Attention Span
— 15 July 2003
Introductory
Note
In
June of 2003, I invited readers of Third Factory
/ Notes to Poetry to submit constellations of up to eleven titles
representing something of their own present interests. While an emphasis
on poetry titles published after 2000 was encouraged, other items of
literary, cultural, and political interest were also welcomed. I am
grateful to everyone who made time to participate in this provisional
(and indeed radically incomplete) attempt at charting the shifting field
of our singular and collective attentions. —Steve Evans
Directory
of Individual Participants (in reverse order received):
Brian
Kim Stefans • Bill Berkson • Stephanie
Young • Jordan Davis • Kasey
Silem Mohammad • Kit Robinson •
Robert Fitterman • Gary
Sullivan • John Latta • Jennifer
Moxley • Lisa Robertson • Andrew
Joron • Jerrold Shiroma • Aaron
Kunin • Jennifer Scappettone •
Kevin Killian • Craig
Watson • Peter Gizzi • Benjamin
Friedlander • Eileen Tabios • Alan
Gilbert • Noah Eli Gordon • Juliana
Spahr • Michael Scharf • Rae
Armantrout • Joshua Clover • Pam
Brown • kari edwards • Robert
Creeley
Brian
Kim Stefans
W.S.
Graham | Selected Poems | Ecco, 1979 + Uncollected
Poems | Greville Press Pamphlets, 1990
Mike
Magee | MS | Sputen Duyvil, 2003
Jennifer
Moxley | Sense Record | Edge 2002
John
Temple | Collected Poems | Salt, 2003
John
James | Collected Poems | Salt, 2002
Bruce
Naumann | Pay Attention Please | MIT, 2003
Steve
Venright | Spiral Agitator | Coach House,
2000
John
Wilkinson | Contrivances | Salt, 2003
Pierre
Guyotat | Eden Eden Eden | Creation Books,
1995
Darren
O'Donnel | pppeeeaaaccceee | Coach House,
2003
back
to directory
Bill
Berkson
Kenneth
Koch | A Possible World
Kenneth
Koch | Sun Out
Kenneth
Koch | Making Your Own Days
Cedar
Sigo | Selected Writings
Holderlin
| Selected Poems and Fragments | Penguin
Auden
& MacNiece | Letters From Iceland
Larry
Fagin, ed. | Sal Mimeo #3 (Spring 2003)
Bill
Blackbeard, ed. | Ignatz & Krazy 1929-30
Carl
Andre | Complete Poems [we need this]
Ron
Padgett | You Never Know
back
to directory
Stephanie
Young
Taylor
Brady | Production Notes for Occupation: Location
Scouting | e-book available here
| Also Production Notes for Occupation: Soundtrack
and Yesterday's News "They Store It Up"
(both of which are, I believe, currently unpublished)
I'm working
(fighting towards, taking a very long time) a full length essay or review
or even blog post on these poems. TOUGH work asking for a fight (Taylor
writes in a more recent poem: "This is my theory / of the active
reader, and it is dense, / both sticky and abrasive.") but poems
also trying to kick the door/skylight open to let in some 'tenderness'
of daily expression: both domestic (inside) and urban (outside) expressions
of tenderness.
Cynthia
Sailers | A New Season | e-book available
here
Dense,
inquisitive lyrics in full frontal engagement with various framing devices:
painters, California, style, novelists, grammar. Etc. ('and more!')
Paulo
Leminski | Meta(/other)poems | Trans. Chris
Daniels | Grand Quiskadee, 2003
I'm choosing
Chris Daniels' 2003 translation of Paulo Leminski's Meta(/other)poems
for this list although I'm also looking at the Orides Fontela
chapbook, One step from the bird I breathe in
(2003) and Josely Vianna Baptista's On the Shining
Screen of the Eyelids (Manifest Press, 2003). I'm choosing Leminski
because I've read him as a central figure and entrance point to the
spheres of Brazilian poetry that Chris Daniels is opening up to English
speaking readers. "TRANSLATION FIGHTS CULTURAL NARCISSISM."
Richard
Greenfield | A Carnage in the Love Trees
| University of California Press, 2003
FINALLY
got my copy just last week. 'Relentless,' one of the words from the
jacket copy, is a good place to start. But hardly a start at all. Something
about 'master of combination,' or, movement.
Tina
Celona Brown | The Real Moon of Poetry and Other
Poems | Fence, 2002
Have been
reading and re-reading this for several months, maybe a year. Book revolves
painfully around several questions: what can go in a poem (physically),
what is a suitable subject, how far can the poem stretch to hold its
subject, what if the poem breaks and CAN'T contain its (monstrous or
even just ugly) subject. Also some time travel between Keats and Celona
Brown. Maybe, too, between Keats, Celona Brown and Spicer. There is
a road from my house that leads to the door of this book and a road
in the book that leads to the door of the moon.
I'm
making a blueberry pie for dinner tomorrow, but I will never
be able to read it.
David
Hadbawnik | Ovid In Exile| stapled chapbook,
2002
The poet
pursues Ovid, who sometimes replies.
Jim
Behrle & Fred Moten | Poems | Pressed
Wafer, 2002
Double
feature.
Almost
burnt the pie!
Eileen
Tabios | GABRIELA COUPLE(T)S WITH THE 21ST CENTURY
| unpublished
but circulating
The poet
is overcome by the ghost of Gabriela Silang.
Judith
Goldman | Vocoder | Roof Books, 2001
Laynie
Browne | Pollen Memory | Tender Buttons, 2003
Comment
| I'm running out of steam and going to bed now, I actually
ran out of room for the things that have been on my list for months
now, Jordan's Million Poems (books and website),
Nada's v. Imp, Nada's/Gary's Swoon
and Moxley's Sense Record. Is this technically
cheating, putting them in the paragraph? And pie in the list?
back
to directory
Jordan
Davis
Lee
Ann Brown | The Sleep that Changed Everything |
Wesleyan, 2003
Brenda
Coultas | A Handmade Museum | Coffee House,
2003
Joseph
Donahue | Incidental Eclipse | Talisman,
2003
Joanna
Fuhrman | Ugh Ugh Ocean | Hanging Loose,
2003
Drew
Gardner | Sugar Pill | Krupskaya, 2002
Fanny
Howe | Economics | Flood, 2003
Joy
Katz | Fabulae | Crab Orchard, 2002
Sarah
Manguso | The Captain Lands in Paradise
| Alice James, 2002
Geoffrey
O'Brien | A View of Buildings and Water
| Salt, 2002
Tony
Towle | The History of the Invitation |
Hanging Loose, 2000
Geoffrey
Young | Lights Out | The Figures, 2003
Comment
| Feel like I'm stuffing the all star ballot box, excluding
my non-poetry reading from this list — these are my most recent
excitements — temporally speaking Anselm Berrigan, Macgregor Card,
Buck Downs, Alice Fulton, Hoa Nguyen and Mary Ruefle come just before
these, and recent reads I'm still letting sink in include Joyelle McSweeney,
Monica Youn, Jack Agueros, Stephen Paul Miller, Eileen Tabios, and Linh
Dinh. I've commented on LAB and FH elsewhere, and hope to get to the
others before the year's out one place or another.
back
to directory
Kasey
Silem Mohammad
David
Larsen | Skips 'n' Scrips | LRSN, 2001
Guerilla
DIY production: recycled, smudgy, paper scraps violently stapled together,
with a mixture of drawings and photocollages. Fierce psychic riffing
on Osama bin Laden, US foreign policy, etc., filtered through Larsen's
scholarly engagement with Arab literary traditions.
