Attention Span 2011 | Sawako Nakayasu

Juliana Leslie | More Radiant Signal | Letter Machine | 2010

The poems feel diaphanous, and like they wouldn’t fare too well in a bar fight, except for the fact that we are all thrown off our stools by a strange and beautiful light that disappears when you turn away, or does it.

Don Mee Choi | The Morning News Is Exciting | Action | 2010

There is so much I love here. If this is postcolonial literature I want to write postcolonial literature too, though I can’t, being Japanese and/or American.

Zachary Schomburg | The Man Suit | Black Ocean | 2007
Zachary Schomburg | Scary, No Scary | Black Ocean | 2009

Love is when a boat is half-buried by all the cobwebs of eyelashes in the ocean.

Kiwao Nomura, trans. Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander | Spectacle & Pigsty | Omnidawn | 2011
Hiromi Ito, trans. Jeffrey Angles | Killing Kanoko | Action | 2009

Nomura’s poems are just as hypnotizing as they are in the original Japanese–darkly gorgeous and radiant, as the ‘orgasm-monger plods past/ nerve ants plod past.’ Norma Cole in her book of essays compares the expansiveness of theater-making to that of her experiences with group translation, and I think she is onto something there–perhaps the future is in collaborative translation.

One of the first things I heard about Hiromi Ito was that Japanese women in the 80s were trembling in the closet reading her work with a flashlight. Some have chalked up her work to an aesthetics of the shocking (as in, Kanoko is the name of her own daughter), but it’s been a very important part of Japanese feminist poetry these last few decades.

Frances Chung | Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple | Wesleyan | 2000

Chinatown is a place to go eat chinks. It’d be kind of silly to label this work something like the Chinese-American New York School, but I just did and yet it’s much more than that–in fact the last thing I want to do is to wrap it up under some Chinese-American bubble because it cuts across these lines, similar-different to Teresa Hak Kyung Cha. Walter Lew sent it to me this summer when I was bugging him about Yi Sang. Thank you, Walter. Thank you, Frances. I have always loved the color celadon, but now joining it on the palette is duck shit green. 

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

A guided tour of Norma Cole’s readings, thinking, and practice…including some excellent writings on translation, Mina Loy, and color. Now the heartbreak of the rational.

Lily Hoang | The Evolutionary Revolution | Les Figues | 2010

Their bodies begin as uncooked noodles, stiff and starchy, but as their heads wander, they limpen, soften, become saturated with dream.

Miryam Sas | Fault Lines: cultural memory and Japanese surrealism | Stanford | 1999

It’s true that I’m working on a Japanese Modernism project right now, but as I go back into this book, I am finding that it offers a conversation about more than just that particular time and place–examples of how to think about cultural transactions, or write about writing, or consider Surrealism inside and outside of its original and secondary contexts.

Marisol Limon Martinez | After you, dearest language | Ugly Duckling | 2005

This analogue version of hypertext is a wonderful way to house a narrative, and makes me think about more analog-digital potentials in poetry. (I also recently realized that I am married to a technophile-technophobe.)

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More Sawako Nakayasu here.

Nakayasu’s Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Jordan Stempleman

Heather Christle | A Difficult Farm| Octopus | 2009

When, months in advance, the memory gets it right, once and for all, equipment will not wake us, and our possessions will sound more like we do.

Joy Williams| Honored Guest | Knopf | 2004

A collection of short stories about the insupportable unease of bare life and surprises like dying.

Kelly Link | Magic For Beginners | Small Beer |2005

Ghosts, zombies, cannons, ex-wives, dead and there at Disneyworld.

Zachary Schomburg | Scary, No Scary | Black Ocean | 2009

Poems suddenly planted in the waking world that update the necessary terror and steady welcomed breathlessness found in old-fashioned sublimity.

Linh Dinh | Some Kind Of Cheese Orgy | Chax |2009

We do say these things; think these things; laugh at these things; say we’re not these things that we are.

VA | Disco Prairie Social Aid And Pleasure Club | Factory Hollow | 2010

The best lines found elsewhere, now poems somewhat to themselves (144 poets).

Dorothea Lasky| Black Life |Wave | 2010

“Fear is not irony”

I was instantly shaken then hooked on this poet when I saw her read in Iowa City in 2007. Astounding mixture of head/heart.

Sawako Nakayasu| Texture Notes | Letter Machine | 2010

Poems more about what sensations do when sensations are focused on the object they carry: “The texture not of motherfucking diarrhea, but texture of / the girls, women, all ages and sizes, who have it, diarrhea / like a motherfucker.”

More Jordan Stempleman here. His Attention Span for 2007. Back to directory.

Attention Span – G.C. Waldrep

I read dozens of poetry books, dozens of journals every year. The list that follows isn’t necessarily a list of recent books I “liked best,” but it is a list of the books I dreamed about, after.

Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin | 2007

Gennady Aygi, trans. Peter France | Field-Russia | New Directions | 2007

Gabriel Gudding | Rhode Island Notebook | Dalkey | 2007

Bin Ramke | Tendril | Omnidawn | 2007

Zachary Schomburg | The Man Suit | Black Ocean | 2007

Rosmarie Waldrop | Curves to the Apple | New Directions | 2006

Michael Burkard | Envelope of Night | Nightboat | 2008

George Oppen | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2007

Catherine Corman, ed. | Joseph Cornell’s Dreams | Exact Change | 2007

Daniil Kharms, trans. Matvei Yankelevich | Today I Wrote Nothing | Overlook | 2007

Joseph Lease | Broken World | Coffee House | 2007

Some others: Anne Boyer, The Romance of Happy Workers; Fanny Howe, The Lyrics; Johannes Goransson, A New Quarantine Will Take My Place; Cecily Parks, Field Folly Snow; Rusty Morrison, The Truth Keeps Calm Biding Its Story; Kristi Maxwell, Realm 64; Fredrik Nyberg, A Different Practice; Craig Morgan Teicher, Brenda Is in the Room; David Mutschlecner, Sign; Priscilla Sneff, O Woolly City; Tony Tost, Complex Sleep; Donald Revell, Thief of Strings; Noah Eli Gordon, A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow; C.S. Carrier, “Lyric”; Julie Doxsee, “Fog Quartets”; Jack Boettcher, “The Surveyic Hero”; etc.