Attention Span 2011 | Suzanne Stein

Brian Whitener | False Intimacy | Trafficker | 2011

Erika Staiti | In the Stitches | Trafficker | 2011

Dana Ward | Cory Arcangel’s “All the Parts from Simon and Garfunkel’s 1984 Central Park Performance Where Garfunkel Sings with His Hands in His Pocket” | Open Space, the SFMOMA blog | November 10, 2010

Kaja Silverman | Flesh of My Flesh| Stanford | 2009

Barrett Watten | Total Syntax | Southern Illinois | 1985

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There are some other things I loved this year also. Laura Moriarty’s | A Tonalist | (Nightboat Books | 2010). David Brazil’s | yo! eos! | (Neo-Baroque, 2011). Sara Larsen’s | The Hallucinated (cannot exist, 2011). I stopped going to poetry readings at the beginning of November. I read The Coming Insurrection. I remembered I went to work in an art museum because I love the way I feel when I am looking at paintings, so I looked at a lot of paintings. I read The Handbook of Poetic Forms. I watched Gena Rowlands in Opening Night again and I bought the John Cassavetes | Five Films box set from The Criterion Collection | 2004. I went to the Bancroft Library for the first time. I listened to Stephen Cope’s | Conference of the Birds | podcasts. I went to Detroit. I stopped in Boston, Baltimore, and Denver. I went to Maine. I visited the Kabuki Hot Springs eight times. I read The Painting of Modern Life. I didn’t go to the office on a lot of Fridays. I looked at a calendar chronology of Duchamp. I bought a rotary telephone and a Sunday subscription to the New York Times. “No knows where that humming is coming from; one could not stop it if one tried.” (Barrett Watten, Total Syntax, 1985.)

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Suzanne Stein is a poet. She works currently as community producer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, editing the museum’s online magazine, Open Space, and organizing a variety of talk- and conversation-based programs. She lives in Oakland. Stein’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Stephen Cope

Joseph Donohue | Terra Lucida | Talisman House | 2009

Donohue’s singular economy of reticence and revelation is in evidence here throughout. Why is he not more widely read and celebrated?

Kenneth Goldsmith, ed. | Poetry Magazine: July/August 2009 | Poetry Foundation | 2009

Still trying to find the right acronym for Flarf: Faux Libertines Against Real Feeling, perhaps? Feminists, Libertarians, Antinomians, Revolutionaries, and Fakes? False Lyricists Appropriating Real Fascism?  Finally Liberated Artists. Recouping… etc. These are not the most interesting Flarf poems I’ve encountered, but still remain more interesting than the vast majority of poems published in this esteemed organ over the last, say, two decades. As for conceptual poetry: I recently ran across a copy of Goldsmith’s “Baseball” in the “sports” section of a used bookstore. Nuff said.

Fanny Howe | The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation | Greywolf | 2009

Perhaps the most important piece of advice I received in graduate school was the simple exhortation: “you should listen to Fanny.”

Adonis | Sufism & Surrealism | Saqi | 2005

Been a concern of mine for awhile – seems time may be ripe to explore Sufic modernisms (and explode thereby the oft exclusively Eurocentric – even when colonial or postcolonial – narratives of modernism still so prevalent). Plus, I’ve needed a lucid discussion of ‘ibn Arabi since I first went through Corbin’s book a decade ago.

Carl Rakosi | The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi | NPF | 1986

The least critically acclaimed—or critically attended-to anyway—of the Objectivists. Having had occasion to revisit this collection for a seminar, I found myself by turns delighted, enlightened, bedazzled, bewildered, inspired—and at every turn engaged. Rakosi still awaits his full share of critical reception and recognition: I wonder why?

Lytle Shaw | Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie | Iowa | 2006

Someone had to write this book, and I suspect Shaw’s discussion of “coterie” will have applications beyond this particular poet—beyond, perhaps, the New York School—for some time to come.

Ariana Reines | The Cow | Flood Editions | 2006

This one floored me. Visceral, vital, clinical, conceptual—it strikes a dissonant chord in the nerves. Precisely, I think, what I’ve been needing.

C. T. Funkhouser | Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms | Alabama | 2007

Best book on the subject, bar none.

Mark Scroggins | Louis Zukofsky: The Poem of a Life | Counterpoint | 2007

Scroggins’s approach is novel, as he mixes narrative with criticism in alternating chapters. Biographies rarely capture my attention the way that this one did, and I found myself repeatedly returning to the poems to find resonance and resource where before I encountered only the opacity of technique. An absolutely necessary book.

Ming-Qian Ma | Poetry as Re-Reading: American Avant-Garde Poetry and the Poetics of Counter-Method | Northwestern | 2008

A dense and pleasurably complex book. Following on Bruce Andrews’s theory of “re-reading,” Ma suggests that “poetry, to the extent that it is a critical-analytical reengagement with method as a problem, is the “rereading [of] the reading that a social status quo puts us through.” But this is no mere rehashing of stock-in-trade Lang Po theory; Ma’s trajectory is unique in engaging philosophical (and not just literary or aesthetic) modernism (and not just that of the trendy sort), At this point, I’m content to have my mind in the book, if not fully wrapped around it.

Wildcard selection: I’ve been known to add music to my lists before—this time I’ll offer relevant text instead. Liner notes to the following recording:

Balla et Ses Balldins |  The Syliphone Years | Stern’s | 2008

In this era of iTunes digital downloads, the inclusion of such booklets as this may become more and more necessary. It’s nothing new, of course, and I could name dozens of other collections with equally impressive notes—this is only the most recent. But as cds go the way of lps before them, one can only hope that the paratext doesn’t vanish with them…(a note on this: I recently downloaded my first two albums in MP3 format. Great sound, easier storage, certainly—but the lack of detailed information on instrumentation, composition, context, etc. has me leaning towards purchasing the actual cd at some later date (i.e. when I can afford the $50 or so…)).

More Stephen Cope here and here.