ground-breaking collection in Canadian letters.

Sina Queryas | Expressway | Coach House | 2009

I read Queryas for her panache, her in-your-faceness, her tightly woven structures.

More Meredith Quartermain here. Quartermain’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.

Attention Span – Meredith Quartermain

Djuna Barnes | Nightwood | New Directions | 1937

Inspired by Nicole Brossard for whom Nightwood is a key text, I entered its marvellous transformative world of shifting subjectivities.

Robert Walser | The Assistant | New Directions | 2007

Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, this early Walser novel is a study of servitude from the perspective of those required to serve–the perspective of servants who have minds and hearts and desires for things other than servitude. The reader cringes on the edge of hilarious sorrow.

Sharon Thesen | Good Bacteria | Anansi | 2006

Thesen adroitly connects daily affairs with the dreams and myths that surround them. Her deeply thoughtful irony rhymes the glossy and trivial with the resonantly spiritual, reminding us repeatedly of the comedy of human endeavour in the face of vast possibility.

Benedict de Spinoza | Ethics | Penguin | 1994

God is a thinking thing, Spinoza shows us. His unfolding of divinity is brilliant. He shows plainly how God is not concerned with the daily affairs of humans, but that nevertheless humans must be concerned with the divine.

Colin Browne | The Shovel | Talonbooks | 2007

Best to read in one sitting so you feel the full force of this powerful choir of voices gathered into Browne’s visionary weir. Browne reads the whole of western imperialism and the atrocities suffered at its hands against his own family’s participation in those atrocities. It’s a vision of a crumbling civilization undone by rapacious opportunism. He reads the destruction of N.A. aboriginal cultures against the pig-headed charge into Mesopotamia for oil in 1915. And in the string section of this marvelous symphony we find Twombly, Eliot, Chopin, Freud, Russell, Lewis and more. Needless to say, resonating heartily with the current Iraq war – its motives and perpetrators.

Denis Diderot | Jacques le fataliste | Oxford | 1999

A novel where narrative is a central character. Utterly postmodern. A page turner.

Norman Cohn | The Pursuit of the Millennium | Oxford | 1961

The story of Christian fanatics stirring up crowds of dispossessed poor around year 1000 with visions of the final days of the apocalypse. Millenarian uprisings, writes Cohn, typically involved a propheta: “sometimes they were petty nobles; sometimes they were simply imposters; but more usually they were intellectuals or half-intellectuals–the former priest turned freelance preacher…obsessed with eschatological phantasies…. Usually a propheta possessed a further qualification: a personal magnetism…. And what emerged then was a new group–a restlessly dynamic and utterly ruthless group which, obsessed by the apocalyptic phantasy and filled with the conviction of its own infallibility, set itself infinitely above the rest of humanity and recognized no claims save that of its own supposed mission.”

Hannah Arendt | The Origins of Totalitarianism | Harcourt | 1966

This was a highly relevant sequel to The Pursuit of the Millennium. Arendt: “The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking.”

Geraldine Monk | Escafeld Hangings | West House | 2005

Monk imagines here letters to Elizabeth I from the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots. A woman speaking back to the power structure just as Monk’s northern English dialect vigorously challenges the southern English power structure represented by Queen Elizabeth II.

Friedrich Schlegel | Lucinde and the Fragments | Minnesota | 1971

A must read, along with Paul de Mann’s essay “The Concept of Irony” for anyone interested in the workings of irony.

Susan Howe | Souls of the Labadie Tract | New Directions | 2007

The labadists, Howe tells us, “believed in…the necessity of inner illumination, diligence and contemplative reflection. Marriage was renounced. They held all property in common (including children) and supported themselves by manual labor and commerce.” The title sequence in this book is a stunning series of short, intensely drawn pieces exploring the psychic landscape opened for Howe by the labadists.