Attention Span 2011 | Brian Kim Stefans

Simon Reynolds | Retromania | Faber | 2011

I’m still halfway through this one. It’s a balm for those of us who have no idea why pop music is so terribly uninteresting today—lots of incredible talent with nothing to say—and a bomb for those who thinks it’s all rosy. I’m having my students read it for my L.A. Post-punk/DIY class (a freshman seminar), along with Lipstick Traces and We Got the Neutron Bomb. Reynolds’ book Rip It Up and Start Again, on English Post-punk, inspired the course. I was happy to discover he’d moved to LA some months ago, and have since met him and his wife, Joy Press, whom some of you might remember from the days of the Voice Literary Supplement—and I thought the name was a pseudonym! I met Billy Idol the day I met Simon Reynolds. Oh, yes, the book. It’s very accessible but dense—allusions to Badiou, Bourdieu, Benjamin, Kittler (I think), the fall of Rome, etc.—and is largely autobiographical as he charts his ineptness with, and reservations about, new technology. I think a lot of you have already bought your copy of this book.

Roberto Bolaño | Nazi Literature in the Americas | New Directions | 2008

The Savage Detectives was the best novel I had read in a long time, at times Dostoyevskian in its grandeur, scope, generosity and addiction to visionary pain, and always threatening to have “magical realist” elements (that might have just been me), but never making good on that threat. It ends with the discovery of a concrete poem—who would have thunk? This collection shows the Borgesian side of Bolaño, though never with that ‘pataphysical hook that makes Borges so addictive. I enjoyed it but read it quickly; it’s actually become the model for my anthology on Los Angeles poetry, as I’m realizing that I should really tell stories, rather than convince with keen analysis, in the volume—people might actually read it. I think the issue of what makes these writers “Nazis” might have more resonance with Latin American readers, as some chapters merely touch on this connection.

Alain Badiou | The Communist Hypothesis | Verso | 2010

This was actually a quick read. Badiou will be spending next year at UCLA doing whatever, and I’ve never gotten around to his headier tomes. Some of it is archival—he includes a longish essay he wrote in the late 60s—and some new. Involves new interpretations of the Paris Commune, Mao’s cultural revolution (which he limits to a very short period early on when theory and action seemed aligned, prior to the descent into chaos) and, of course, Paris ’68. It ends with a light recount of his famous theory of the Event, and has a useful critique of the cult of individualism in the States versus living according to an “Idea.” I don’t want to go into it much deeper, except to note that I’m increasingly (ok, I have been for a while) wary of the fetish about of May ’68. I think we should just give it up, start afresh. It’s an attractive moment, when intellectuals (many of whom were great writers) and labor seemed aligned, and the ensuing chaos—contained, in the end—brought a violent poetic spirit to the everyday—but now it merely survives as a tone, a prose style. Ok, that’s dismissive. I also bought a trio of books edited by Zizek, his “Revolution” series, but have only finished Virtue and Terror on Robespierre (I had seen this in a bookstore in Paris and wanted to buy it then, but I wanted to “live in the present,” not fill the place with the ghosts of Danton and Saint-Just). I’ll leave it at that.

Junot Díaz | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | Riverhead | 2007

I don’t read a lot of fiction. I’m teaching Only Revolutions, by Mark “House of Leaves” Danielewski, in my contemporary American poetry class, so I should probably read House of Leaves. I’m also teaching the first section of the Changing Light at Sandover and Alice in Wonderland (the class is subtitled “The Ludic Turn”). Anyway, this was a beach read; I read my stepmother’s copy while I was visiting them in Long Island. I actually did read some of this on the beach. Díaz is obviously talented and very smart, and it didn’t feel like what it is, Bolaño-lite. There is sex, sexual addiction, political violence, abusive cracked parents, picaresque descriptions of overseas travel, and something like tragedy. The major annoyances were the little eye-wink inclusions of academic jargon (it’s a very “teachable” book in that way) which was couched in a pseudo-hipster Latino American speak, to make it go down easy. It’s meta-identity literature, but not meta enough. He created a pretty interesting synthetic language that could accommodate the various audiences he was trying to reach, and deserves credit. In any case, I enjoyed it pretty much. I’m sure Javier Bardam will have a role in the movie.