Michael
Magee | My Angie Dickinson | blogspot
link
Funny,
elegant, disjunctive, and Flarf-inspired serial-poem-on-a-blog, truly
Dickinsonian in all eight senses. Should be required reading for people
who love great American poetry and people whom it is likely to annoy.
May it never end.
Heriberto
Yepez | Babellebab | Duration, 2003
I once
said on my blog that poetry should be at least as interesting as getting
beaten up. This language-jacking, imperialism-busting chapbook is like
getting run over by a damn truck. Feels great!
Patrick
Durgin | Color Music | Cuneiform, 2002
An object
so richly luxurious in its handwrought, silkscreened, letterpress beauty
that it's not just obscene, it's evil. And the poem is
great too.
Clark
Coolidge | On the Slates | Tougher Disguises,
2002
More
letterpress decadence, albeit slightly more restrained than the Cuneiform
chapbook. Coolidge in fine form.
Stephanie
Young | Telling the Future Off | ms. | New
Langton Arts
reading handout, 2002
This is
just some photocopied pages stapled in the upper lefthand corner. But
when the book itself comes out, it will send a tremor straight to the
planet's core.
Kevin
Davies | "Lateral Argument" | Alterran Poetry Assemblage 7
| December 2002
A long
poem. Actually, has this been published somewhere now? Maybe
on
Arras?
Michael
Cross | in felt treeling | Soft, 2003
Pages of
a poetic dialogue in an envelope, on unbound squares of cardstock.
Carol
Mirakove | Temporary Tattoos | BabySelf,
2002
Tough,
witty, introspective city poems.
Nathan
Austin | Glost | Handwritten, 2002
Uses Noah
Webster as a source, among other texts.
back
to directory
Kit
Robinson
Ed Barrett
| Rub Out | Pressed Wafer, 2003
Hot off
the press, "a trilogy of experimental verse novels" by an
interesting, new (to me) and original writer.
Diane
DiPrima | Pieces of Song | City Lights,
1990
She lives
the life and tells the tale, with humor and hutzpah. "THE ONLY
WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION / ALL OTHERS ARE
SUBSUMED IN IT" ("Rant").
Merrill
Gilfillan | The Seasons | Adventures in
Poetry, 2002
Merrill's
been one of my favorite poets for a long time. This gem of a book includes
the autobiographical poems "1958" and "1972". The
title poem's a knock-out.
Erica
Hunt | Piece Logic | Carolina Wren, 2003
A new book
by Erica Hunt is a rare treat, and this hand-sewn, letterpress chapbook
packs a wallop, including the over-the-top, late-late capitalist inventory
"A House of Broken Things".
Joanne
Kyger | As Ever: Selected Poems | Penguin,
2002
A treasure
trove of great works, each on a daily, human scale, ironic sassy and
deep.
Keith
Shein | Rumors of Buildings to Live In |
O, 2002
Beautifully
written, serial renderings of the urban American landscape at the millennium,
serious in the best sense. Check it out.
George
Stanley | A Tall, Serious Girl | Qua, 2003
A major
discovery. Where have I been? Gritty, funny, rife with historical detail,
existential frisson and flat-out bald-faced writing.
Brian
Kim Stefans | Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics
| Atelos, 2003
Not a book
of poems per se, as per the Atelos genre-bending SOP, but an argument
enacted by multiple means at various & sundry formal levels. Brainier-than-I
but highly recommended as a stimulant.
Rodrigo
Toscano | Platform | Atelos, 2003
Post-colonialist,
pro-labor, post-language, proletarian, paratactic burlesque, full of
ripped seams, high-fives, and sly digs. Like there's a party goin' on!
Geoffrey
Young | Lights Out | Great Barrington: The
Figures, 2003
Excellent
recent work from a past master at conflating the confessional and the
urbane. While the frame of reference skids across literature, art and
jazz, the author holds his own feet to the hot-damn something-personal
fire.
back
to directory
Robert
Fitterman
Rodrigo
Toscano | Platform | Atelos, 2003
Jason
Rhoades | Volume: A Rhoades Referenz | 1998
Stacy
Doris | Paramour | Krupskaya
Lytle
Shaw | The Lobe | Roof, 2001
Kenneth
Goldsmith | Day | The Figures, 2003
Kim
Rosenfield | Good Morning—Midnight |
Roof
Kevin
Davies | Comp. | Edge, 2000
Dan
Farrell | The Inkblot Record | Coach House,
2001
Buck
Downs | Marijuana Soft Drink | Edge
Brian
Kim Stefans | Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics
| Atelos, 2003
back
to directory
Gary
Sullivan
A truer constellation
of my own would include things that are irrelevant here (Bollywood encyclopedias,
comics, graphic novels, blogs, and the Flarflist, not to mention lots
of things published prior to 2000), but even still, I found it impossible
getting it down to 11 titles. I actually wound up with 12:
Jordan
Davis | Million Poems Journal | Faux
Stacy
Doris | Paramour | Krupskaya
Drew
Gardner | Sugar Pill | Krupskaya, 2002
Nada
Gordon | V. Imp | Faux
Kevin
Killian | Argento Series | Krupskaya, 2001
Jack
Kimball | Frosted | Potes & Poets
Alexei
Kruchenykh | Suicide Circus: Selected Poems
| Green Integer
Steve
McCaffery | Seven Pages Missing | Coach
House
K. Silem
Mohammad | Deer Head Nation | Tougher Disguises,
forthcoming | published
on the web, no URL, but found by doing a Google search on "k. silem
mohammad deer head nation"
Eileen
Tabios | Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole |
Marsh Hawk
Rodrigo
Toscano | Platform | atelos, 2003
Kevin
Young | To Repel Ghosts | Zoland
back
to directory
John
Latta
Devin
Johnston | Telepathy | Paper Bark, 2001
William
Fuller | Sadly | Flood, 2002
Yusef
Komunyakaa | Talking Dirty to the Gods |
Farrar, 2000
Jennifer
Moxley | The Sense Record | Edge, 2002
Caroline
Knox | A Beaker | Verse, 2002
Richard
Caddell | Magpie Words | West House, 2002
Martin
Corless-Smith | Nota | Fence, 2003
Barbara
Guest | Forces of Imagination | Kelsey St.,
2003
Anselm
Berrigan | Zero Star Hotel | Edge, 2002
Sam
Truitt | Vertical Elegies 5 The Section
| U of Georgia, 2003
Michael
Haslam | The Music Laid Her Songs in Language
| Arc, 2001
Comment
The Komunyakaa and the Truitt probably because of this group of abecedarian
arrangements that's been occupying me for the last few years—Some
Alphabets—five word lines, sixteen lines. And K— and
T— working similar short forms. I'm also "took" by skewed
dictions, invasions of early English orthographies that come from my
day job digitizing such texts, and Haslam and Corless-Smith do much
in their way. I'm seeing in the list two opposing impulses: the Niedecker
pared-down sound, a "cleanliness" (Caddel, Johnston) and the
hubbub, "messily" exfoliate noise excursions (Knox: "As
I baden-zuyt was entreating stop-and-go Pushkin here around /
the dubious greensward," Moxley: "what thinks / the noble
grandson of this generation of Jules as he runs his digit / across the
Bronze Age contract rusted to the face of his domicile?"). Haslam
is somebody Nate Dorward mentioned I've found congenial and enduring
repeated looks, Hopkins noises, that English Green Man tradition that
Corless-Smith drags along behind him too. I could mention (belatedly
realizing) Dale Smith's The Flood & The Garden
(First Intensity) for its studies of prose series, and recent books
by August Kleinzahler, and Forrest Gander.
back
to directory
Jennifer
Moxley
Noël
Coward | Future Imperfect
History
with a twist.
