Attention Span 2011 | Susana Gardner

David Kirschenbaum, ed. | The Portable BOOG Reader | BOOG LITERATURE | 2000

I acquired this anthology recently in an after reading pints and swap. From the stunning cover photo of Lee Ann Brown (taken by Allen Ginsberg no less) to the vast multitude of interior work by NYC based poets. Featuring Julie Patton, Wanda Phipps, Betsy Fagin, Sharon Mesmer and many, many more.

Dodie Bellamy | CUNTUPS | Tender Buttons | USA | 2001

This is a book I should have read right away, ten years ago today, actually. Ten years ago we all should have read it, but only now did I come to it. It is daring, a modern sort of nod to Lifting Belly. Modern and dual, bi-and all-BECOMING. It makes me WANT, it will make you WANT too. All MEN should read it NOW, all WOMEN too. Read it in one go, read it in two. Dodie Bellamy will bewitch you as she has me. Bewitched, betwixt, and tricked, all done up with all that lovely goo! An erotic love poem manifests each page. She will badger you, she will eschew you, as she wants you and you and you. So little! So Wild!!!

Sean Cole | Itty City | Pressed Wafer | 2003
Sean Cole | The December Project | BOOG | 2005

Like unexpected sound bites in rapid succession…

The moon is night alert. It’s half-nigh, strafing. Like an Alewife it slaps against the black movement of the sky. Every year I write about the moon, it’s ambitious, as if it did anything but whip the surf into dumb caps, as if it did anything but laps around the Earth.

Emily Critchley Love / All That / & OK by Emily Critchley | Penned in the Margins | UK | 2011

This is an amazing, thorough collection of British poet Emily Critchley’s publications to date. You need to read this book!

(The Avaunt Garde)

speaking in logic (or Greek) where nothing’s divided everything’s
dug up out of the dirt, bomb or butterfly, but such dirt gets stuck
(like red paint) under the nails & the world after all is not for such
violent admiring. the archaeological point may be us at the drinking
bowl us as the clouds part us offering ourselves up to ourselves in
graphic violence.to get the beauty of it hot

Frances Cruk | DOWN YOU GO OR Négation de Bruit | Punch | USA | 2011

Just in! This is a beautiful letterpress book, total gorgeousness all around. This is an amazing I-XX sequence, which begins:

Swarms!
We will bang
Into the sun Blinded
thirsty,
howling

(and continues in IX)

Again the fake garden, motionless plastic curves.
This time we are Great in our Smart
Bomb Time Machine device.
We come to fuck the mutants
We go to mutant them
I am with the mutant
firing limbs

I want to quote more. No, I want to type the whole sequence here for you now, but resist doing that…you need to order this book. And since I just received my copy, I want to digest its negation, its lyrical dreamy chasms before me.

Amy De’Ath | Erec & Enid | Salt | UK | 2010

From the title poem of De’ath’s impressive first collection:

Said Erec to Enide, the sun burst
down on my sails and glowing tore
my winnow North.
Said Enide to Erec, I don’t know how
to soothe you.
…
Said Erec to Enide,
Enide dozed, & her lips gently
popped as they parted. Erec sat on
the grass, the horse chestnut on his
chest, and the salmon who jumped,
and the curvature of his intense
guilt, his ergonomic fantasy office
and the parameter of his suburb.

j/j hastain | myrhh to re all myth | Furniture | forthcoming

‘This is a romance of fractals,’ an invigorating linguistic panoply which refuses to be any one thing. myrhh to re all myth gives us a vivid transdifferentiated poethic state—a sonic inquiry—thus feral post-gendered embodiment of ‘the infinitely ferric dress’. Multiple, layered, disarming and hauntingly worthwhile. Hastain spins a fine vocalic lyric gossamer about us, a future ethos and new grammatical treatise of fracture, rediscovery, and retelling, a myrhh re(garding) all myth.

Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: A Project For Future Children | Kelsey St. | 2009

Kapil threads together a now nearly forgotten story, as she realizes the tale of the two feral ‘wolf’ girls poetically as it is heart wrenching and hopeful.

“Lucidly, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next to your body; then my eyes clicked the photo into place. Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed.”

