Attention Span — 15 July 2003

Introductory Note

In June of 2003, I invited readers of Third Factory / Notes to Poetry to submit constellations of up to eleven titles representing something of their own present interests. While an emphasis on poetry titles published after 2000 was encouraged, other items of literary, cultural, and political interest were also welcomed. I am grateful to everyone who made time to participate in this provisional (and indeed radically incomplete) attempt at charting the shifting field of our singular and collective attentions. —Steve Evans

Directory of Individual Participants (in reverse order received):

Brian Kim StefansBill BerksonStephanie YoungJordan DavisKasey Silem MohammadKit RobinsonRobert FittermanGary SullivanJohn LattaJennifer MoxleyLisa RobertsonAndrew JoronJerrold ShiromaAaron KuninJennifer ScappettoneKevin KillianCraig Watson Peter GizziBenjamin FriedlanderEileen TabiosAlan GilbertNoah Eli GordonJuliana SpahrMichael ScharfRae ArmantroutJoshua CloverPam Brown kari edwardsRobert Creeley


Brian Kim Stefans

W.S. Graham | Selected Poems | Ecco, 1979 + Uncollected Poems | Greville Press Pamphlets, 1990

Mike Magee | MS | Sputen Duyvil, 2003

Jennifer Moxley | Sense Record | Edge 2002

John Temple | Collected Poems | Salt, 2003

John James | Collected Poems | Salt, 2002

Bruce Naumann | Pay Attention Please | MIT, 2003

Steve Venright | Spiral Agitator | Coach House, 2000

John Wilkinson | Contrivances | Salt, 2003

Pierre Guyotat | Eden Eden Eden | Creation Books, 1995

Darren O'Donnel | pppeeeaaaccceee | Coach House, 2003

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Bill Berkson

Kenneth Koch | A Possible World

Kenneth Koch | Sun Out

Kenneth Koch | Making Your Own Days

Cedar Sigo | Selected Writings

Holderlin | Selected Poems and Fragments | Penguin

Auden & MacNiece | Letters From Iceland

Larry Fagin, ed. | Sal Mimeo #3 (Spring 2003)

Bill Blackbeard, ed. | Ignatz & Krazy 1929-30

Carl Andre | Complete Poems [we need this]

Ron Padgett | You Never Know

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Stephanie Young

Taylor Brady | Production Notes for Occupation: Location Scouting | e-book available here | Also Production Notes for Occupation: Soundtrack and Yesterday's News "They Store It Up" (both of which are, I believe, currently unpublished)

I'm working (fighting towards, taking a very long time) a full length essay or review or even blog post on these poems. TOUGH work asking for a fight (Taylor writes in a more recent poem: "This is my theory / of the active reader, and it is dense, / both sticky and abrasive.") but poems also trying to kick the door/skylight open to let in some 'tenderness' of daily expression: both domestic (inside) and urban (outside) expressions of tenderness.

Cynthia Sailers | A New Season | e-book available here

Dense, inquisitive lyrics in full frontal engagement with various framing devices: painters, California, style, novelists, grammar. Etc. ('and more!')

Paulo Leminski | Meta(/other)poems | Trans. Chris Daniels | Grand Quiskadee, 2003

I'm choosing Chris Daniels' 2003 translation of Paulo Leminski's Meta(/other)poems for this list although I'm also looking at the Orides Fontela chapbook, One step from the bird I breathe in (2003) and Josely Vianna Baptista's On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids (Manifest Press, 2003). I'm choosing Leminski because I've read him as a central figure and entrance point to the spheres of Brazilian poetry that Chris Daniels is opening up to English speaking readers. "TRANSLATION FIGHTS CULTURAL NARCISSISM."

Richard Greenfield | A Carnage in the Love Trees | University of California Press, 2003

FINALLY got my copy just last week. 'Relentless,' one of the words from the jacket copy, is a good place to start. But hardly a start at all. Something about 'master of combination,' or, movement.

Tina Celona Brown | The Real Moon of Poetry and Other Poems | Fence, 2002

Have been reading and re-reading this for several months, maybe a year. Book revolves painfully around several questions: what can go in a poem (physically), what is a suitable subject, how far can the poem stretch to hold its subject, what if the poem breaks and CAN'T contain its (monstrous or even just ugly) subject. Also some time travel between Keats and Celona Brown. Maybe, too, between Keats, Celona Brown and Spicer. There is a road from my house that leads to the door of this book and a road in the book that leads to the door of the moon.

