Posts Tagged ‘Tyrone Williams’
Witness Is Not What We Understand
Thom Donovan – Come Out, Again (1’09”). Recorded January 24, 2009 at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn. More Donovan on PennSound. Tyrone Williams on PennSound. About Steve Reich’s composition Come Out. Reich in conversation about the piece. Download Early Works from iTunes.
Attention Span – Michael Kelleher
Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer | The Savage Detectives | Picador | 2008
Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007
Tyrone Williams | On Spec | Omnidawn | 2008
Richard Deming | Let’s Not Call It Consequence | Shearsman | 2008
Susan Howe | Souls of the Labadie Tract| New Directions | 2007
Thomas Mann | The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods | Everyman’s Library | 2005
César Vallejo, trans. Clayton Eshleman | The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition | California | 2007
bpNichol, ed. Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson | The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader | Coach House | 2007
Gary Sullivan | PPL In A Depot | Roof | 2008
Linda Russo | Mirth | Chax | 2007
*
More Michael Kelleher here.
Attention Span – Marcella Durand
Daniel Bouchard | The Filaments | Zasterle | 2006
“Life is art” and vice versa. Great book to read with all the noises of the world (including new baby) next to you.
Tisa Bryant | Unexplained Presence | Leon Works | 2008
Unsettling explorations into various Eurocentric films, artworks, and television shows (Regency House Party being one of the most disturbing) that use black characters, often even as compositional elements (Bryant uses illuminating quotes throughout: Zola says of Manet’s Olympia, “You wanted black patches, and you placed a Negress and a cat in a corner. What does that mean? You hardly know, and neither do I.”).
Cabinet Magazine
I stay “in touch” with worlds artistic in a pleasantly subversive way with this magazine/journal. Content ranges from Peter Lambourn Wilson on concrete and “viewsheds” to the Chadwicks and their land-use dominions.
Tina Darragh | Opposable Dumbs: A Project Report | Self-Distributed | 2007
Darragh’s invitation to plagiarize is also an invitation to a deep creative reading/writing into issues of anonymity, ownership of language, science and language, morality and science, humanism, disintegration of words, disintegration of morals, disintegration of science, of principles.
Beverly Dahlen | A Reading 18-20 | Instance | 2006
Add to your collection of Dahlen’s faboo A Readings.
Andrew Joron | The Cry at Zero | Counterpath | 2007
Very highly recommended collection of intricate essays on poetics, science, philosophy and how they circle back to that “cry” from nothingness.
Miranda Mellis | Talk on “The Vault” | Naropa Summer Writing Program | June 2008
Allow Mellis to be your guide to the world’s largest seed vault, housed in Norway’s permafrost and counting Du Pont as one of its funders. (Look for her talk to be published—somewhere! Hopefully soon.)
Ousmane Sembene | God’s Bits of Wood | Heinemann | 1960
I suggest replacing all of Hemingway’s books in school curricula with this unrelenting depiction of the 1947-1948 strike on the Dakar-Niger railway. One of the best novels I’ve ever read. (And while we’re at it, his film “La Noire de…” is also amazing.)
Eleni Sikelianos | The California Poem | Coffeehouse | 2004
Word-constellations fracture beautifully on housing projects and fault-shaped coastlines.
Tyrone Williams | On Spec | Omnidawn | 2008
Massively riveting. A linguistic ultrasound into the innards of language.
*
More from Marcella Durand’s library on Goodreads.
Attention Span – Keith Tuma
Trevor Joyce | What’s in Store | The Gig and New Writers’ Press | 2007
If verse is a turning, the short poems here have some of the tightest corners on the road. New poems as if carved in stone; old folksongs from Ireland, Hungary and all over the map made new; birdsong collaged. A big book of lyric poetry plus: “not all / plants / are alike // some are / astringent / some are / salty // some sour / some sweet // some men / are short / -lived / some long // some ugly / others fortunate // weak strong / stupid clever / poor rich // was it / brevity / you wanted?”
