Attention Span 2010 – Rodney Koeneke

Lauren Shufran | The Birds | self-published | 2010

“half Punkish ideology, half ludicrous athleticism,” all sleek Greek comic fronting “During Hella Restless Times.”

Bruce Boone | Century of Clouds | Nightboat Books | 2009

Served up last century, lost through the clouds, spiked in the now for the win.

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

Lazarus reborn on Christmas as Ian Curtis.

Lauren Levin, Catherine Meng & Jared Stanley, eds. | Mrs. Maybe | 2010

What Timberlake did to sexy the Mrs. does maybe to staples.

Anselm Berrigan | Free Cell | City Lights | 2009

The socius blown through poet & getting its rhetoric high.

Ariana Reines going to Haiti | Blog of Ariana Reines | 2010

Poetics rethunk via contrails, tap taps, feet.

Brandon Downing | Lake Antiquity | Fence Books | 2009

History bending its head feelingfully to meticulously whacked lithography.

Sam Lohmann, ed. | Peaches and Bats | 2010

The regional conceived as planisphere.

Brandon Brown | Wondrous Things I Have Seen | Mitzvah Chaps | 2010

Latest stop on BB’s dromedary progress from strength to strength to strength.

Sara Larsen & David Brazil, eds. | Try! | 2010

We’re still having fun, and you’re still the one.

Lindsay Hill | The Empty Quarter | Singing Horse Press | forthcoming

Mauritania’s sand in metaphor creep to everything.

More Rodney Koeneke here.  His Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2006. 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 2010 – Elizabeth Treadwell

Vine Deloria, Jr. | Spirit & Reason | Fulcrum | 1999

“We should be making a determined effort to move forward in the creation of a continental culture that understands itself as a totality and a novelty whose only concern is developing forms of existence that provide everyone involved with a sense of integrity and identity.”

Stephanie Rioux | My Beautiful Beds | Parrot 1/Insert | 2010

“each eye ajar upon the animalised blot”

Christine Wertheim, ed. | Feminaissance | Les Figues | 2010

“…in the grass green skin of one’s humanness…”
—Caroline Bergvall

Lara Glenum & Arielle Greenberg, eds. | Gurlesque | Saturnalia | 2010

“These boobs are real”—Dorothea Lasky

Carrie Etter, ed. | Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets | Shearsman | 2010

“Yet none have hard real edges, since each one
is rightly spilled over, from the start of her life.”
—Denise Riley

Jane Campion | Bright Star | Pathe International | 2009

Who would not go for sweet skinny Keats all in his word dream? Although I haven’t loved her films equally (“Portrait of a Lady,” “In the Cut”), I am so grateful for Campion’s very particular, and particularly female, comprehension and sensibility. I appreciate the ways she portrays kids and families, and the varied ways my three favorites of hers — “An Angel at My Table” and “Holy Smoke” in addition to this new one — portray young women’s individuality and seeking as very much an outgrowth of and supported, however imperfectly, by family love. Kerry Fox, who once played Janet Frame in “An Angel” is here the mom, which leaves me happily aging.

Sara Larsen | Novus | Earthworm | 2009

In this bright orange chapbook and in the film above, I really appreciated the centrality of a young woman’s brave, pleased, idiosyncratic, non-monetized sexual loving. As we attempt to live despite each day & ages synthetic limitations, we could use a fuck of a lot more of this.

Nella Larsen | Passing | Knopf/Penguin | 1929/2003

10x finer than Melanctha.

Louise Erdrich | Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country | National Geographic | 2003

“Sometimes I look at men, at the way most of them move so freely in the world, without a baby attached, and it seems to me very strange. Sometimes it is enviable. Mostly, it is not. For at night, as she curls up or sprawls next to me and as I fall asleep, I hold onto her foot. This is as much for my comfort as to make sure that she doesn’t fall off the bed. As I’m drifting away, I feel sorry for anyone else who is not falling asleep this way. The world is calm and clear. I wish for nothing. I am not nervous about the future. Her toes curl around my fingers. I could even stop writing books.”

Rebecca Skloot | The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | Crown | 2010

“If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that’s dishonest. It’s taking away their lives, their experiences, and their selves.”
—an unnamed relative of Henrietta Lacks, as quoted by Rebecca Skloot

More Elizabeth Treadwell here. Treadwell’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to 2010 directory

Attention Span 2009 – Brandon Brown

K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams | Unpublished

Kasey’s most recent work complicates any orthodox aesthetics of Flarf. While it surely deploys the twin, cardinal rules of computer aid and histrionically “bad” content, the “Sonnagrams” are for me also work of conceptual translation, doubly or triply nuanced by Mohammad’s own training as a Shakespearean scholar. And this is Shakespeare 2009: “Then do I pray this adage may hold tight / Mohammad sweetens seagull panties right.”

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

The “Notes” themselves an experiment in conceptual collaboration, the NOC were as controversial in summer 2009 as “The Call” Don Denkinger made correctly in the 1985 World Series. I found them extremely generative, useful, and profound.

Sara Larsen and David Brazil | Try!| stapled magazine | 2008-2009

Try! is heir to the rich tradition of Xeroxed, stapled, hand-delivered, often-appearing magazines in the Bay Area. Try! comes out every two weeks—and it really does! It also manages to collect the newest, most vibrant writings that surpass the alienating categories of genre and xenophobic (read: your given “local poetry community” xenophobia) coterie-or-nuthin’ loyalties. I love it. You love it.

Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | In Girum | 2008

I spent the oughts waiting for this book to come out and thanks to In Girum Nocte etc. press it has.

