Attention Span
2004
Introductory
Note
In
July of 2004, I invited readers of Third Factory
/ Notes to Poetry to submit constellations of up to eleven titles
that spoke to their present interests. While an emphasis on poetry titles
published after 2001 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 ongoing attempt to map the shifting
field of our singular and collective attentions. —Steve Evans
Directory
of Individual Participants
Ammiel
Alcalay • Rae Armantrout • Bill
Berkson • Anselm Berrigan • Jules
Boykoff • Pam Brown • Franklin
Bruno • Joshua Clover • Chris
Daniels • Jordan Davis • Marcella
Durand • kari edwards • Larry
Fagin • Steve Farmer • Graham
W. Foust • Benjamin Friedlander
• Heather Fuller • Alan
Gilbert • Noah Eli Gordon • Kevin
Killian • Aaron Kunin • John
Latta • Peter Middleton • Chris
Murray • John Palattella • Marjorie
Perloff • David Perry • Meredith
Quartermain • Lisa Robertson •
Kaia Sand • Jennifer
Scappettone • Michael Scharf • Jerrold
Shiroma • Rick Snyder • Eileen
Tabios • Tony Tost • Karen
Volkman • James Wagner • G.C.
Waldrep • Dana Ward • John
Wilkinson • Stephanie Young
Combined
list by title and frequency
Ammiel
Alcalay
Faraj
Bayrakdar | Dove In Free Flight | Published
in Beirut, no date/Arabic
A remarkable
book by a former political prisoner that I have spent a lot of time
with over the past several years, working on a translation with a group
of people (we call ourselves the New York Translation Collective, even
though members are in New York, New Hamphsire, Damascus, Cairo and Beirut!).
Individual poems have come out in Beyond Baroque (revived mag
from Los Angeles), and Bomb, with some more expected and a book
to come sometime this year).
Alan
George | Syria: Neither Bread Nor Freedom
| Zed, 2003 | 206pp
I was reading
this to understand a little more about the context of Bayrakdar's imprisonment
and subsequent release; one of the only books in English that covers
this period.
David
Meltzer | Beat Thing | La Alameda Press,
2004 | 160pp | $18.00
History
as bop, verse as life. The inimitable encyclopedic David Meltzer, a
must-read.
Herman
Melville | Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War:
Civil War Poems |
DaCapo Press, 1995 | 272pp | $13.95
Particularly
apt in these times, with a superb introduction by Lee Rust Brown; here
is Melville, in 1865, in a poem called "America": "Law
on her brow and empire in her eyes."
Anne
Waldman and Lisa Birman, eds. | Civil Disobediences:
Poetics and
Politics in Action | Coffee House Press, 2004 | 470pp | $18.00
Just in
over the transom—I'm a contributor but, despite that, looks like
there is a lot here to digest and explore.
Maggie
Dubris | Skels | Soft Skull, 2004 | 240pp
| $14.95
I've read
an earlier version in manuscript and have been eagerly awaiting the
publication of this. Maggie Dubris is unique, read her.
Douglas
Valentine | The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret
History of America's War on Drugs | Verso, 2004 | 554pp | $29.00
Masterful
alternative history that can restructure the way you think about politics,
economics, government, and all kinds of other things. The real deal,
by the man who brought us the indespensable Phoenix Program, perhaps
the only book to detail the operations against civilians during the
latter days of the American war in Indochina.
Steve
Hodel | Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story
| Harper-Collins, 2004 | 560pp | $14.95
An absolute
knock-out. Hodel is a former LAPD detective who actually fingers his
own father, Dr. George Hodel, as the Black Dahlia killer and the killer
of other women. Most interesting are Dr. George Hodel's connections
to people like Man Ray and John Huston.
Maureen
Konkle | Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals
and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863 | University of
North Carolina Press, 2004 | 368pp
An important
view into native discourse prior to the civil war and "removal."
Very useful in reconsidering some popular but too loosely used categories
like "post-colonialism."
Dorothy
B. Hughes | In A Lonely Place | The Feminist
Press, 2003 | 250pp | $14.95
Yale Younger
Poet turned pulp and noir writer Dorothy Hughes, finally re-issued.
Magic!
Cornell
Woolrich | Rendezvous in Black | Modern
Library, 2004 | 212pp | $12.95
The inimitable
Woolrich is slowly coming back into print; check this one out, along
with a collection of stories recently out and edited by Francis Nevins,
his biographer.
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to the directory
Rae
Armantrout
Since I also
responded to the last survey on this site, I’ve chosen only recent
books this time to avoid duplication.
Bob
Perelman and Francie Shaw | Playing Bodies
| Granary Books, 2004
The book
presents 52 paintings by Shaw, each of which shows a toy dinosaur and
a doll involved in an ambiguous tussle. Perelman has written a poem
in response to each painting. The poems are terse, urgent, colloquial.
They deal with big subjects in a completely unpretentious way.
Lyn
Hejinian | The Fatalist | Omnidawn
This work
opens wide to admit anything imaginable. That makes for a wild ride.
I love all of Lyn’s books and this is among my favorites.
Graham
Foust | As in Every Deafness | Flood Editions
Foust seems
to have come out of the blue as a completely accomplished poet. His
work is extremely compressed, even miniature, yet each poem makes wrenching
twists and leaves you somewhere unexpected.
Graham
Foust | Leave the Room to Itself | ahsahta
press
I’m
just a G.F. fan.
Lisa
Robertson | Occasional Work and Seven Walks from
the Office of Soft Architecture |Clear Cut Press
Lisa Robertson
may be the opposite of Graham Foust, but I love her work too. This book
deals with (Vancouver) space in terms of texture. Its baroque style
seems to suggest we’ll never get to the bottom of "things."
Kit
Robinson | The Crave | Atelos
This book
is also about space — the alienated space of the business traveler.
It isn’t depressing though. It’s more like cool jazz.
Catherine
Wagner | Macular Hole | Fence Books
Wagner
is sort of like a post-feminist Sylvia Plath on acid. Check it out.
It’s intense.
Peter
Gizzi | Some Values of Landscape and Weather
| Wesleyan
This book
is elegant. The poems invite you in and then threaten to dissolve. It’s
a bit like Ashbery but with no hint of camp.
Elizabeth
Willis |Turneresque | Burning Deck
Willis
makes a kind of grim comedy out of our fantasies and representations.
"inventing a bobby / fischer to live through it."
Elizabeth
Robinson | Apprehend | Fence
I love
fairy tales and this book finds a way to rewrite fairy tales, opening
them up to contemporary experience.
Ron
Silliman | Woundwood |Cuneiform
This is
a good example of what I like in Ron’s writing: the quality of
his observation. And behind or between the observations, increasingly
lately, there is a subtle emotional resonance.
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Bill
Berkson
Take one
Kenward
Elmslie | Agenda Melt
Charles
Reznikoff | Testimony
Kenneth
Koch | A Possible World
Nathaniel
Dorsky | Devotional Cinema
Ron
Padgett, ed. | Painter Among Poets: George Schneeman
John
Thorpe | Five Aces and Independence
Adam
Phillips | Darwin's Worms
Kit
Robinson | The Crave
Rudy Burckhardt | Abrams monograph
W.H.
Auden | Lectures on Shakespeare
Frank
Kermode | Shakespeare's Language
Take two
John
Godfrey | Private Lemonade
Charles
Rosen | The Classical Style
Frank
O'Hara | The Houses at Falling Hanging |
in Yale Review with intro by Olivier Brossard
Paul
Valery | Selected Writings
Silver
Poets of the Sixteenth Century
Whitman
| Selected by Robert Creeley
Ovid
| The Metamorphosis | Trans. John Golding
David
Rattray | How I Became One of the Invisible
Richard
Holmes | Sidetracks
Alexander
Nehamas | The Art of Living
Plato
| The Symposium | Trans. Alexander Nehamas
& Paul Woodruff
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Anselm
Berrigan
Eric
Baus | The To Sound | Verse | 2003
Samuel
R. Delaney | Times Square Red Times Square Blue
| NYU, 1999 | 203pp | $18.00
Hafiz
of Shiraz | Thirty Poems: An Introduction to the
Sufi Master | Trans. by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs | Handsel,
2003 | 81 pp | $14.00
Karen
Weiser | Placefullness | Ugly Duckling,
2004
Douglas
Oliver | Arrondissements | Salt, 2003 |
172pp | $16.95
Anne
Waldman and Lisa Berman, eds. | Civil Disobediences:
Poetics and Politics in Action | Coffee House, 2004 | 425pp |
$18.00
Michael
Lewis | Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair
Game | Norton, 2002 320 pp | $13.95
Samantha
Powers | "A Problem from Hell": America
and the age of Genocide | Perennial, 2003 | 656 pp | $17.95
Lorenzo
Thomas | Dancing On Main Street | Coffee
House, 2004 | 110 pp | $15.00
Linh
Dinh | All Around What Empties Out | Subpress/Tinfish,
2003 | 96 pp | $12.00
Unpublished
manuscripts by Alice Notley, Dana Ward, Marcella Durand, Karen Weiser
and Edmund Berrigan, plus the Collected Poems
of Ted Berrigan, nearly 900 pages, and due to be published by UC Press
in late 2005.
•
• •
Notes: I
am choosing not to choose books by anyone I introduced at the Poetry Project
in the past year, which cuts out about fifty books. At the same time I
am choosing to list family and the person I live with, as I probably spend
the most time with that work (and it is also among the best, he says without
a care towards the lack of impartiality, whatever the fuck that's supposed
to be in this day and age). Noah Eli Gordon's Frequencies,
from Tougher Disguises should be in there too. I have also been obsessively
reading all of J.R.R. Tolkien's works for the past three years
(having never read them before), and any of David Halberstam's
sports books (The Breaks of the Game,
on Basketball, and 1964, on Baseball,
in particular). And lots of political essays, which I think constitute
some kind of new genre of trash reading (left and right). Otherwise, I
can't think of anything to say about the books I am listing beyond the
fact that they work.
Recent poems
by Anselm Berrigan can be found on-line at GutCult.com and 2ndAvenue.com.
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Jules Boykoff
Alex
Callinicos | The New Mandarins of American Power
| Polity, 2003
A smart,
concise, measured, critical look at the ‘War on Terrorism.’
A good Marxist for the good Marxist in all of us.
Renee
Gladman | The Activist | Krupskaya, 2003
This is
a fractured planning session, a psychological excavation, & mass
media critique all rolled up into a gripping book. "I swear on
my heart that Americans will not be rabble-roused," said the President.
Carol
Mirakove | Occupied | Kelsey St. Press,
2004
Speaking
of rabble-rousing, Carol Mirakove brings us Occupied, a crucial book
for this historical moment. Mirakove kindly reminds us that "democracy
is a contact sport." This work is more direct than her previous
stuff, as she seems to be overtly reading the vertiginous swirl-a-girl
called Our Present Moment. The book even comes with handy-dandy glossary-like
reference section.
Critical
Art Ensemble | Flesh Machine | Autonomedia,
1998
Steve Kurtz’s
recent suppression (via the USA PATRIOT Act etc.) inspired my return
to the Critical Art Ensemble’s engaging discussion of new-wave
eugenic based technological advance masquerading as social progress.
Lisa
Robertson | Occasional Work and Seven Walks from
the Office of Soft Architecture | Clear Cut Press, 2003
I love
the precision of language, the perambulation of thought, the thoroughgoing
ranginess of this book. Fun to read out loud with a friend. Fun to look
at the [color!] pictures, too.
Robert
Pollin | Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures
and the Landscape of Global Austerity | Verso Press, 2003
Lucid
demystification of the so-called economic boom in the 1990s under Clinton.
Pollin is radical economist who is also a sonuva NBA owner (Abe Pollin
of the Washington Wizards).
Devendra
Banhart | Oh Me Oh My…The Way the Day Goes
by the Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit
| Young God Records, 2002
This CD
has been spinning wildly in our stereo since the day we got it. "You
certainly are nice people, in your white-ass suit and lion tattoos.
You’ve seen it all. Pale horse licks your skin, begin."
Michael
Smith | It A Come | City Lights, 1986
A collection
worth returning to. Michael Smith, a Jamaican poet, was the victim of
political murder in 1983. His poem "Sunday" is one of my all-time
favorites.
Aishah
Rahman and Kamili Feelings, eds. | NuMuse: An Anthology
of Plays from Brown University | Seventh Issue | Providence,
2001
Contains
an interview with playwright Adrienne Kennedy. Kennedy’s "Sleep
Deprivation Chamber" is also included.
Chalmers
Johnson | Blowback: The Costs and Consequences
of American Empire | New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000
Direct,
compelling analysis replete with numerous specific examples of U.S.
foreign policies in East Asia. This was written before 11 Sept. 2001.
Read chapters 1, 2 & 10, if nothing else.
Leslie
Scalapino, ed. | War and Peace | O Books,
2004
Includes,
among other things, a fantastic long piece from Judith Goldman &
one of my all-time favorite Rodrigo Toscano poems—one that reminds
me of the enormous gaps in my education.
Women
in the Avant Garde | cd | Narrow House Recordings, 2004
This CD
is a recording of a slam-bang poetry reading given by Laura Elrick,
Heather Fuller, Carol Mirakove, Kristin Prevallet, and Deborah Richards
that Kaia Sand organized in St. Mary’s County, Maryland in Nov.