Linh Dinh | Jam Alerts | Chax | 2007
Imagine Catullus in a tiki bar having a drink with an unemployed rodeo clown, contemplating the end of empire. Or don’t: “Bombs / scared them away? Hell no, / We ate them all.”
Marjorie Welish | Isle of the Signatories | Coffee | 2008
Modernism as bricks in a wall you think you can tag: “WITH INDETERMINANCY WE SHALL BURY YOU.” Blue and white: are they true?
Keston Sutherland | Hot White Andy | Barque | 2007
No fire extinguisher left, they’ll be sorting stage directions for this at mid-century, looking for the way out: “He always does this. You get used to it. It is / what brains means.”
Norma Cole | Do the Monkey | Zasterle | 2006
Thinner than Spinoza in Her Youth and every bit as smart. Here and there more flip, e.g. a waka is a 31 syllable poem: “My dog Stoutie is a stout little pal, kind of sugary, damp little nose, especially when he wants to go for a waka.” Check out “Heavy Lifting,” “The Olympics Is All in Your Mind,” and the rest: a “full sea / outside the self.”
Tyrone Williams | On Spec | Omnidawn | 2008
Cornucopia of hybrid texts. Jimmy Webb and Jacques Derrida tango on one page: “Pop ain’t s’posed to drawl and corn in the bright can’s just plain wrong.” “Derrida clarifies and develops this difference between the Platonic and Christian concepts of the soul in Chapter Three.”
Catherine Wagner | everyone in the room is a representative of the world at large | Bonfire | 2007
As if Plath read Wittgenstein aloud in the town square: “God knows the question arises from its own background / like a bas-relief, so that if one located it / one could chisel the whole thing off the wall and throw it away.”
Tom Raworth | Let Baby Fall | Critical Documents | 2008
When hungry, eat fast: “what are the chances? / what do they want with the bowl?”
Devin Johnston | Sources | Turtle Point | 2008
Not least for translations of Sappho and Propertius, and for more poise and balance than I’ve seen since Thom Gunn left these peeling shores: “Wake and sleep / sleep and wake.”
Rod Smith | Deed | Iowa | 2007
Something about the house is probably a metaphor, Mr. Jones: “Then the house / is popping.”
Frances Kruk | A Discourse on Vegetation & Motion | Critical Documents | 2008
There are other books, there are larger books, maybe you do and maybe you don’t need them: “today the Penalty is Self.”
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2010 – Brent Cunningham
leave a comment »
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009
The title of Nichols’s book, to my ear, indicates a kind of linguistic density that actually the poems inside don’t much have—instead you get poems of such emotional authority and seriousness of purpose that immediately I was ready to go anywhere with them. There’s lightness and levity as well, lots, but it’s in the refreshing context of feeling like the poet really, deeply knows what she’s doing, I mean really. Even the formal moves, the spacing, leaving phrases off in space, composition by field and the like, has a kind of rightness and intentionality to it that I don’t often accept so unquestionly. This is the kind of book I take around with me to remind me how to write as well as how to read. What else can I say? I know it came out last year and was mentioned often then, but I just love this book
Aaron Kunin | The Sore Throat & Other Poems | Fence | 2010
A lot of writers are influnced by philosophy, but Kunin is one of very few living poet I know where I feel like I’m reading someone with truly philosophical sensibilities and skills, i.e. who really lives in a Kantian or maybe in this case more a Spinozian reality. What his work shows, I think, is in part how much feeling there is in thinking, and also how much pleasure there is in the artistic distanciation of self-conciousness
Khaled Mattawa | Tocqueville | New Issues Poetry & Prose | 2010
I’m not entirely persuaded by all the elements of Mattawa’s work, but I like to mention him since I think he’s completely worthwhile yet almost completely off the radar of most self-identified experimental writers. This makes sense if you read his early, more conventional and overly-wringing writing, or if you look at those who blurb his books, etc., but this book is serious and thoughtful about its politics, courageous in its formal experimentation, and fervent in its contempt for false emotion. If you read one book blurbed by Yusef Komunyakaa this year, it should be this one, etc.