Rob Halpern | Disaster Suites | Palm Press | 2009

Disaster Suites is an outrageous work, the word that has accompanied my living adjacent to and with Rob over the last few years of his writing and reading these magnificent polemics against complicity and the tonal shifts of global capital.

Madeline Gins | What The President Will Say And Do!! | Station Hill | 1984

Not quite a neglectorina and certainly not a new release, but since this is my first “Attention Span” I’ve got to include one of my all-time favorites.

Anne Tardos | I Am You | Salt | 2008

Woah. Seriously. The high point for me probably the sudden photograph of Anne glaring at the reader into the ostensible Macbook camera, literalizing the transgression of the lyric already at work through the bloodbath and beyond.

Dana Ward | The Drought | Open 24 Hours Press | 2009

The drought is over thanks to O24HPress. Fundamentally an advancement of the lyric impulse as mediated not only by “post-avant” poetics (including contemporary post-avant manifestations—Ward’s work stands not as an emblem of some categorical “other” or “hybridity” to some bicameral hegemony of flarfists and conceptualists, but for me it is one of the finest proofs of a world out there) but fulsome ecologies of pop prosody and interpenetrations.

T.I. | Paper Trail | Grand Hustle / Atlantic | 2008

T.I.P.’s sixth studio effort is the shining mainstream hip hop LP of the fiscal year. The classic Clifford approach (the breathless Whitmanian line, the essential Atlantan drawl) inflected by his impending jail sentence—the record’s carpe diem message amplified by its anthemic choruses.

Anne Boyer | odalisqued.blogspot.com | Internet | 2008-2009

The thresholds between Anne’s “books” and her activity on the blog are constantly threatened and renewed. What you get in both places is a contemporary lyric, made in the place where web-based simulacra meets the real-time alienated worker, all the while expressive of Anne’s sui generis aesthetic and integrity.

More Brandon Brown here.

Attention Span 2009 – Elizabeth Treadwell

Jennifer Firestone & Dana Teen Lomax, eds. | Letters to Poets | Saturnalia | 2008

“I for one don’t care about George Bush, we shouldn’t be disturbed by dogs, or low caste people and the power they have, they are average minds with a lot of power and attention, but for me they are just farts who don’t know the true history of how cultures and science weave. They are always into themselves, they cannot perceive other people or the pain that they are causing them. Obviously you can’t reach them with language.”—Victor Hernandez Cruz, to Brenda Coultas

“Female history is always destabilized by whatever guy is now watching the line of women parading by. It’s maddening but those guys will never change. We have to think differently. ….I think females need to write new fictions to hold their truths….. We have to set each other up better all the time and the terms of the world are always inadequate to women’s true accomplishments…..The feminine line means that above all women mustn’t be contemptuous of themselves. Just when the last thing going on is one’s purported femininity, it erupts like a big bow. We’re just so many things. I distrust my own jargon, my abandoning of the feminine for the female. I guess I was preferring sex over gender, but later thinking how arrogant to pretend not to be feminine. For anyone really. Why is the feminine the thing to hate. Something men, or mothers made to control girls. Surely it can free us too, then in some homeopathic way. I often forget words, that’s why I like holes. All this quiet diving through the dictionary and a bird comes up tweeting.”—Eileen Myles, to Jennifer Firestone

Reid Gomez | K’e/For Future Reference | http://reidgomez.blogspot.com | ongoing

“Food, dolls, stories, baskets, beadwork, silverwork, weavings, hand drums, flutes, songs and dances tell us who we are and teach us how to care for ourselves and our relations. Farmers, artists, wise men and women, weavers, dancers and singers invest their time and money living tradition, making a place for us in the here and now. They invest their resources in us and our future, creating and forging relationships that support us as individuals and as people. When we support them we support ourselves. When we purchase objects or services based in hate and exploitation we are funding hate and exploitation.”

Ann Vickery | Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing | Wesleyan | 2000

Such dear close history, a little surprised I’m just reading it now.

Nate Dorward, ed. | Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada | The Gig | 2008

The Johanson on Annharte and O’Leary on Wolsak were of particular interest to me.

Trevor Joyce | Courts of Air & Earth | Shearsman | 2008

The gorgeous Irish. Love it. Trans from the trad, intro’d by Fanny Howe.

Tim Atkins | Folklore | Salt | 2008

“Milks. Stitched into history.”

A curious pleasure to read this in conjunction with the above.

Andrew Rippeon | Priest | 2008

This little chap just appeared in my box, beautiful work.

Cathy Park Hong, Evie Shockley, &c, eds. | jubilat

Never a dull issue. I especially enjoyed the interview with CB I Hate Perfume in #15.

David Brazil & Sara Larsen, eds. | Try

Again with the never a dull issue, plus highly lovable production values.

Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone | Poems | Green Integer |1999

Keeping this close of late.

More Elizabeth Treadwell here.

Attention Span 2009 – Cedar Sigo

John Wieners | The Lanterns Along The Wall | Other Publications | 1972

Suzanne Stein | Hole In Space | OMG | 2009

Sara Larsen and David Brazil, eds. | Try! Magazine (A first year subscription) | 2008-9

Joanne Kyger | Lo & Behold | Voices From The American Land | 2009

Tom Raworth | A Serial Biography | Fulcrum Press | 1969

Kimberly Lyons | Phototherapique | Katalanche and Portable Press At Yo-Yo Labs | 2008

Micah Ballard | Parish Krewes | Bootstrap Press | 2009

Dodie Bellamy | Barf Manifesto | Ugly Duckling | 2008

Rene Daumal, trans. Roger Shattuck | Mount Analogue | Pantheon | 1960

Bill Berkson | Goods and Services | Blue Press | 2008

Filip Marinovich | Zero Readership | Ugly Duckling | 2008

More Cedar Sigo here.