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

I read none of this on the beach, unless it was the beach beneath Los Angeles counts. Ken lived two doors down from me in Williamsburg, which I only discovered after I was asked to review a book of poems by this Australian guy for PW, Googled him, and discovered I’d been bumming cigarettes off of his wife for a few years. Wark is an advocate of what he calls “low theory,” which is what he described (somewhere) as theory that you don’t need a Ph.D. to read; his previous two books, both excellent, are written in this style as well, and I admire that effort. The book covers many of the figures of Situationism who are major though overlooked—I especially liked the bits about Jorn’s aesthetic theory and the narrative of Alexander Trocchi, though would have liked to learn more about Alice Becker-Ho. Isidore Isou figures prominently, but there is nothing really new about Debord or Vaneigem here. Of course, the fetish of Paris ’68 rears its weird head, but Wark, unlike some, doesn’t fly off the handle with crypto-Marxist, Debordian rhetoric that is always interesting as a style—I’d love to write that way, at least for a day—but ends up, for me, seeming to advertise its impotence. I think Wark’s struggle for a new language is actually a very interesting project I’d like to write about; his Hacker’s Manifesto went so far as to introduce a new class, the Vectorist Class, though I don’t think anyone’s quite picked up on that, and I don’t know how serious he was about that.

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

I gave my author’s copy of this as a going away present to an Italian art historian friend who was staying with me for a month earlier this year—she’s stopped returning my emails. I ordered a desk copy, which I then gave to my sister’s boss, thinking he could plumb it for ideas for outdoor text/light installations—my sister was laid off a month later. This is a dangerous book. It ruins lives, but only slowly. That’s why I’m ordering five more as potential gifts for people I would like to quietly run out of my life. Seriously, the brief introductions to the work are great, and I suspect it’s quite economical and “interesting” given the piles of empty text it is attempting to condense. I can’t offer any intelligent commentary until I order a new one.

Julia Boynton Green | Noonmark | Redlands, California (no publisher listed) | 1936

Green is one of the “lost” Los Angeles poets I’ve been researching for my series of essays, “Chapters in Los Angeles Poetry,” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. She was born in the 1860’s, published two books late in life (her first, This Enchanting Coast, is largely devoted to writing about plants and the landscape, as per the dominant mode at that time in L.A.), and had some excellent anthology appearances. Her satires on technology are quite brilliant, and though quite conservative, she published a lot of poems in Amazing Stories and Weird Tales (which I haven’t seen) probably because of her critical but rich evocations of the promises of science and technology. She’s my great find, but I have no biographical information about her. Nora May French and Olive Percival are the other two poets (can’t find any males that earlier on) of my pre-WWII section.

Walter Benn Michaels | The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality | Metropolitan | 2006

I don’t know anything about Michaels, though he spoke at UCLA last quarter and I had lunch and dinner with him—a very animated guy, I liked him a lot, but suspect that he thinks he’s a bit smarter than he is. (I only say this because he went out on a limb about all sorts of matters regarding contemporary poetry and minority literature, but when pressed, his knowledge of the fields was pretty shallow). The argument in the book is pretty basic: that institutions like universities would be better off aiming for class diversity rather than ethnic diversity if the idea is to truly achieve a more egalitarian society with wealth spread equally across a wider range of people. Americans don’t like to talk about class—we pretend that upward mobility is an actual living promise—and so divert some of these anxieties to discussions of race, which he says doesn’t exist (not in the way culture exists). Of course, I agree, but then again, I don’t think he’s travelled much, at least not as a black or Asian person. As he did in his talk, there is recourse to statics and charts, but very lightly; he is quite frank, in his afterward, that he wrote this book to make money, and it’s clearly aimed at the same class of people who thought The Closing of the American Mind was a serious statement on the decline of American culture. I like his arguments generally, but I think he loses wind when it becomes apparent that he’s probably written this book about fifteen years too late. I don’t think the cult of diversity is quite as strong as it once was.

