Attention Span 2011 | Mathew Timmons

Stan Apps | The World as Phone Bill | Combo | 2010

Allison Carter | Sum Total | eohippus labs | 2011

Harold Abramowitz | Not Blessed | Les Figues | 2010

Amanda Ackerman | The Seasons Cemented | Hex | 2010

Steven Zultanski | Cop Kisser | BookThug | 2010

Matvei Yankelevich | The Nature Poetry of Matvei Yankelevich | Ugly Duckling | 2010

Mairéad Byrne | The Best Of (What’s Left Of) Heaven | Publishing Genius | 2010

Donato Mancini | Fact ‘N’ Value | Fillip | 2011

Gregory Betts | The Others Raisd in Me | Pedlar | 2009

Janice Lee | Kerotakis | Dog Horn | 2010

Brian Getnick & Zemula Barr, eds. | Native Strategies: So Funny It Hurts. The performance art journal of Los Angeles, No. 1 | Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions | Spring-Summer 2011

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Los Angeles based artist, writer, curator and critic Mathew Timmons‘ books include The New Poetics (Les Figues), Sound Noise (Little Red Leaves), CREDIT (Blanc Press) & Lip Service (Slack Buddha); and forthcoming projects include Lip Service / Sound Noise / Basic Hearing (Jaded Ibis Press), Where is it Written? (Imipolex Press), and After Darío (Phoneme Books).

Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Keith Tuma

Steven Zultanski | Cop Kisser | Book Thug | Toronto | 2010

“Workers of the world, come on already.” 32 brands of beer matched by 32 Zultanski personalities, Lenin a deck of identity cards, Mao with Zultanski’s mother: this is a collection of long tail poetry taking on the banality of information with insight and wit, its idioms absolutely contemporary, its prosody deadpan, its cover brighter than canary yellow. Rod Smith wouldn’t let me out of Bridge Street Books without it. He was right to insist.

Rae Armantrout | Money Shot | Wesleyan | 2011

“All we ask / is that our thinking / sustain momentum, / identify targets.” I don’t know a poet who thinks more in her poems, via analogy, juxtaposition, definition, and otherwise. Armantrout begins the first poem with a line from the Book of Revelation promising a new world, noting that new worlds are always with us—and also not with us—in “The spray / of all possible paths.” But thinking can’t stop with recognition or contemplation: “Define possible.” Several of the poems think about the collapse of the economy, e.g. “Money Shot” and “Soft Money,” where one notorious phrase from the pornoculture—“so hot”—deflates those who would eroticize social inequality.

Jeff Hilson | In The Assarts | Veer | 2010

A comic sonnet sequence and something of a clearing in the dark wood of recent experimental English poetry, no less serious or engaged for its light touch. The kitsch of England from crossbows to Kinks, Anne Boleyn to Jeremy Irons. “I am sick of the banks of England” in a mix of faux-archaic and contemporary registers where Wyatt meets Berrigan: “I was lost in doe a deer.” Stephen Rodefer gets a cameo, and there’s passing reference to In the American Tree and The Reality Street Book of Sonnets. One poem opens with what is probably a joke about a recent book by Jean-Luc Nancy. That one takes us back to the book’s first poem, where the reader is asked to “Give them thy finger in the Forêt de Nancy.”

William Fuller | Hallucination | Flood Editions | 2011

It’s not only poetry that almost successfully resists the intelligence—try banking: “Several times a day someone passes by the door holding a report.” That’s the first sentence of the book’s last poem, a prose poem called “The Circuit.” Maybe it’s best to indicate the texture and quality of these prose poems making for more than half of Fuller’s book by quoting first lines from a few others: “More numbness from less pain, I heard the preacher say. When does apprehension become extinction? Of what omitted act is it the fruit?” (“Flaming”). “It dreamt that it spoke as it dreamt and wrote down what it spoke in echoes of situations dreamt about which its mind wondered at” (“The Will”). “For the period of thirty lunar days after the receipt of appropriate notice [undefined], the parties [not specified] shall attempt in good faith to resolve whatever dispute has (evidently) arisen by employing the advanced measurement approach, which computes a given event’s penumbra as it tumbles into the lap of someone who studies it.” Seeing as if through fog events apprehended only after the fact constitutes most worlds; these poems map our life “in the dark” while admitting—not always as ominously as “The Circuit” does—the “imperceptible” as fact.