I'm making a blueberry pie for dinner tomorrow, but I will never be able to read it.

David Hadbawnik | Ovid In Exile| stapled chapbook, 2002

The poet pursues Ovid, who sometimes replies.

Jim Behrle & Fred Moten | Poems | Pressed Wafer, 2002

Double feature.

Almost burnt the pie!

Eileen Tabios | GABRIELA COUPLE(T)S WITH THE 21ST CENTURY | unpublished
but circulating

The poet is overcome by the ghost of Gabriela Silang.

Judith Goldman | Vocoder | Roof Books, 2001

Laynie Browne | Pollen Memory | Tender Buttons, 2003

Comment | I'm running out of steam and going to bed now, I actually ran out of room for the things that have been on my list for months now, Jordan's Million Poems (books and website), Nada's v. Imp, Nada's/Gary's Swoon and Moxley's Sense Record. Is this technically cheating, putting them in the paragraph? And pie in the list?

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Jordan Davis

Lee Ann Brown | The Sleep that Changed Everything | Wesleyan, 2003

Brenda Coultas | A Handmade Museum | Coffee House, 2003

Joseph Donahue | Incidental Eclipse | Talisman, 2003

Joanna Fuhrman | Ugh Ugh Ocean | Hanging Loose, 2003

Drew Gardner | Sugar Pill | Krupskaya, 2002

Fanny Howe | Economics | Flood, 2003

Joy Katz | Fabulae | Crab Orchard, 2002

Sarah Manguso | The Captain Lands in Paradise | Alice James, 2002

Geoffrey O'Brien | A View of Buildings and Water | Salt, 2002

Tony Towle | The History of the Invitation | Hanging Loose, 2000

Geoffrey Young | Lights Out | The Figures, 2003

Comment | Feel like I'm stuffing the all star ballot box, excluding my non-poetry reading from this list — these are my most recent excitements — temporally speaking Anselm Berrigan, Macgregor Card, Buck Downs, Alice Fulton, Hoa Nguyen and Mary Ruefle come just before these, and recent reads I'm still letting sink in include Joyelle McSweeney, Monica Youn, Jack Agueros, Stephen Paul Miller, Eileen Tabios, and Linh Dinh. I've commented on LAB and FH elsewhere, and hope to get to the others before the year's out one place or another.

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Kasey Silem Mohammad

David Larsen | Skips 'n' Scrips | LRSN, 2001

Guerilla DIY production: recycled, smudgy, paper scraps violently stapled together, with a mixture of drawings and photocollages. Fierce psychic riffing on Osama bin Laden, US foreign policy, etc., filtered through Larsen's scholarly engagement with Arab literary traditions.

Michael Magee | My Angie Dickinson | blogspot link

Funny, elegant, disjunctive, and Flarf-inspired serial-poem-on-a-blog, truly Dickinsonian in all eight senses. Should be required reading for people who love great American poetry and people whom it is likely to annoy. May it never end.

Heriberto Yepez | Babellebab | Duration, 2003

I once said on my blog that poetry should be at least as interesting as getting beaten up. This language-jacking, imperialism-busting chapbook is like getting run over by a damn truck. Feels great!

Patrick Durgin | Color Music | Cuneiform, 2002

An object so richly luxurious in its handwrought, silkscreened, letterpress beauty that it's not just obscene, it's evil.  And the poem is great too.

Clark Coolidge | On the Slates | Tougher Disguises, 2002

More letterpress decadence, albeit slightly more restrained than the Cuneiform chapbook. Coolidge in fine form.

Stephanie Young | Telling the Future Off | ms. | New Langton Arts
reading handout, 2002

This is just some photocopied pages stapled in the upper lefthand corner. But when the book itself comes out, it will send a tremor straight to the planet's core.

Kevin Davies | "Lateral Argument" | Alterran Poetry Assemblage 7 | December 2002

A long poem. Actually, has this been published somewhere now? Maybe on
Arras?

Michael Cross | in felt treeling | Soft, 2003

Pages of a poetic dialogue in an envelope, on unbound squares of cardstock.

Carol Mirakove | Temporary Tattoos | BabySelf, 2002

Tough, witty, introspective city poems.