Doug Aitken and Noel Daniel | Broken Screen: Expanding The Image, Breaking The Narrative | Distributed Art | 2005

This is a fairly light read, just a bunch of interviews with artists and other folk who are dealing with image and narrative, particularly “non-linear” narrative. I discovered a handful of new artists in this one, some I’d never heard of, some whose works I’d seen but simply didn’t know who made them. I can’t find my copy right now, so I can’t tell you who they are—Herzog, Gehry and Baldessari I remember (of course, I’d heard of those guys). Aitken doesn’t ask terribly probing questions—he always brings it back to non-linear narrative, which I don’t think is that interesting, just like I don’t think appropriation is all that interesting these days, but Aitken lives in L.A., as I do, where we are quite oppressed by an obsession with cheese-ball, leaden, over-determined narratives. You know what I mean. He really aims for conversations and shop talk, which is ok but it let some of the artists “phone in” their contributions. The question of the screen—what is happening now with digital technology, how the photograph, the film, the machine and animation are folding into a single genre—is a question I’m probing, and this book doesn’t quite get there. I’m reading a lot about photography: The Photograph as Contemporary Art (World of Art) by Charlotte Cotton and, finally, Susan Sontag, On Photography—I’d always thought this book was quite boring when I tried to read it before, but got through it this time. I have big chunky books about Thomas Ruff and Sam Hsieh on my table right now.

Jacques Brel | Songbooks

I can’t find these either! But I bought them during my three week stay in Paris, which was filled, appropriately, with heartache, desire, elation and lots of walking around penniless (or at least with a credit card howling with pain—food, hotels, telecommunications). I bought a ukulele in Paris also, and recorded a few songs on my iPad, including a version of the Smiths’ “I Won’t Share You.” I made my debut as a pop singer at a small conference on British Poetry—Keston, Emily, John and Sam were there. Harry Mathews was giving a reading a floor below. Prior to going to Paris, I started writing songs again; Brel’s work, along with the Weill/Brecht collaborations (I also bought sheet music for those) are my guides, along with the Smiths and Scott Walker. I was also reading Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire (Howard edition) and the poems of Arthur Rimbaud (Fowlie edition). My French seemed to have gotten worse as the trip went on—starvation for fluid conversation, I believe. It was quite a trip. It rained a lot.

Joan Brossa | Furgó de Cua (1989-1991) | Quarderns Crema | 1993

 I’m not reading Brossa—who writes in Catalan, and is one of the great, largely untranslated Spanish poets of the last century—so much as looking at the language. He was both a concrete poet and creator of text objects and a high formalist—a large part of his oeuvre consists of sestinas and other invented, intricate structures. I’m trying to find someone to help me translate his work. Know anyone? Since I don’t have much to say about this one, I’d like to tack on…

Mark Zuckerberg | Facebook | The Interweb | 2004-2011

Yes, I think he writes all of it. Facebook is the TV of today. Facebook makes nothing happen. It’s all trivial, and makes many of the people I admire appear quite trivial, which of course isn’t their faults. I just don’t need to know what you eat. I like it when people “like” me, which I don’t like. I’m off Facebook. I was reading it too much. I use Twitter.

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Brian Kim Stefans is the author of five books of poems including What is Said the Poet Concerning Flowers (2006) and Kluge: A Meditation (2007), along with Before Starting Over: Essays and Interviews (2008) and Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (2003). He teaches new media and poetry in the English Department of UCLA. Digital works include “The Dreamlife of Letters” and “Kluge: A Meditation.” Recent projects include a column, “Third Hand Plays,” for the SFMoma blog on digital text art, a ten-part column for the Los Angeles Review of Books on the history of L.A. Poetry, and a “freeware” compilation of Los Angeles D.I.Y/Post-punk music.

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 – Robert Stanton

John Ashbery | Collected Poems 1956-1987 | Library of America | 2008

On the (debatable, but defensible) premise that “the more Ashbery the better,” this is the best Ashbery to date. A universe unto itself.

Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer | Antwerp | New Directions | 2010

Bolaño remaking himself—somewhat painfully—from post-Beat bard to ruthlessly dispassionate novelist. Fascinating to watch.

Andrea Brady | Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination | Krupskaya | 2010

Human history—and the “essay”—as slo-mo explosion. A timely and salient product of imaginative (rather than ethical) deregulation.

Anne Carson | Nox | New Directions | 2010

Grief as it is, opaque and piercing. Even the accordion form of the text seems oddly allegorical: it’s constantly threatening to bend away from you and scatter as you read.

Joseph Massey | Exit North | BookThug | 2010

The contemporary king of minimalism (“Old news—after a storm— / torn apart between two lawns”—that’s a whole poem, “Sunday”) wandering down increasing philosophical paths.