2003. The recording is so crisp that at times you can hear Sophie Prevallet
squealing with glee in the background. Can’t blame her—this
is a fantastic, & variegated, reading.
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Pam
Brown
Laurie
Duggan | Mangroves | University of Queensland
Press, 2003 | 186pp
During
a long bout of poetry-writing block, Laurie Duggan wrote a doctoral
thesis on early Twentieth Century modernism in Australian visual culture.
It was published as a book called ‘Ghost Nation’ in 2001.
Then, starting from where he left off from poetry , or from where poetry
left him a few years earlier, he wrote his eleventh book of poems, ‘Mangroves’.
Softly critical, mildly scholarly, always wry , often funny – ‘If
the futurists were reborn would they choose to live under the flightpath
?’ Ten of the best poems here are written ‘after Ardengo Soffici’.
Michael
Brennan | The Imageless World | Salt Publishing,
2004 | 93pp
These poems
are excised from the work of mourning. Endearing, ‘emotional’,
also tinged with an eastern european tone (eastern europe before the
1980s fall). Axiomatic fragments sensitize a reader’s consciousness
with feeling. ‘Freedom might be the week love begins or love ends.
Well fed words might keep it from us.’ The wanderer’s already-nostalgic
letters and postcards home are also occasionally tragicomic – a
lover’s departure – ‘She left a sliver of green soap/Which
I started to use/The day after the day she left./I tried to mail the
postcard but/Without a forwarding address/Only the soap that was almost
gone was left.’ Michael Brennan is the Australian founder of the
vibrant independent chapbook imprint Vagabond Press.
John
Tranter | Studio Moon | Salt Publishing,
2003 | 114pp
A selection
of poems from the last fifteen years from this prolific Australian poet
and editor of the widely-read internet magazine, ‘Jacket’.
Tranter displays his formal skills – elegies, odes, haibun, sestinas
, pantoums and so on. Desperation and the darker side of disappointment
in poems like ‘Decalcomania’ and a kind of ordinary or domestic
ennui in others, temper any excess of imaginative revelation. A wide
range of narrative unravelments that come close to seeming classical.
Plus daring feats of twentieth century fin-de siècle stream-of-consciousness.
Lisa
Robertson | Occasional Work and Seven Walks from
the Office for Soft Architecture| clear cut press, 2003 | 274pp
Little
essays that might have been dreamed, or received, rather than thought.
Conceptual beauties. ‘My guide raised the styrofoam coffee cup
as if it were the most translucent of foliate porcelains. During the
instant of that gesture morning was all recollection…’ In
Vancouver.
Donna
Haraway | The Companion Species Manifesto
| Prickly Paradigm Press 2003 100pp
Dog writing
is a branch of feminist lit theory . So Australian novelist Amanda Lohrey
includes a talking, thinking mutt in her latest novel ‘The Philosopher’s
Doll’. The well-known male writers John Berger in ‘King -
A Street Story ‘ and Paul Auster in ‘Timbuktu’ use dogs
as their first-canine-pronoun leading characters, partially pre-empting
this treatise. Now that cyborgs have completed their absorption into
an imaginary feminist-run world, Haraway exhorts us to continue the
struggle and to ‘Run fast; bite hard !’
Susan
M. Schultz | And Then Something Happened
| Salt Publishing, 2004 | 132pp
Dense,
intense, engaged, darkly witty, observant, worldly, brainy, this book
is a necessary antidote for the jaded. The reader can follow thinking’s
action in these socially (or societally) grounded poems and prose poems.
Covering a mix of topics from writing theory to adoptive motherhood
to corporate crime to political, philosophical & military power,
Susan Schultz critiques the western English speaking world with extraordinary
acuity and poetic brilliance.
Eileen
Myles | The Inferno (Chapter 1) | Angry
Dog Midget Editions, 2003 | 32pp
Pacy autobiographical
prose - distracted, dishevelled, glamorous, frank and funny, the teenage
poet falls for the world literature teacher who understands existentialism
– thereby reclaiming (or is it ‘inventing’ ?) a lesbian
trope.
Gerry
Dukes | Samuel Beckett | Penguin Books,
2001 | 161pp
A photographic
biography. Beckett was shy of publicity, wary of speaking in public
yet not, as is evidenced here, camera-shy. Over a hundred photos of
Samuel Beckett and his friends and family , his stage and film work
in progress or production, plus ephemera (book jackets etc) and an inventive
text as a condensed biography by Dublin-based academic, Gerry Dukes.
•
• •
Regular reading
News &
current affairs:The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Newspaper,
Green Left Weekly, The Guardian Weekly, The Nation - online, The Onion
- online
Journals:
Art Monthly Australia, Art & Australia, Modernism/Modernity, Jacket,
Tinfish, Meanjin, Southerly, Cordite, HOW2
Newsletters:
Five Bells (NSW Poets Union), The Gleaner (Gleebooks bookshop), Red
Tape (CPSU - my union), AFI (Australian Film Institute), Friends of
the National Film & Sound Archive, Sydney Alliance Francaise
Blogs:
Ron Silliman, Steve Evans' Third Factory, Cassie Lewis' The Jetty
Current
manuals: Roxio Toast 6 Titanium - Getting Started Guide, Pentax Optio
S40 digital camera Operating Manua
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Franklin
Bruno
Rae
Armantrout | Up To Speed | Wesleyan University
Press, 2003
Observation,
comprehension, doubt; the experience of time as a condition of consciousness
and intentionality. "Does a road/run its whole length/at once?"
Also Veil (Wesleyan, 2001); The Pretext (Green Integer,
2001), and two new poems in The Canary 3.
Christian
Bök | Eunoia | Coach House Books, 2001
If a thing’s
done perfectly, does that demonstrate it was worth doing? Also the Coach
House CD of the author reading his work; MacGregor Card’s two palindromic
poems in The Hat 5; Guy Bennett & Ron Griffin, Drive to
Cluster (ML & NLF, 2003).
Fanny
Howe | Economics | Flood Editions, 2002
The argument
that transparency is by nature illusory is much more convincing when
made implicitly, by writing that nearly achieves it. "Lotto"
devastates me with its ‘surprise ending,’ all the more so
in that I usually find Howe’s prose heavy going (Indivisible,
The Wedding Dress).
Manny
Farber | About Face | 2003 | Museum of Contemporary
Art, San Diego
I’m
cheating; the catalog essays are excellent, but I really mean the show
of seventy-odd paintings itself, and the three out of four related screenings
I managed to attend. (Musketeers of Pig Alley!) I’ve been
struggling to get an essay on Farber down to 6,000 words, so 50-or-less
is out of the question.
Wayne Koestenbaum | Cleavage | Ballantine
Books, 2000
Like Robertson
and Stark below, a collection of magazine writing – in this case,
elliptical, deceptively light, and technically enviable. Manages to
make something of the least promising assignments: Interview Alec Baldwin
for Vogue, write Monica’s Clinton diary. Also, Andy Warhol
(Penguin Lives/Viking, 2001)
Peter
Richards | The Nude Siren | Verse, 2003
Productively
indeterminate between an imagistic poetics (or maybe a Kayak-y
soft Surrealism) and a materialist one. I’m told but haven’t
confirmed that this is entirely different from his earlier Oubliette.
Lisa
Robertson | Occassional Work and Seven Walks from
the Office for Soft Architecture | Clear Cut Press, 2003
"I
watched the city of Vancouver dissolve in the fluid called money….I
began to research the history of surfaces. I included my own desires
in the research." Cold comfort: I had thought it was just L.A.
(Not incidentally, this is a gorgeous book-object.)
Frances
Stark | Collected Writings 1993-2003 | Book
Works, 2003
I’m
not drawn to the work of the fellow L.A. visual artists Stark discusses,
but I respond to her sense of the practical payoffs of theoretical engagement,
and to "The Housewife and The Architect," an earlier pamphlet
on Modernism and domesticity reprinted here.
Caetano
Veloso | Tropical Truth | Knopf, 2002
Essentially
an intellectual autobiography, barely disguised as an insightful, not
unromantic account of Veloso’s (ongoing) cultural moment. Makes
you wish Bob Dylan were the discursive type. Also A Foreign Sound
(Nonesuch, 2004); Ruy Castro, Bossa Nova (A Cappella Books, 2000);
Arto Linsday, Salt (Righteous Babe, 2004); Luciano Perrone, Batacuda
Fantàstica Vol. 3 (1972, CD reissue Whatmusic 2004); Xeroxes
of sheet music for several Veloso songs, courtesy Scott Saul.
Kevin
Young | To Repel Ghosts | Zoland, 2001
Narrow-lined,
broadly polysemous stalk-poems sprouted from the seed-language in Jean-Michael
Basquiat’s paintings. See/hear also: Basquiat (dir. Julien
Schnabel, 1996), Downtown 81 (dir. Edo Bertoglio, DVD released
2000), "Beat Bop," Ramelzee Vs. K.Rob (12" single prod.
Basquiat, 1981, available on New York Noise, Soul Jazz, 2003).
Tyrone
Williams | c.c. | Krupskaya, 2002
‘Fierce
erudition’ is a cliché, but it fits. Ending a collection
with fifteen identically-titled haiku ("Tag") takes some nerve,
I’d say: "Silver chains of com-/mand identify remains/of etcetera."
A difficult book in more than one respect, but one I’m glad not
to be done with.
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Joshua
Clover
Pierre
Alferi | La voie des airs | P.O.L., 2004
"Ne
pas écouter l'intérieur
— enregistrer, enregistrer"
Barbara Cole | Situation Comedies | /ubu
editions, 1998-2004
There's
a time and a place for everything. An MLA reading with 27 participants
is the time and place to stand up and say "This is called... 'Foxy
Moron.'" Onward to Philadelphia, and "Foxycontin."
Jay-Z | "99 Problems" | Roc-A-Fella
Records, 2003
Specifically
the second verse, where he walks his core audience through their 4th
Amendment rights armed only with savoir-faire and Rick Rubin. Brechtian.
Many Artists/Many Songs/No Albums At All | Acquisition 110.3 | 2004
Wasn't
the fax machine just so weird? Such a brief but intense period in the
history of technology, such a big and clunky thing? And then one day
you realize you'll probably never use one again.
Chris Nealon | The Joyous Age | Black
Square, 2004
"We
should totally be sister cities."
RETORT | "Afflicted Powers: The State,
the Spectacle and September 11" | New Left Review
27 | May/June 2004
The only
analysis of recent political developments to make good use of both Milton
and Lowell
Lisa Robertson | Occasional Work and Seven Walks
from the Office for Soft Architecture | Clear Cut, 2004
The only
way I could like this book more is if it actually had a puffy cover,
like Chairman Mao's Little Pink Book of Derives. Hello Kitty Situationist.
Kristin Ross | May '68 and Its Afterlives
| University of Chicago, 2002
Acidic
disdain for the New Philosophers of the late Seventies, and for their
equation between "totality" and "totalitarian,"
viz contemporary poetics: helpful.
Michael Scharf | "I Love Systems"
| /ubu editions, 2004
A coffee
table book for a better world. I know because I had it on my coffee
table for almost a year. It's fun to watch guests pick it up idly like
it's a magazine -- their faces.
Xi Chuan | Trans. Maghiel van Crevel | "Salute"
and "What The Eagle Says"
"I
chose this record player from the warehouse, to play you a song, to
cure you of your old disease." These are both quite long prose
poems, started around 1997 and translated recently. Trying to imagine
what "warehouse" feels like in the China of spastic murderous
entrepreneurial Communism: difficult.
Yang Xiaobin | Trans. author | "Final Excursion:
Twelve Tercets"
"He
sang with a variety of mouths and marched off in all directions at once."
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Chris
Daniels
I have adored
poetry since my father, in the bathtub with me, recited "The Owl
and the Pussycat" and Hafiz’s great poem about the rose and
the nightingale. This is one of my earliest memories. Over the past forty
years, I’ve slowly but inexorably turned away from Poetry USA and
its various cliques, claques and apparatchiki. Nearly everything "creative"
I’ve read in the past few years has been in Portuguese, Spanish or
in translation (in that order). The Eurocentric, Clinton-Liberal, emotionally
touristic, all-too-public cluelessness of the vast majority of US poets
and the academic and corporate parasites who make their living and/or
gain prestige by feeding off of them and controlling exposure and interpretation,
have all become unendurable.
1. Current
translation projects (whoever said that translation is the deepest form
of reading was absolutely right):
Clarice
Lispector | Um Sopro da Vida (pulsações)
| Livraria Francisco Alves Editora, 10th edition, 1994
Her last
"novel." No publisher as yet.
Murilo
Mendes | Chaos’s Window | Listening
Chamber, forthcoming
I read
and re-read:
Murilo
Mendes | Poesia Completa e Prosa | Nova
Aguilar, 1994
Murilo
Mendes | Recordações de Ismael Nery
| EDUSP, 1996
Murilo
Mendes | Laís Corréa de Araújo
| Perspetiva, 2000 (1st ed., 1972)
Júlio
Castañon Guimarães | Territórios/Conjunções,
poesia e prosa crítica de Murilo Mendes | Imago, 1993
Murilo
Marcondes de Moura | Murilo Mendes: a poesia como
totalidade | EDUSP, 1995
Leila
Barbosa and Marisa Rodrigues | A Trama Poética
de Murilo Mendes | Lacerda Editores, 2000
Francisco
Faria | The Meaning of American Landscape
| Edições Mirabilia | bilingual edition | forthcoming
in 2004
Art criticism
by one of Brasil’s best artists.