Nathan Austin | Glost | Handwritten, 2002

Uses Noah Webster as a source, among other texts.

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Kit Robinson


Ed Barrett | Rub Out | Pressed Wafer, 2003

Hot off the press, "a trilogy of experimental verse novels" by an interesting, new (to me) and original writer.

Diane DiPrima | Pieces of Song | City Lights, 1990

She lives the life and tells the tale, with humor and hutzpah. "THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION / ALL OTHERS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT" ("Rant").

Merrill Gilfillan | The Seasons | Adventures in Poetry, 2002

Merrill's been one of my favorite poets for a long time. This gem of a book includes the autobiographical poems "1958" and "1972". The title poem's a knock-out.

Erica Hunt | Piece Logic | Carolina Wren, 2003

A new book by Erica Hunt is a rare treat, and this hand-sewn, letterpress chapbook packs a wallop, including the over-the-top, late-late capitalist inventory "A House of Broken Things".

Joanne Kyger | As Ever: Selected Poems | Penguin, 2002

A treasure trove of great works, each on a daily, human scale, ironic sassy and deep.

Keith Shein | Rumors of Buildings to Live In | O, 2002

Beautifully written, serial renderings of the urban American landscape at the millennium, serious in the best sense. Check it out.

George Stanley | A Tall, Serious Girl | Qua, 2003

A major discovery. Where have I been? Gritty, funny, rife with historical detail, existential frisson and flat-out bald-faced writing.

Brian Kim Stefans | Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics | Atelos, 2003

Not a book of poems per se, as per the Atelos genre-bending SOP, but an argument enacted by multiple means at various & sundry formal levels. Brainier-than-I but highly recommended as a stimulant.

Rodrigo Toscano | Platform | Atelos, 2003

Post-colonialist, pro-labor, post-language, proletarian, paratactic burlesque, full of ripped seams, high-fives, and sly digs. Like there's a party goin' on!

Geoffrey Young | Lights Out | Great Barrington: The Figures, 2003

Excellent recent work from a past master at conflating the confessional and the urbane. While the frame of reference skids across literature, art and jazz, the author holds his own feet to the hot-damn something-personal fire.

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Robert Fitterman

Rodrigo Toscano | Platform | Atelos, 2003

Jason Rhoades | Volume: A Rhoades Referenz | 1998

Stacy Doris | Paramour | Krupskaya

Lytle Shaw | The Lobe | Roof, 2001

Kenneth Goldsmith | Day | The Figures, 2003

Kim Rosenfield | Good Morning—Midnight | Roof

Kevin Davies | Comp. | Edge, 2000

Dan Farrell | The Inkblot Record | Coach House, 2001

Buck Downs | Marijuana Soft Drink | Edge

Brian Kim Stefans | Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics | Atelos, 2003

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Gary Sullivan

A truer constellation of my own would include things that are irrelevant here (Bollywood encyclopedias, comics, graphic novels, blogs, and the Flarflist, not to mention lots of things published prior to 2000), but even still, I found it impossible getting it down to 11 titles. I actually wound up with 12:

Jordan Davis | Million Poems Journal | Faux

Stacy Doris | Paramour | Krupskaya

Drew Gardner | Sugar Pill | Krupskaya, 2002

Nada Gordon | V. Imp | Faux

Kevin Killian | Argento Series | Krupskaya, 2001

Jack Kimball | Frosted | Potes & Poets

Alexei Kruchenykh | Suicide Circus: Selected Poems | Green Integer

Steve McCaffery | Seven Pages Missing | Coach House

K. Silem Mohammad | Deer Head Nation | Tougher Disguises, forthcoming | published on the web, no URL, but found by doing a Google search on "k. silem mohammad deer head nation"

Eileen Tabios | Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole | Marsh Hawk

