Attention Span 2011 | Peter Quartermain

Robert Duncan , ed. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman | The HD Book | California | 2011

At last! Even if you don’t like Duncan (and quite a few don’t), this is still not to be ignored. Its publication a major event of the year.

Tony Judt | Ill Fares the Land | Penguin | 2010

I lament his death, he’s irreplaceable. Not to heed his work, these essays, would be sheer folly.

Norma Cole | To Be At Music: Essays & Talks | Omnidawn | 2010

Brilliant, pithy, full of news.

George Bowering | My Darling Nelly Gray | Talonbooks | 2010

Bowering in top form.

Robert Pogue Harrison | The Body of Beatrice | Hopkins | 1988

An oldie but goodie, still opening doors.

Meredith Quartermain,  drawings by Susan Bee | Recipes From the Red Planet | Book Thug | 2010

I’m not exactly impartial here, but hey, this is really a very interesting and indeed good book. The publisher calls it fiction; it’s more like poetry to me, and resourceful.

Lissa Wolsak | Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 | Station Hill | 2010

Dense, difficult, bracing—can I say these wide-ranging poems are obsessed with words? They’re sure instructive to anyone who cares about them, and really are exhilarating in their astonished thought.

Guy Birchard | Further Than The Blood | Pressed Wafer | 2010

This is Birchard’s sixth or maybe seventh book of poetry, but nobody seems to have noticed. Maybe his poems are too subtle and careful, perhaps the mode at casual glance too familiar, the skill too unobtrusive.

Michael Boughn | Cosmographia: A Post-Lucretian Micro-Epic | Book Thug | 2010

Issued in fascicles over the last few years, and at last collected together. Boughn is a terrific poet, who actually thinks as he writes. He can be very funny; sometimes he’s very angry. He’s always without fail interesting, so long as you’re paying attention.

Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Barbara Johnson | Divagations: The Author’s 1897 Arrangement | Belknap / Harvard | 2007

Delighted to find this still in print.

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Peter Quartermain has just (July 2011) submitted “Poetic Fact,” a collection of his essays, to an interested publisher. His edition of Robert Duncan’s Collected Early and Collected Later Poems and Plays is currently at the U of California P. The introduction to the first volume appeared in The Capilano Review, Fall 2009.

Quartermain’s Attention Span for 2010, 2008, 2006. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2011 | John Palattella

Annie Dillard | Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | Harper | 1974

The electron is like a muskrat; it cannot be perfectly stalked.

T.S. Eliot, eds. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton | The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–1925 | Faber | 2009

…the Editor has to combine and reconcile principle, sensibility, and business sense. That is why an editor’s life is such a bloody sweat.

Merrill Gilfillan | The Bark of the Dog | Flood | 2010

Sprigs for sunrise,
sprigs for Taos, and soldiers
on the steep blue sea.

Peter Gizzi | Threshold Songs | Wesleyan | 2011

And my body also
a commotion of sound
and form. Of tides.

Tony Judt | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Penguin | 2005

The much-anticipated transition from capitalism to socialism had been theorized ad nauseum in academies, universities and coffee bars from Belgrade to Berkeley; but no-one had thought to offer a blueprint for the transition from socialism to capitalism.

James Longenbach | The Iron Key | Norton | 2010

Hephaestus, carve me a hollow cup!
The dark earth drinks, and the trees drink the earth.
The sea drinks the wind,
The sun drinks the sea.

Jennifer Moxley | Coastal | The Song Cave | 2011

A muggy sunny day, better for plants than people.

Lorine Niedecker, ed. Jenny Penberthy | Collected Works | California | 2002

Ruby of corundum
lapis lazuli
from changing limestone
glow-apricot red-brown
carnelian sard
Greek named
Exodus-antique
kicked up in America’s
Northwest
you have been in my mind
between my toes
agate

David Rieff | Swimming in a Sea of Death | Simon & Schuster | 2008

My mother’s “default mode” had always been the transcendental, or, perhaps more accurately, that of the exemplary student who also aspires to be the exemplary soul. Don’t laugh or smile condescendingly, dear reader: there are more ignoble ambitions.

Marilynne Robinson | The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought | Houghton Mifflin | 1998

Economics, the great model now among us, indulges and deprives, builds and abandons, threatens and promises. Its imperium is manifest, irrefragable—as in fact it has been since antiquity. Yet suddenly we act as if the reality of economics were really reality itself, the one Truth to which everything must refer. I can only suggest that terror at complexity has driven us back on this very crude monism. We have reached a point where cosmology permits us to say that everything might in fact be made of nothing, so we cling desperately to the idea that something is real and necessary, and we have chosen, oddly enough, competition and market forces, taking refuge from the wild epic of cosmic ontogeny by hiding our head in the ledger.

W.B. Yeats | The Poems | Macmillan | 1983

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The hearts grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

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John Palattella is the Literary Editor for The Nation. Palattella’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to 2011 Directory.

Attention Span 2011 | Bill Berkson

Stephen Sondheim | Finishing the Hat | Knopf | 2010

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, ed. Ben Mazer | Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman | Belknap Press of Harvard | 2010

Bishop, Janet, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow, eds. | The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde | San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale | 2011

Jennifer Homans | Apollo’s Angels: A History of the Ballet | Random | 2010

Alvin Levin | Love Is Like Park Avenue | New Directions | 2009

Ron Padgett | How Long | Coffee House | 2011

Tony Judt | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Penguin | 2005

John Keegan | A History of Warfare | Vintage | 1993

Adam Phillips |The Beast in the Nursery | Vintage | 1999

Edwin G. Burrows & Mike Wallace | Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 | Oxford | 1999

Herbert Muschamp | Hearts of the City | Knopf | 2009

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Bill Berkson’s recent books are For the Ordinary Artist: Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces & More (BlazeVOX, 2010); Not an Exit, with drawings by Léonie Guyer (Jungle Garden, 2011); and Darkness and Light (Verna, 2011). Berkson’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – John Palattella

Elizabeth Arnold | Effacement | Flood | 2010

Günter Eich, trans. Michael Hofmann | Angina Days: Selected Poems | Princeton | 2010

Manny Farber, ed. Robert Polito | Farber on Film | Library of America | 2009

Graham Foust | A Mouth in California | Flood | 2010

Ruth Harris | Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century | Metropolitan | 2010

Tony Judt | Ill Fares the Land | Penguin | 2010

Gabriel García Márquez, trans. Asa Katz | Clandestine in Chile | New York Review Books | 2010

Marilynne Robinson | Absence of Mind | Yale | 2010

Frances Stoner Saunders | The Woman Who Shot Mussolini | Metropolitan | 2010

Ben Sonnenberg | Lost Property: Memoirs & Confessions of a Bad Boy | Summit | 1991

More John Palattella here. Palattella’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to directory.