Raul
Bopp | Cobra Norato | multiple publishers
Long poem
based on BR folklore. Modernist classic, now in it’s 19th edition.
Also reading various crit. works. No publisher as yet.
Josely
Vianna Baptista | Os poros flóridos
| unpublished in BR | bilingual Mexican edition, Aldus, 2003
A modern
Soledades in six cantos. A palimpsest of thresholds. No publisher as
yet.
José Lezama Lima, Néstor Perlongher, Severo Sarduy
| various poems
Carlos
Drummond de Andrade | Various texts,
including "Prideful heart, you rush to confess your downfall /
and put off for another century our collective happiness. / You accept
rain, war, unemployment and unjust distribution / because all alone
you could never dynamite Manhattan." And a great many others. I’m
working on an anthology of BR poetry. Might be a publisher.
Fernando
Pessoa | Fictions of the Interlude |
massive selection of Pessoa’s heteronymic poetry | Grand
Quiskadee, Berkeley, 2006 |at least two volumes, print-on-demand,
coming your way after January 1, 2006, when the work falls back into
P.D.
The
Fourth World War | documentary film
Into Portuguese,
for release in BR this winter or early in 2005. I’m organizing
the work. Everybody should see this powerful film.
Various
journalism and dispatches for MST | Ongoing
2. The following
have helped/are helping to remind me of what it means to be a citizen.
Michael
Barratt Brown | The Economics of Imperialism
| Penguin, 1974
Michael
Hudson| Super Imperialism | Pluto Press,
2003
Immanuel
Wallerstein | After Liberalism | The New
Press, 2000
Immanuel
Wallerstein | The Essential Wallerstein
| The New Press, 2000
Robin
Hahnel | Panic Rules! Everything You Need to Know
About the Global Economy | West End Press, 1999
Bertell
Ollman | Alienation | Cambridge UP, 1971
The
Code of Federal Regulations | online here
Title 31—MONEY
AND FINANCE: TREASURY, Chapter V, Part 515—Cuban Assets Control
Regulations, contains the language that got Ry Cooder in trouble with
the Office of Foreign Assets Control. Start with Subpart B—Prohibitions,
§ 515.206 Exempt transactions, and follow the cross-referencing.
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to directory
Jordan
Davis
Ben
Friedlander | Simulcast | Alabama
Jenny
Browne | At Once | Tampa
Kasey
Mohammad | Deer Head Nation | Tougher Disguises
Chris
Edgar | At Port Royal | Adventures in Poetry
K.L.
Evans | Whale! | Minnesota
Joanna
Fuhrman | Ugh Ugh Ocean | Hanging Loose
Rod
Smith | Music or Honesty | Roof
Catherine
Wagner | Macular Hole | Fence
Matthea
Harvey | Sad Little Breathing Machine |
Graywolf
Joseph
Donahue | Incidental Eclipse | Talisman
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to the directory
Marcella
Durand
Lisa
Robertson | Occasional Work and Seven Walks from
the Office of Soft Architecture | Clear Cut, 2003
This eminently
portable book is part of a subscription series from Clear Cut Press,
based in Oregon and edited by Matthew Stadler of Nest magazine.
Brenda
Coultas | A Handmade Museum | Coffee House
Press, 2003
A permanent
sensitizer of consciousness/conscientiousness about one's environs.
Karen
Weiser | Placefullness | Ugly Duckling Presse,
2004 | Edition of 300
Poems written
in "conversation" with Etel Adnan's There, In the Light
and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other.
Bird
walk with Jack Collom and Cecilia Vicuna | July 19, 2004 | Jamaica Bay
Wildlife Refuge | Queens, NY
Some species
seen: Black crowned night heron, tundra swan, laughing gull, cedar waxwing,
yellow warbler.
Michele
Metail | Les Horizons du Sol | CIPM, 1999
Geological
poem of the deep origins of Marseille.
Joan
Murray | Poems by Joan Murray 1917-1942
| Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1947
After publishing
essay by John Ashbery on Murray in first issue of Newsletter,
perfect copy miraculously found at some bookstore before bridge to Deer
Island, Maine.
Exhibition
and catalogue | Ocean Flowers: Impressions from
Nature | at the Drawing Center, NYC, 2004
Early Victorian
drawings, impressions ("embedded specimens"), botanographs,
photograms, and durandotypes (sic) of various seaplants, including limboo
mal. lycopodium and laminaria fascia, "drawn by the plant itself."
Harry
Mathews | Tlooth
So much
depends on one enamelled word.
Jean-Michel
Espitallier | Le Theoreme d'Espitallier
| Flammarion, 2003
"There
are the victims, there are the events. And now, a small relaxation session."
Kevin
Davies | Lateral Argument | 2003
A signal
work
by a signal poet, beautifully printed by Baretta Books.
Andrew
Joron | Fathom | Black Square Editions,
2003
Like reading
philosophy in poetic form, or poetry in philosophical form.
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to the directory
Yedda
Morrison | Crop | Kelsey St. Press, 2003
a must
have book...a truly gifted writer
Daphne
Gottleib | Final Girl | Softskull, 2003
punky,
queer, here and a must read
Brenda
Iijima | Around sea | O books, 2004
this is
a beautufl book
Deborah
Richards | Last One Out | Subpress, 2003
Michelle
Naka Pierce & Veronica Corpuz | Tri/Via
| Erudite Fangs, 2003
wonderful...do
not miss this on going collaboration
Allison
Cobb | Born2 | Chax Press, 2004
fun and
multi-layered
Peter
Gizzi | Some Values of Landscape and Weather |
Wesleyan
University Press, 2003
this is
lovely and delightful read
Terrence
Chiusano | On generation and corruption
| Handwritten Press, 2004
and object
hand printed book, deep in language
Hung
Q. Tu | Structures of feeling | Krupskaya,
2003
Jill
Hartman | A painted ELFphant | Coach House
Books, 2003
a great
read. this is how to use language.
kari edwards
is the author of iduna (O Books, 2003)
and a day in the life of p. (subpress
collective, 2002). Work can also be found in Scribner's The
Best American Poetry 2004. There's a review
here; and the blog is here.
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to the directory
Larry
Fagin
Richard
Roundy | The Other Kind of Vertigo | Barretta
Books, 2003
Kostas
Anagnopoulos | Daydream | Insurance Editions,
2004
Carol
Szamatowicz | Reticular Pop-ups | Insurance
Editions, 2004
David
Perry | Knowledge Follows | Insurance Editions,
2004
David
Perry | New Years | Braincase Press, 2004
Clark
Coolidge | Mine: The One That Enters the Stories
| new edition | The Figures, 2004
Philip
Whalen | Prose [Out] Takes | Poltroon Press,
2002
Duncan
McNaughton | Counting Toes | 2004
Duncan
McNaughton | Capricci | Blue Millennium,
2001
David
Meltzer | Beat Thing | La Alameda Press,
2004
Jo Ann
Wasserman | The Escape | Futurepoem, 2003
James
Schuyler | Alfred & Guinevere | NYRB,
2001
Bill
Berkson | Sweet Singer of Modernism | Qua
Books, 2003
Merrill
Gilfillan | Rivers & Birds | Johnson
Books, 2003
Frank
O'Hara | The Houses at Falling Hanging |
Play | In most recent Yale Review
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Steve
Farmer
Tim
Davis | Dailies | The Figures, 2000 | $12.50
| 111pp
Have not
put this book down for almost 4 years.
Laura
Elrick | Skincerity | Krupskaya, 2003 |
$11 | 82pp
Great great
debut. Tough, toned, great sense of structure, and whip-smart. Looking
forward to tons more from this talented writer.
Robert
Fitterman | Metropolis 16-29 | Coach House
Press, 2003 | $14.95 | 124pp
Never a
dull moment as this uber urban long poem continues, starting fresh and
varied with each new installment. The best "berries" in the
land.
Heather
Fuller | Dovecote | Edge Books, 2002 | $10
| 90pp
Truly strange
and original writing that pushes the envelope. Intriguing push-off points
like Hopper (the painter and/or the actor), beggars, and the Civil War
coalesce and spin out.
Yedda
Morrison | Crop | Kelsey St Press, 2003
| $11 | 79pp
Brilliant
and focused writing of a major order. Lends itself to many re-readings,
each one revealing new layers of the machine.
Kim
Rosenfield | Good Morning-- Midnight-- |
Roof Books, 2001 | $10.95 | 106pp
Displays
not only her deft, subtle wit, but her power (see "Excelsior Reflector").
"A Self-guided Walk" one of the all-time greats.
Deanne
Stillman | Twentynine Palms | Perennial/HarperCollins,
2001 | $12.95 | 79pp
Couldn't
put this one down. "A true story of murder, Marines, and the Mojave."
Timely and local hello America.
Rodrigo
Toscano | Platform | Atelos Press, 2003
| $12.95 | 231pp
A massive
sounding wall of the highest magnitude. Complexity of thought &
wordplay should be basic text for all students of things poetique.
Hung
Q. Tu | Structures of Feeling | Krupskaya,
2003 | $11 | 107pp
Great minimalist
pieces singed with wit, music, and disdain. Brilliant.
Diane
Ward | Portraits & Maps | NLF Editions,
2000 | 74pp
The latest
from one of my favorites, a collaboration bouncing off the work of artist
Michael C. McMillen, published in Italy with Italian translations.
Elizabeth
Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003
| $10 | 95pp
Her best
book yet, which is saying a ton. 'Nuff said.
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Graham
W. Foust
Rae
Armantrout | Up to Speed
DJ Rae
gettin’ busy as a midget mountain climber. Tick, tick, vroom.
The
National | Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers |
Brassland Records, 2003
The second
album by the best band in the world. Don’t like The National? You’re
wrong.
Frederick
Seidel | The Cosmos Poems | FSG, 2003
I can’t
decide whether I want to spank or be spanked by the speaker of Fred
Seidel’s poems, but if he lived in the penthouse across the hall
from mine, boy oh boy would I want there to be some spanking.
Peter
Doig | "Metropolitan" | Pinakothek
der Moderne, Münich
People
often talk about bursting into tears before certain paintings. All well
and good, I suppose, but in front of Doig’s paintings, I burst
into color, planet, thought. And then I asked the grouchy motherfuckers
at the info desk if they had that dogs playin’ poker picture.
Rod
Smith | The Good House | Spectacular Books,
2001
Okay, I
burst into tears when I finished this. More than once. My most re-read
poem of this millennium.
Peter
Ramos | Watching Late-Night Hitchcock and Other
Poems | Handwritten Press, 2004
Berryman
said his Dream Songs were meant to comfort and terrify. If this
chapbook contained an author photo, Peter Ramos would be carrying a
hot water bottle in one hand and an incredibly venomous spider in the
other. As it stands, the book’s cover photograph is by Lara Odell,
which makes the poems all the more beautifully bleak.
Monica
Youn | Barter | Graywolf, 2003
See Ben
Friedlander’s review of Elaine Equi’s book from 2003’s
Attention Span; substitute "Monica" for "Elaine."
My favorite full-length of 2003.
Stacy
Szymaszek | Emptied of All Ships | Bronze
Skull Press, 2003
Sometimes
I wish this chapbook were a 12" single, ‘cause I’d spin
it all day long and sing along. I almost always wish more poets sounded
this good...
Die
Kreuzen | Self-titled LP | Touch and Go
Records, 1984
During
a year in which I made many pleasurable pilgrimages back to old favorite
bands (The Smiths, Television, The Go-Go’s, Van Halen), this return
was perhaps the most rewarding. Even—nay, especially—après
grunge, Milwaukee’s finest are still way scary, still absolutely
vital. Steve Albini said it best, way back when: "This is so fucking
great . . . that all that horseshit that passes for punk nowadays doesn't
even upset me anymore. This exists too, and that's enough."
Joyelle
McSweeney | Reading "The Commandrine"
and other poems | Drake University, Fall 2003
Should
you decide to put forth the effort required to maintain a regular series
of "cultural events" at an academic institution, two things
might happen almost simultaneously. One: People whom you once assumed
were "on your side" might say snide things to you about the
relevance and sincerity of your efforts and intentions. Two: Someone
whom you’ve known for only twelve hours might do something so thrilling
and hilarious that the aforementioned people will—for at least
forty minutes or so—cease to matter.
Listening
to Life without Buildings’ "The Leanover" while driving
past the Williamsburg, Iowa outlet mall and its gi-normous American
flag on September 11, 2003
I guess
you had to be there. I didn’t, but I was.
•
• •
I also
have to mention Xiu Xiu’s "Fabulous Muscles" from the
Fabulous Muscles LP (5RC, 2004), simply
because any song that contains the lyrics "Cremate me / After you
come on my lips / Honey boy / Place my ashes in a vase / Beneath your
workout bench" needs to be on a list, and because I haven’t
been as obsessive about continuously replaying a song since I discovered
Jim Croce’s "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" in the first grade.
Graham
Foust has a heart murmur, grinds his teeth, and divides his time between
central Des Moines and the north end of Iowa City.
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Benjamin
Friedlander
Gwendolyn
Brooks | In Montgomery and Other Poems |
Third World Press, 2003
The title
poem—first published in Ebony with photographs sadly absent
here—is investigative poetry, and forms the moral ground for this,
Brooks's last book, which also includes a sequence of lyric diffractions
spoken by children and her devastating long poem from 1968, "In
the Mecca."