Rodrigo Toscano | Platform | atelos, 2003

Kevin Young | To Repel Ghosts | Zoland

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John Latta

Devin Johnston | Telepathy | Paper Bark, 2001

William Fuller | Sadly | Flood, 2002

Yusef Komunyakaa | Talking Dirty to the Gods | Farrar, 2000

Jennifer Moxley | The Sense Record | Edge, 2002

Caroline Knox | A Beaker | Verse, 2002

Richard Caddell | Magpie Words | West House, 2002

Martin Corless-Smith | Nota | Fence, 2003

Barbara Guest | Forces of Imagination | Kelsey St., 2003

Anselm Berrigan | Zero Star Hotel | Edge, 2002

Sam Truitt | Vertical Elegies 5 The Section | U of Georgia, 2003

Michael Haslam | The Music Laid Her Songs in Language | Arc, 2001

Comment The Komunyakaa and the Truitt probably because of this group of abecedarian arrangements that's been occupying me for the last few years—Some Alphabets—five word lines, sixteen lines. And K— and T— working similar short forms. I'm also "took" by skewed dictions, invasions of early English orthographies that come from my day job digitizing such texts, and Haslam and Corless-Smith do much in their way. I'm seeing in the list two opposing impulses: the Niedecker pared-down sound, a "cleanliness" (Caddel, Johnston) and the hubbub, "messily" exfoliate noise excursions (Knox: "As I baden-zuyt was entreating stop-and-go Pushkin here around / the dubious greensward," Moxley: "what thinks / the noble grandson of this generation of Jules as he runs his digit / across the Bronze Age contract rusted to the face of his domicile?"). Haslam is somebody Nate Dorward mentioned I've found congenial and enduring repeated looks, Hopkins noises, that English Green Man tradition that Corless-Smith drags along behind him too. I could mention (belatedly realizing) Dale Smith's The Flood & The Garden (First Intensity) for its studies of prose series, and recent books by August Kleinzahler, and Forrest Gander.

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Jennifer Moxley

Noël Coward | Future Imperfect

History with a twist.

Queer as Folk | Showtime, 2001-present | DVD

Not deep, but penetrating.

Rick Snyder | This Charming New Chapbook | Situations, 2003

Elegantly rendered ressentiment.

David Kennedy | President of Earth | Salt

Charm, wit, angst, and Juliette Greco.

Led Zeppelin | Led Zeppelin | DVD

Plant flirts in girl's shirts: delicious.

Monkey Puzzle | Ed. by Kreg Hasegawa and Daniel Comiskey in Seattle

Deftly edited stapled 'zine out of the Emerald City.

Bob Perelman | "The Revenge of the Bathwater" | ms

For those who are sick of the baby.

Aaron Kunin | The Mandarin | ms (novel)

Shades of The Waves and a dash of Robbe-Grillet made strangely compelling in Minneapolis.

James Thomas Stevens | Combing the Snakes from His Hair | U of Michigan, 2002

Desire, beauty, longing, lyric—and a perfect ear.

Heather Fuller | Dovecote | Edge, 2002

The natural politics of the urgent real.

Juliette Valéry | Format Américain

Chic chapbooks of American writing translated into French.

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Lisa Robertson

These are the recent books I plan to reread—

Fiona Banner | The Nam | Frith Street books 1997 | Printed Matter

Artist's book. whacking huge book of war. she retells 6 or 7 viet nam movies, by describing while watching, almost frame by frame. No paragraph breaks, no section breaks, a running bold helvetica flow. massive.

Stacy Doris | Conference | Potes and poets, 2001

E Tracy Grinnell | Music or Forgetting

Erin Moure | O Cidadan | Anansi, 2002

Rae Armantrout | Veil | Wesleyan

Lorine Niedecker | Collected | Ed. Jenny Penberthy | U California 2002

Dionne Brand | thirsty | McClelland and Stewart, 2002

Denise Riley | The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony | Stanford UP, 2000

Rodrigo Toscano | Platform | atelos 15 | 2003

Kenneth Goldsmith | Soliloquy | Granary Books, 2001

Janet Cardiff | A Large Slow River | Oakville Galleries, 2000 | www.oakvillegalleries.com

A 3D effect audio CD narrating a walk. 32 track sound composition, recorded on two omni directional mikes, simulating human hearing. an audio atmosphere.

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Andrew Joron

Barbara Guest | Miniatures | Wesleyan, 2002

Mastery never arrives at the stillness of perfection, but shows its ability to flicker beautifully amid the flaws in reality.

Nathaniel Mackey | ATET A.D. | City Lights, 2001

The third epistolary novel about the Mystic Horn Society, "a funky-sweet rhythmic foray into ditty-bop dreamtime."

Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Drafts 1-38, Toll | Wesleyan, 2001

A series of constellations or dialectical images (in Benjamin's terms), poetico-ethical acts of resistance against totality, whose language seeks mystery in its own materiality.