Marianne Morris | SolacePoem (afterParvine‘Tesami) | Tusk Records | UK | 2011

Listen to this link and be bewitched by this UK/CAN sylph in her gorgeous words and sound work. Seeing Morris perform is the only way to trump the poetic sound experience.

Tom Pickard | MORE PRICKS THAN PRIZES | Pressed Wafer | USA | 2010

This little book is packed with kicks & punches as it delivers a great poetic memoir of sorts, seriously small enough to fit in your pocket! While recounting a particular period of his experiences as a young poet, Pickard’s story also recounts the difficulty of ‘being’ a poet, father and citizen in the 60’s. Also, just received some beautiful postcards from Tom. He is an amazing photographer as well, and now I have many images of his far off corner in ‘Blighty’ (he taught me that!) The pic of him and Allen Ginsberg is tacked to my study wall.

Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | USA | 2009

I was pleased to meet Douglas this past summer at the Boston Poetry Marathon and then again in NYC for a Zinc reading. I am still digging into Dug’s Theogony. For some reason, when I meet poets I instantly fabricate (in my dense head) what kind of poems they write…Rothschild, for me was a poet of the long poem category…so at first I was surprised to see all of these small(ish) poems throughout the book…but then I realized it is all one poem we are all writing, right? One long fabulous poem! Here is one I particularly like… I also want to quote UNEXPOSED here, but no, I will not expose it. No, I will not expose it! Go find it!

PANZY 

& then another
first one & then a flock
of snow bells

Jaime Robles | foundlings | EXETER | UK | 2011

Receiving this book was a real treat—like a foundling itself, beautiful and austere in its form. And heart-wrenchingly prescient! It is works like this that bring me to poetry. It is many things, an inventory, a recalling of the past, an articulation of sorrow and even the beauty therein…a book of lost children, lost mothers, of hope.

from foundling 2275, a boy

                        This Silver Ribbon is
                            Desired to be preserved as
          The Childs mark for distinction

This ribbon binds but also reaches,
Observes the shortest distance between me and her,
Maps the call of a bird—
Tinsel and silky: each stitch a feather.

Michael Ruby | Window on the City | BlazeVOX | 2006

This is a beautiful book, another fabulous contribution to publishing from BlazeVOX! & a Dusie Kollektiv participant at that! It was also a great pleasure to hear Michael read his work at the Dusie Zinc Reading this past summer, I sent him away with his pockets full of chocolate.

Kathrin Schaeppi | Sonja Sekula: Grace in a Cow’s Eye: a memoir | Black Radish | 2011

An amazing book project convergence, re-seeing / investigation, and collaboration with the late Swiss visual artist and writer Sonja Sekula. When Schaeppi performs works from this book, I am inspired to write it to the score of one-woman musical. Vielleicht einmal!

Gertrude Stein | Lifting Belly | The Naiad Press Inc. | 1989

Lifting belly confounds me, entrances and enchants me.
Lifting belly what is earnest. Expecting an arena to be monumental.
Lifting belly is recognized to be the only spectacle present. Do you mean that.
Lifting belly is a language. It says island. Island a strata. Lifting belly is a repetition. (17)

§

Susana Gardner‘s Herso: An Heirship in Waves was published earlier this year by Black Radish.

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

Attention Span 2010 – Susana Gardner

aRb (ar)/ARB (Rb) | joy as Tiresome Vandalism | if p then q then others | 2008

Definitely acquired from James Davies up in Manchester. I have had these two beautifully wax-sealed documents. I didn’t want to open them, that is a shame because I finally broke the seal of one today to find a wondrously spineless collaboration with public spaces both poetic and photographic. As chance would have it I opened them incorrectly (2nd first, etc) This has the feeling of poetic grab-bag, especially in the confusion of my opening them wrong. This is a wonderful response project.

Elizabeth Bryant | (nevertheless enjoyment | Quale | 2010

Fantastic book—an inquisition of what if or what were in that space of nevertheless? Where it not this, were it not what it is in this temporal state. Clever in what is not said as it is in what is. The title, (nevertheless enjoyment crafts the book and utilizes the itself to its utmost possibility, denoted by space itself, the reader must remind themselves of the title again and again—with each new page and poem. Deliberate wanton poetic spaces, hapless and wondrous, with numerous possibility toward further want and understanding.