Frances
Chung | Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple |
ed. Walter Lew | Wesleyan UP, 2000
I love
this book because it documents the New York I lived in but never really
knew* and also because its poetic idiom is so wily: layers of simple
statement that initiate the reader into a structure far richer and more
complex than any individual poem could reveal.
*Two other
books I enjoy for the same reason: James McCourt, Queer Street (cited
below), and Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: A History of American
Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 (Duke UP, 2003).
Barbara
Cole | Situation Comedies: Foxy Moron |
Ubu Editions, 2004
By turns
gleeful and inane—but glee is so rare a thing, I'll take it in
any form I can get.
Robert
Creeley | I Know a Man, Poems 1945-1975
& Just in Time, Poems 1976-1998 | CDs
| Optic Nerve, 2004
Creeley's
poetry is molecular: a series of irreducible, endlessly recombinant
blocks. Its virtues are clarity, definition, adaptability, surprise...qualities
that his reading style also embodies, while highlighting in addition
the subjective basis (experienced, organic, fallible, contingent) of
what otherwise might come across as objective (observed, logical, precise,
necessary). It's trippy too, for reasons I can't easily explain.
Jordan
Davis and Sarah Manguso, eds. | Free Radicals:
American Poets before Their First Books | Subpress Collective,
2004
The poets
here believe in high concept and the power of naming, a welcome relief
from the poetry of honed technique and abstraction that held sway in
the '90s. The premise is dubious, that booklessness is freedom, but
the book that results (a contradiction?) is persistently readable, so
who cares.
Susannah
Young-ah Gottlieb | Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety
and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden | Stanford UP,
2003
I've admired
Auden but never read him for pleasure, so I turned to this for what
it might tell me about poetry and philosophy, and out of affection for
Arendt. I only wish the critics who did take up the poets I love were
as careful and original as Gottlieb.
James
McCourt | Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an
American Culture, 1947-1985 | Norton, 2003
Walter
Benjamin's historical imagination is so idiosyncratic, I didn't think
it could serve as a model for anyone else. McCourt proves me wrong.
It helps, of course, that he writes so well (in "bejewelled barbed
wire"—Wayne Koestenbaum), and that his history is, like Benjamin's,
a magnificent dream assembled from lovingly collected bits of material
culture.
Adah
Isaacs Menken | Infelicia and Other Writings
| Ed. Gregory Eiselein | Broadview Press, 2002
The strangest
story in the history of identity politics.
K. Silem
Mohammad | Hanging Out with Pablo and Jennifer
| Duration E-Book 15, n.d.
If I have
to choose, I'll be a Philistine: I want my reading to be intellectually
daring, but I also want to be entertained...or at least kept awake.
The Cap'n understands that.
Murat
Nemet-Nejat, ed. and trans. | Eda: An Anthology
of Contemporary Turkish Poetry | Talisman House, 2004
This book
has a wonderful coherence—I've wondered in passing if Murat didn't
make it all up himself—yet resists assimilation in its range of
delirious possibility. I imbibe bits whenever I can, but it will be
a while before I can offer a serious opinion.
Philip
Pullman | His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass,
The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass | Knopf, 1995-2000
By happy
accident I read this just after my first serious encounter with Blake,
the principal inspiration—along with Milton—for what is, in
essence, a theological argument in fantasy form, aimed at teens. Beautifully
imagined, magnificently realized, unconvincing.
Quid
nos. 1-12 | online .pdf archive | link
Nate Dorward
has fed me photocopies from this journal, but until the .pdf became
available this year, QUID was more a rumor than reality to me. The most
engaging poetry magazine of the last decade?
Rod
Smith | Music or Honesty | Roof Books, 2003
If a choreographer
transcribed a tantrum and then performed it as a dance, without anger,
the result would be something like these poems, which trace out patterns
of behavior in language ordinarily overwhelmed by meaning.
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to the directory
Heather Fuller
Noam
Chomsky | Hegemony or Survival | An Audio
Renaissance Audio Book, 2003 | 6 CDs, 7 hrs | $34.95 | ISBN 1-55927-941-9
Chomsky
is all over the place but that's one reason we love him. I found the
parts on the U.S.'s terrorism in Central American countries most compelling,
but you really have to listen to all of the CDs to feel the cumulative
effect of this thread.
K. Silem
Mohammad | Deer Head Nation | Tougher Disguises
Press, 2003 | 113 pp. | $12 | ISBN 0-9740167-0-5
Pure euphoria
is the effect of much of this book, in which each deer is a recognition
scene transcribed by an intelligent awe of where we find ourselves,
pinned to history, culture, each other.
Lisa
Robertson | Occasional Work and Seven Walks from
the Office for Soft Architecture | Clear Cut Press, 2003 | 274
pp. | $12.95 | ISBN 0-9723234-3-0
Desperately
gorgeous documentation of the trace of capital disparity and exploitation
on Vancouver and consciousness in general.
Oz:
Seasons 1-3 | HBO series on DVD, 1997-1999 | 9 discs
I am intrigued
by the slashing and burning of metaphors throughout each episode, some
of this process stunning and some of it disarming. Apart from the obvious
Wizard of Oz allegory butting up against Em City in Oswald Prison,
there is this fascinating employment of a narrator, part spoken-word
poet, part griot, part seer. His poetry ain't outstanding, but his job
of linking Oswald Prison to the epic and tragicomic traditions is well-done
indeed.
Jules
Boykoff, Max Boykoff, Kaia Sand, Neal Sand, editorial collective | The
Tangent #14 | February 2004, special insert to Boog City
Another
fine issue of Tangent magazine.
Debbie
Stoller | Stitch 'n Bitch | Workman, 2003
| 248 pp. | $23.95 HC | ISBN 0-7611-3258-9
Every girl
needs to get her knit on, subversively. I am working on the sweater
with the big skull on it and the devil hat.
Miles
Champion, poem; Trevor Winkfield, drawings | "Air
Ball" | Tolling Elves
#15 | February 2004
Two pieces
of 8.5 X 11 paper folded into a lovely surprise of language and imagery.
Brenda
Coultas | A Handmade Museum | Coffee House
Press, 2003 | 125 pp. | $15 | ISBN | 1-566-89-143-4
Heartbreaking
homage to decay, transition, recovery.
Carol
Mirakove | Occupied | Kelsey St. Press,
2004 | 48 pp. | $10 | ISBN 0-932716-66-0
How to
present intelligence, when our government does not.
Buck
Downs | Golden Taters | Buck Downs ephemera,
chapbook, 2004
Nuggets
excised from speech and the writing on the wall, circumscribed by the
inimitable Buck Downs alchemy.
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to the directory
Alan Gilbert
Currently
Provisional Top Ten List (Poetry & Otherwise)
Michael
Moore | Fahrenheit 9/11 | Lions Gate Films,
2004
What does
it say about current conditions in the US that the veracity of Moore’s
film is debated far more extensively and vigorously than the evidence
the Bush administration presented for the invasion of Iraq? This is
not a rhetorical question.
cLOUDDEAD
| Ten | Mush, 2004
Maybe my
favorite "hip hop" album since Cannibal Ox’s 2001 release
The Cold Vein. If the stoned-sounding lyrics and production of
Ten weren’t so brilliantly
boundary pushing, they would just be stoned-sounding lyrics and production.
Alex
Bag | The Coven Services for Consumer Mesmerism,
Product Sorcery, and the Necromantic Reimagination of Consumption
| Elizabeth Dee Gallery, 2004
"Hi,
I’m Private Jessica Lynch!" Actually, it’s Alex Bag dressed
up as Jessica Lynch while pretending to star in a very amateurish commercial
for Halliburton, mixed with footage of metrosexual ennui, and snippets
from Paris Hilton’s homemade sex tape. Utilizing video, collage,
and handwritten spells, Bag’s solo show at Elizabeth Dee did everything
in its power to make the military-industrial-Michael Jackson complex
shake in its (moon)boots.
Lorenzo
Thomas | Dancing on Main Street | Coffee
House Press, 2004
Thomas
has had a total of three original book-length manuscripts of poems published
in the US during his forty years of serious commitment to the writing
and teaching of poetry. Recent paint-by-the-numbers poetry MFA program
(or equivalent) graduates [insert relevant names here] have already
had a couple books published by [insert relevant presses here]. What’s
wrong with this picture? This is not a rhetorical question, either.
Animal
Sounds | Illustrated by Aurelius Battaglia | Western Publishing
Company, 1981
If it’s
my 14-month-old daughter’s favorite book, it means I’ve been
spending a lot of time with it also. "Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!"
Dinh
Q. Lê | From Vietnam to Hollywood
| PPOW, 2004
Lê’s
literal weavings of personal, social, historical, and cultural imagery,
his sophisticated use of foreground and background, and his rhythmic
splatters of visual static seem just as applicable an approach to poetry.
Anti-colonial
resistance | cf., Frantz Fanon | Iraq, Afghanistan, Occupied Territories,
elsewhere | ongoing
If US government
officials really want deeper insight into the anti-colonial disposition,
they shouldn’t be congratulating themselves for belatedly discovering
Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, they should be
reading Fanon.
Benjamin
Friedlander | Adult Contemporary | Subpoetics
self-publish or perish, 2004
Friedlander
continues to mine the vernacular of popular culture in a way that’s
never meant to impress you with the size of his CD collection or his
knowledge of, say, obscure film noir. Rather, plumbing the fathomless
emotional depths of if-the-shoe-fits-wear-it FM radio love songs, Adult
Contemporary feels as if it’s written by a Kantian Glen
Campbell, with the result that you don’t know if it’s just
an idea or entirely real.
Marvin
Gaye | What’s Going On | Motown, 1971
| remastered version, 2002
A couple
months ago, this CD earned the distinction in my household of being
the only one my partner has ever told me that I play too much.
The
Detroit Pistons | NBA Champion, 2004
If they
can do it, surely Kerry can beat Bush.
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.
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to the directory
Noah Eli Gordon
George
Albon | Brief Capital of Disturbances |
Omnidawn, 2003 | $12.95 | 94pp
Beth
Anderson | Overboard | Burning Deck, 2004
| $10 | 78pp
Eric
Baus | The To Sound | Verse Press, 2004
| $12 | 80pp
Fran
Carlen | I Know Where I’m Going | Adventures
in Poetry, 2003 | $12.59 | 117pp
Kevin
Davies | Lateral Argument | Barretta Books,
2003 | unpaginated
John
Godfrey | Private Lemonade | Adventures
in Poetry, 2003 | $12.50 | 100pp
Tan
Lin | BlipSoak01 | Atelos, 2003 | $12.95
| 327pp
Christopher
Nealon | The Joyous Age | Black Square Editions,
2004 | $13 | 69pp
Hoa
Nguyen | Your Ancient See Through | Subpress,
2002 | $12 | 111 pp | illustrations by Philip Trussell
Catherine
Wagner | Macular Hole | Fence Books, 2004
| $12 | 64pp
Elizabeth
Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003
| $10 | 95pp
•
• •
I decided
it’d be interesting to construct an Attention Span pseudo-cento in
place of any brief commentary. The following sentences, taken verbatim
(although many were written in verse & didn’t originally have
periods marking the sentence’s end) from the 11 books on my list—two
sentences from each, are deployed alphabetically, according to the last
name of the author, mirroring the progression of the list itself; however,
each author is given one sentence until the list repeats its cycle.
A strange,
small bird-sound from outside: a clucking rasp, only sounded when your
attention has returned to where it was before. Obsession with the recovery
of what has been taken from you manifests itself as an excess of sleep.
I’m afraid you’ll have to build another machine to explain
yourself. The delicate link to silence, luminous redemption, adieu then,
curtain slit, kimono sleeve. You might be familiar with the old atlas
I’m shaking in your face to keep both of us cool. It goes in one
ear and stays put. This aspect and its watercolor. These are qualities
of mind we like to call emotion. My Luden’s cough drop sunrise.
The reward for buying is the bought thing. Who would not leave the mess
for the illumination, the culture for the poem? Labor replaced by simple
days, simple days by labor. I am not a hero, and I expect the assassin
this evening. I am writing to you from the most public library in the
world. It is raining and one part of the population tries to annihilate
another. The weather is something you notice. It should be one of us.
Needles of pink smoke jet from a vent high in the wall. Am I the sexiest
person in the building? We wisely keep these thoughts to ourselves.
Trying to walk out of there. Why risk warmth?
Noah Eli
Gordon is the author of the book-length poem The
Frequencies (Tougher
Disguises, 2003) and a collection of three long poems The
Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta,
forthcoming). He lives in Northampton, MA, where he publishes the Braincase
chapbooks series.
back
to the directory
Kevin
Killian
Terrence
Chiusano | On generation and corruption
| Buffalo: handwritten Press, 2004
Unbound,
the pages of Chiusano’s first significant publication take a stand
and argue for systems of increasing lexical and syntactical complexity,
while retaining the down-home flavor of good old Long Island tack. He
is almost frighteningly good, but if you stand too close you get sucked
in like those glass houses filled with Venus flytraps.
Garin
Cycholl | Blue Mound to 161 | Pavement Saw
Press | PO Box 6291, Columbis, OH 43206
I don’t
usually care for this kind of poetry, but the exception proves the rule.