Ange Mlinko | Shoulder Season | Coffee House | 2010

Mlinko here uses her stance as unapologetic aesthete to craft a surprisingly political volume, presenting in florabundant language our increasingly diminishing world as both great sorrow and supreme joy. Book of the year, if I’m forced.

Ange Mlinko | Hotel Lazuli | in An Instance | Instance | 2010

Written in the shadow of that trickster Pessoa, a glorious pendant to Shoulder Season. Her vocabulary alone—spirochete, cozier, bilabiate, duochrome, phenotype, a-pollyanna-ing (all used precisely)—makes me glad.

Jennifer Moxley | Fragments of a Broken Poetics | Chicago Review 55.2 | 2010

Can any one person be “the voice of a generation” these days? Probably not (and a good thing too), but Jennifer Moxley comes pretty close.

J. H. Prynne | Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage Artesian | Barque | 2009

Like most recent Prynne, this brushes achingly close to some unprecedented meaning without quite committing, leaving the reader alert and abuzz. Title of the year too, by some margin.

Kay Ryan | The Best of It | Grove | 2010

I kept coming back to this. Like good whiskey, Ryan’s poems are bracing in small doses, but increasingly nauseating when consumed in bulk. Taken individually, though, they impress as true works of “quietude,” promoting humility, pragmatism, stoicism and a kind of amused awe at the complexity of the world. “Wisdom” is impossibly unhip, but Ryan has her moments.

More Rob Stanton here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Juliana Spahr

I keep thinking to myself that it has been a really amazing year of reading for me. I have loved so much of what I have read. I have no complaints. I’m not sure I have read a book I thought was a waste of my time all year. I think I feel this way because I have had trouble reading because I have a two year old who is at that stage where if I am reading in his presence, he comes up and grabs the book and says no, no, no. Reading feels a little illicit right now when I get to do it. Thus all the more sweet. So I should also confess that I think I might write this very differently if I was reading more inclusively. There are many books that came out this year that I have not yet gotten to read. I have an exciting large stack to read.

Mark McGurl | The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing | Harvard | 2009

I confess that I have at moments gotten bogged down in the long readings of Thomas Wolfe and Flannery O’Conner. Mainly because I’m not a super huge fan of that work and so not very well read in it. But the money shot, if one can say that, is the analysis of what he calls “program fiction.” So much here that feels right. Mainly that the university system has shaped US writing dramatically in the last half of the 20th century. Also really interested in his talk about how this fiction has a sort of generic localism (my term not his). But at same time I find McGurl’s respect for “program fiction” super frustrating. He keeps talking about how he likes it! And I’m so suspicious of the writing that this system has produced (not the teaching of writing, that is another complicated story). Primarily because it is a sort of generic local writing that has isolated writing from more activist and urgent concerns.

M Nourbese Philip | Zong! | Wesleyan | 2008

Super obsessed with this book. It has everything. Anti-imperial righteousness, avant garde extremity, ghosts or channeled beings, lists, etc. I love how she “recovers” the names of those lost on the Zong.

Ian Baucom | Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History | Duke | 2005

Also about the Zong and the development of credit around the slave trade. He talks a little about Philip’s book. I was reading it just as the financial markets were collapsing.

Renee Gladman | To After That | Atelos | 2008

Gladman at her best.

Aaron Cometbus | Cometbus | na | na

Joshua Clover gave Chris Nealon the issue of Cometbus on the Berkeley bookstores. And I had to go out and get my own copy. And then I started buying more and more copies to give to people because it such a lovely history of the complications around Telegraph Avenue.

Felix Feneon | Novels in Three Lines | NYR Classics | 2007

Reznikoff-style. Or I should say Reznikoff is Feneon-style. Classic playful social realist writing.

Mark Nowak | Coal Mountain Elementary | Coffee House | 2009

It surprised me! I don’t need to say anymore. I am so in love with this book right now.

Roberto Bolano | 2666 | Farrar, Straus, Giroux | 2008

I know, everyone else has already said all that needs to be said. I will add this though: there is no other male writer of women that is better than Bolano. Plus I keep rereading the sermon in the third book.

David Buuck | The Shunt | Palm Press | 2009

Juggling, with disgust.

Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009

I want to say something about beauty and lyric but I feel that would piss her off. But really, the book made my heart happy.