Frances Kruk | Down You Go / Négation de Bruit | Punch | 2011

A series of fragments after Danielle Collobert, two or three lines or clusters of lines per page, white space the silence between them and allowing for their little explosions —“I revolt / project.” “Swarms! We will bang / into the sun Blinded.” Bitterness distilled to an essence: “I ordered a hurricane & I am still / on this island I am still / on this island.” I had to look up “crkl,” which appears twice, and so courtesy of Wikipedia: “Crk-like protein is a protein that in humans is encoded by the CRKL gene…. CRKL has oncogenic potential.” I don’t know Collobert’s work well enough to suggest the most pertinent comparisons, having seen only two books translated by Norma Cole, but I do know that this is a powerful and defiant book—“We come to fuck the mutants / We go to mutant them / I am with the mutant / firing limbs.” One of the best young British poets is Polish-Canadian.

Mina Loy, ed. Sara Crangle | Stories and Essays of Mina Loy | Dalkey Archive | 2011

As Crangle notes in her introduction, this first book-length collection of Loy’s short stories, drama, and commentary is not a “definitive” or “critical” edition, but its apparatus includes a smart and readable introduction and 100 plus pages of notes briefly situating and glossing the work while detailing the nature of the manuscripts involved and listing Loy’s editorial corrections. The book ought to make for the best news of the year in modernist studies, though you can ignore modernist studies and just read it.

Tom Pickard | More Pricks Than Prizes | Pressed Wafer | 2010

A brief memoir of the 1970s that has Pickard’s arrest, imprisonment, and eventual acquittal on charges of selling marijuana as its central story, with glimpses of Eric Mottram and Jeff Nuttall and a more extensive account of Basil Bunting and what he did for Pickard as mentor and character witness at the trial. I wish we had more of this kind of thing about the days of the so-called British Poetry Revival. I’d trade it for a dozen academic studies. Written in a no-nonsense prose, with one moment where Pickard puts his foot on the gas. That’s where he’s detailing a scheme to use books as ballast in crates previously emptied of “almost one ton of Ugandan bush” and writes of selling the people who were doing this all of his copies of The Strand Magazine, his sets of The Times History of World War I and Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s not enough to make the weight so he starts buying up crap books all over London. Here’s the Homeric moment: “The ancient bookseller was blissful as we bought much of his space wasting dust gathering, back breaking, spirit deadening unread and unreadable religious and military texts; all those pounds of printed pages by puffing parsons, anaemic academics, bloated bishops, geriatric generals, corpulent combatants and high ranking haemorrhoidal heroes. All that catechistic cataplasm, the militarist mucus, that pedantic pus from festering farts. The engaging entrails of emetic ambassadors, pestiferous papers by prudish pedagogues. I struggled to the wagon with arms full of books, and still he wasn’t satisfied—so I purchased conquering chronicles by conceited commanders….” This goes on for another 40 or fifty lines and ends as follows: “And it still wasn’t enough so I bought the works of talk show hosts, canting sofa cunts coughing up chintzy chunder, bloated volumes by toady poets who sit in circles blowing prizes up each other’s arseholes with straws—until we’d filled the crates.”

Jed Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger, eds. | Mimeo Mimeo 4 | Winter 2010

Like Pickard’s memoir, a valuable resource for those who want to catch up with the British poetry that matters most, including the “only known essay” by Asa Benveniste, whose poems ought to have more readers, interviews about small press publishing with Tom Raworth and David Meltzer, essays by Ken Edwards and Alan Halsey (on the mimeo editions of Bill Griffiths), and selections from Eric Mottram’s correspondence with Jeff Nuttall. It concludes with Miles Champion’s interview with Trevor Winkfield.