Cycholl takes a few square miles of territory (in Illinois) and watches
it up and down the 20th Century as it mutates on some kind of Wisconsin
death trip. The dark and bloody crossroads where US writing and politics
are often said to meet has a new signpost that says, "This stretch
of highway adopted by Garin Cycholl." If there are any questions
about this national nightmare, feel free to call him at any time.
Buck
Downs | Golden Taters | Box 53318, WDC 20009
As a tribute
to Jonathan Williams’ poetics, it’s an unusual tribute from
one generation to an older, on a regional basis, in multiple fonts and
multiple eras of US Southern history. "Throw the first fish back
/ hold me that hash bucket / I can still smell your ass in my hair."
It’s raunchy as all get out.
K. Lorraine
Graham | Terminal Humming | Slack Buddha
Press | 50 Garrison Avenue | Somerville, MA 02144
I have
seen Graham’s work compared to that of the late Kathy Acker, she’s
got something of Acker’s sexual frankness, voracious intake, the
sense that anything can come into the writing, but even if she isn’t,
you know, Kathy Acker she’s got something that Acker never had.
I can’t really characterize it right now, but I’m a sucker
for Graham’s writing and this is the best example of it I can name.
Paolo
Javier | The Time at the End of this Writing
| Tokyo/Toronto: Ahadada Books, 2004
Though
he aposteothizes himself as a kind of freee zone of writing between
the large islands of Jose Garcia Villa and Ted Berrigan, Javier’s
best poetry is all about youth and its relentless extremism. Thus there’s
a poem which takes off from the different names by which he is known
to many people--the mirror effect of Lacan writ large. I could read
this forever and hope someday to meet the lad.
Murat
Nemet-Nejat | EDA: An Anthology of Contemporary
Turkish Poetry | Jersey City: Talisman House, 2004
This is
a big book I’ll be poring through for ages, because it brings to
me a number of areas I know nothing of, via the generosity of editor
Murat and publisher Ed Foster. I riffle the pages of this big book and
the air of the Sufi blows back at me. There’s a feeling of utter
strangeness not being familiar with any of the names. Murat’s introductory
matter proposes a mystical reading of poetry, a gathering of a band
of readers that itself flirts with the mystic. I’m all ears.
Barry
Schwabsky and Hong Seung-Hye | Ways | Meritage
Press | $12 | ISBN 89-950473-2-1 03650
If possible,
WAYS looks even more elegant than when Dodie and I published its text
in our zine, "Mirage #4/Period[ical.]" The combination of
Schwabsky’s sparkle and shine with Hong Seung-Hye’s jokey,
Lego-block drawings is a potent one.
•
• •
And then
there are our four new Krupskaya books which appear almost any minute
now. One is by Rob Halpern, called "Rumored
Place," the first book of a young poet and student in
the "HIS-CON" program at UC Santa Cruz. For a long time I’ve
been wanting to see a whole book by Halpern, and it’s great to
actually be part of the publishing collective that’s doing one.
He is one of the bright lights who has been brokering the marriage of
high theory, New Narrative, and Genet-like French symbolism. And everything
is about situationalism to the extent that the term includes the site.
Or mattress in Rob’s case.
Another
book we are doing is called TRAMA
by Kim Rosenfield. Rosenfield has a whole battery of different
styles that she wields effortlessly, like Willlow Rosenberg her spells
and charms, and she can interweave them within a singlle paragraph.
TRAMA to me is a brief, poetic, even picaresque novel about a young
child and also an epic history of a world shimmering under blue smoke
of crisis. Rosenfield’s writing is hypnotic, puts you under.soul.
Deborah
Meadows’ book is called ITINERANT MEN.
Meadows, who lives in the Southland, has been turning various chapters
of Moby Dick into the purest kind of Pan-American verse, and
this book contains the largest selection of them yet. I saw her read
at a reading at Antioch in Marina del Ray and haven’t gotten it
out of my head still, this voyage between the oceans.
We fantasize
that in decades to come, poetic historians will look back at this time
and dub it the Age of Rodrigo Toscano, and they will be reading
TO LEVELING SWERVE as one of the
signal texts of this era. And then and only then will our poetic prognostications
be fully justified, but in the meantime we feel sure that Toscano’s
great gifts have never been more beautifully brought to fruit, and we
have the book that we call, in the loving shorthand of fans, "TLS."
back
to the directory
Aaron
Kunin
Beth
Anderson | Overboard | Burning Deck, 2004
Brian
Blanchfield | Not Even Then | California,
2004
Kevin
Davies | Lateral Argument | Barretta, 2003
Frances
Ferguson | Pornography, The Theory | Chicago,
2004
Graham
Foust | As In Every Deafness | Flood, 2003
Lisa
Jarnot | Ring of Fire | Second edition |
Salt, 2003
Madeleine
de Scudery | Trans. Karen Newman | The Story of
Sapho | Chicago, 2003
Marjorie
Welish | Word Group | Coffee House, 2004
•
• •
Also,
some older books: W.S. Gilbert, The Bab Ballads;
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove; T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets; and a lot of Jack
Spicer.
back
to the directory
John
Latta
A contribution
arrived at (with the imposed limit of eleven) with some difficulty—after
weighing several strategies of "balance" (wild churning considerations
of gender, generation, trade versus small press, praises unsung versus
lauds oversung, jeez Louise . . .). I pretty much quit the gob-smackin’
and look’d around the room: what (for the most part) seem’d
the flotsam bobbing to surface in the sea of books got the nod. One I
was unhappy to leave out: Jordan Davis’s Million
Poems Journal (really, the whole project—I’m not
entirely convinced that the best Davis poems here end’d up under
the Faux Press imprint). Another nod should go to Dale Smith’s
tremendous Black Stone project—seventy
prose ditties to help a new son into the world—that he recently finish’d,
all post’d at Possum Pouch.
So, alphabetically
(whatever caches the fancy footwork of preference, and makes all equal
in the eyes of jeez Louise):
August
Kleinzahler | The Strange Hours Travelers Keep
| FSG, 2003
Christopher
Edgar | At Port Royal | Adventures in Poetry,
2003
Graham
Foust | As In Every Deafness | Flood, 2003
Joyelle
McSweeney | The Red Bird | Fence, 2002
Lee
Ann Brown | The Sleep That Changed Everything
| Wesleyan University Press, 2003
Lisa
Jarnot | Black Dog Songs | Flood, 2003
Lyn
Hejinian | The Fatalist | Omnidawn, 2003
Merrill
Gilfillan | The Seasons | Adventures in
Poetry, 2002
Susan
Howe | The Midnight | New Directions, 2003
Ted
Pearson | Songs Aside: 1992-2002 | Past
Tents Press, 2003
Tony
Tost | Invisible Bride | Louisiana State
University Press, 2004
A few notes:
though most of these I think I spoke about at th’Hotel
sometime or other in the last several months . . .
Fought down
a temptation to put some other Hejinian books to the list: The
Beginner (Tuumba, 2002), Slowly
(Tuumba, 2002), and My Life in the Nineties
(Shark, 2003) could all arguably be present—Hejinian is just now
writing her finest work, fluid, all-encompassing, having "natural"
(oh dear) grace.
The newest
discovery here is the Pearson (and he’s apparently almost
a homeboy, living nearby in Detroit)—the book is four sequences,
each in number’d sections of eight short lines (four couplets) with
impeccable attention to sound. I go mindful of the Harryette Mullen
of Muse and Drudge reading him. Pick’d
at random (from "Acoustic Masks"):
Or (from
"Hard Science"):
The
Red Bird
appeals to something like my vestigial love of "surrealism"
(or something like it, thank you, Georg Trackl), one that seems "natural,"
not over-stretching, not "dream-work," not research’d,
more like th’eyes of a curious 19th c. naturalist stuck into the
ratty consumerist 21st c. Notebook in hand. "The bobcat poses in
a tripod of rifles." I like the humor, especially the humor; also
the mischief, mystery and mess of it all.
The
Midnight:
I keep wanting to fault Howe for something like "unavoidable
and leaking Brahminism" (a charge that could be level’d at innumerable
men and women "of letters" in these historical States). Something
faintly precious in th’infatuation with colonial history, and "things"—"dimity,"
for Chrissake:
1775 landscape
America
blindstitched to French
edge silk damask cover
Silhouette of Gothic city
soaring bird needlework
Quiet under false scant
lonely ecstatic incessant
white on white coverlet
Then I relent,
"took" by my language affliction, its variables and vagaries
(and "dimity" is a lovely word, just as "wade" below
enlarges my world . . .):
Sweet affliction,
sweet affliction
Singing as I wade to heaven
Or:
Is the
cloven rock misled
Does morning lie what prize
What pine tree wildeyed boy
back
to the directory
Peter
Middleton
Bruce
Andrews | Lip Service | Coach House Press,
2001
Read this
in bursts for the startling sense of a documentary of the contemporary
sexed up libido, fear and grappling in the urban world where epigrams
are to cultural capital what xeroxed money is to a hedge fund.
Andrea
Brady | Vacation of a Lifetime | Salt, 2001
Parataxis
struggles with clever stanzaic architecture, deadpan linebreaks, dialectical
intelligence, an exilic consciousness of America.
Ken
Edwards | Eight + Six | Reality Street Editions,
2003
If only
we believed in our English sarcasm, say the poems, trying to meet the
times with bluster and wit, then admitting a fragility, conscious of
the other poets who "presuppose no need / for emotional closure."
Allen
Fisher | Ring Shout | Equipage, 2000
Another
episode of the cosmological epic in which our protagonist tries the
Hay diet and the "prepared trampoline" of science. Despite
saying at the end that "ecodamage reifies poetic strain" the
dry tallying of genetics, SAS activities, and undergrowth brilliantly
conveys the sheer scale and many-sourced high street of everyday experience.
Lyn
Hejinian | Happily | Post-Apollo Press,
2000
I love
post-Romantic autobiography, and this brief cross-Stein-dressing keeps
it dawning. Retro-introspective questioning reflects into generalisations
of personal dilemma in a rare because truly free verse line.
Fanny
Howe | Gone | University of California Press,
2003
Surprising
syntax, as in the poem about the Brontes, "Angria". The gap
between aspirant self-image and the actual "poetic stitch",
the shoulds and I don't means. You can trust her to tell you.
Myung
Mi Kim | Commons | University of California
Press, 2002
Understated,
encylopedic history of war in South East Asia, never polemical or sensational,
wise after the long aftershocks of destruction.
J. H.
Prynne | Furtherance | The Figures, 2004
Four books
seen before in pamphlets from a poet I am always rereading. They read
better in this format. Unanswering Rational Shore has the Mephistophelean
voice offering consumer blandishments and anaesthetic moralities that
taunts the later work, as well as a newer tone of chipper brightness
in the pediment story of Triodes.
Tom
Raworth | Collected Poems | Carcanet, 2003
Several
British poets are long overdue for a collected, just so we can see the
line of working. This ugly volume has none of the visual, tactile pleasures
of the variegated books, but the words still offer endless delight at
the comic cuts, narrative wierdos, exposed textuality androids, words
that surely don't.
Peter
Riley | Excavations | Reality Street, 2004
Prose poetry.
Further reading may amend reactions, have only read the first part of
the new book, Distant Points, published earlier. A series of meditations
based on the re-inhumation of the texts of archeological reports on
British grave sites. Evokes the curiously English melancholic interest
in landscape.
Lissa
Wolsak | Pen Chants or nth or 12 spirit-like impermanences
| Roof
Books, 2000
Immensities,
traces of landscape, travel, undiscovered terms. Deft sonics, fake sublime.
back
to the directory
Chris
Murray
This list
is from my home worktable where I write and post to my blog, texfiles.
It is my habit to keep a lot of books in play simultaneously, going over
something in one, then turning to another, and so forth – even to
the point of reading while I walk on campus, which is one way to remain
sanely ignorant of how (in many ways), for many and much of Texas, there
is no question that the earth is flat.
Some of these
books are new to me, while some I am happily rereading. While a given
deck like this is reshuffled often, I only completely replace it about
three times a year--due again in September. Also included here from the
texts themselves are a few words I have found particularly resonant as
I read and cross-read, or in the case of the Ana de Orbegoso entry, a
book of photography, I offer a description with commentary. Where authors
have inscribed special notes to me, I offer these in the italics after
the publication information. There are longer considerations of many of
these books on my blog.
Ana
de Orbegoso | directo al CORAZON | Instituto
Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, 2001
—photography,
black/white, all on the figure of the heart, which is artfully/comically,
semiotically, (totally) rent and rendered. As if linguistically literal
and unflinchingly material. Though in terms of what and how art works,
this also suggests that rhetorical functioning necessarily stems from
connections via fabrication and/or narrative, to a large extent—otherwise
there is no comic/joke to get in this artwork. Best example?—the
clichéd compound word for a beloved, "Sweetheart" (in
Spanish: corazoncito de azucar) is represented here by the depiction
of an animal’s fat-encrusted heart, which has also been sprinkled
to encrustation with sugar. Thus, atop it now is a sprinkling of dead
fly-bodies. Live flies are also busily walking across and around this
monumentalized and apparently demobilized, abject heart. Thus it is
that (now post-romanticized, and post-romantic:) Life (flies and/or)
Goes On. Semiotically, this is a very economical art-system.