C. D. Wright | Rising, Falling, Hovering | Coffee House | 2008

How the world defines the personal. Also a really beautiful book. With hope for poetry despite its claim “What is said has been said before / This is no time for poetry.”

More Juliana Spahr here.

Attention Span 2009 – Josef Kaplan

Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2008

They said they would never put any photos of cats in Artforum.

Michael Scharf | For Kid Rock/Total Freedom | Spectacular Books | 2007

Re-read this after the post-’08 election euphoria (and my money) had been plowed into corporate handouts. Scharf refracts the claustrophobic political atmosphere of 2002/2003 through an equally stringent pyramid of de rigueur poetics to show that “total freedom” is, of course, totally not. The book’s appulsion of liberal aesthetics and furtive atrocity reads both cogent and anxiously sympathetic, a “bourgeois panic” that is mordant, lucid, the relentlessness of its critique entirely correct.

Gordon Faylor | 5 6 | Self-Published | 2009

The Mechanical Turk meets Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.

Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter, eds. | Issue 1 | For Godot | 2008

The fall of the house of usher.

Roberto Bolaño | 2666 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2008

It’s nice how this post-modern novel is almost totally unconcerned with the meta, how it instead just ruthlessly tails the fractal, internal details that spin off from stuff like… ordering a coffee, or a city’s (sub)conscious conspiracy to murder every woman living in it. The Baudelaire epigraph: “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom”; Sonora stretching out its infinite ends.

Anne Boyer | odali$qued | Blogspot | ongoing

Poetry’s Battlestar Galactica: humans create little machines which create other little machines and they all blow each other to pieces, over and over again. Also a response, doing Kafka one better by cutting out the Max Brod-style middleman. An anti-bureaucratic literature that inverts and immolates against pretty much every authoritarian context in sight.

Tan Lin | HEATH (PLAGIARISM/OUTSOURCE) | Zasterle | 2009

Poetry’s The Blob. Less a “book” than an open source platform for critical reimagining. Strikingly handsome for being that, too—like the titular man himself? Or the shrub?

Rachel Loden | Dick of the Dead | Ahsahta Press | 2009

“This machine” / you know / “kills hypocrites”

Marie Buck | Life & Style | Patrick Lovelace Editions | 2009

“People! Cool personalities!” These burrowings into consumerism, vanity, gender cultures, celebritydom (both literary and pop-culture-y), social networking, social damage, flagellism and futurity are often as gentle as they are disturbing. Not a small feat. The absence of irony doesn’t come off as pedantic, but instead gives everything a tragic, keen(ing) sheen.

Brad Flis | Peasants | Patrick Lovelace Editions | 2009

The Lottery-esque scratch-and-win cover reveals a severed head, which is kind of how the whole book works. Also worth noting that the severed head looks like a combination CNN image capture/Chuck Close portrait, which, again, is kind of how the whole book works.

David Lau | Virgil and the Mountain Cat | University of California Press | 2009

Stately state mash-ups. Lau redistributes allusion across a field of junked discourses, declares a new decadence based in the reification of history. The tone of this book is just so oddly, wonderfully grandiloquent, like wigs worn to the King’s beheading: “a domed frieze phrased in freedom, / extra moiety signum // as time’s / dipterous nonextension / deemphasized dispatches to come– // incurable, its miserable son.”

More about Josef Kaplan here.

Attention Span 2009 – Andrew Epstein

Roberto Bolano | The Savage Detectives | FSG | 2007

As many others have said, this novel has to be one of the most exhilarating, devastating, exhausting, and revealing accounts to be found of avant-garde poetry and the movements that sustain it – the avant-garde as dream, as farce, as tragedy, as inspiring coterie and impossible community, tantalizing possibility and heart-breaking, inevitable failure. “The problem with literature, like life, said Don Crispín, is that in the end people always turn into bastards.”

Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian | My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer | Wesleyan University Press | 2008

“I gave you my imaginary hand and you give me your imaginary hand and we walk together (in imagination) over the earthly ground.” Such a beautiful, and beautifully edited, book. The early work, like Spicer himself, feels suddenly indispensable. “Plague took us and the land from under us, / Rose like a boil, enclosing us within.”