Gizelle Gajelonia | Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus | Tinfish Press | 2010

The modernist canon as read and written through in Hawaii—Stevens, Bishop, Crane, Ashbery, and Eliot’s “The Waste Land” for starters. Here’s the Eliot poem’s opening lines:

He Do Da Kine in Different Voices

January February March April May June
July August September October November
December is the cruelest month, mass breeding
Plumeria leis out of homestead land, mixing
Exoticism with desire, stirring
Dull roots with windward and mauka showers….

The chapbook ends with prose titled “The Day I Overthrew The Kingdom of Hawai‘i”: “I remember filling out the application form. Gajelonia, Gizelle, Evangelista. My middle name is my mother’s maiden name because I’m Filipino. ‘Are you an American citizen?’ the form asked. No, I told you I’m Filipino. Technically. I have a green card. And a green passport. But I’m an American. I’ve been here 4 years. I got my period here. My first love was an American boy named David Powers. My favorite boy band was N Sync, not Backstreet Boys. I’m in the ninth grade. In the Philippines there’s no such thing as a ninth grade. I’m not sure what I am. Is that an option? Call my mother in case of an emergency….”

Rachel Warriner | Eleven Days | RunAmok | 2011

One poem each day between the IMF’s arrival in Ireland and the agreement signed: “burn me up / in anonymous austerity / your fat face / lies / in last sovereign days” is how it begins and “sold out and done” is how it ends. For now. Promising work from a new press in Cork.

Ron Silliman | Wharf Hypothesis | LINESchapbooks | 2011

I’d lost track of Silliman’s poetry since the The Alphabet was published entire and found it pleasant and interesting to look over his shoulder on the train from Victoria to the Text Festival in Bury, England, noticing him noticing this and that (missing baseball diamonds) and thinking about writing and about kissing while punning along (“feeling blurby—Simon / mit Garfunkel”). Like Dickens in America—maybe—and Dickens ends the poem, which is said to belong to “Northern Soul,” which is in turn said to be a part of Universe. Beautifully produced, with a cover photograph by Tom Raworth.

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Keith Tuma‘s On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes is due from Salt later this year.

Tuma’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009 . Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Craig Dworkin

Derek Beaulieu | Seen of the Crime | Snare | 2011 (forthcoming)

Collected short essays from the fearlessly indefatigable, inquisitive, and generous poet, letraset master, micro-press publisher, and collector of literary curiosities. I haven’t seen the final manuscript, but an early draft suggests that this will be the practical, earnest compliment to the abstruse theoretical wink of Notes on Conceptualisms.

Gregg Biglieri | Little Richard the Second | Ugly Duckling | 2011

A gorgeous new book by my favorite poet. Little Richard offers a lyric meditation on doubling (echo), words (and letters), and the +ow (/wo) effect. Wow. The philosophical aviary of these post-objectivist stanzas resound with all the interlingual puns that can pass in the augenblicke of Minerva’s insomniac bird (which blinks rarely, and has two eyelids, but is the only bird to blink like humans do). Printed letterpress on luxuriously doubled sheets of laid Neenah paper, with elegant hand-sewn Japanese stab-binding and a device evoking the culture ministry of some central asian dictatorship.

Kieran Daly | Plays/ For Theater | bas-books | 2011

I’ve been genuinely surprised and excited by everything I’ve seen from Daly, which suggests that there is still some room left for both the reduction and expansion of conceptual writing before the mode is played out (and Daly pushes in both directions simultaneously). This is hard-core conceptual theatre in which bibliography takes center stage. Gertrude Stein meets Jarrod Fowler.