Linh
Dinh | Blood and Soap | Seven Stories, 2004
| To Chris! LD
—"In
darkness, semiconscious and cursing, we try to brush these ants onto
the floor, or kill them by crushing them against our cheeks. The ants
retaliate by biting us. By the time a lamp can be turned on, however,
all of the ants are gone." (81)
Ravi
Shankar | Instrumentality | Cherry Grove,
2004
—"Better
to lay eyeglasses at Hephaestus’ forge as alms for the prosthetics/
Which grant our bodies metaphors for itself. Because before the invention/
of the pump, there was one less way to understand the human heart."
(37)
Barry
Schwabsky and Hong Seung–Hye | Ways
| Artsonje Center and Meritage Press, 2004
—"Mrs. Blue Skies-translationese/ for music pushed through
blown/ speakers. Slow burning when I do you/ this ode to distraction,
invisible/ and certified real as the day." (np)
Jill
Jones | Struggle and Radiance | Ireland,
Wild Honey Press, 2004 | For Chris: Some Australian words out
of Eire heading to Texas... --JJ
"A
star falls/ past your window/ into the alley./ And nothing else?"
(17)
Dale
Smith | My Vote Counts | Effing, 2004 |
To Chris: Vote Goat!
—Buy
a goat instead of a vote. Milk it. ... I will vote for my irrelevance.
Me and my goat. Hunting birds, we shall wander a wilderness darkened
by growth of ten-thousand year old trees. We shall walk antique gardens.
Burrow in soiled grottoes... " (npp)
Chus
Pato | from m-Tala | Tr. Erin Moure | Nomados,
2003
—"...
she knew of the body’s destruction by the unbearable weight of
the passion of God, by the word/ —that passion led her to an unrelenting
desire for disappearance, in the cerebral circumlocution of time. And
so the forest closed upon itself. That’s how the script of the
Yawist Bathsheba relates the real meaning of ‘opening toward light’
or genesis. In the tomb of Cordelia... Long live Grimm!" (26)
Hoa Nguyen | Your Ancient See Through |
Subpress, 2002| Artwork by Phillip Trussell | To Chris, O joy’s
selfish traveling—HN
—"You
have your ancient see through/ ways Stars sustain their axis/ Orion
listing like gallows/ for my creepy life the pieces/ of our ascending
selves/ Olmecs/ (save for a few stone faces)/ erased in the ‘50’s
by an oil company..." (77)
Steve
Tills | Rugh Stuff | ms | Theenk Books,
due out Fall, 2004
—
"Position, Cure thySelf!/ Sing in a Barrel/ Wing it through the
tunnel/ of Carpe Diem Syndrome/ these dings/ in the marrow." (97)
K. Silem
Mohammad | Deer Head Nation | Tougher Disguises,
2003 | For Chirs—I mean Chris! in Carrboro, NC, 6/04-- Love,
Kasey [note: I sometimes typo my own name as Chirs, and Kasey has
seen that in email, thus his kindly joke in this inscription.--cm]
—
"the riot grrl kicked the goat’s ass/ for something as meaningless/
as a crow being present/ ‘it was just sleeping’/ thousands
of free essays/ crash into the back of me" (15)
Murat
Nemet-Nejat, ed. | Eda : An Anthology of Contemporary
Turkish Poetry | Talisman, 2004
—"In
the insanity of turtles/ i am the owner of useless arguments/ i strolled
along the shore for days."—Sami Baydar (276)
Shanna
Compton & Shafer Hall | Big Confetti
| Half Empty/Half Full, 2004 | Dear Chris: Enjoy!! --SC
—"Here
I sit, with you on the other side of the window, out on the street,
out window shopping, looking in at the dough kneaders and the mannequins
in turbans and the lip-reading teachers like myself. I’m saying
something to you; only you don’t know what it is, because you haven’t
taken my class yet." (24)
Tom
Beckett | Vanishing Points of Resemblance
| Generator Press, 2004
—"Metaphor
sucks the life out of things. It is the basis for communication."
(np)
back
to the directory
John
Palattella
Kenneth
Burke | Counter-statement | Harcourt, 1931
Basil
Bunting | Complete Poems | New Directions,
2003
Jeff
Clark | Music and Suicide | Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2004
Yves
di Manno | <<endquote>>: digressions,
1989-1998 | Flammarion, 1999
Kenneth
Fearing | Selected Poems | Library of America,
2004
Peter
Gizzi | Some Values of Landscape and Weather
| Wesleyan, 2003
Susan
Howe | The Midnight | New Directions, 2003
Sandra
Moussempès | Vestiges de fillette
| Flammarion, 1997
Lorine
Niedecker | Collected Works | California,
2002
George
Oppen | New Collected Poems | New Directions,
2002
Gilbert
Sorrentino | Something Said: Essays | North
Point Press, 1984
John Palattella
writes about poetry for The Nation and other publications. He lives
in Brooklyn, New York.
back
to directory
Marjorie
Perloff
Anne-Marie
Albiach | Figurations de l'image | Paris:
Flammarion, 2004
Charles Bernstein (libretto) and Brian Ferneyhough (music) | Shadowtime
(opera), CD | forthcoming, see Buffalo website
Clive Bush | Pictures after Poussin | Illustrated
by Allen Fisher | Hereford, England: Spanner Press, 2004
John Kinsella | Peripheral Light: Selected and
New Poems | New York: Norton, 2004
Karen Mac Cormack | Implexures | Tucson:
Chax Press, 2003
Douglas Messerli | First Words | Los Angeles:
Green Integer, 2004
Dimitri Prigov | Fifty Drops of Blood |
Trans. Christopher Mattison | Ugly Duckling, 2004 | distributed SPD
Lev Rubinstein | Catalogue of Comedic Novelties
| Trans. Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky | Ugly Duckling, 2004
| distributed SPD
Gerhard Rühm | I My Feet: Poems and Constellations
| Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Providence, Burning Deck, 2004
Susan M. Schultz | And then Something Happened
| Cambridge, Salt, 2004
Susan Stewart | Columbarium | Chicago: University
of Chicago Press | Phoenix Poets, 2003
Note: I don't
usually list books in languages other than English or translations but
Waldrop's Ruhm is outstanding as are Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky's
renderings of Rubinstein and Christopher Mattison's Prigov. Anne-Maria
Albiach's book is her first in over a decade and thus must be cited.
back
to directory
David
Perry
Eric
Baus | The To Sound | Verse, 2003 | and Something
Else the Music Was | chapbook ms., forthcoming from Braincase
Peter
Culley | Hammertown | New Star, 2003
Jean
Day | Linear C & "The
I and the You" | PDF, /ubu Editions, 2004
John
Godfrey | Private Lemonade | Adventures in
Poetry, 2003
Noah
Eli Gordon | Jaywalking the Is | chapbook,
Margin to Margin, 2004 | and The Frequencies
| Tougher Disguises, 2003
Lyn
Hejinian | The Fatalist | Omnidawn, 2003
Andrew
Joron | Fathom | Black Square Editions |
2003
Aaron
Kunin | The Mandarin | unpublished ms.| and
The Mauberly Series | PDF, /ubu Editions,
2004
George
Stanley | A Tall, Serious Girl | Qua, 2003
Rosmarie
Waldrop | Love, Like Pronouns | Omnidawn,
2003
Jacqueline
Waters | The Garden of Eden a College | chapbook
ms., forthcoming from A Rest Press
back
to the directory
Meredith
Quartermain
Richard
Caddel | Magpie Words: Selected Poems 1970-2000
| West House, 2002
The territory
of language as bird-cry, language as vulnerable, exact instrument, that,
taken with all the other cries of living creatures, presents an unclosable
eruption, rather than an explanation, is the territory of Caddel's poetics.
His work reflects an acute awareness of both music and plants
and animals, particularly birds. Caddel learned much from Olson, Creeley,
Bunting, Zukofsky, Pound and Williams, but grew far beyond the formal
possibilities opened to him by these poets, developing a highly inventive
compositional strategy based on musical forms (he played viola and studied
music at university). In this he brings to mind the Canadian poet Fred
Wah's Music At the Heart of Thinking.
Richard
Caddel | Writing in the Dark | West House,
2003
In facing
his own death as he had done in facing his son's, Caddel triangulated,
with the voices of others, in particular Robert Duncan's last work:
Ground Work II: In the Dark: "The imagination alone knows
this condition." What emerged was a series of compact riveting
condensations—some of the finest of his work. He confronts death
head-on with humour, rage, charm, love, political savvy and, above all,
song.
Gail
Scott | My Paris | Dalkey Archive, 2003
This novel/prose
poem series records Scott's sojourn in Paris in which, inspired
by Benjamin's Arcades Projects, she examines her actual Paris and the
ideas of Paris that haunt it. The book is full of delightful ironic
cross-cuts between cafes, parties, encounters with the forbidding concierge,
French television, food, Gertrude Stein, Baudelaire, and anecdotes of
eccentric friends. We discover here the "floating state" of
being in Paris, along with the floating states of Canada and France,
a state which is created formally and brilliantly in prose that proceeds
entirely in conditional fragments and phrases.
Annharte
| Exercises in Lip Pointing| New Star, 2003
Containing
three collections—"Memory Fishes," "Red Noise"
and Coyotrix Recollects"—this work opens with dissembling
simplicity followed by a swift left punch. Annharte challenges
Canadian cultural syntax with Red Noise as opposed to White Noise.
Robert
Walser | Selected Stories | Farrar, 1982
| Trans. Christopher Middleton; Forward Susan Sontag
Walser
is a favorite of philosopher Giorgio Agamben. He's somewhere between
Stevie Smith and Beckett and somewhere between Kafka and Robert Musil,
both of whom admired his work.
Robert
Walser | The Robber | U of Nebraska, 2000
| Trans. Susan Bernofsky
Fabulous,
quirky, intensely thoughtful, poetic novel, where the narrator keeps
stealing the show in the most bizarre, amazing and amusing ways.
Lisa
Robertson| Rousseau's Boat | Nomados, 2004
Rousseau
describes this book better than I ever could: "The ebb and flow
of this water, its ongoing sound swelling with vibration that set adrift
my outer senses, rhythmically took the place of the strong emotions
my dreaminess had calmed, and I felt in myself so pleasurably and effortlessly
the sensation of existing, without troubling to think."
Peter
Culley| Hammertown | New Star, 2003
No word
in this book is taken for granted, slid over, or smoothed into easy-to-swallow
spoons. Which is to say Culley makes the awesome machinery conducting
language and perception and any attempt at human communication visible
for our contemplation. A skillful weaver of many idioms (art criticism,
economics, pop music), Culley makes words spark and implode in the shifting
landscapes of competing ideologies which the heart must navigate.
Francis
Ponge | The Power of Language | U of California,
1979| Trans. Serge Gavronsky
Ponge is
one of those marvelous, stubborn, quirky, ironic minds that is a pleasure
to live with.
Francis
Ponge | Selected Poems | Wake Forest UP,
2000 (1994)| trans CK Williams, John Montague, Margaret Guiton
Ponge works
in prose forms. He may say he is writing about pebbles or seashells,
but you quickly find that he is writing about writing and about humanity.
Rainer
Maria Rilke| The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
| Random House, 1983; Vintage, 1990| trans. Stephen Mitchell
Again,
I was drawn to this prose work because of its formal hybridity,
its connection to poetry. It is a series of vignettes, but also a meditation
on death.
Meredith
Quartermain's next book of poems, Vancouver
Walking, will be
published by NeWest Press in Spring 2005.
back
to the directory
Lisa
Robertson
Peter
Culley | Hammertown | New Star Books, 2003
Christine
Stewart | Taxonomy | West House Books, 2003
Andrea
Brady | Vacation of a Lifetime | Salt, 2001
Chus
Pato | from M-Tala | Translation from Gallician,
Erin Moure) | Nomados, 2003
Christophe
Tarkos | Ma Langue est Poetique-- selected works
| Edited by Stacy Doris and Chet Wiener | Roof Books, 2000
Tom
Paulin | The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's
Radical Style | Faber, 1998
Arakawa
and Gins | Architectural Body | U Alabama,
2003
Eleni
Sikelianos | The Monster Lives of Girls and Boys
| Green Integer, 2003
Ann
Carson | Economy of the Unlost | Princeton
UP, 1999
Renee
Gladman | The Activist | Krupskaya, 2003
Aby
Warburg | The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity
| The Getty Research Institute, 1999
back
to the directory
Kaia
Sand
I submit
my list as a snapshot of reading highlights since January 2004….
Here goes:
Jules
Boykoff | Philosophical Investigations in a Neo-Con
Roots-Dub Styley | The Interrupting Cow, 2004
These poem-conversations
between NeoCon "thinkers" and reggae artists, among others,
compose a handbook for resisting the Age of the NeoCon. The chapbooks
contain Jules’s Ronald Reagan art and are handmade artifacts by
Cathy Eisenhower.
Allison
Cobb | Born Two | Chax Press 2004
My reading
and thinking are most recently informed by how place and space convulse
with unframed history, so I’m especially intrigued by these poems
that spring from the ColdWar, nuclear reality of Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Buck
Downs | his postcard series
The mail
deliverer blushes and smiles. So do I. Gladly.