Lisa Robertson | The Weather | New Star Books | 2001

“Days heap upon us,” Robertson writes. As do words, well-turned, elusive, gorgeous, consistently surprising, like days themselves. “A slight cloud drifts contrary to the planet; the day might be used formally to contain a record of idleness… It is the clear, magnificent, misunderstood morning; we pick up the connections.”

David Shapiro | New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) | Overlook Press | 2007.

A radiant gathering: always surprising and strange, mournful, playful, and wise. “Thus, in presenting sleep // The poem must leap over the cut-offs. / You see clearly in a revolution, // Look down and notice how you have slept.” … “Out of the pills and the pencils, out of toothbrushes and night guards, out of CDs and Altoids, out of feathers and staplers, out of time clocks and syllabi, out of tissues and scissors, nothing straight has ever been made.”

Gabriel Gudding | Rhode Island Notebook | Dalkey Archive Press | 2007

This is a seriously big, seriously funny book: ambitious and capacious, sharp-eyed and dangerous (at least to other drivers on the road). “Very hazy / the bug splats collect & remark / upon the butterscotch light / of the sun directly / ahead. The corn stands in lines of / musketeers row upon rank / : It is late corn. It is late. / At 5:47 PM the sun is a / sharper orange, juicier. Then it pales.// What strange fate light is here: as if / a pig is coming out of the sun instead of / sunlight. what white, fat, changing light.”

Alice Notley | Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems: 1970-2005 | Wesleyan University Press | 2006.

Like the other large selecteds here, this volume is such a welcome, generous bringing together. “Your Dailiness, / I guess I must address you / begin and progress somewhat peculiarly, wanting / not afraid to be anonymous, to love what’s at hand / I put out a hand, it’s sewn & pasted hingewise & / enclosed in cover. I’m 27 and booked …”

Katie Degentesh | The Anger Scale | Combo Books | 2006

Flarf is trying to break your heart. “I hated my mother for hating cats / but I wanted her to live, and I knew that // in this era of navel gazing, / it was my navel she was always gazing at. // After mastering the rules of grammar / she was like a ghost to all my friends // No one felt they had the right to have her committed / while baking cookies.”

Ron Silliman | The Age of Huts (compleat) | University of California Press | 2007
Ron Silliman | The Alphabet | University of Alabama Press | 2008.

A remarkable, inexhaustible achievement. “Ketjak,” like the rest of the works in these books, has a rare quality: addictive and good for you at the same time. “The form itself is the model of a city, extension, addition, modification.”

Carole Maso | The Art Lover | New Directions | 2006 [reprint, 1991]

“I am a lover of detail, a marker—it’s a way of keeping the world in place. One documents, makes lists to avoid becoming simply petals. I am like you, Max: a looker, an accountant, a record keeper, a creator of categories, a documenter. For evidence, I rip flyers from telephone poles, save every scrap of paper I get. Listen carefully. Organize. Reorganize.”

James Schuyler | Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler, 1951-1991 | Turtle Point Press | 2004

A wonderful trove of chatter, wit, news, and aperçus. “December in New York is one big mess. Everybody gets drunk too much: Mike Goldberg looks gray and shaky; New York looks bright and shaky; Frank, I’m sorry to say, looks gray and shaky. Write him plenty heap big buck-up notes and postals; Xmas is depressing for some of us deracine Christians.”

Joshua Clover | The Totality for Kids | University of California Press | 2006

Under the paving stones, the city! But it’s another city, a shattered and shattering place which Clover discovers to be where we already are living: “City which is / A love letter. Interior to that, / City emerging naked from the white / Indifferences of winter. City / Once hidden in the library and now / Drowsing in the sleep of the collective.” “Say hello to the generation that burned itself in effigy.”

More Andrew Epstein here.

Attention Span 2009 – Chris Hosea

Lisa Robertson | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House | 2009

Robertson’s books punk baroque mythologies, riff on errant possibilities, tickle traditions. Debbie: An Epic, or The Weather, or The Men, is each a world, a project. This volume gathers shorter poems that are just as ravishing. The back cover shouts in big silver capitals: “MY FIDELITY IS MY OWN DISASTER.” If you read this book in public, you may get curious looks, as I did on the F train. The lyrics are long on capital-R Romance. Each time you ride in the Soul Whip, turn up the stereo, roll down the windows and see stars shining even in hellish places. “Utopia is so emotional. / Then we get used to it.” Blues music Coleridge would download if he could.