Queer
as Folk
| Showtime, 2001-present | DVD
Not deep,
but penetrating.
Rick
Snyder | This Charming New Chapbook | Situations,
2003
Elegantly
rendered ressentiment.
David
Kennedy | President of Earth | Salt
Charm,
wit, angst, and Juliette Greco.
Led
Zeppelin | Led Zeppelin | DVD
Plant flirts
in girl's shirts: delicious.
Monkey
Puzzle
| Ed. by Kreg Hasegawa and Daniel Comiskey in Seattle
Deftly
edited stapled 'zine out of the Emerald City.
Bob
Perelman | "The Revenge of the Bathwater" | ms
For those
who are sick of the baby.
Aaron
Kunin | The Mandarin | ms (novel)
Shades
of The Waves and a dash of Robbe-Grillet
made strangely compelling in Minneapolis.
James
Thomas Stevens | Combing the Snakes from His Hair
| U of Michigan, 2002
Desire,
beauty, longing, lyric—and a perfect ear.
Heather
Fuller | Dovecote | Edge, 2002
The natural
politics of the urgent real.
Juliette
Valéry | Format Américain
Chic chapbooks
of American writing translated into French.
back
to directory
Lisa
Robertson
These are
the recent books I plan to reread—
Fiona
Banner | The Nam | Frith Street books 1997
| Printed Matter
Artist's
book. whacking huge book of war. she retells 6 or 7 viet nam movies,
by describing while watching, almost frame by frame. No paragraph breaks,
no section breaks, a running bold helvetica flow. massive.
Stacy
Doris | Conference | Potes and poets, 2001
E Tracy
Grinnell | Music or Forgetting
Erin
Moure | O Cidadan | Anansi, 2002
Rae
Armantrout | Veil | Wesleyan
Lorine
Niedecker | Collected | Ed. Jenny Penberthy
| U California 2002
Dionne
Brand | thirsty | McClelland and Stewart,
2002
Denise
Riley | The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity,
Irony | Stanford UP, 2000
Rodrigo
Toscano | Platform | atelos 15 | 2003
Kenneth
Goldsmith | Soliloquy | Granary Books, 2001
Janet
Cardiff | A Large Slow River | Oakville
Galleries, 2000 | www.oakvillegalleries.com
A 3D effect
audio CD narrating a walk. 32 track sound composition, recorded on two
omni directional mikes, simulating human hearing. an audio atmosphere.
back
to directory
Andrew
Joron
Barbara
Guest | Miniatures | Wesleyan, 2002
Mastery
never arrives at the stillness of perfection, but shows its ability
to flicker beautifully amid the flaws in reality.
Nathaniel
Mackey | ATET A.D. | City Lights, 2001
The third
epistolary novel about the Mystic Horn Society, "a funky-sweet
rhythmic foray into ditty-bop dreamtime."
Rachel
Blau DuPlessis | Drafts 1-38, Toll | Wesleyan,
2001
A series
of constellations or dialectical images (in Benjamin's terms), poetico-ethical
acts of resistance against totality, whose language seeks mystery in
its own materiality.
Josely
Vianna Baptista | On the Shining Screen of the
Eyelids | Trans. Chris Daniels | Manifest, 2003
Widely
spaced lettering turns this experimental poetry from Brazil into a shimmering
curtain of polysemy, a reading surface made of "b l a d e - g l
o w a n d f o g - c h i p."
Paul
Celan | Romanian Poems | Trans. Julian Semilian
and Sanda Agalidi | Green Integer, 2003
Celan's
debt to surrealism (an early influence that never entirely receded from
his work) is demonstrated in these phantasmagoric poems.
John
Yau | Borrowed Love Poems | Penguin, 2002
Who needs
Bataille?
Laynie
Browne | Pollen Memory | Tender Buttons,
2003
Prose poems
that artfully trace electricities through a tree of language that is
"quietly becoming a night double."
Elizabeth
Robinson | Pure Descent | Sun & Moon,
2003
Abstractions
of (spiritual) passion; a poetry whose obliquity of mode only heightens
the terror & eroticism of its impulse.
Craig
Watson | True News | Instance, 2002
Here, the
poetic act is also a form of critical intervention, one that maintains
a lyric intensity even as it makes palpable the contradictions of life
in an overdeveloped world.
Joseph
Donahue | Incidental Eclipse | Talisman,
2003
Shards
of harsh reality receive angelic witness as they fall into a zone of
bright shadows, which is nothing other than the redemptive space of
the poem itself.
Sotere
Torregian | "I Must Go (She Said) Because
My Pizza's Cold" | Skanky Possum, 2002
Selected
works (from 1957 to 1999) by an unjustly neglected poet whose work exposes,
with warmth and humor, the surrealist roots of the New York School.
back
to directory
Jerrold
Shiroma
Not enough
time, I'm afraid, to put together any kind of commentaries, but
below is a list of some things I found interesting over the past couple
of
years, not in any particular order:
Gennady
Aygil | Child & Rose | Trans. Peter
France | New Directions, 2003
Rodrigo
Toscano | Platform | Atelos, 2003
Jen
Hofer, ed. and trans. | Sin Puertas Visibles
| U of Pittsburgh, 2003
Mahmoud
Darwish | Unfortunately, It Was Paradise
| U of California, 2002
Harry
Polkinhorn & Mark Weiss, eds. | Across the
Line / Al otro lado: The Poetry of
Baja California
| Junction, 2002
Abdellatif
Laâbi | The World's Embrace | City
Lights, 2003
George
Oppen | New Collected Poems | New Directions,
2002
Kamau
Braithwaite | Ancestors | New Directions,
2001
Jennifer
Moxley | The Sense Record | Edge, 2002
Juliana
Spahr | Fuck You, Aloha, I Love You | Wesleyan
UP, 2001
Rosmarie
Waldrop | Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading
Edmond Jabes | Wesleyan, 2002
back
to directory
Aaron
Kunin
Here are
some of the books on my desk:
David
Batchelor | Chromophobia | Reaktion, 2000
Thomas
Carlyle | The French Revolution: A History
| Modern Library, 2002—according to the back cover, this is the
only unabridged edition currently in print, which I think might be true
if you added "in the U.S."
Harun
Farocki | Imprint | Ram, 2001
Barbara
Guest | Miniatures | Wesleyan, 2002
Cole
Heinowitz | Stunning in Muscle Hospital |
Detour
Susan
Howe | The Midnight | New Directions, 2003
Ronald
Johnson | The Shrubberies | Flood
David
Perry | Range Finder | Adventures in Poetry
Jacqueline
Waters | A Minute Without Danger | Adventures
in Poetry
Karen
Weiser | Eight Positive Trees | Pressed
Wafer, 2002
Comment
I am also reading Samuel Richardson's novel The
History of Sir Charles Grandison ("He Never Unsheathes His
Sword" until volume 4) and other books published before 2000.