Brenda Iijima, ed. | eco language reader | Nightboat | 2010
To the properly sceptical this book probably won’t, and probably shouldn’t, prove there’s a new movement or even a new sensibility afoot, but whatever Iijima’s anthology is or isn’t claiming in those terms it is certainly very well edited, filled with a great group of contributors, and embarrasingly rich with new ideas and new passions.
Laura Moriarty | A Tonalist | Nightboat | 2010
I should perhaps recuse myself here since I’m one of Laura’s “A Tonalists,” but whether the pseudo-movement/anti-movement/non-movement of the title has any reality or not, Moriarty has used the idea of groups and groupings to make a fierce, delicate, layered text that stands as a work, and an art, of its own.
Douglas Rothschild | Theogony | Subpress | 2009
Rothschild has, basically, a classical sensibility (where “classical” is considered as running the gamut from the unadornedness of certain ancient greek writers to the unadornedness of Ted Berrigan), which is then shot through with a whole lot of eccentric, baroque intelligence. I may have been a little less taken with the long middle section about NYC than some: it’s what seem to be framed as the more “minor” poems that really have stayed with me. And in a way that makes perfect sense because the significance of the minor is what Rothschild himself is so productively interested in.
Tan Lin | Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) | Zasterle | 2009
There’s something fascinating about limit cases, and Lin has been exploring those frontiers for a few books now, but this is the first time I really & completely got it. I like to carry around what I’ll call Heath (the title is a subject of debate by the way) just to show aspiring conceptualists how tepid and obvious their plans often are, by comparison. Really I can’t think of another book that seems to have gone farther off the grid of our presumptions about “the book” and “poetry” than this pleasantly transgressive text. It’s a further mystery that it remains, inexplicably, rather readable (with the right kind of approach). Everything in it—images, computer code, emails, texts—have the feeling of being placed, not overly systematically, but such that they beg for your own thinking to complete them.
Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, Kyle Schlesinger, eds. | ON: Contemporary Practice, Issue #2 | Cuneiform | 2010
Some will say the structure of this magazine, where poets talk about the work of poets, will only add to the feeling that experimental poetry is a small coterie with a secret knock to get in. Others, including me, find ON to be just what was lacking, and will find it far less about in-group backslapping than one might presume (very much like the Attention Span project, which has a lot in common with ON). Coterie is a sword of the two-edged variety, and ON is a much needed venue for poets to not only talk about works by their contemporaries but to fashion a renewed sense of basic, shared critical values.
Yedda Morrison | Girl Scout Nation | Displaced Press | 2008
This is the oldest book on my list but I only just got to read it. I had the pleasure of hearing a lot of the poems in this book for a few years at various readings, but the effect of reading them all together is fierce and splendid and at an entirely other level. Anger and love seem to be Morrison’s twin obsessions here and in other works—the love that both lies and lies in every anger, maybe. These concerns dovetail into her starkly eco/feminist/activist/understandably-pissed-off approach in ways that I find enviously original. She’s doing some great work and to me this book is both sweeping and, despite or because of the intensity, suprisingly personal.
Tyrone Williams | The Hero Project of the Century | The Backwaters Press | 2010
Unlike a decade ago Williams is not a secret anymore, but he’s still one of those poets I always read no matter what. I’d say I liked this book just a sliver less than On Spec, but it’s still terrific. Compared to On Spec it’s driven a bit more by content than form, but regardless TW is always, to me, most compelling in the way he works with linguistic density, counterpunctuating it with sudden moments of simple anger and direct content. I never thought enjambed aesthetic complexity could come across as so persuasive and natural, but it is here.
More Brent Cunningham here. Back to directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 17, 2010 at 10:53 am
Posted in Attention Span 2010, Commented List
Tagged with Aaron Kunin, Brenda Iijima, Brent Cunningham, Douglas Rothschild, Khaled Mattawa, Kyle Schlesinger, Laura Moriarty, Mel Nichols, Michael Cross, Tan Lin, Thom Donovan, Tyrone Williams, Yedda Morrison