Roberto Bolaño | 2666 | Farrar Straus | 2008

Bolaño’s epic, in a symphonic translation by Natasha Wimmer, resists any attempt at summary in the same way that it humanely mocks totalizing interpretations. 2666 inhabits the narrative space Homer’s swineherd summoned when he told Odysseus, “The nights are endless now.”

Hadley Haden Guest, ed. | The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest | Wesleyan | 2008
Barbara Guest | Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing | Kelsey Street | 2003

Guest’s essays, which lay out her conception of imagination as elusive and visionary (“obscure light…the mysterious side of thought”), helped me begin to unlock the Wesleyan collected and see how Guest’s poems collage images. Her poems rarely argue or lead. They provide beautifully designed spaces for thought, to be returned to in all seasons.

Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009

Nichols leaps the gap between one non sequitur and the next with all the grace of Buster Keaton. I guess I was thinking of the news when something musical came from the hard drive, and we were working days again.

Stuart Bailey, ed. | DOT DOT DOT 17 | 2008

Will Holder’s lecture on “the poetics of CONCRETE POETRY and documenting the work of FALKE PISANO” is transcribed and lineated, and though it doesn’t purport to be a poem, strikes me as the most genuinely new work in the genre I’ve read this year. Holder, with this patchwork of citations about concrete poetry (including examples of the form and quotations from his own critical writings), genially takes poetry about poetry to a deadpan reductio ad absurdum. Not for the faint of heart.

Stephanie Young | Picture Palace | ingirumimusnocte | 2008

Reading Young’s book feels like being admitted to someone else’s daydream. Or getting lost in a Jonas Mekas movie, only digital. A gorgeous sprawl.

Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood | 2009

Moxley’s narratives take craft to the limit without losing the easygoing lilt that makes this book such a pleasure. This is poetry as remarkable for its intellectual scope as its generous attempts to imagine and recreate the first person plural in a boldly imaginative variety of guises.

Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds. | The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940 | Cambridge | 2009

The bulk of this selection of letters, including drafts of poems, is addressed to Beckett’s friend Thomas McGreevy, fellow acolyte of Joyce, poet and critic. How amazing to see Beckett’s perspective and humor change and sharpen with the years! He sets himself questions he will attempt forever, such as, “Am I to set my teeth & be disinterested? […] Is one to insist on a crucifixion for which there is no demand?”

Renee Gladman | To After That (Toaf) | Atelos | 2008

In this critical memoir of the process of thinking about writing a novel, Gladman invents a new architectural period of nostalgia and ambition.

Paolo Virno | Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation | Semiotext(e) | 2008

Jokes make a revolution in the workplace. “The joke is a public action that can be accomplished solely by means of words.” File under philosophy.

Chris Hosea is co-editor, with Cecily Iddings, of The Blue Letter.

Attention Span 2009 – G.C. Waldrep

Alice Notley | Alma, or The Dead Women | Granary Books | 2006

Geoffrey Hill | Selected Poems | Yale University Press | 2009

Jack Spicer | My Vocabulary Did This to Me | Wesleyan University Press | 2008

Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer | 2666 | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 2008

Wallace Stevens | Collected Poetry & Prose | Library of America | 1997

Fanny Howe | The Winter Sun | Graywolf Press | 2009

Asher Ghaffar | Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music | ECW Press | 2009

Lisa Robertson | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House Books | 2009

Carla Harryman | Adorno’s Noise | Essay Press | 2008

Alice Oswald | A Sleepwalk on the Severn | Faber | 2009

Ismail Kadare, trans. David Bellos | The Siege | Canongate | 2008

Some other titles I’ve spent time thinking about this past year, in no particular order and for many different reasons: Ulf Stolterfoht, Lingos I-IX (trans. Rosmarie Waldrop); Emily Wilson, Micrographia; Cal Bedient, Days of Unwilling; Michael Dickman, The End of the West; Katy Lederer, The Heaven-Sent Leaf; Cole Swensen, Ours; Susan Stewart, Red Rover; Kevin Prufer, National Anthem; Lyn Hejinian, Saga/Circus; Robyn Schiff, Revolver; Laynie Browne, Daily Sonnets; Jacqueline Risset, Sleep’s Powers (trans. Jennifer Moxley); Eric Baus, Tuned Droves; Dan Beachy-Quick, This Nest, Swift Passerine; Mark Cunningham, Body Language; Brian Teare, Sight Map; Sandy Florian, The Tree of No; Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection; J. Robert Lennon, Castle & Pieces for the Left Hand; John Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth?

