Attention Span 2010 – Nada Gordon

Stan Apps | Universal Stories with Unknown Particulars | valeveil e-book | 2009

A work of conscience and searching thought: What does poetry do in the world? What does it do for us?

Lynn Berhrendt | petals, emblems | Lunar Chandelier | forthcoming 2010

My blurb: “The affect-drenched poems in Lynn Behrendt’s Petals/Emblems leap off beauty’s edge right on to the electrified grid of being: that difficult ‘barrage/ of having been born/ at all.’ There (here) everything’s objective correlative: love and pain ‘crave form like alms’ and surely find it, sensuous, phonic, and unsettling, ‘heavy’ with ‘gyn grief’ and ‘undaunted desire.’ ‘This ache to tell you something’ shoots the poems through with yearny rhetorical force like the ‘inward arch’ of ‘nostalgic ocean’: palpable, fluid, engulfing.”

Charles Bernstein | All the Whiskey in Heaven | Farrar | 2010

Do I even need to say why?

Brandon Brown | The Orgy | self-published | 2010

I wrote on Ululations that this book “… spreads a metaphorical net onto the orgy of late capitalism in the hyper-information age (‘this crystal mall must be destroyed’); and most compellingly, to me, it seems to refer back on itself to the orgy of writing that makes itself felt in every moment of this galvanized, kind of emo (in the best possible sense: ‘My heart struggles./ It’s big as a chard, but it never learns.’) poem.”

K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge | 2009

I blurbed this one, too. [All “this shining and this _utter [!].” Terminal Humming is a very exciting book and I love it. Eavesdropping and borrowing from diverse discourses, K. Lorraine Graham has created a complex “essay on scrounging.” It is a wonderfully violent “attempt to unleash inner badness” in poems that are hot and audacious, in a girly way: “Wonder Woman boots twirl twirl.” Terminal Humming is just the right amount of weird. In it, “kinks become beautiful and obvious,” and “language [hums] as angry form.” Read this “downwind chess urine bird bathing extravaganza” of a book!]

Michael Gottlieb | Memoir and Essay | Faux | 2010

A moving, witty, precise and somewhat theatricalized bildungsroman. How he got this way.

Carla Harryman | Adorno’s Noise | Essay | 2008

Like psychedelics for the intellect.

Rodney Koeneke | Etruria | manuscript

Exquisite. Someone please publish this. This is poetry exuding the most poignant possible elegance.

K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams 1-20 | Slack Buddha | 2010

Don’t be surprised if you find yourself ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING upon reading these poems. Seriously. Kasey is my idol.

Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009

Mindbogglingly delicate and audacious, all at once.

Lanny Quarles | chapbooks

He sent us an envelope of chapbooks which I loved. Gary squirreled them away somewhere so I can’t check titles. Endlessly inventive!

Ariana Reines |The Cow | Fence | 2006

I know I’m late to this one, but wow, The Cow. She packs a punch.

Monica de le Torre | Public Domain | Roof | 2008

It’s conceptual! It’s funny! It’s whip-smart! It’s art!

Dana Ward |Typing Wild Speech | Summer BF Press | 2010

All the outspilling radiance of life and death here, like a pop Proust or a more-beatific-than Kerouac Kerouac.

PLUS: live computer-facilitated performances of Danny Snelson (“Mabuse”) and Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford (“The Ballad of the Death of Spring”) Why limit ourselves to the page? This is a future of poetry.

More Nada Gordon here. Her Attention Span for 2005. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – John Sakkis

Alastair Johnston | Zephyrus Image A Bibliography | Poltroon | 2003

George Oppen | The Collected Poems Of George Oppen | New Directions | 1976

David Brazil and Sara Larsen, eds. | Try Magazine | 2010

Micah Ballard and Patrick James Dunagan | Easy Eden | Push | 2009

Daniel Clowes | Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron | Fantagraphics | 1998

Gad Hollander | Walserian Waltzes | Avec | 1999

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

Sean Cliver | Disposable A History Of Skateboard Art | Warwick | 2005

Jason Morris | Spirits And Anchors | Auguste | 2010

Steve Lavoie and Pat Nolan | Life Of Crime Documents In The Guerrilla War Against Language Poetry | Poltroon | 2010