Judith Goldman | l.b.; or, catenaries | Krupskaya | 2011 (forthcoming)

The concatenated series of poems in Judith Goldman’s l.b chart the narratives formed by texts of uniform density hanging freely from two fixed readings not in the same semantic line. On the one hand, the book dramatizes language under the regimes of contemporary communication—the protocols and phatics of privatized and publicly traded language—with all the false and inescapable sociality of networked media and commercial memoranda. On the other hand, the motivated material play of the signifier points to the paths of greatest resistance: chance, ludic laughter, and the recalcitrant residuum of the body.

At the level of composition, l.b is also a kind of catena patrum: a series of extracts from earlier writings, forming a commentary on some portion of scripture. Goldman’s finely sutured microcollage of forms and phrases moves from Aristotle to Andy Warhol, Kathy Acker to William Wordsworth, Abu Ghraib to Thomas Wyatt. Where the traditional catena is also a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine, here the discrepant result is a more thoroughly, honestly, chronic text: not the false time of doctrine and tradition, but something more true to its own time, and to linguistic time itself.

Helen Hajnoczky | Poets and Killers: A Life in Advertising | Snare | 2010

As if Rob Fitterman wrote a season of Mad Men, Hajnoczky gives us the life story of a character told exclusively through the language of corporate advertising, with the publication date of the (actual) found text keyed to the corresponding year of his (fictional) life. Given the degree to which North Americans are all shaped by the interpellating hail of commercial media, this is also the biography of many of its readers as well. The book, sporting a handsomely textured purple cover decorated with ‘pataphysical gidouilles, contains a generous and considered Afterword. Snare, run by Jon Paul Fiorentino in Montréal, has rapidly established itself as a press to watch and a venue of envy for conceptual writers.

Yedda Morrison | Darkness | Make Now | 2011 (forthcoming)

Morrison has produced an edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which only references to the natural world remain. But what counts as “natural” is far from self-evident, and Morrison’s erasures open onto a range of philosophical and ethical questions. At one extreme, the reader begins to suspect that perhaps we can never recognize a truly natural world, one uncoloured by our human perspective, at all. And at the same time, at the other extreme, one begins to suspect that maybe there is nothing—including our own artifice—that is not in fact a part of an all-encompassing natural world after all.

The test of conceptual writing is the degree to which the distance between the concept and the execution creates enough friction to generate a spark across that gap. Here, the ethereous space between the idea and the text—between mind and body, artifice and nature, erasure and source—ionizes with violent disruption and report.

Joseph Mosconi | Galvanized Iron on the Citizen’s Band | Poetic Research Bureau | 2009

Each poem here is a mash-up of euphemistic cant, with one half taken from the slang of soldiers and the other from the code of truckers (the G.I. and C.B. of the deacronymized title). The results come across like eroticized slogans, often with an uncomfortable and vaguely aggressive comedy. The thin, oversize hardback is bound like a primer for early readers, with the text set in an enormous 25-point Times New Roman, as if Jenny Holzer were excerpting lines from mid-career Bruce Andrews’ poems, to be printed on billboards or bumperstickers. Conceptual, wry cultural critique, with one ear to the art world and one ear to the microphonemics of the best Language writing. Two poems, just to give a taste: “Gucci/ Kit/ Diesel/ Cop”; “Shamurai/ Cash/ Box.”

Travis Ortiz | Variously, Not Then | Tuumba | 2011 (forthcoming)

The book I have been most anticipating for the longest time. Ortiz has taken a finely polished series of prose poems (originally composed in a west-coast, post-language, ‘90s mode of socially motivated radical parataxis) and written through them both lexically and typographically. The result simultaneously displays both the remixes, with their delicious lines like “geography towers is narrative,” and also the original texts. Those originals are the epitome of their genre, and so opening Variously is like discovering a forgotten time-capsule containing a pristine print from a lost, never-screened film documenting its own vanished golden-age. A treasure chest, in other words. Luxuriously designed, and a rare issue from Lyn Hejinian’s revamped Tuumba press.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven | Body Sweats | MIT | 2011 (forthcoming)

Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (an interesting poet in her own right – see Parlance [Coach House, 2003]), this long-needed collection remaps the frontiers of Modernism by allowing us to fully see, for the first time, just how radical von Freytag-Loringhoven’s writing was. We know her performative persona was something to be reckoned with (she scared the shit out of William Carlos Williams, offering to infect him with her syphilis in order to help free up his poetry – they ended up more than once in fistfights on his suburban front lawn), but her linguistic fearlessness puts her in the same league as Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, and Abraham Lincoln-Gillespie. Moreover, these poems will be a wake-up-call to many contemporary poets: a century later the Baroness’ work is still as drastic as anything being published today.

Eric Zboya | Translations | Avantacular | 2010

Two volumes, in collaboration with Andrew Topel, of “algorithmic” translations, which transform the letters of a poem into extruded dendrites of exploded non-lexical exclamation. Abstract, illegible geometric patterns in a densely inked but subtly-shaded blue-black sheen, each shape is determined by an alphabetic logic that human viewers can appreciate but cannot reconstruct. A new idiom for digital poetry, visual poetry, and appropriation.

Steven Zultanski | Pad | Make Now | 2010

Ultimately more about the tension between the literal and the figural imagination than the Beavis and Butthead idée fixe of its domestic inventory (the book purports to catalogue every object in Zultanski’s apartment and whether or not his dick can lift it), PAD nonetheless suggests a new kind of confessional autobiography, filtered through the strategy of a clinically deodorized conceptualism. In the process it creates a new meter, and gives a parodic send-up of the charge that Conceptual writing is a phallocentric guy-thing. Zultanski’s premise begs its anatomical sequel—whether every object in an apartment fits in a writer’s vagina—which would offer yet another a new scale for classifying possessions but with a radically different psychological twist. I’m looking forward to that book, which I trust is being written as I type, if it’s not already in press. In the meantime, the bottom line: I can lift Steven Zultanski’s PAD with my dick.

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More Craig Dworkin here.

Dworkin’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2007 . Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Vanessa Place

Divya Victor | Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place | Factory Series | 2010

There is no genius like the original genius, no caste like the hallow.

Steven Zultanski | Pad | Make Now | 2010

Le dick n’existe pas—donc, ceci n’est pas un dick.

Heimrad Bäcker | Transcript | Dalkey Archive | 2009

The article proposes that transcript should be considered not only as a documentary work but also as a work determined by several forms of incompleteness, and it shows how the aestheticizing aspects of Bäcker’s text repeat or quote National Socialism’s will to aestheticize.

James Wagner | Geisttraum | Esther Press | 2010

Language as solid and fearsome as the religious American Middle West: plain, transparent and similarly constituent of its own allegorical surface.

Gary Barwin | Servants of Dust | No Press | 2010

The punctuation (only) of Sonnets 1 through 20, rendered spatially (O, Mallarmé!) (O, darling buds of May!)

Robert Fitterman, ed. | Collective Task | Patrick Lovelace Editions | 2010

“I would argue that a poet who has a project that he can lucidly discuss is a pretty boring poet, at best. I would argue that a poet with a project might not be a poet at all. Or at least a baby poet, not a great one…. I would argue that a poet who says he has a project probably has no sense of the idea of habitus and its intersection with the act of creation. Yeah. I think the term ‘project’ has nothing to do with poetry.”

Immanuel Kant | Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason | Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy | 1999

Radical evil: the primer.

Simony Morley, ed. | The Sublime (Documents of Contemporary Art) | MIT | 2010

Marco Belpoliti, John Berger, Paul Crowther, Jacques Derrida, Okwui Enwezor, Jean Fisher, Barbara Claire Freeman, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Doreet LeVitte-Harten, Eleanor Heartney, Lynn M. Herbert, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Lee Joon, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, Thomas McEvilley, Vijay Mishra, David Morgan, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Gene Ray, Robert Rosenblum, Philip Shaw, Marina Warner, Thomas Weiskel, Slavoj Zizek.

