Attention Span 2010 – Kit Robinson

Mark Weiss, ed. | The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry | California | 2009

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker | The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic | Beacon | 2000

Robin D. G. Kelley | Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original | Free Press | 2009

Hugh Kennedy | The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In | Da Capo | 2007

Ned Sublette | The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans | Lawrence Hill | 2009

Rodger Kamenetz | The History of Last Night’s Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul | Harper One | 2007

Norman Fischer | Questions/Places/Voices/Seasons | Singing Horse | 2009

cris cheek | part: short life housing | The Gig | 2009

Barbara Henning | Aerial View India; Cities & Memory; An Arc Falling into the Bougainvillea; Twirling, the Spirit Flies Off Like a Falcon | Long News | 2004; 2007; 2008; 2010

George Tysh | The Imperfect | United Artists | 2010

Ted Greenwald | In Your Dreams | Blazevox | 2008

More Kit Robinson here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2003. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Cathy Wagner

Aaron Kunin | The Sore Throat | Fence | 2010

Radical constraint. Self-reflexive to the point of wilderness.

Hoa Nguyen | Hecate Lochia | Hot Whiskey | 2009

Technique!

Laynie Browne | The Desires of Letters | Counterpath | 2010

You don’t go to poetry for wisdom? When it’s funny? And formally brilliant? And aware that tradition will stick its nose in? So it picks that nose and that pocket?

Stephen Rodefer | Call It Thought | Carcanet | 2008

“Then I stand up on my hassock and say sing that, / It is not the business of poetry to be anything.” Astonishing playful poetic know-how flung around as if it might hurt somebody. Call it ambulance.

Andrea Brady | Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination | Krupskaya | 2010

Brave and erudite. Documentary precision, passionate correlation. How do we make war out of ourselves? “What would make you throw yourself out?”

Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008

Iteration strummed to song. Say it again, Ted.

Brenda Iijima | If Not Metamorphic | Ahsahta | 2010

It’s trying to be adequate to the bio-crisis. Formally ambitious, absurdly sane.

Lance Phillips | These Indicium Tales | Ahsahta | 2010

Visceral detail: a phenomenology. “One purses fingers and lips to form a membrane.”

Akilah Oliver | A Toast in the House of Friends | Coffee House | 2009

Everything I want to quote from this book feels irritatingly depressurized when extracted from its spinning, oblique, humorous gravitas, but let’s try “this is a happy story but first i want to tell you about the shape of the incredible sadness. a porn movie you volunteer for. unpaid. untended. the sadness has that shape.”

Ara Shirinyan | Your Country is Great: Afghanistan–Guyana | Futurepoem | 2008

Funny as a crutch. As they say.

Daniel Kane | We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry | Iowa | 2009

Fascinating on visionary consciousness, formal innovation, and the mutually influential connections between Duncan, O’Hara, Ashbery, Ginsberg, others and radical postwar filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Alfred Leslie, Stan Brakhage, others.

More Cathy Wagner here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Bill Berkson

Charles M. Joseph | Stravinsky & Balanchine | Yale | 2002

Morton Feldman | Morton Feldman in Middelburg: Words on Music Volumes I & II| MusikTexte 34 | 2008

John Ashbery | Collected Poems 1956-1987 | Library of America | 2008

Pierre Reverdy, trans. Joh Ashbery | Haunted House | Brooklyn Rail & Black Square | 2008

William Kentridge et alia | WK5 | SFMoMA & Yale | 2008

John Godfrey | City of Corners | Wave | 2008

Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008

Kenneth Koch | The Collected Poems | Knopf | 2005

Alex Hamilton | Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art | University of Michigan | 2007

Isaiah Berlin | Russian Thinkers | Penguin | 1977

Duncan McNaughton | Bounce | First Intensity | 2007

Bill Berkson’s recent books are Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems (Coffee House, 2009) and Ted Berrigan (with George Schneeman, Cuneiform, 2009).

Attention Span – Brad Flis

Aihwa Ong | Neoliberalism as Exception | Duke | 2006

Ong’s, if only for its wide divergence from common iterations, is a refreshing theoretical reconsideration of the concept of neoliberalism. Instead of as a quasi-form of government, Ong suggests neoliberalism ought to be thought of as a technology of governing that can be used variously by an array of acting powers.  She provocatively claims that neoliberalism’s new configurations of territoriality, nationality, and identity, though motivated by market logics and self-interest, inevitably create new (hopeful) “spaces” from which populations can make claims to citizenship, human rights, benefits, and recognition previously excluded by state power. A take-to-the-beach kind of book.

Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008

Greenwald’s work tends to arrive in waves, but this past year it’s coming in torrents, with 3 being perhaps the most meaty sampling (another Cuneiform Press and a forthcoming BlazeVOX publication flank it). Three separate poems, built out of sonnets, quartets, tercets in series, each creating a centrifugal music by forging the ghosts of common speech out of the chambers of repetitive and modulating line structures. “Day in blue/ Stone in my passway/ Rehumanize/ Day in blue”  This is a much more personal, reflective Greenwald then I think we’re used to. Flawless and resonant, another career achievement in his long history of chart toppers.