"Amazing!
We have the same books."
"Haven't you noticed that everyone has the same books?"
back
to directory
Jennifer
Scappettone
Giorgio
Agamben | Stato d'eccezione [State of Exception]
| Bollati Boringhieri, 2003
If post-dialectical
thinking has a political praxis, this could be its route: following
Schmitt and Benjamin in theorizing the uncertain term, Agamben sounds
the rank ambiguities of custody and detainment within current (and indefinitely
prolonged) states of patriotism.
Mamma Andersson | Oils from Devil-May-Care:
"In the Room of Another," "In the Waiting
Room," "Installation," "Travelling in the Family,"
"Sleeping Standing Up," "Master's Voice" & 6
others | Nordic Pavilion | Venice Biennale, 2003
This Swedish
painter represents less the end of her medium than its residue, and
thus isn't likely to arise in accounts of the new canon, but so what
— or more to the point, therefore: Reliquefied relatives of works
we might have known dwell in unaccommodating planes of her interiors,
while painted modernist sculpture, uncanny, darkens the corners of dittoish
townscapes; they shouldn't be there, but for joy, remember.
Eugenio
De Signoribus | Principio del giorno [Principle
of the Day] | Garzanti, 2001 | See also Istmi e
chiuse (1989-1995) and Memoria del chiuso
mondo (Quodlibet, 2002)
Seemingly
impermeable, “high” lyric, but arriving from “after towards
before” — erasure-cradling.
Lyn Hejinian | Slowly
| Tuumba, 2002
Lately,
this slim volume — published more or less in tandem with the reprint
of The Beginner — has helped us amass
and savor our temporary panoramas at a canal's pace.
David Larsen | Freaky if You Got This Far |
Self-published chapbook, Berkeley, 2003
Makes a
sensuous case for the persistence of the maker's mark within our everyday
(&) elegy.
Dinh
Q. Le | Photoweavings: Destruction of Memory, Paramount,
Shooting Back, and 3 others | Delays and Revolutions Pavilion|
Venice Biennale, 2003
Within
the sprawl of the Biennale, this photographic series so far (along with
the far less self-lucid series of IllyMind promotional spaces) grapples
most palpably with truth in mediation: working out of Ho Chi Minh City
and Los Angeles, Le literally interweaves grids of images from Vietnamese
films and family albums and notorious war photos with stilled Hollywood
Vietnam and superficially separate pistol-toting starlets, yet the movement
of the pieces isn't simply bidirectional. The ghosting that results
from their super- and interpolation haunts the way one gathers the first
film reels did.
John Ruskin | Fors Clavigera, 4 vols
| Poke around for editions — all long out of print, 1871-84
and later
Forget
the chopped-up editions of Stones of Venice,
if you haven't already, and try to digest some odd share of this or
another piece of late Ruskin: its too-intimate intellectual epistolary
to the discontinuous present vis-a-vis surgical/merciful relic- and
steam-reading will make you look differently.
Edwin Torres | The All-Union Day of the Shock
Worker | Roof, 2002
A good
loud time, visually and sonically, whose bombast has to be cherished
given current contexts of shock and anti-blast labor made mild.
Rodrigo Toscano | Postcard Poems | Broadsides
making up section of book in progress for Krupskaya, 2003
Post-Poundian
play on modes of inscription monumental and ephemeral, taking a stab
at time as linguistic/historical jam (unlike his previous works broken
into shorter or longer lines), addressing Tacitus, Horace, Cicero, Lucretius,
Frontinus Architect, & etc.: "Hic tamen nevertheless four ferociously
kool and bespectacled and be-pistollèd up the kazoot hominem
representing not the universality of values but the universality of
valuation...."
Jalal Toufic | Forthcoming | Atelos, 2001
I don't
have access to my notes on this latest from writer, video artist, film
theorist Toufic. Suffice it to say that it has held up to the “in-progress”
state for six months or so — I mean I've held it there, wanting
each piece to last.
Andrea Zanzotto | Sovrimpressioni [Superimpressions]
| Mondadori, 2001
Continues
to sing, dialect-tic-ically, of farming and hostelry & “del
gnentintut che l'é stat al jeri,” or “of the little-or-null
that was yesterday.” Within our “Apocolocíntosi”
or “Apocalosynthesis,” those idiolects cleaving most stubbornly
to the local — terrain and tongue — at centrifugal core tend
not only to ground but to suprarelevance at every point, wherever it
is.
Jen Scappettone
lives and "works" in Berkeley, and sometimes in Venice.
back
to directory
Kevin
Killian
Rodrigo
Toscano | Platform | Atelos, 2003
Atelos
keeps coming out with bigger and bigger books, no more slim volumes
of gilded verse anymore, now we are issuing doorstops and Henry Moores.
But, Toscano has delivered on the early promise we saw way back when
and he is a walking compendium of everything I want from poetry now:
the fierce intelligence (maybe I don't mean "fierce" as much
as "feisty"), the assured and yet jittery mastery of all kinds
of lengths of line and stanza, the social protest and depth of emotion
that I need to, I don't know, be a meaning person.
Yedda
Morrison | Crop | Kelsey St.
I wrote
a big blurb for Morrison's book that I don't know if they'll use, an
extravagant one predicting that poetry will change forever once the
book is released. I hope everyone picks it up. The only thing I don't
like is the title, I wish it were called "The Cherry Pickers"
instead. "Crop" makes me feel kind of cropped, of the moment,
afloat. Plus remember when Truffaut talked about the French filmmakers'
adage, don't call your film Whatever of the Night, "la Nuit,"
because it sounded too similar to "L'Ennui" thus giving an
opening to unfavorable reviewers. Plus ca change, Yedda Morrison! But,
you're the best.
Derek
McCormack | The Haunted Hillbilly | ECW
Not a book
of poetry per se, in fact a kind of novel, but a great work of genius
that will appeal to poets I feel sure. McCormack is to world literature
as Cormac McCarthy is to US literature, except more inventive and with
a stronger narrative voice one can't get out of one's head. This book
is an exploration of the homosexual cult of menswear's designers and
how they changed country music by putting gold lame suits on Hank Williams
Sr.
George
Stanley | A Tall, Serious Girl | Qua, 2003
Well, here's
another book I wrote a blurb for, so you know I'm willing to speak up
for the downtrodden. He, George, has been criminally overlooked in the
history of contemporary poetry, but if this book could get out there
I think people would sit up and pay attention, incidentally rewriting
the canon. Okay, so he emigrated, okay, so he's in this nomadic position
of being rejected or at any rate not totally accepted by two nations.
Plus, he spent all those years up in the wilderness of Terrace, why
it's a wonder he's alive to tell the tale. Like Ivan Denisovich. But
to sum it all up, for many of us this book IS the book of the year and
the greatest discovery to boot.
Cedar
Sigo | Selected Writings | Ugly Duckling
Presse, 2003
Cedar is
a young poet I met at Naropa a few years back, then very heavily into
Robert Creeley's poetics, then via Irving Rosenthal and John Wieners
he entered an Auerhahn, druggy, pathetic (in the best way) fugue state
of lyric abstraction and gritty urban detail. Immersion in Cedar Sigo's
work produces heady results akin to those I remember feeling when first
reading (1960s) Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers.
Elizabeth
Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003
What the
devil is up with Burning Deck, the cover for Willis' book is so out
of this world! Rosmarie Waldrop assures me it was a one time thing only.