Rachel Zolf | Neighbor Procedure | Coach House | 2010

After all, what could be funnier than the slapstick of perpetual internecine warfare?

Jacques Lacan | The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955 (Book II) (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan) | Norton | 1991

No self! Only other!

Hanna Darboven | Die Geflügelte Erde Requiem | Edition Cantz | 1991

While “history” takes place even without human involvement, progressing with time (“History takes place on its own, that is historical time”), both “intellectual” and “technical” history hinge, according to Hanne Darboven, “on what the person has done” (page 26). In this way the two mutually influence one another.

Ryan M. Haley | Autobiography: Volume One (1975-1993) | Ugly Duckling | 2010

“The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.”—David Hume

Walter Benjamin | The Arcades Project | Belknap | 2002

Must be read sequentially to be read in the uncanny.

Eugene Delacroix | The Journal of Eugene Delacroix | Phaidon | 2006

“We are making rapid strides towards that happy time when space will have been abolished; but they will never abolish boredom, especially when you consider the ever-increasing need for some occupation to fill in our time, part of which, at least, used to be spent in travelling.”

Ezra Pound | The Cantos of Ezra Pound | New Directions | 1998

The Pisan Cantos again.

More Vanessa Place here. Back to directory

Featured Title – Human Resources by Rachel Zolf

Rachel Zolf | Human Resources | Coach House | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 3 mentions in Attention Span 2008

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. (Kristin Prevallet)

Like spam but better, Human Resources reworks the junk language of the internet to bring to the surface it’s conflicted relationship to desire. On the one hand, spam is work written by a bot. On the other hand, spam is work written to be an intrusion in lives of people who are not bots: to spark the reader’s interest with its outrageous subject-heading or its surprising collage of often-sexualized language. Zolf uses this language to write a book not written by a bot, a book about desire as articulated by a person who speaks the language of spam, a language which is not necessarily rational, but which as immediate as a Jaguar eating a man’s face (as seen in Apocalypto). This book is spazzy, surprising and over-the-top. Since I only like things that are over-the-top, I like this book. (Steven Zultanski)

Also mentioned by Joel Bettridge.

Featured Title – The Transformation by Juliana Spahr

Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 4 mentions in Attention Span 2008

Spahr’s poetic memoir blends the personal and the political in a different way. (Rae Armantrout)

The Transformation may be, by the author’s account, a novel. I’m not sure. If so it’s a little out of place on this here poetry list, but who cares? The disregard for genre is part of its charm. Spahr’s increasingly intensive connective writing brings as many things into relation that can fit into a linguistic scene. Actually that’s not quite true – the relationships she builds are precise ones, with particular contemporary and political resonances. For instance, the migration from Hawaii to NYC narrated in The Transformation brings us from a colonial scene to it’s obverse: late 2001 America. Within this broader frame, all manner of institutional effects, social contradictions and forms of natural life are brought into conversation. That’s what keeps Spahr’s work from lapsing into a hippie monism or relativism: the politicized frame always reconfigures the disparate material into a specific critique. And Apocalypto. (Steven Zultanski)

Also mentioned by Megan London and Michael Kelleher.

Featured Title – Deed by Rod Smith

Rod Smith | Deed | Iowa | 2007 |  Goodreads | LibraryThing | 5 mentions in Attention Span 2008

What the small press poetry world has known for years now finally garners national attention: this is a poetry to be reckoned with. (Tom Orange)

“The Good House” is a poem that is never less than itself, continually reinventing the topos of dwelling through the tropos of surprise. (Patrick Pritchett)

There’s a part in 3-D Imax Beowulf where Beowulf jumps out of the eye of a seamonster, presumably killing the beast. How he got into the eye remains unclear. Deed is better than that scene, and Rod Smith is more heroic than Beowulf, by far. (Steven Zultanski)

Also mentioned by Marie Buck and David Dowker.

Attention Span – Steven Zultanski

Some of my favorite poetry with a 2007 or 2008 copyright date.