Rodney Koeneke | Rules For Drinking Forties | Cy Press | 2009

More John Sakkis here. His Attention Span for 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Kit Robinson

Clarice Lispector | The Stream of Life | University of Minnesota | 1989

Benjamin Moser | Why This Life: A Biography of Clarice Lispector | Oxford University| 2009

Carla Harryman | Adorno’s Noise| Essay | 2008

Anne Tardos | I Am You| Salt| 2008

Lyn Hejinian | Saga/Circus | Omnidawn | 2008

Rodney Koeneke | Rules for Drinking Forties | Cy Press | 2009

Michael Gizzi | New Depths of Deadpan| Burning Deck | 2009

Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer | The Cave| Adventures in Poetry | 2009

Andrew Joron | The Sound Mirror | Flood Editions | 2008

Lewis Warsh | Inseparable: Poems, 1995-2005 | Granary Books | 2008

David F. Garcia | Arsenio Rodriguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music | Temple University | 2006

More Kit Robinson here.

Attention Span 2009 – Rodney Koeneke

Kit Robinson | The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems 1976-2003 | Adventures in Poetry | 2009

“When I was a musician’s musician / I used to be a poet’s poet / then a black box” is the story of American poetry, postwar to next war to the one after that, rendered to clean Dolchese. ‘76 daps 2003: “Hey, poetry lovers! / It’s good to see you / here on the page.”

Julian T. Brolaski | A Buck in a Corridor | flynpyntar press | 2008

Saunter Gowanus with enough English in your pocket and it curls to its Middle like this, a new-gender’d Cockaigne “wher no bivalves gurgle at our kushing.”

Norma Cole | Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 | City Lights | 2009

City Lights brought back to life via “the whole story of the light” set to music of “enormous rotating blades.” Poetry as algebra proving the theorem “that dictionary may be a companion to art but life/is the most sentimental thing there is.”

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

Truth in advertising: all 500 hundred of Ibn Khalawayh’s names for the lion (“Whose Complaint Sets Others Moving,” “Whose Coat is the Color of Papyrus,” “He Who Looks for Trouble in the Night”) shined and seductively annotated “in the procedural spirit of recent avant-garde tradition.” “If Names of the Lion reads like an elegiac text, it is because we of the twenty-first century mourn the lion’s lost mastery over the earth.”

Barbara Guest | The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest | Wesleyan | 2008

Jupiter no longer so invisibly pulling so many of ‘09’s moons.

Douglas Oliver | Whisper ‘Louise’ | Reality Street | 2005

Louise Michel, “Red Virgin” of the Paris Commune, turned Revolution into paper-mâché and held sick horses in the street. Oliver makes her contradictions a piñata for his own life to fit into, the better to study the candy of our shared political dreams.

Stephanie Young | Picture Palace | ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni | 2008

Memoir goes to the movies and comes back as Parker Posey in a script by Yvonne Rainer. “That we could come of age inside another person’s coming of age story, or come to political consciousness inside another person’s coming to political consciousness story, haven’t people been doing that forever?”

Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009

Say it forty times fast and watch “little ships / of sensitive data” leave magic dimes behind everyone’s seats.

Michael Gizzi | New Depths of Deadpan | Burning Deck | 2009

Gizzi’s the Moses of tablets turned to sound, then dropped from the cliffs to hit ‘C’. This new Sinai’s pure Barbasol, all wobble and aloe and swing. When “blessings descend but no one knows how to redeem them,” then “grammar cracks eggs as best it can.”

Brandon Downing | bdown68’s Channel | YouTube | 2009

Disjunction soaked in the world’s B-movies and pulled out as syntax again. Jung never looked so harajuku, subtitles so lyrically green.

David Brazil & Sara Larsen, eds. | Try! Magazine | self-published | 2008-2009

Periplum to a party that would never have Pound as a member. Proof positive that toner and staples can make a Bay Area anywhere.

More Rodney Koeneke here.