Anyhow you'll see it and know what I mean, good work Jeff Clark. Turneresque
itself strikes me as Elizabeth Willis' best book yet, and her most book-like
book (cohesive, stretchy, everything that makes a poetry manuscript
hold together) due to relentless application of Turner standards across
a wide variety of poetic material.
Daniel
Kane | All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry
Scene of the 1960s | U of California
I would
have reviewed this book at greater length but just try to get a free
copy out of the publicists at Cal! They make you feel like pond scum.
There's only so many times I'll call their office to be switched over
from person to person and told to state my case to each one. "But
I AM Kevin Killian," "Who?" I name all my credentials
and then some others stolen from Greil Marcus, etc., and they're still
witheringly icy on the phone. "You say you want a review copy?"
As though it were the Hope Diamond. Anyhow, Kane's book is terrific
in a lot of ways, and the CD is a nice touch too, but maybe I'm just
too skeptical and I wind up less convinced than before that the 2nd
Generation NY School Poets were all that. Then more charitably I'm doubting
my own judgment, voices quarrelling within me, "They're great,"
"Second rate," "You're like, tenth rate and you're just
bitter because those publicists didn't recognize your name." So,
get it and judge for yourself.
Comment
I've read and liked so many books I forget what else stands out. Here's
the space where I should also talk about the new Krupskaya books that
come out this summer... But I won't. And also to recommend my own new
book (Island of Lost Souls) and Dodie's
book too (Fat Chance) both from Nomados
Books... But I won't. And also to salute the winners of Small Press
Traffic's Book of the Year awards for 2002, but I won't because not
all of them have been tabulated so far. Oh
I remember one final book that is also terrific, a book about which
I've already written a bit, Anselm Berrigan's latest book Zero
Star Hotel (from Roof Books). As far as I can see, 2003 is already
a annus marvelitus for poetry and quite an improvement over the slim
pickins of 2002... I don't know, what does everyone else say? People
are talking about Jen Hofer's anthology of Mexican women poets, but
how would I know if it's good or not? Might as well ask the moon, about
the crying game.
back
to directory
Craig
Watson
Elizabeth
Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003
"The
lost highway of ornament fades into origin. Shipwrecks return like magnets
to their builders."
"The martyr trades her wings for a day at the beach, but who can
blame her? You can't reform a lighthouse."
Ted
Pearson | Songs Aside | Past Tents, 2003
"And
so they came / to the shining city // the burning city / the
entropic city // an arcanum devoted / to punishing choices //
as ingress of fact / as desolation."
Susan
M. Schultz | No guns, no durian | Tinfish,
2003
"Adoption adapts nature into construct, intervening in myths of
origin, the rivers of the breast."
"[John Ashcroft, he do the police n many voices.
The enforcer, Miss Clavel, goes faster and faster
as her minions gather before the first with the heroic
dog who saved Madeline's ass from the Seine.]
Elizabeth Robinson | Pure Descent | Sun
& Moon, 2003
The key is in the lock, but
that signifies only interruption.
Keith Waldrop | The House Seen from Nowhere
| Litmus, 2002
I'm the one who's
running out
and then
time's
on its own
Craig
Watson is the author, most recently, of True
News and Free Will. With Michael Gizzi,
he publishes Qua Books.
back
to directory
Peter
Gizzi
Anselm
Berrigan | Zero Star Hotel | Edge Books,
2002
Lee Ann Brown | The Sleep That Changed Everything
| Wesleyan UP, 2003
Lisa Jarnot | Ring of Fire | Zoland Books,
2001
Julie Kalendek | Our Fortunes | Burning
Deck, 2003
Mark McMorris | The Blaze of the Poui |
Georgia UP, 2003
Jennifer Moxley | The Sense Record | Edge
Books, 2002
Pam Rehm | Saving Bonds | The Cultural Society,
2002
Michael Scharf | Vérité |
Ubu Editions, 2002
Juliana Spahr | Fuck You, Aloha, I Love You
| Wesleyan UP, 2001
Rod Smith | The Good House | Spectacular
Books, 2001
Elizabeth
Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003
back
to directory
Benjamin
Friedlander
Here are
eleven titles that kept me occupied over the last year. I regretfully
left out another eleven that I cared for just as much, and I arbitrarily
excluded the seven I blurbed or otherwise wrote about elsewhere.*
Rae
Armantrout | The Pretext | Green Integer,
2001
I think
of Rae's work as a kind of "Jumble" for pissed-off intellectuals,
but without the satisfaction of a single solution. In a better world,
it would be distributed for free in holding cells and waiting rooms.
But of course, if this were a better world her work would lose much
of its purpose. I feel a certain kinship in that.
Paula
Bennett | Poets and the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory
Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900 | Princeton UP,
2003
I acquired
this just as I was leaving town for the summer and was only able to
read bits and pieces. But Bennett's 1997 Blackwell anthology, Nineteenth-Century
American Woman Poets, is the quirkiest and most learned of several
on the same or similar themes, and the present book has the virtue of
building on that research as well as on an astonishing collective re-imagination
of nineteenth-century American poetry begun by feminist scholars in
the 1970s but adopted since then by the field at large. This book looks
to be a major push forward.
Stephen
Burt | Randall Jarrell and His Age | Columbia
UP, 2003
Jarrell
is a poet I took up and loved with the accidental and oblivious taste
of high school, then forgot about for twenty years. When I rediscovered
him a few years ago, it was with a deep but embarrassed affection. His
faults are obvious enough, but his strengths are entirely his own, and
precious for those of us who care for them. Burt's book follows superb
studies by Richard Flynn and Thomas Travisano (and a fine appreciation
by Ellen Bryant Voigt) in reestablishing Jarrell's reputation on a basis
other than his criticism. The particular value of this book is its thorough
engagement with the unpublished papers and Burt's detailed identification
of Jarrell's intellectual projects. The title, in other words, is a
misnomer: the book isn't really about Jarrell's "Age," but
about his poetics—and so much the better.
John
Caputo | On Religion | Routledge, 2001
My favorite
of the many bite-sized monographs flooding the market in recent years:
I even like the dorky use of Robert Duvall's The
Apostle. It's a book that makes me want to write one of my own,
so I look at it from time to time for cues and inspiration.
Elaine
Equi | The Cloud of Knowable Things | Coffee
House, 2003
No one
really believes that intelligence has to be ponderous or grace without
point. But why then is so much intelligent or graceful writing so ponderous
and pointless? Elaine is a treasure, not treasured nearly enough.
Nada
Gordon and Gary Sullivan | Swoon | Granary
Books, 2001
I'd love
this book if only for the chance it gives me to lecture my students
about the crazy ways my friends conduct their private lives. It's also,
I think, the most meaningful book so far on the Internet. The first
half—leading up to and through Nada's initial meetings with Gary—is
utterly fascinating even after three readings. The last half is a letdown,
but the letdown is itself worth pondering for its insight into the perennial
question, "What next?"
Allen
Grossman | How to Do Things With Tears |
New Directions, 2001
Ridiculous
in places, but the only serious attempt I know of to respond with equal
intensity to two primary and contradictory theses regarding poetry "after
Auschwitz": that one must speak about what happened, lest its memory
die with the survivors; and that one must approach it with a language
approximating silence, lest speech recuperate what happened as a mere
material for art, or—much worse—render it into something too
banal for art.