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

O’Hara said that Whitman , Crane and Williams were the only American poets who were better than the movies, but today, in a world with Apocalypto and 3-D Imax Beowulf, only Kevin Davies is better than the movies. Maybe you’re in it for the giddy surprise of a turned phrase. Maybe you’re in it for the zonked formal apparatus (“floaters”?). Maybe you just want to drink a Corona and take pot shots at the government. Anyway you want it, that’s the way I need it. More than one Davies book a decade? Yes, please.

Craig Dworkin | Parse | Atelos | 2008

Like the chase scene in Apocalypto, Parse is a feat of athletic strength and technical virtuosity. And I mean that in the best sense (I’m a Yes fan, after all). This book is proof that conceptual writing deserves to be realized. Sure, the idea of parsing a grammar book by it’s own rules is clever, and many lazy McLazies would leave it at that and call it a piece—but the actual fact of the book goes way deeper than any mere suggestion. This work is ‘pataphysical’ in the truest sense—it appropriates a logic only to drag it to its limits, where the supposed rationality of its system is inverted—university discourse in the service of parody, or truth.

Rob Fitterman and Nayland Blake | The Sun Also Also Rises | No Press | 2008

Mr. Fitterman at his most tender, no kidding. Conceptualism and the lyric do meet, despite hysterical claims otherwise. In what seems at first like a closed system (all of the first person statements from Hemingway’s novel) we find instead a subjective opening: the sentences are so vague and gestural that they cry out to be grafted on to the autobiography of the reader, they serve as little memory-nuggets, each interchangeable and abstract. Which is precisely why the second part, a rewriting using material from the author’s own biography, is so necessary. Fitterman finds the ripples in Hemingway narrative (or, to be more broad, in novelistic conventions of masculinity) and, instead of a destructive gesture which breaks the original, ideologically-encrusted text apart, he adds more ripples, until eventually we can’t see to the bottom of the text. Psst—there is no bottom. Nayland Blake’s terrific minimalist coda sends us off on another open, leaky note, like the closing shot of 3-D Imax Beowulf, in which a computer-enhanced actor gets caught in the freeze-frame, or the fade-out, I don’t remember which.

Peter Gizzi | The Outernationale | Wesleyan | 2007

Peter Gizzi’s cameo in Apocalypto might have increased his star power, but it hasn’t diminished his poetic ability one bit. The opening sequence, “A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me,” is an ambitious serial work that takes Gizzi’s engagement with the complex arragement of image and statement to knottier, stranger territory. The title poem knots statement even tighter by mixing the poetic line with part-words, which can only suggest meanings, and defer the meanings made by the full sentences. This is dense poetry: not in the sense that say, Prynne is dense, nor in the sense that Oppen is dense. Instead of bludgeoning us with experimental vocab or treating us to crafted, meaningful line breaks, Gizzi’s lyric resides in the no man’s land between information management and intimate conversation. His romanticism (and I mean that in the best sense—I’m a Wordsworth fan, after all) is completely contemporary—the language of the present authors the poet. Said language is soaked in both abstract, highly mediated war-time quasi-correspondence, the dailiness of human sociality, and the sensory experience of the distance between those two things—as Gizzi says, bewilderment.

Renee Gladman | Newcomer Can’t Swim | Kelsey Street | 2007

Gladman’s writing so successfully carries the illusion of transparency that sometimes it seems like there’s not much there, in any particular sentence. But the accumulation of sentences, and especially the sense of narrative blows back that very transparency to create an effect that is more crystalline than glass-like. Identity is refracted – not invisible but manifold. The narrators of these fictions, or these poems, or whatever, are not lacking identities but exposing them, not as frauds but as real structures, and as real feelings. The sentences, likewise, are not frauds in their simplicity, in their transparency. They are part of a complex and many-sided form, somewhat akin to 3-D Imax Beowulf.