Rob
Fitterman | Metropolis XXX | Edge 2004
In this
book, the internet provides content caught on pages and bound in its
chatter—from chatrooms on Goth jewelry to promotional material
on Christian-themed mini-golf parks. The unfamiliar and de-familiarized
feel very familiar…
Heather
Fuller | Primary Writing 7/03
This pamphlet
poem doubles as a bureaucractic form Heather fills out during animal
rescue in Virginia. These poems at once serve their practical purpose—she
does record the necessary information —and present a kaleidoscope
of imagery and words that shape that information with ethics and urgency.
Carol
Mirakove | Occupied | Kelsey St. 2004
Bravo for
this book with its fierce political engagement, tender turns, and incredibly
useful and innovative glossary!
CE Putnam | Putnam Institute for Space Opera
Research | link
Like Lisa
Roberton’s "Office for Soft Architecture," PISOR is an
"institute" that houses an author—in this case, Chris
Putnam. I first started reading these zany sound and text projects in
March, when Chris Putnam performed in Wash DC.
Joan
Retallack | Poethical Wager | University
of California Press
When, six
years ago, I read a photocopied conversation between Joan Retallack
and Quinta Slef, my sense of poetics took a radical shift. I’ve
been eager for this book ever since (the book contains that interview),
and I am reading it now, luxuriating in Joan Retallack’s rigorous
thinking…
Lisa
Robertson | Occasional Work and Seven Walks from
the Office for Soft Architecture | Clear Cut Press
This book
is the size of my hand. I carried it across country when we moved across
the continent last month, often in my hand, sometimes in my bag, always
with me. This is a book of the most lovely sentences.
Lorenzo
Thomas | Dancing on Main Street | Coffee
House Press 2004
Poems skidding
across time and ideas, playing off and against idioms…
Kevin
Varrone | g-point almanac 9.22-10.19 | duration
e-book 16, 2004
This is
the newest volume of Kevin V.’s big project, g-point almanac.
It’s downloadable from duration, and full of Kevin’s most
charming lines of lists and surprising moves from word to word or punctuation.
Kaia Sand
is the author of Interval (Edge 2004).
She co-edits the Tangent, and currently,
briefly, lives in Portland, Oregon. She will soon live in Walla Walla
Washington.
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Jennifer
Scappettone
In random
order, and leaving out what I thought would be well covered already as
well as the bitter enchantment of Google News:
Lisa
Robertson | The Weather | New Star Press,
2001
The battered
paysage sees you back. In tandem with Occasional
Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture,
Clear Cut Press, 2003, reviewed for Tripwire. Inversely, in wading
through some contemporary sources of the latter, I was overwhelmed by
the flimsiness of third wave theory. Deleuze could not model us girls
and neither will the likes of his critics (c.f. Zizek’s interpretation
of the nursing Madonna & kid on The Puppet and the Dwarf: The
Perverse Core of Christianity (MIT, 2003)).
Heriberto
Yepez | mexperimental.blogspot.com | sporadically from late ‘03
through present | link
No-guar-gum
prose.
Superstudio
| Life Without Objects | 2003 catalog
Much anticipated
show still respected the hide of these guys.
Pierre
Alferi | OXO | Translated by Cole Swenson
| Burning Deck, 2004
Solid too.
Sergio
Bettini | Tempo e forma: Scritti 1935-1977
| Time and Form: Writings
Art historical
segues put together by the publishing house out of Adriatic Marche called
Quodlibet in 1997.
Alan
Halsey and Kelvin Corcoran | Your Thinking Tracts
or Nations | West House, 2001
Sandy,
who still hitchhikes between Berkeley poetry readings and treehouse-type
quarters in Mendocino, recommended this charming he said/he said set
of drawings and poems. Out of the runes and diagrams gone awry Corcoran
manages fairy prose with a guilt complex, which is a substantial achievement,
since the signature of those tales is their lack thereof, or arrest
within "the white zero of spring." C.f. also Halsey’s
The Text of Shelley’s Death,
same publisher same year.
Henry James | The Wings of the Dove |
various, including Googleable online editions
Plowing
through the hearttwisting syntax a third time was not nearly enough
to get it.
CA Conrad
& Magdalena Zurawski, eds. | Frequency Audio
Journal | 2004 | link
Listen
to some of these pieces and think who says the voice is dead?
IRWIN
Group | Malevich Between Two Wars and other icons
| 1980s-2003
Framed
chatty speakers on charcoal ground are classics you can’t take
in.
Yun-Fei
Ji | The Empty City | scattered sites in
2004
"The
figure of the constrained gives happiness because the force of constraint
must not be forgotten; its images are a memento" (from Adorno's
Aesthetic Theory, "Natural Beauty").
Louis
Zukofsky | 80 Flowers
They live
in mediation. Also "Anew," most pleasurably in chorus. Both
books are in All and in Complete
Short Poetry of Louis Zukofsky (Johns Hopkins, 1997).
Taylor
Brady | Essay on the lyric coming up in Faux Press anthology of Bay
Area poetics
Undersummarized
thus far; from my April notes: "lyricism of empire" "proxy
dust" "without authorizing cadence" "anything but
return" "phatic gamble of the lyric" "is the recognition
that I might not speak at all."
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Michael
Scharf
The comments
below are excerpts from Publishers Weekly's unsigned "Poetry
Forecasts," or capsule reviews. A section of poetry reviews will
again appear monthly beginning in September.
Adrienne
Rich | The School Among the Ruins | Norton,
2004
"This
confessional reeks of sweet anitseptic/ and besides she’s not confessing,"
writes Rich toward the end of this newest collection, the third person
standing for her speaker, her self, the genre she is often tagged with
(and the gender "confessional poetry" is itself tagged with)
and the real stakes of speech for real detainees at various global locales—as
well as religious hypocracy and a refusal to speak within its confining
terms.... The result is Rich’s most powerful and engaging work
since Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), and perhaps the most
urgent book of her long career: "The desert isn’t vacancy
or fear, it’s life, a million forms of witness. The fake road,
its cruel deception, is what we have to abandon."
Carl
Philips | The Rest of Love | Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 2003
Phillips’s
unmistakable, short-lined apostrophes, riddled with exhalative em-dashes
and pulled-up-short interrogatives, perform the kind of personal control
that, before The Tether, would have been a main component of
domination, but has slowly modulated into conscious attempts at sharing
one’s physical and psychic lives fully--or as fully as possible:
"to what extent can this be said, and/ it be true? and/ it be false?/
Under what conditions?// Under whose conditions?".... And as with
Phillips’s other recent work, while the poems do not form a series,
they seem to provide multiple and overlapping accounts of the title’s
excess (or its repose) without trying to define it.
Deborah
Richards | Last One Out | subpress, 2003
From the
Quarked-out textual imaginings of "The Beauty Projection"
(where the so-called Hottentot Venus’s history and legacy gain
voice) and "C’est L’Amour: That’s Love" (ditto
the cinematic Carmen Jones), to the Tarzan-based deconstructions
of Last One Out’s title poem, Deborah Richards, from Philadelphia
by way of London, creates immediate, can’t-look-away present-tense
synchronic slices of colonialism’s multiply dimensioned "interventions."
[To which
I would add—"Parable" is my favorite poem in the book,
and is best read I think in the Leroy chapbook edition, which gives
its carefully-spaced prose the margins it requires.]
Jalal
Toufic | Distracted (2nd Edition) | Tuumba,
2003
This year
has already seen the publication of Toufic’s Undying Love, or Love
Dies (Post Apollo), a book that among other things unforgettably re-writes
various versions of the Orpheus myth, as well as the release of a "revised
and expanded" version of (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead
in Film (also from Post Apollo), first published in 1993, and written
for "mortals to death...." The book is... not so much about
what happens when Raymond Roussel repeats a sentence but changes billard
(pool table) to pillard (plunderer), or about theories of the effects
of "surpassing disaster" on cultures (including Jewish and
Shi’ite) and literatures, or about reactions to how love, drunkenness
and distraction are rendered by (and in) the deeply interconnected media
of memory, film and language. Rather, the book records a kind of double
or even multiple experience of these things (what Toufic elsewhere calls
an "over-turn"), with eternal recurrence and total dissolution
as its horizons.
Laura
Elrick | sKincerity | Krupskaya, 2003
"How
big/ is now" asks the provisional subject position constructed
in Laura Elrick’s brilliantly historico-rhetorical sKincerity.
These nine "jerk the beat" open-field disputings of canned
sociopolitical particulars push the limits of discursive and body-based
action; readers become more than "fixtures/ for composition,"
and begin to—productively—"altercate."
Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge | Nest | Kelsey Street, 2003
"In
the classic Empathy (1989), Berssenbrugge made inquiries into
the ways sentences constitute perceptions and form the boundaries of
worlds by sculpting them into impossibly long-lined verses. Four
Year Old Girl (1998) marked a shift to hemistitch-like lines where
each sentence stands by itself, seeming to accrue as thought and perceptions
do. Nest further refines that style into an almost diaristic
directness and descriptive bluntness: one poem begins "We’re
in New Mexico," while another opens "The photograph is handsome
of the young man," and a third "I’m so pleased to be
friends with Maryanne, though I don’t understand how she has time
for me, with her many friends." These intentionally scaled-down
beginnings develop, with demanding elegance and unerring pace, into
scenes where the speaker seems to quietly reflect those around her,
as in Chantal Akerman’s film Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna.
And as in that film, the maintenance of such spaces seems to require
a lot of leisure, as the speaker repeatedly takes "all morning
to lounge in bed, talk on the phone, read the paper," while deliveries
of flowers arrive, last night’s parties are picked over, and "a
jade ring is endowed with depth with stories of Grandmother’s connoisseurship."
Yet it is not languor or money that give this book depth, but rather
their teller’s ease in turning them around with statements like
"I... accept my old relative whose memories are sentimental and
impure" or "A sense of deferral has been added to this weave
of naivete, humor, fragility, but our relation has, in fact, ended."
Anyone who has a family or friends will relate.
Michael
Gottlieb | Lost and Found | Roof, 2003
"The
Dust" is a list poem, one that tallies, in trade catalogue language
("Interior Concepts workstation T-base for non-raceway panels"),
some of the things that got compacted when the World Trade Center towers
fell. When Gottlieb finally, and with extreme care, transitions from
products to people’s names, the juxtaposition of financial, bureaucratic
and personal losses seems to make the ground fall out from under everyday
life. The poem is sad, frightening and extraordinary, and while it honors
the dead, it also refuses to separate them from the things with which
they lived.... This is a brave book, one that records enormous loss,
but refuses to look away from events that continue to unfold.
Peter
Culley | Hammertown | New Star, 2003
Vancouver
and its environs have produced an obscene number of superb poets now
mostly in their 40s; with this book, his first in 10 years, Culley’s
unique, seamlessly constructivist lyric comes to the fore.... Traveling
far beyond their fictional base and collecting aural and visual source
material ("Sepia splash along a margin"), the poems produce
a provisionally connectivity, yet edit out all lapses of attention;
the speaker’s sets of perceptions are cut together in the manner
of a film editor or DJ. "House is a Feeling" brilliantly puns
on felicitous domestic arrangements and music measured in beats per
minute.... Culley’s multiply reflective sonics, winningly quixotic
references (one poem prints "the tattooed maxims of Philip Whalen"
beside "the heaving crystallographies/ of Wanda Landowska")
and unerringly pitched descriptions forge a poetic that is as unshakably
materialist and understatedly hopeful as it is sharply beautiful.
Rae
Armantrout | Up To Speed | Wesleyan, 2003
...contains,
particularly in the poems that end the book, the most dazzling meditations
on time and space of this century.
Semezdin
Mehmedinovic | Nine Alexandrias [trans.
by Ammiel Alcalay] | City Lights, 2003
The title
series of short lyrics opens, imagining "at least nine cities in
America called Alexandria" (Mehmedinovic’s is the one outside
of Washington D.C. in Virginia) and how one might "mov[e] from
one/ American Alexandria to another,/ On the same Egyptian dock"
as the poet and poems cross the country. The terrific "This Door
Is Not an Exit," written in slowed-down, sometimes fragmentary
couplets, reflects on exile in the aftermath of violence, death and
continued political insolubility: "I am, in fact, where you are,
to make/ your weariness inspire meaning." The final sequence, "8
Things About Cadillac," takes in everything from the ironies of
a luxury car named for a destroyed people (and that now drives over
their land), to the fact that "The longest lasting Cadillac in
memory/ Is the one JFK is dying in."
Renee
Gladman | The Activist | Krupskaya, 2003
By turns
noirish first-person memoir and journalistic satire, The Activist
depicts the goings on of a cell or affinity group that may or may not
have blown up a bridge that may or may not have existed. Descriptions
are inflected such that the names of characters (Lomarlo, Monique),
their relations to each other (often same sex) and the way they talk
("This our downtown"; the title itself may be in the plural)
put pressure on categories of race, gender and sexual orientation. The
group may also have developed technology for emptying the memories of
subjects, and controlling them Matrix-style, and their prevarications
have a Godardian intellectualized haplessness. Yet the memory technology
sets up the most powerful of the book’s 10 sections, "The
State," where it is unclear if the first-person narrator is being
held by the government or by the activists, for what reason and to what
purpose. The book works best as one of the first full-length mirrors
held to the post 9/11 U.S.; in its targeting and rhetoric, it is something
less than allegorical, more than a little chilling, and often very beautiful.