Josely Vianna Baptista | On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids | Trans. Chris Daniels | Manifest, 2003

Widely spaced lettering turns this experimental poetry from Brazil into a shimmering curtain of polysemy, a reading surface made of "b l a d e - g l o w a n d f o g - c h i p."

Paul Celan | Romanian Poems | Trans. Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi | Green Integer, 2003

Celan's debt to surrealism (an early influence that never entirely receded from his work) is demonstrated in these phantasmagoric poems.

John Yau | Borrowed Love Poems | Penguin, 2002

Who needs Bataille?

Laynie Browne | Pollen Memory | Tender Buttons, 2003

Prose poems that artfully trace electricities through a tree of language that is "quietly becoming a night double."

Elizabeth Robinson | Pure Descent | Sun & Moon, 2003

Abstractions of (spiritual) passion; a poetry whose obliquity of mode only heightens the terror & eroticism of its impulse.

Craig Watson | True News | Instance, 2002

Here, the poetic act is also a form of critical intervention, one that maintains a lyric intensity even as it makes palpable the contradictions of life in an overdeveloped world.

Joseph Donahue | Incidental Eclipse | Talisman, 2003

Shards of harsh reality receive angelic witness as they fall into a zone of bright shadows, which is nothing other than the redemptive space of the poem itself.

Sotere Torregian | "I Must Go (She Said) Because My Pizza's Cold" | Skanky Possum, 2002

Selected works (from 1957 to 1999) by an unjustly neglected poet whose work exposes, with warmth and humor, the surrealist roots of the New York School.

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Jerrold Shiroma

Not enough time, I'm afraid, to put together any kind of commentaries, but
below is a list of some things I found interesting over the past couple of
years, not in any particular order:

Gennady Aygil | Child & Rose | Trans. Peter France | New Directions, 2003

Rodrigo Toscano | Platform | Atelos, 2003

Jen Hofer, ed. and trans. | Sin Puertas Visibles | U of Pittsburgh, 2003

Mahmoud Darwish | Unfortunately, It Was Paradise | U of California, 2002

Harry Polkinhorn & Mark Weiss, eds. | Across the Line / Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California | Junction, 2002

Abdellatif Laâbi | The World's Embrace | City Lights, 2003

George Oppen | New Collected Poems | New Directions, 2002

Kamau Braithwaite | Ancestors | New Directions, 2001

Jennifer Moxley | The Sense Record | Edge, 2002

Juliana Spahr | Fuck You, Aloha, I Love You | Wesleyan UP, 2001

Rosmarie Waldrop | Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes | Wesleyan, 2002

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Aaron Kunin

Here are some of the books on my desk:

David Batchelor | Chromophobia | Reaktion, 2000

Thomas Carlyle | The French Revolution: A History | Modern Library, 2002—according to the back cover, this is the only unabridged edition currently in print, which I think might be true if you added "in the U.S."

Harun Farocki | Imprint | Ram, 2001

Barbara Guest | Miniatures | Wesleyan, 2002

Cole Heinowitz | Stunning in Muscle Hospital | Detour

Susan Howe | The Midnight | New Directions, 2003

Ronald Johnson | The Shrubberies | Flood

David Perry | Range Finder | Adventures in Poetry

Jacqueline Waters | A Minute Without Danger | Adventures in Poetry

Karen Weiser | Eight Positive Trees | Pressed Wafer, 2002

Comment I am also reading Samuel Richardson's novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison ("He Never Unsheathes His Sword" until volume 4) and other books published before 2000.

"Amazing! We have the same books."
"Haven't you noticed that everyone has the same books?"

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Jennifer Scappettone

Giorgio Agamben | Stato d'eccezione [State of Exception] | Bollati Boringhieri, 2003

If post-dialectical thinking has a political praxis, this could be its route: following Schmitt and Benjamin in theorizing the uncertain term, Agamben sounds the rank ambiguities of custody and detainment within current (and indefinitely prolonged) states of patriotism.

Mamma Andersson | Oils from Devil-May-Care: "In the Room of Another," "In the Waiting Room," "Installation," "Travelling in the Family," "Sleeping Standing Up," "Master's Voice" & 6 others | Nordic Pavilion | Venice Biennale, 2003

This Swedish painter represents less the end of her medium than its residue, and thus isn't likely to arise in accounts of the new canon, but so what — or more to the point, therefore: Reliquefied relatives of works we might have known dwell in unaccommodating planes of her interiors, while painted modernist sculpture, uncanny, darkens the corners of dittoish townscapes; they shouldn't be there, but for joy, remember.