Stan Apps | info ration | Make Now | 2007

I fully endorse this totally awesome, gnarly, and radical poetic explosion. All the things you wanted to say about capitalism and American imperialism but were afraid to sound like Keith Olbermann. As the title suggests, Apps dismantles and re-encrusts the critical desire of contemporary infotainment mediaspeak into a stained-glass Voltron of dystopic/ utopic language. “The oppressor was inside everyone/ I was fascinated by the chance to observe.”  Comes with neat Gary Sullivan cover.

John Keene & Christopher Stackhouse | Seismosis | 1913 | 2006

One of those books you keep picking up because new ideas in the interim force you back in. A text-drawing collab between these two artists, it’s the most fascinating argument for a reconsideration of Formalism in recent years, which works against the exploitable grain, from Kant to the New Critics, where the more isolated the presentation of something like ‘pure form,’ the more the mark of its contextual making breaks through. Stackhouse’s hand-drawings, frenzied and organic, are set against Keene’s amazing range of poetic forms, the latter of which concern themselves with the nature of form and abstraction, but restricted to a generally categorical palette of language itself. The result is the long creaking of history, the voice, and communal touching of art production and reception that breaks surface. “Injuring it, when I look./ What am I opening?/ Unlocking or loosing movement, the query of intent./ To enter the fail, the medium falling// in marks and strokes.”

Rob Halpern | Rumored Place | Krupskaya | 2004

Completely incredible. I almost put the book down by the end of the first section, being generally unenthused. So glad I didn’t. By the end of the second section, my understanding of and attitude toward the first completely pivoted. And then again through the next section, and then again, and again. The book roundelays the desire for collective history with a need for collective space. “Desire is a detour”  A masterful display in five parts of narrative reorienting through poetic mutation to wholly gratifying effect. “These shapes in us, negating figures like ‘future findings’—tracing rents in the general intelligence.”

kari edwards | having been blue for charity | BlazeVox [books] | 2007

This is a very strong, very lush book of resistances of all sorts, and a call to question the forms of resistance as it does so. Though its wild carnival of digital and formal interference will disappoint the avant techno novaphile, edwards explicitly theorizes a retreat away from the periphery of absolute break to address the point behind the lines where recognition and resource are not guaranteed but must be recycled from this behind-space. Too much going on in this book to encapsulate here justly, but certainly a record of and sustained demand for constructive presence. Though her last book, I know I will be rereading having been blue for charity for decades more.

Dudley Randall, ed. | Black Poetry | Broadside | 1969

Its full title is Black Poetry: A Supplement, To Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets, easily the best title of any publication of all time with the exception of Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours. 24 mostly familiar poets spanning two generations, from Hughes to Nikki Giovanni, packed into fewer than 50 pages, all post-war selections, which includes some exceptionally great poems by (then) Leroi Jones, Giovanni (at 25!), Clarence Major, Ahmed Alhamisi, & Sonia Sanchez. Malcolm X, recently assassinated, is taken up as figure and theme in much of the younger works. I’ve lately been looking for some texts with which to seriously yoke the persistent (insistent) critical hoopla around the New American Poetry Anthology, and this seems like a productive book to begin that retelling.

Hannah Weiner, ed. Patrick Durgin  | Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Kenning Editions | 2007

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.

Brian Kim Stefans | Before Starting Over | Salt | 2006

I love this book of essays, (digital) poetics, and reviews more than sin itself. A constant reference for what we need to be talking about and how we might go about it, like a poet’s little red book except kind of chunky (350p plus) and yellowish. Highlights include his letters to editors which are magically explosive given their brevity, while his spats with Silliman prove more than just entertaining, they get under the skin as nano-imperatives.  Overall Stefans is furiously scooping up from the vocabulary bin new ideas, concepts, and language and presenting it, however wet and dripping with goop, in the most generous and advanceable manner. The writing is impeccable, piercing, mellifluous, without a pixel of irony. N00bs & neuro-aesthetes take note.

Lesley Yalen | This Elizabeth | minus house | 2007

“At the end, the husband is strictly scientific.// At the end, someone is mopping like a mommy.// At the end, the glaring absences are back.// The background is ground.” Yalen’s  ten-part poem powerfully and uniquely scrutinizes the domestitcat(ed/ing) liberal fantasies of identity by forcing parodying and paradoxical figures upon a shallow stage. Husbands and moms, street people and lawyers, blondes and doctors all bolster the central figure, this Elizabeth, in a backward unpeeling of race and gender codes which the anti-hero of the poem, the Poet, is forced to reckon with, failingly, with all her aesthetic theory. Formally akin to Deborah Richards’ Last One Out, a solid read and an exquisite chapbook production by the press.

Martha Dandridge Custis, Lawrence Giffin (ed.) | Comment is Free, Vol. 2: Imperialism at Home | Lil Norton | 2008

This will be the book to replace Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader for decades to come. The ad copy reads like this: “Taking the government buyout of Bear Stearns, Custis deftly weaves a wondrous tapestry of the abuse of power and the potential for resistance.” The book’s contents read like this: “There is no accountability left in the ‘system’, only the rich and well connected make up the rules and we all slave to their gains.// I don’t understand why ‘we’ are at fault. ‘We’ are powerless to stop anything.” Imagine your entire collegiate graduating class invited to your house to discuss the economy. Better than the movie.

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More Brad Flis here.

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.