Adrienne
Kennedy | The Adrienne Kennedy Reader |
U of Minnesota P, 2001
I've yet
to read "She Talks to Beethoven" without tears streaming down
my face—it's like a doctor tapping my knee with a hammer. The "Reader"
in question is a Collected Plays supplemented with several valuable
prose pieces, most notably a quasi-fictional "Letter to My Students
on My Sixty-first Birthday," which extends the Alexander cycle
deeper into the psycho-historical terrain that makes Kennedy the most
powerful writer of our time.
Ruth
Kluger | Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
| Feminist Press, 2001
Not so
much a translation as a re-imagination of her 1992 Weiter
Leben: Eine Jugend, and as much an essay (or better: disputation)
as an autobiography. Which is what we need at this late date: not another
recitation of facts, but a wrestling with the fact's afterlife. I've
never read a book that captures so well the personality of certain survivors
I've known, or attends so rigorously to the temporal displacement we
mean by the word "survival." For a sample of Kluger's work
with some of the same qualities, see her essay on SHOAH, published under
the name Ruth K. Angress and now available online: http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/resources/books/annual3/chap10.html
James
Merrill | Collected Poems | Knopf, 2001
Merrill's
work is roundly detested by a great many poets I admire and by a great
many fools who write about the world as if they were spying through
a keyhole. When I first began reading him—about six years ago—I
felt with a pang that I'd let my craft atrophy, and that I'd become,
in spite of myself, another one of those peeping toms. Now, whenever
I come home from a lousy reading, I open my Merrill to remind myself
why I care about this art, and what I might use it to accomplish.
Marianne
Moore | Becoming Marianne Moore: Early Poems 1907-1924
| Ed. Robin G. Schulze | University of California Press, 2002
The heart
of this book is Observations, one of the
two or three most perfect volumes of poetry published in English in
the twentieth century, and for all practical purposes an unread book
since 1935 (when Moore's Selected Poems,
the basis for all subsequent editions, appeared under T. S. Eliot's
aegis). Schulze's presentation of this material is impeccable: the book
is a model of contemporary textual scholarship, reproducing photographically
all of Moore's early publications, leaving intact all the interesting
and even essential "bibliographic codes" (to borrow Jerome
McGann's phrase) that make it such a perpetual joy to visit libraries,
archives, and old bookshops. Expensive, but worth it.
* Here
are the seven I wrote about elsewhere, smuggled in as a list: Tony Brinkley,
Stalin's Eyes; Daniel Bouchard, Diminutive
Revolutions; Dan Davidson, Culture;
Philip Jenks, On the Cave You Live In; Joanne
Kyger, Again; Paul Muldoon, Poems;
Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment.
back
to directory
Eileen
Tabios
Edward
Foster and Joseph Donahue, eds. | The World in
Time & Space: Towards
a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time
| Talisman, 2001
Barry
Schwabsky | Opera: Poems 1981-2002 | Meritage,
2003
Gabriela
Mistral | Selected Prose and Prose-Poems
| Ed. and trans. Stephen Tabscott | U of Texas, 2002
Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge | Nest | Kelsey St., 2003
Leza
Lowitz | Yoga Poems | Stone Bridge, 2000
Barbara
J. Pulmano Reyes | Gravities of Center |
Arkipelago, 2003
kari
edwards | a day in the life of p. | subpress,
2002
David
Mura | Songs for Uncle Tom, Tonto, and Mr. Motto
| U of Michigan, 2002
Christian
Bök | Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary
Science | Northwestern UP, 2002
Sharon
Dolin | Serious Pink | Marsh Hawk, 2003
Paul
Celan | Selected Poems and Prose | Trans.
John Felstiner | Norton, 2001
back
to directory
Alan
Gilbert
Currently
Provisional Top Ten List (Poetry & Otherwise)
DJ/rupture
| Minesweeper Suite | Tigerbeat 6, 2002
If cultural
syncretism in the 21st century sounds anything like this, then various
sectarianisms inherited from the 20th century have serious cause for
concern.
Julian
LaVerdiere | Lost Cornerstone | Lehmann
Maupin, 2003
A replica
of a 5' tall eagle from the façade of New York City's original
Penn Station swings through space, breathlessly reflecting the brute
force of current US imperial aggressions.
Ammiel
Alcalay | From the Warring Factions | Beyond
Baroque, 2002
It may
take poets a few years to catch up with the methodology employed in
Alcalay's book.
Muslimgauze
| Hummus | Soleilmoon, 2002
I put it
on every time Bush gives a speech. And every time I think about Bush
giving a speech.
Muhammad
Said al-Sahaf (Iraqi Information Minister) | various proclamations |
Baghdad, Spring 2003
As US troops
were rolling into Baghdad, al-Sahaf was proclaiming in solicitous yet
belligerent press conferences that: 'I triple guarantee you, there are
no American soldiers in Baghdad,' along with even more memorable quotes
such as, 'I now inform you that you are too far from reality,' and,
'We're going to drag the drunken junkie nose of Bush through Iraq's
desert, him and his follower dog Blair.' The ravings of a lunatic? Surrealist
theater? Or a brilliantly self-reflexive exposure of the workings of
ideology and propaganda, as well as the media's complicity with, and
manufacture of, their embedded lies?
David
Rees | Get Your War On | Soft Skull, 2002
'Oh yeah!
Operation: Enduring Freedom is in the house!' 'Oh yeah! Operation: Enduring
Our Freedom is in the motherfucking house!' 'Yes! Operation: Enduring
Our Freedom To Bomb The Living Fuck Out Of You is in the house!!!'
Bowery
Poetry Club | 308 Bowery Street, New York City | since 2002
Proprietor
Bob Holman's pluralistic vision proves that independent poetry can thrive
outside of the MLAs, AWPs, MFAs, and the deadening effects of workshop
experimentalism.
World
Bank, WTO, IMF, G8, and anti-war protests
| Various locations, ongoing
Quite possibly
the largest combined series of worldwide public demonstrations in history
are one of the few reasons to be hopeful during what is quite possibly
one of the darkest points in world history (economically, socially,
and environmentally), only further aggravated by the replacement of
Cold War detente with the clash of Christian and Islamic eschatology.
Walid
Ra'ad | The Atlas Group | Whitney Biennial,
Documenta 11 (2002), Venice Biennale (2003)
Raíad's
sophisticated and formally pristine conceptual documentary project focusing
on the Lebanese Civil War reveals him to be one of the most compelling
visual artists working today.
Sophie
Aster Prevallet | born 18 April 2003
'There
will be no other words in the world / But those our children speak'
(George Oppen, 'Sara in Her Father's Arms').
Alan Gilbert's
writings on poetry, art, culture, and politics have appeared in a variety
of publications, as have his poems. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
back
to directory
Noah
Eli Gordon
John
Godfrey | Push the Mule | The Figures, 2000
These long
prose poems eke out a wounded masculinity from the twisting musculature
of every sentence.
Michael
Friedman | Species | The Figures, 2000
Gestural
and witty, small prose poems whose deceptive surface clarity is muddied
via subtle parataxis.
Lisa
Jarnot | Ring of Fire | Zoland, 2001
This book
just might be the brightest star over the battlefield us 20something
poets are just beginning to get our bearings on, mostly because it feels
like a re-centering of the numerous routes avant-garde poetries have
taken in regards to the "I" in the last 50 years.