Eugenio De Signoribus | Principio del giorno [Principle of the Day] | Garzanti, 2001 | See also Istmi e chiuse (1989-1995) and Memoria del chiuso mondo (Quodlibet, 2002)

Seemingly impermeable, “high” lyric, but arriving from “after towards before” — erasure-cradling.

Lyn Hejinian | Slowly | Tuumba, 2002

Lately, this slim volume — published more or less in tandem with the reprint of The Beginner — has helped us amass and savor our temporary panoramas at a canal's pace.

David Larsen | Freaky if You Got This Far | Self-published chapbook, Berkeley, 2003

Makes a sensuous case for the persistence of the maker's mark within our everyday (&) elegy.

Dinh Q. Le | Photoweavings: Destruction of Memory, Paramount, Shooting Back, and 3 others | Delays and Revolutions Pavilion| Venice Biennale, 2003

Within the sprawl of the Biennale, this photographic series so far (along with the far less self-lucid series of IllyMind promotional spaces) grapples most palpably with truth in mediation: working out of Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles, Le literally interweaves grids of images from Vietnamese films and family albums and notorious war photos with stilled Hollywood Vietnam and superficially separate pistol-toting starlets, yet the movement of the pieces isn't simply bidirectional. The ghosting that results from their super- and interpolation haunts the way one gathers the first film reels did.

John Ruskin | Fors Clavigera, 4 vols | Poke around for editions — all long out of print, 1871-84 and later

Forget the chopped-up editions of Stones of Venice, if you haven't already, and try to digest some odd share of this or another piece of late Ruskin: its too-intimate intellectual epistolary to the discontinuous present vis-a-vis surgical/merciful relic- and steam-reading will make you look differently.

Edwin Torres | The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker | Roof, 2002

A good loud time, visually and sonically, whose bombast has to be cherished given current contexts of shock and anti-blast labor made mild.

Rodrigo Toscano | Postcard Poems | Broadsides making up section of book in progress for Krupskaya, 2003

Post-Poundian play on modes of inscription monumental and ephemeral, taking a stab at time as linguistic/historical jam (unlike his previous works broken into shorter or longer lines), addressing Tacitus, Horace, Cicero, Lucretius, Frontinus Architect, & etc.: "Hic tamen nevertheless four ferociously kool and bespectacled and be-pistollèd up the kazoot hominem representing not the universality of values but the universality of valuation...."

Jalal Toufic | Forthcoming | Atelos, 2001

I don't have access to my notes on this latest from writer, video artist, film theorist Toufic. Suffice it to say that it has held up to the “in-progress” state for six months or so — I mean I've held it there, wanting each piece to last.

Andrea Zanzotto | Sovrimpressioni [Superimpressions] | Mondadori, 2001

Continues to sing, dialect-tic-ically, of farming and hostelry & “del gnentintut che l'é stat al jeri,” or “of the little-or-null that was yesterday.” Within our “Apocolocíntosi” or “Apocalosynthesis,” those idiolects cleaving most stubbornly to the local — terrain and tongue — at centrifugal core tend not only to ground but to suprarelevance at every point, wherever it is.

Jen Scappettone lives and "works" in Berkeley, and sometimes in Venice.

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Kevin Killian

Rodrigo Toscano | Platform | Atelos, 2003

Atelos keeps coming out with bigger and bigger books, no more slim volumes of gilded verse anymore, now we are issuing doorstops and Henry Moores. But, Toscano has delivered on the early promise we saw way back when and he is a walking compendium of everything I want from poetry now: the fierce intelligence (maybe I don't mean "fierce" as much as "feisty"), the assured and yet jittery mastery of all kinds of lengths of line and stanza, the social protest and depth of emotion that I need to, I don't know, be a meaning person.

Yedda Morrison | Crop | Kelsey St.