Drew
Gardner | Sugar Pill | Krupskaya, 2002
"Missile
silos implode in North Dakota/ copping the absence/ as I shrunk back
in horror at the use I was making of my intelligence..." writes
Gardner in "Black Atlantic Sky," one of 12 perfectly calibrated,
mostly monostichic poems in Sugar Pill. The editor of Snare
magazine and a percussionist who has collaborated frequently with other
poets, Gardner is concerned with keeping time of all sorts here: "Homeostasis"
finds "body systems regulated within normal bounds/ tethered seven
shrimp to a platform"; "The Manufacturers" know that
"each muscle fiber can support 1000x its own weight/ set up to
maintain systems of feeling/ whether we are included with our descendants"
or not; the title panacea charts "footprints of darkening work/
we cannot fall out of." Readers will not want to fall out of this
one.
[To which
I would add: Gardner's new work goes even further toward incorporating
consc. and unconscious bad algorithms into linear Sardonic Structures
(see Chomsky, 1956) — gets extremely close to historicized syllogisms
of self- and outer deception (check the Keats/Cortez shout out) —
and not only articulates them in this space-generating way — but
shows a method of bloodlessly powering them down that I think is some
kind of future poetry, and an active articulation. It is at this level,
where discourse prepares the ground for death (in ways that are updated
daily), that poetry can still operate. Gardner’s work seeks to
disclose, unmask and make intelligible the spoonful-of-sugar procedure
by which the entire process is generally rendered painless for a certain
percentage of the world, and to slo-mo the psychic transactions that
provide the cover by which it can happen. In presenting what Arendt
called "the banality of evil," or the making of TIME into
TIMETABLES, Gardner refuses to heighten the materials with which he
comes into contact. Fragmentary increments turn into reflectively teleological
puzzle pieces that spell out, as Gardner’s "Student Studies"
note, "how isolated/ in experience and history / anyone is."]
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Jerrold
Shiroma
Pierre
Alferi | OXO | Burning Deck, 2004
Peter
Gizzi | Some Values of Landscape & Weather
| Wesleyan, 2003
Lisa
Jarnot | Black Dog Songs | Flood Editions,
2003
Mark
McMorris | The Blaze of the Poui | U. of
Georgia, 2003
Semezdin
Mehmedinovic | Nine Alexandrias | City Lights,
2003
Jerome
Rothenberg | Writing Through | Wesleyan,
2004
Marjane
Satrapi | Persepolis | Pantheon Books, 2003
Jean
Sénac | Oeuvres Poétiques
| Actes Sud, 1986
Cole
Swensen | Goest | Alice James, 2004
Keith
Waldrop | The House Seen from Nowhere |
Litmus Press, 2003
Rosmarie
Waldrop | Love Like Pronouns | Omnidawn,
2003
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Rick Snyder
Giorgio
Agamben | The Open: Man and Animal | Trans.
by Kevin Attell | Stanford UP, 2004
In this
reduction and expansion of his examination of the zoe/bios
distinction in Homo Sacer, our suave scholiast sketches the development
of the "anthropological machine" that allows "man"
to distinguish himself from other beasts. Gorgeous and provocative,
as always. Perfect beach reading.
Noelle
Kocot | The Raving Fortune | Four Way Books,
2004
Colloquial,
intense and visionary, a brilliant collection with more influences than
antecedents.
Sin
Puertas Visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women
| Ed. and trans. by Jen Hofer | Pittsburgh UP, 2003
Finely
translated, extensive selections of a number of talented poets working
in a variety of modes. A generous introduction to a wealth of progressive
writing.
George
Oppen | New Collected Poems | ed. by Michael
Davidson | New Directions, 2002
Still some
of the most relevant and vital work I know. I’m never really comfortable
with the inclusion of unpublished work in a posthumous collected, but
Davidson’s insightful introduction, the re-setting of the Discrete
Series, and long-overdue addition of Primitive make this
book a necessity.
Peter
Culley | Hammertown | New Star Books, 2003
Marked
by an overwhelming sense of place, as beautiful and uncanny as Bunting.
Lev
Rubinstein | Catalogue of Comedic Novelties
| Trans. by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky | Ugly Duckling Presse,
2004
Wry and
circular, a wonderful gift from Russia, with love via Brooklyn.
Ingeborg
Bachmann | Letters to Felician | Trans.
by Damion Searls | Green Integer, 2004
Devastatingly
romantic letters to a lover who resides in the young writer’s psyche.
Circumference
| Vol. 1, Issue 1 | Ed. by Stefania Heim and Jennifer Kronovet | 2003
It’s
actually hard to comprehend the scope and quality of this journal. The
typesetting alone is an amazing feat, and the poetry is even better.
Ted
Greenwald | Common Sense | L Publications,
1978
I traded
my rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn for a copy of this book, and
I think I got a bargain.
Graham
Foust | As in Every Deafness | Flood, 2003
Spare as
early Creeley and sad as Trakl. It’s amazing that he pulls it off.
Sextus
Propertius | The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius
| Trans. by Vincent Katz | Princeton UP, 2004
Katz’
admirable introduction and elegant translations display a fine understanding
Propertius’ milieu and influences.
The
Butthole Surfers | Brown Reason to Live and Live
PCPPEP | Latino Bugger Veil, 1983-4/2003
A CD re-release
of two albums that made an Indiana adolescence in the 80s less (or more)
than suicidal. Highlights include the live version of "Bar-B-Q
Pope," with Gibby’s improvised (or so I’ve always imagined)
golf monologue via bullhorn, "A marvelous triple eagle on eleven."
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Eileen
Tabios
Simon
Smith | Reverdy Road | Salt Publishing,
2003
kari edwards | iduna | O Books, 2003
Barry Schwabsky and Hong Seung-Hye | [WAYS]
| Meritage Press and Artsonje Center, 2004
James Meetze | Instrument & Amplifier
| mss.
Spencer Reece | The Clerk | Mariner Original;
Houghton Mifflin, 2004
Basil King | Mirage | Marsh Hawk Press,
2003
Jon
Pineda | Birthmark | Southern Illinois University
Press, 2004
Nick Carbo, ed. | Pinoy Poetics: A Collection
of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino American
Poetics | Meritage Press, 2004 | More info here
Tom
Beckett | Vanishing Points of Resemblance
| Generator Press, 2004
Susan Schultz | No Guns, No Durian | Tinfish
Press, 2003
David Larsen | Freaky If You Got This Far
| Self-Published, 2004
Eileen
Tabios plays with Poetry at her blog, The
Chatelaine's Poetics.
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Tony Tost
The following
recent books I've found especially compelling. I've left off books I've
recently reviewed favorably, as well as books by folks with poems in Octopus;
so in addition to those folks, I'm extremely grateful about the following:
Joseph
Donahue | Incidental Eclipse | Talisman
House
David
Rosenberg | See What You Think: Essays for the
Next Avant-Garde | Spuyten Duyvil
Aaron
McCollough | Double Venus | Salt
Standard
Schaefer | Nova | Sun & Moon
Murat
Nemet-Nejat | The Peripheral Space of Photography
| Green Integer
Will
Oldham | Bonnie "Prince" Billy Sings
Greatest Palace Music | Palace Records/Drag City
Janet
Kauffman | Five on Fiction | Burning Deck
Pierre
Alferi | Oxo | Translated by Cole Swensen
| Burning Deck
Mark
Wallace | Haze | Edge
K. Silem
Mohammed | Hanging Out with Pablo & Jennifer
| Duration
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Karen
Volkman
John
Tipton | Surfaces | Flood Editions, 2003
Rae
Armantrout | Up to Speed | Wesleyan, 2004
Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge | Nest | Kelsey Street, 2003
Elizabeth
Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003
William
Gibson | Pattern Recognition | Berkeley
Books, 2003
Richard
Foreman | Paradise Hotel and Other Plays
| Overlook, 2001
Bill
Knott | Outremer | U of Iowa Press, 1989
Peter
Gizzi | Some Values of Landscape and Weather
| Wesleyan, 2003
Louis
Feuillade | Les Vampires | DVD of the 1916
10-episode series | Water
Bearer Films, 2000
Various
libretti | recently Purcell's The Fairy Queen
and Lully's Atys | Both performed by Les
Arts Florissants | harmonia mundi
Sergio
Leone | Six film series | Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, July 2004
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James
Wagner
Marjorie
Welish | Word Group
Lyn
Hejinian | The Fatalist
Tan
Lin | BlipSoak01
Rosmarie
Waldrop | Love, Like Pronouns
Antennae
| literary magazine | current and back issues
Lisa
Jarnot | Black Dog Songs
K. Silem
Mohammad | Deer Head Nation
Robert
Creeley | If I Were Writing This
Denver
Quarterly | Vol. 38, No. 4 (current issue)
Christopher
Kennedy | Trouble With The Machine
Kristin
Prevallet | Scratch Sides—Poetry, Documentation,
and Image-Text Projects
James Wagner is the author of the false
sun recordings. He has reviewed a few of the titles above at
his website, Esther Press.
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G.C. Waldrep
Kevin
Young | To Repel Ghosts
Laird Hunt | Indiana, Indiana
John Tipton | Surfaces
Rae Armantrout | Up to Speed
Tony Tost | Invisible Bride
Tymoteusz Karpowiczó | anything at all
I can get in translation
Rosmarie Waldrop | Blindsight
Srikanth Reddy | Facts for Visitors
Cole Swensen | Goest
Eric Baus | The To Sound
Myung-Mi Kim | Commons
—and
a 12th, if I may
Brenda
Coultas | A Handmade Museum
Is it possible
to list a book that does not exist? I refer, of course, to Tan Lin's
Ambient Stylistics. Clearly it
is the Necronomicon of our time.
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Dana Ward
Done in the
manner of Rod Smith's Bridge Street updates, which I always thought were
fine reading in & of themselves.
James
Meetze | Instrument & Amplifier | ms.
"A
rouge wave of pathos in the pre-dawn"
Douglas
Oliver | Arrondissements
"the
coffin waits in this little night/for the whole day's train"
Cynthia
Sailers | Rose Lungs
"To
describe what I would eventually want I worry has been fed to the wolverines."
Karen
Weiser | Placefullness for Etel Adnan |
ms.
"Still,
there is humiliation in simple ways of being near, how can we stand
it?"
Mark
Tardi | Euclid Shudders
"Yet
I'm still trying to embrace the impalpable, as if it were a flower floating
only a foot away"
Kaia
Sand | Interval | Edge 2004
"Now
I know how it is/with a cup to the ear of thunder"
Jeff
Clark | Music & Suicide
"unable
to leave, sleepless, relieved only in daydream"
Joseph
Lease | Broken World | ms.
"singing
hyms for no reason: and, and, and, and, and, and--I, I, I, I, I--"
Tanya
Brolaski | "The Real"
"I'm
sure my foot is cleaner than your ass"
Renee
Gladman | The Activist
"What
is it--beyond the issues? What makes one go outside and scream?"
Geoffrey
Dyer | The Dirty Halo of Everything
"pay
attention to the words collaborating inside your skull"
Dana Ward
is the publisher of Cy Press.
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John Wilkinson
I'm continuing
to read — and always shall — two inexhaustible volumes of Collected
Poems, those by Tom Raworth and John James. The
James appeared a couple of years ago but I've returned to it; for about
fifteen years, from 1968 to 1983, James was the poet most sharply responsive
to British politics and popular culture. The collection of four pamphlets
by J.H. Prynne in the chic volume Furtherance from The Figures was of
pleasing utility, since I'm always struggling to catch up with the-last-Prynne-but-one.
Favourite
new books —
Marjorie
Welish | Word Group
Laura
Elrick | Skincerity
Andrea
Brady | Cold Calling
Drew
Milne | Go Figure
Because I
had the privilege of a year away from work in 03/04 I was able to read
more generally than since the time (decades ago) when I was a graduate
student. My best discoveries during this resumed education have been the
writings of Bruno Latour and of Henri Lefebvre. Provocateurs
rather than systematisers.
John
Wilkinson's new chapbook Iphigenia
is published by Barque.
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Stephanie
Young
Jordan
Davis and Sarah Manguso, eds. | Free Radicals:
American Poets before Their First Books | Subpress Collective,
2004
Dodie
Bellamy | Pink Steam
Kit
Robinson | The Crave
The
Poker 4 | Edited by Daniel Bouchard
Commonweal,
issues 1-4 | Edited by Brandon Brown
John
Weiners | Selected Poems
Bob
Perelman | Ten to One: Selected Poems
K. Silem
Mohammad | A Thousand Devils | Combo, 2004
Juliana
Spahr | Fuck You, Aloha, I love you
Tanya
Brolaski | The Daily Usonian | chapbook
mss, due out from Michael Cross's press, Atticus/Finch in August 2004
•
• •
And, for
a list within a list, this best of 03 CD from a friend in Toronto is in
near constant rotation:
the new
pornographers | the laws have changed
hot hot heat | bandages
metric | succexy
future bible heros | smash the beauty machine
the shins | kissing the lipless
the eels | love of the loveless
the plastic folk | that love falls thing
sam roberts | don't walk away eileen
tegan and sara | living room
magnetic fields | I need a new heart
the strokes | is this it
future bible heroes | losing your affection
hot hot heat | this town
metric | IOU
belle & sebstian | dear catastrophe waitress
young and sexy | the city you live in is ugly
the new pornographers | the electric version
the shins | mine is not a high horse
the eels | dirty mouth
joel plaskett | work out fine
cat power | free
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