Albert
Mobilio | Me with Animal Towering | Black
Square / Hammer, 2002
Mixes poems
having gone through the syntax grinder, where "we hydrogenate the
voice" with the best parts of surrealism, a pinch of abstraction
and a straightforward tough talker.
Rosmarie
Waldrop | Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading
Edmond Jabes | Wesleyan, 2002
A beautiful
book! Part memoir, part biography, part explication of the poems, part
exploration of the problems of translation, but all done with an endearing
love.
Anselm
Berrigan | Zero Star Hotel | Edge, 2002
Five Stars!!!
Ann
Lauterbach | If in Time: Selected Poems, 1975-2000
| Penguin, 2001
The only
poet I can think of who is able to make adjective traffic pay off.
David
Shapiro | A Burning Interior | Overlook,
2002
There
is a variance here between Shapiroís reverent erasures and the
more truncated musicality of the long title poem.
Fanny
Howe | Selected Poems | U of California,
2000
Everything
I ever wanted to know about line breaks I learned from Fanny Howe.
Anne
Waldman and Lewis Warsh, eds. | The Angel Hair
Anthology | Granary, 2001
Ample evidence
of the importance of community and a history lesson for us youngsters.
Michael
Palmer | The Promises of Glass | New Directions,
2000
Still life
with Epistemology and Bits of Mirror—Palmer consistently pokes
holes in both the real and imagined world until it is unclear which
is which is which is.
back
to directory
Juliana
Spahr
I've fallen
off the reading map due to writing criticism (isn't it funny how they
are contradictory?), but here are some thoughts...
Dan
Beachy Quick | North True South Bright |
Alice James, 2003
The back
compares it to Hopkins, but the real debt seems to be to Susan Howe.
The poems are a little more conventionally lyrical than Howe's work,
but similar interests in crossed out lines and fragmented words and
Rowlandson and Hutchinson (and how to make sense of America's history
of contact--or perhaps an exploration of how it does not make sense
and tears things apart).
Ernesto
Cardenal | Zero Hour | New Directions, 1980
I'm just
getting around to this years late. Still trying to think my way through
what documentary poems might be and how they might work. At moments
these ring false (too declaratory; too easy?; not sure what it is).
At other moments are fascinating.
Norma
Cole | Spinoza in Her Youth | Omnidawn,
2002
It has
taken me years to begin to understand Cole's references but I'm beginning
to get it--getting it has something to do with relaxing into the work's
mind--and I'm glad I stuck it out.
Lisa
Kanae | Sista Tongue | Honolulu: Tinfish,
2002
Part personal
essay, part history of pidgin, part defense of the pidgin writing scene.
I tend to read the essay as a reply to the complaints of racism and
exclusion in the pidgin lit scene made by critics such as Candace Fujikane
and Rodney Morales even though the book does not directly engage the
critcs.
Walter
Lew | Treadwinds | Wesleyan, 2002
Wild and
wacky; polylingual and perverse.
Hoa
Nguyen | Your Ancient See Through | Subpress,
2002 | Chosen for Subpress by Anselm Berrigan (disclaimer: I am
also a member
of Subpress).
Tight,
often nasty little poems. They completely weird me out. Which is what
is good about them. They seem almost without influence, as if they have
sprung from Nguyen's head fully formed.
James
Thomas Stevens | Combing the Snakes from His Hair
| U of Michigan, 2002
His work
is also frequently an exploration of America's history of contact, but
from a Mohawk perspective. Especially interesting: "A Half-breed's
Guide to the Use of Native Plants. "
Robert
Sullivan | Captain Cook in the Underworld
| Aukland U, 2003
A libretto
by Maori poet about the arrival of Cook told through/as the Orpheus
myth. Sullivan is writing some of the most accomplished mixes of lyric
and cultural writing in the Pacific.
Lee
Tonouchi | Living Pidgin | Tinfish, 2002
Short talks
and concrete poems on pidgin. Tonouchi, calls himself da pidgin guerilla,
is also tireless in his defenses of pidgin.
Truong
Tran | Dust and Conscience | Apogee, 2002
Something
about what Silliman deemed the "new sentence" seems have allowed
it to become an ideal form often used for exploring cultural complication
(often immigrant or second generation but still immigrant identified
experience). Beautiful and sharp and aestheticized exploration of self
in cultures.
Craig
Watson | True News | Instance, 2002
I'm a bigger
fan of Free Will but this book is good also.
Elizabeth
Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003
Long awaited
and lyrical. Don't read too fast or you'll miss the sense of humor that
is so subtle and makes the poems last.
back
to directory
Michael
Scharf
Ammiel
Alcalay | From the Warring Factions | Los
Angeles: Beyond Baroque, 2002
Brent
Hayes Edwards | The Practice of Diaspora: Literature,
Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism | Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2003
Kiosk
No. 2 | Edited by Gordon Hatfield, Sasha Steensen & Kyle Schlesinger
| Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo, 2003
Assembling
Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally
| Edited by Romana Huk | Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003
Laura
Moriarty | Spicer's City | Poetry New York/Meeting
Eyes Bindery: New York, 1998
Marcel
Proust | Swann's Way | Trans. Lydia Davis
| New York: Penguin, 2003
Leslie
Scalapino | Zither & Autobiography |
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003
Rod
Smith | Music or Honesty | New York: Roof,
2003
Brian
Kim Stefans | Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics
| Berkeley: Atelos, 2003
Michael
Taussig | The Nervous System | New York:
Routledge, 1992
Rodrigo
Toscano | Platform | Berkeley: Atelos, 2003
Comment
| I'd place with Alcalay's volume listed above the following titles:
Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab
Conflict 1881-2001 by Benny Morris (New York: Vintage, 2001);
The Next Jerusalem: Sharing the Divided City
edited by Michael Sorkin (New York: Monacelli, 2002); The
Politics of Collective Violence by Charles Tilly (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); Prisoner of
Love by Jean Genet (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003
[1986]); A History of Arab Peoples by Albert
Houari (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002 [1991]); Unsettled:
An Anthropology of the Jews by Melvin Konner (New York: Viking,
2003 [forthcoming]).
back
to directory
Rae
Armantrout
Jenny
Penberthy | Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works
Fanny
Howe | Gone
Lisa
Robertson | The Weather
Lydia
Davis | Samuel Johnson Is Indignant
Harryette
Mullen | Sleeping With The Dictionary
Jennifer
Moxley | The Sense Record
Alice
Notley | Disobedience
Claudia
Rankine and Juliana Spahr | American Women Poets
in the 21st Century
Lyn
Hejinian | Slowly
Jordan
Davis | Million Poem Journal
Elaine
Equi | The Cloud of Knowable Things
Comment |
I guess Jordan is the token male. It wasn't planned that way. If Perelman's
Playing Bodies was out it would have been
high on the list. And I know I will like Kit's new book, The
Crave and Barrett's critical book — but I don't have those
yet.
back
to directory
Joshua
Clover
Kevin
Davies | "Lateral Argument" | The Alterran Poetry Assemblage
7.0 | December 2002 | http://members.rogers.com/alterra/davies.htm
I'm still
trying figure out what the web is good for re poetry, beyond being a
place to put it. It seems felicitous for long poems. When I read a long
poem in a book or journal, I find that I skip ahead to see how far I
have to go, and intensify my attention when I know I'm nearing the end.
Online, I somehow find it easier to pay close attention to passages
as they appear.