Featured Title – Landscapes of Dissent by Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerilla Poetry and Public Space | Palm | 2008 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 3 mentions in Attention Span 2008

Field manual for the practice of not sitting on hands, pitched against “the almost imperceptible social octave known as normality.” (Rodney Koeneke)

The smartest demonstration and open invitation I’ve seen of what a poetics off the page and engaged with the world does, can and might look like. (Tom Orange)

Also mentioned by Joel Bettridge.

Featured Title – PPL in a Depot by Gary Sullivan

Gary Sullivan | PPL in a Depot | Roof | 2008 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 3 mentions in Attention Span 2008

Gary Sullivan demonstrates that free speech is all about hurting people, wanting to hurt people, and other illusions of agency. These plays show us how much it matters by being brutally honest about how little it matters; the formal care and attention that goes into these collages weights even the lightest, most banal statements with foreboding emblematic import. (Stan Apps)

Brecht shutting cell phone to mustachio Mozart with Caucasian circle chalk. “Between the dark and the thyme soufflé … mmmm …” (Rodney Koeneke)

Also mentioned by Michael Kelleher.

Featured Title – The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes by Benjamin Friedlander

Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | Subpress | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 3 mentions in Attention Span 2008

Lovely music of what happens, gracefully. (Simon Schuchat)

Transatlantic two-step for treated Bösendorfer. My feet slip over at ends of lines, like when you trip in dreams. Your catching yourself’s the poem. (Rodney Koeneke)

Overviews from two of our most important poets at mid-career, presenting new opportunities to see where they’ve come from and where they’ve now brought us. (Tom Orange, reviewing this title along with Laura Moriarty’s A Semblance)

Featured Title – Annoying Diabetic Bitch by Sharon Mesmer

Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 5 mentions in Attention Span 2008

This book is like cherry-flavored anthrax in a Pixie Stix straw. Mesmer breaks all the rules of decorum, craft, and form—she even invents some new rules just to break them. I would like to see her and Jennifer Knox have a poetic slapdown in a big hockey arena somewhere. My guess is that it would end in a tie with the audience dead from hemorrhaging. (K. Silem Mohammad)

It’s impossible to read these poems without wanting to share the lines out loud. Silence is helpless here: even when I’m alone with this book, I break the silence, laughing. Is there anything more poignantly utopian than that? If ideology is the presence of society in our heads, then laughing out loud when we’re alone is the very summoning of that society, an involuntary assertion of communion. (Benjamin Friedlander)

Dear Poetry: Please can you be like this sometimes always? (Rodney Koeneke)

Finally a poet meaner than Lenny Bruce. For all those who have been spiritually exploited by the iconography of the Olsen twins, get this book and be healed. (Stan Apps)

Also mentioned by Rod Smith, and by Tom Devaney in his entry on Mesmer’s The Virgin Formica.

Featured Title – Hannah Weiner’s Open House

Hannah Weiner, ed. Patrick Durgin | Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Kenning | 2006 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 5 mentions in Attention Span 2008

If only I had known sooner the ways in which she was engaged in art and performance, with her terrific inventiveness in the events of language in both private and public realms! (Sawako Nakayasu)

Not much to add to what oft’s been thought and mostly already been said about this needed book. A phenomenal display of Weiner’s talent and capability. Surely everyone should have read this by now, or else you’re the most unhip gluon. Major kudos to Durgin and the press. (Brad Flis)

Each room has many mansions. More doors, please, soon. (Rodney Koeneke)

Long-awaited. (Jennifer Scappettone)

Also mentioned by Marie Buck.

Attention Span – Dana Ward

Douglas Oliver | Whisper ‘Louise’ | Reality Street | 2005

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

Bob Perelman | IFLife | Roof | 2007

Ariana Reines | Coeur De Lion | Mal-O-Mar | 2008

Bill Berkson & Bernadette Mayer | What’s Your Idea of a Good Time | Tuumba | 2006

Catherine Wagner | Hole in the Ground | Slack Buddha Press | 2008

Marcella Durand | Area | Belladonna | 2008

Michael Nicoloff & Alli Warren | Bruised Dick | unknown | 2008

Stacy Szymaszek | from ‘Hyperglossia | Hot Whiskey Press | 2008

Rodney Koeneke | Rules for Drinking Forties | Cy Press | 2009

Young Brandon (Brandon Brown) | You Better Ask Somebody | unknown | 2008