Harry Gilonis | North Hill | Free Poetry | December 2009

A syntactic consequence or take on two classical Chinese Poets, Tu mu and Yu Hsüan-chi —Gilonis makes the ancients new again. Each poem begins, or quite a way after Tu Mu (c. 803-852 AD) (or Yu Hsüan-chi 844-869 AD)

drinking alone

open window winds in snow
embrace embrasure   open wine
yawning like a yawl in the rain
unreefed  asleep  solitude  a star

for Peter Manson bis Mallarmé

Danielle Pafunda | iatrogenic: their tesitmonies | noemi | 2010

Wicked. Pafunda is at her best. Even had you dared to get iatrogenic with her, well it’s no surprise she beat us all in her craft and cunning. Though I do wonder if their is a poetic possibility of iatrogenic disorder we as poets could, say inherit or intuit from our poet forbears? Perhaps this is what Pafunda is trying to get at, versus owning the role of palpitating patient? Hypnotically hip and positively derisive!

Kaia Sand | Remember to Wave | Tinfish | 2010

Here, the poet (Sand) crosses into new genre or territory of poet toward that of poet-journalist. Remember to Wave should be read as testimony, a position of witness in a time the world we live in simply want to forget. Tracing the city on foot, Sand unveils the lost story, a story that is told more through the landscape of archives as it is through the contemporary retelling of the Japanese-American POW camp experiences, and subsequent devastation of a people and culture. An incredible beauty is also unveiled in the city’s foot-journey and Sand’s mapped coordinates, and it is this: Every city needs a poet like Sand. In her own way, Sand challenges every poet to take on the city in which they live and perhaps bear the witness or voice of those that can no longer tell the story.

David Wolach | OCCULTATIONS | Black Radish | 2010

Wolach’s Occultations is at once bawdy, beautiful and electrifying. No stops are missed, whether it be textural vispo imagery sidling other occultations and palimpsestic frameworks of a new body-poetic taxonomy. If ever a book needed to stand for a poet as they are daily as much as they are poetic, Occultations meets that challenge as it speaks plainly as well as being concurrently laden with contradictory fire and in your face farce— ‘in the forest in the dilated pores of firenight/ I dare you to devour me’.

Jeff Hilson, ed. | The Reality Street Book of Sonnets | Reality Street | 2008

This is an amazing, must have collection of sonnets. I am a bit embarrassed that I did not have a copy until now. The amazing breadth and inclusion even of very anti-sonnet sonnets is fantastic. Notably for me, Sean Bonney’s, Astrophil and Stella, Bern Porter’s Sonnet for An Elizabethan Virgin (imagine oA oA oA oA oA in a sonnet), or Mary Ellen Solt’s Moon Shot Sonnet, Paul Duton’s sonic so’net (s), Alan Halsey’s Discomposed Sonnets, John Gibbens’ leaf matter sonnets, from Underscore, or Philip Nikoayev’s Letters from Aldenderry, for which I must add I once asked, what is the opposite of an erasure…I think Nikolayev has given me the answer here. Props to Hilson and Reality Street for getting this beauty into the world.

Recently acquired goodies which I am very excited about reading…

Cara Benson | (made) | book thug | 2010

Francesca Lisette |As the Rushes Were (chapbook) | Grasp  | 2010

Tom Jenks | * | if p then q | 2010

Tom Jenks | a priori | if p then q | 2008

Brenda Iijima | If Not Metaphoric | Ashanta | 2010

Zoe Skoulding |You will have your own Cathedral (with cd) | Seren | 2008

Scott Thurston | Internal Rhyme | Shearsman | 2010

Scott Thurston, ed. | The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk | Salt | 007

want list:

I got to see Byrne, Myles and Wagner read this summer, sadly did not get my hands on their books (yet). But all gave amazing readings and I will get their books before the new year.

Mairéad Byrne | The Best of (what’s left of) Heaven (first edition) | Publishing Genius | na

Eileen Myles | Inferno: ( a Poet’s Novel | OR Press | 2010

Catherine Wagner | My New Job | Fence | 2009

More Susana Gardner here. Here Attention Span for 2007. Back to directory.