Juliana
Spahr | Series of dated poems spanning 11/30/02-3/20/03 | Heard at reading
and requested of author. They have been published all over:
Shampoo, The Baffler, PoetsAgainstWar
website, Village Voice, some journal at
Chicago School of Art, and the anthology enough!
(eds. Scalapino, London).
These made
me really happy. It seems like a fulfillment of the promise of Spiderwasp.
The application of lo-affect language to hi-affect concerns is a big
trope these last several years (is this the opposite of archness?) but
not always so motivated, or so expressive of something beyond the disparity
itself. That these could (thusly?) bear equally the telos of being overt
political engagements and love poems...I could not love these more.
"Zone"
| Guillaume Apollinaire | Beckett trans. in Auster's Random House anth.
There are
as many good ways to translate as to write poems blah blah blah. Twice
as many bad ways. Still, I get the feeling you could teach an entire
translation course using nothing but this poem, comparing Beckett to
Revell and Fitts. Also, this is a good poem to read while washing the
dishes.
Rem
Koolhaas | "Junkspace" | October
100 | I think this is a fragment of a larger piece or aggregate
As architectural
writing, dull and redundant; one of my favorite poems of last year.
Perhaps unconsciously influenced by the Atelos project, I am more and
more likely to get excited by poetics found in non-poems. Similarly:
"Theory of Distraction," Walter Benjamin (Selected
Writings Volume 3, Harvard 2003), and filmscript for In
Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni, Guy Debord (Pelagian Press).
Ed
Roberson | Atmospheric Conditions | Sun
& Moon, 2000
Ange
Mlinko | A Book Called Odile | to be published
at some point in book form
by The Germ
Missy
Elliott | Under Construction
Much more
liberating than being under erasure.
Durs
Grunbein | Various poems | Trans. Rosemarie Waldrop
He's a
German poet. Someone sent me a bunch of xeroxes last fall; I guess some
or all were from Chicago Review.
David
Buuck | "Stanzas in Mediation" | ongoing project, requested
of author; a part is in enough!, eds. Scalapino
& London
Poetry
blogs
Don't these
exist, at a superstructural level, so that when poets google themselves,
they get more hits?
Andreas
Gursky exhibition | SFMoMA | 2003
I find
that the psychic labor of many major exhibitions involves balancing
the aesthetic pleasure of the stuff, and the embarrassment with my own
trendiness. It's sort of like being really wowed by some scenic place
you're visiting, all the while devising in the back of your mind a rationale
for why you're not like all the other gawkers, who are just tourists.
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Pam
Brown
Kate
Lilley | Versary | Salt
Kate Lilley's
poetry is resolutely 'literary' and although it's probably preferable
to have some knowledge of rhetoric, semiotics, and postmodernism it's
also quite possible that you can get a huge variety of pleasures from
reading Versary whether or not you know
anything at all about poetics and its influences. •
read full review here
Ron
Silliman | Tjanting | Salt (rpt.)
Breathlessly,
seamlessly exciting. You can almost see synaptic flashes as you read.
Each wordplay, thought, joke, sentence and phrase is express delivered.
Ron Silliman avoids the word-salad effect that writing techniques like
his can sometimes have. This seems to be due to his apparent ease of
making language connect rather than being merely assembled. This work
is dense, conceptual and yet more condensed than Lorine Niedecker's
famous "condensery". Tjanting
makes John Ashbery's poetry seem dimmer-switched to low. For me, this
is a brilliant book to read.
Rod
Mengham and Glen Phillips, eds. | Fairly Obsessive:
Essays on the Works of John Kinsella | Fremantle Arts Centre
Press
The Western
Australian U.K./U.S.A.-based poet John Kinsella has raced into a slot
in 21st Century English-language poetry and poetics like a new millennium
rocket. This collection of essays attempts to chart his quixotic trajectory
and his poetic multiple personality –as a pastoral poet, a traditionalist,
a subversive, a post-modernist and so on. In the main, it succeeds.
Most perspicacious essays are by Ann Vickery on Kinsella and screen
memory – the effect and use of media in his poems and on his work
as a "post pastoralist" in "The Radnoti Poems".
In his essay, Glen Phillips calls this work "neo-pastoralist".
Other essays noted for their imaginative liveliness are by Michael Brennan,
Peter Minter, Nigel Wheale on Kinsella’s seemingly amphetamine
charged novel "Genre" and Xavier Pons on post-coloniality
in Kinsella’s poetry. Amongst the eleven other contributors, there’s
an essay from Marjorie Perloff and an interview with John Kinsella conducted
by Rod Mengham. Energising food for the universal curriculum.
Bruce
Dawe | Towards a War: Twelve Reflections
| Picaro
Bruce Dawe
has been a topical poet publishing his commentaries in poems in Australian
newspapers and journals since the 1960s. This is a pamphlet released
as part of the "debate" regarding the recent U.S.A.-led conflict
in Iraq. The poems are solid, traditional (modernist), serious, troubled
and, as could probably be expected by so grave a topic, they never really
"lift-off". Bruce Dawe’s dark humour about Australian
society is quite well-known but it’s not employed in this instance.
A portion of the proceeds from sales will go to the Red Cross in aid
of Iraq. A worthy project.
Pam Brown
is the author of fourteen poetry collections. Her most recent titles are
Text thing (Little Esther Books, 2002) and
Dear Deliria : New and Selected Poems (Salt
Publishing, 2003). Web site link here
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kari
edwards
Rodrigo
Toscano | Platform | Atelos, 2003
Very exciting,
broke from and language...
Stephen
Ratcliffe | Sound / (system) | Green Integer,
2002
A wonderful
use of the pastiche.
Christine
Hume | Musca Domestica | Beacon, 2000
I can not
believe it has taken me this long to find this...
Jen
Hofer | Slide Rule | Subpress, 2002
Jocelyn
Saidenberg | Cusp | Kelsey St., 2001
Heather
Fuller | Dovecote | Edge, 2002
kari
edwards | a day in the life of p. | subpress,
2002
If no one
else will tell you this is a must buy, then let me, what are you waiting
for, go buy it now.
Brian
Massumi | Parables for the Virtual | Duke,
2002
A must
for any cyborg, poet, or human.
Aphex
Twin | 26 Mixes for Crash | 2003
Wonderful,
have not taken it off my cd player
Jonathan
Bepler | Music for Matthew Barney's Cremaster
3 | 2003
See the
movie, see all of them 1-5, then get the sound track you will
see what I mean. You can only get the sound track at the Guggenheim
museum
Darren
Wershler-Henry | The Tapeworm Foundry |
2000
A hand
book for life or something...
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Robert
Creeley
With caveat
that this is 'right now' —:
C.D. Wright | Steal Away: Selected
and New Poems
Tom
Raworth | Collected Poems
Kenneth
Rexroth | The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth
Sam
Truitt | Vertical Elegies 5 The Section
George
Stanley | A Tall, Serious Girl
Martin
Espada | Alabanza, New and Selected Poems 1982-2002
Carolyn
Forche |Blue Hour
Jaime
Saenz | Immanent Vistor, Selected Poems of Jaime
Saenz | Trans. Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander
Joanne
Kyger | As Ever: Selected Poems
Fanny
Howe | Gone
Anne
Tardos | The Dik-dik's Solitude
Susan
Howe | The Midnight
And now for
the next eleven...
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|