More G.C. Waldrep here.

Attention Span – Michael Kelleher

Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer | The Savage Detectives | Picador | 2008

Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007

Tyrone Williams | On Spec | Omnidawn | 2008

Richard Deming | Let’s Not Call It Consequence | Shearsman | 2008

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

Thomas Mann | The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods | Everyman’s Library | 2005

César Vallejo, trans. Clayton Eshleman | The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition |  California | 2007

bpNichol, ed. Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson | The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader | Coach House | 2007

Gary Sullivan | PPL In A Depot | Roof | 2008

Linda Russo | Mirth | Chax | 2007

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More Michael Kelleher here.

Attention Span – Kristin Prevallet

Walter Benjamin, trans. Esther Leslie | Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs | Verso | 2007

This beautifully produced book includes lots of snapshots from Benjamin’s archive, including his wooden toy collection and—my favorite—the log he kept of his child Stefan’s funny expressions as he was learning language.

Anne Tardos | I Am You | Salt | 2008

I saw Tardos give a reading from this book at the Bowery Poetry Club sometime last Fall, and thought, this is “beautiful, sexy, hilarious and smart—and most important, it’s REAL!” I got the book and still think the same thing—Tardos give 100% in this book.

Roberto Tejada, Kristin Dykstra, Gabriel Bernal Granados, eds. | Mandorla Nº 10 | 2007

I was thrilled to see the long awaited Mandorla 10, with such carefully edited selections from a wide variety of writers, many of them bi-lingual or presented in translation. For me, it is an anthology of everything I’ve been missing in poetry in the last five years (in terms of both form and content).

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

I love the “lexical landscape” Howe creates in her books, this one in the time of the language of the Labadists, a 17th century Quietist sect.

with me here between us–of
our being together even in
english half english too late

Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer | The Savage Detectives | Picador | 2007

The tale of two wild poet boys in an On The Road Adventure… at least that’s how the book is characterized by reviewers. It seems to me to be more about the attempt to recover the mythology of poetry and the bohemian ethic of beauty, love, and self-indulgence … remember when we were racy, spontaneous, scandalous, drunk, oversexed, high on ambition, low on productivity? Not me, I came of age in the 90s. But I remember clearly thinking that literature ended with my generation—now that’s youth! Bolaño hits it on the head (sometimes…). In my reading, however, Natasha Wimmer is the true genius here—she’s clearly an amazing writer herself, and the book reads as if it was written in English. Quite a feat, given how raunchy most of the language is.

John Bellamy Foster | Ecology Against Capitalism | Monthly Review | 2002

I caught the tale end of Foster’s talk at a poetry conference at Evergreen College, and was struck by his ecological critique of capitalism, so I bought the book. It has me thinking about how difficult it is to think outside of economic models—Cartesian thinking is economic! Yikes.

Selah Saterstrom | The Pink Institution | Coffee House | 2004

A genre blend of poetry and narrative, the tale comes undone along with all the characters. And the writing is as gorgeous as her voice, reading it.

Rachel Zolf | Human Resources | Coach House | 2007

The back cover suggests reading this book as “the creative potential of salvage” and that’s a pretty good description. This book has a pissed-off ironic tone that reveals how junk-language permeates our everyday life, and there’s no redemption: “Our abstractions stink of pure gibberish.” Ain’t that the truth! This book is definitely not wallowing in abstractions – which is very refreshing. Susquehanna by Dale Smith

Isabelle Garron, trans. Sarah Riggs | Face Before Against | Litmus | 2008

An immersion in language, slow but energetic…. these precise and elegant translations sometimes remind me of Mallarme’s A Tomb for Anatole; others remind me of It Then by Danielle Collobert. Something between elegy and remembrance, body, woman, and thought.

Marina Abramovic | 7 Easy Pieces | Charta | 2007

I paid $60 for this whopper of a book, documenting Abramovic’s reenacted performances by Beuys, Export, Nauman, Pane, Acconci, and Abramovic herself. This woman terrifies me—she builds walls, and then moves through them.

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More Kristin Prevallet here.