Kenneth Goldsmith | Traffic | Make Now | 2007
Kenneth Goldsmith | Sports | Make Now | 2008

Goldsmith’s “American Trilogy” is the Apocalypto of poetry—one long chase scene, the spectacularization of suffering, and a relationship to history that makes accuracy an irrelevant question. Of course, the big difference is that Mel Gibson is an anti-semite, and Goldsmith is a Jew. They would probably not get along.

Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008

Quoth Patrick Lovelace: “The fundamental question of writing is: after you write a word, do you repeat the word that you’ve just written, or do you choose another?” Quoth Beowulf: “The sea is my mother! She would never take me back to her murky womb!” Ted Greenwald has been grappling with just this problem for decades. 3 is one of my favs by him, especially the standout first poem, “Going Into School That Day,” a long poem on love and memory, in which the next word is either a new word, or the previous word, or the previous word in a new place.

Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007
Juliana Spahr | Intricate Systems | The Press Gang | 2008

The Transformation may be, by the author’s account, a novel. I’m not sure. If so it’s a little out of place on this here poetry list, but who cares? The disregard for genre is part of its charm. Spahr’s increasingly intensive connective writing brings as many things into relation that can fit into a linguistic scene. Actually that’s not quote true – the relationships she builds are precise ones, with particular contemporary and political resonances. For instance, the migration from Hawaii to NYC narrated in The Transformation brings us from a colonial scene to it’s obverse: late 2001 America. Within this broader frame, all manner of institutional effects, social contradictions and forms of natural life are brought into conversation. That’s what keeps Spahr’s work from lapsing into a hippie monism or relativism: the politicized frame always reconfigures the disparate material into a specific critique. And Apocalypto.

Kevin Thurston and Lauren Bender | Boys are Retards | Produce | 2007

Kevin Thurston answers all the questions from a Cosmo Girl quiz-book, and he answers them truthfully. Is this because Thurston is a Cosmo Girl at heart? Or is it because he has a non-patronizing relationship to mass culture which allows him to engage with it formally, in a way which respects the sincerity of feeling structured by ideology? See, Thurston’s feelings are also ideological, he doesn’t pretend not to be cry during 3-D Imax Beowulf, he doesn’t pretend to be outside. Instead of a condescending attitude, instead of mocking forms of entertainment which swell legitimate emotion in legitimate humans, Thurston offers a skeptical but honest response to manipulative ad-affects. A single tear runs down his cheek.

Rod Smith | Deed | University of Iowa | 2007

There’s a part in 3-D Imax Beowulf where Beowulf jumps out of the eye of a seamonster, presumably killing the beast. How he got into the eye remains unclear. Deed is better than that scene, and Rod Smith is more heroic than Beowulf, by far.

Rachel Zolf | Human Resources | Coach House | 2007

Like spam but better, Human Resources reworks the junk language of the internet to bring to the surface it’s conflicted relationship to desire. On the one hand, spam is work written by a bot. On the other hand, spam is work written to be an intrusion in lives of people who are not bots: to spark the reader’s interest with its outrageous subject-heading or its surprising collage of often-sexualized language. Zolf uses this language to write a book not written by a bot, a book about desire as articulated by a person who speaks the language of spam, a language which is not necessarily rational, but which as immediate as a Jaguar eating a man’s face (as seen in Apocalypto). This book is spazzy, surprising and over-the-top. Since I only like things that are over-the-top, I like this book.

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Special Mention: the comments box on Silliman’s Blog

Day after day, loyal Silliman readers fill up his comments box with: insults and whining?  A terrific and totally baffling phenomenon. The misdirected anger of poets everywhere comes to a head here, in a great wash of complaining and PC finger-wagging. Silliman, to his credit, is graceful – he doesn’t seem to censor the comments, he allows all the regulars their space to be wacky or conservative, and he keeps on blogging on. A toast to Silliman, of course. But a second toast, please, to the folks who transform a poetry blog into a absolutely entertaining parade of off-beat characters.

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More Steven Zultanski here.