I wrote a big blurb for Morrison's book that I don't know if they'll use, an extravagant one predicting that poetry will change forever once the book is released. I hope everyone picks it up. The only thing I don't like is the title, I wish it were called "The Cherry Pickers" instead. "Crop" makes me feel kind of cropped, of the moment, afloat. Plus remember when Truffaut talked about the French filmmakers' adage, don't call your film Whatever of the Night, "la Nuit," because it sounded too similar to "L'Ennui" thus giving an opening to unfavorable reviewers. Plus ca change, Yedda Morrison! But, you're the best.

Derek McCormack | The Haunted Hillbilly | ECW

Not a book of poetry per se, in fact a kind of novel, but a great work of genius that will appeal to poets I feel sure. McCormack is to world literature as Cormac McCarthy is to US literature, except more inventive and with a stronger narrative voice one can't get out of one's head. This book is an exploration of the homosexual cult of menswear's designers and how they changed country music by putting gold lame suits on Hank Williams Sr.

George Stanley | A Tall, Serious Girl | Qua, 2003

Well, here's another book I wrote a blurb for, so you know I'm willing to speak up for the downtrodden. He, George, has been criminally overlooked in the history of contemporary poetry, but if this book could get out there I think people would sit up and pay attention, incidentally rewriting the canon. Okay, so he emigrated, okay, so he's in this nomadic position of being rejected or at any rate not totally accepted by two nations. Plus, he spent all those years up in the wilderness of Terrace, why it's a wonder he's alive to tell the tale. Like Ivan Denisovich. But to sum it all up, for many of us this book IS the book of the year and the greatest discovery to boot.

Cedar Sigo | Selected Writings | Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003

Cedar is a young poet I met at Naropa a few years back, then very heavily into Robert Creeley's poetics, then via Irving Rosenthal and John Wieners he entered an Auerhahn, druggy, pathetic (in the best way) fugue state of lyric abstraction and gritty urban detail. Immersion in Cedar Sigo's work produces heady results akin to those I remember feeling when first reading (1960s) Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers.

Elizabeth Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003

What the devil is up with Burning Deck, the cover for Willis' book is so out of this world! Rosmarie Waldrop assures me it was a one time thing only. Anyhow you'll see it and know what I mean, good work Jeff Clark. Turneresque itself strikes me as Elizabeth Willis' best book yet, and her most book-like book (cohesive, stretchy, everything that makes a poetry manuscript hold together) due to relentless application of Turner standards across a wide variety of poetic material.

Daniel Kane | All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene of the 1960s | U of California

I would have reviewed this book at greater length but just try to get a free copy out of the publicists at Cal! They make you feel like pond scum. There's only so many times I'll call their office to be switched over from person to person and told to state my case to each one. "But I AM Kevin Killian," "Who?" I name all my credentials and then some others stolen from Greil Marcus, etc., and they're still witheringly icy on the phone. "You say you want a review copy?" As though it were the Hope Diamond. Anyhow, Kane's book is terrific in a lot of ways, and the CD is a nice touch too, but maybe I'm just too skeptical and I wind up less convinced than before that the 2nd Generation NY School Poets were all that. Then more charitably I'm doubting my own judgment, voices quarrelling within me, "They're great," "Second rate," "You're like, tenth rate and you're just bitter because those publicists didn't recognize your name." So, get it and judge for yourself.

Comment I've read and liked so many books I forget what else stands out. Here's the space where I should also talk about the new Krupskaya books that come out this summer... But I won't. And also to recommend my own new book (Island of Lost Souls) and Dodie's book too (Fat Chance) both from Nomados Books... But I won't. And also to salute the winners of Small Press Traffic's Book of the Year awards for 2002, but I won't because not all of them have been tabulated so far. Oh I remember one final book that is also terrific, a book about which I've already written a bit, Anselm Berrigan's latest book Zero Star Hotel (from Roof Books). As far as I can see, 2003 is already a annus marvelitus for poetry and quite an improvement over the slim pickins of 2002... I don't know, what does everyone else say? People are talking about Jen Hofer's anthology of Mexican women poets, but how would I know if it's good or not? Might as well ask the moon, about the crying game.

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Craig Watson

Elizabeth Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003

"The lost highway of ornament fades into origin. Shipwrecks return like magnets to their builders."

"The martyr trades her wings for a day at the beach, but who can blame her? You can't reform a lighthouse."

Ted Pearson | Songs Aside | Past Tents, 2003

"And so they came /  to the shining city // the burning city /  the entropic city // an arcanum devoted /  to punishing choices // as ingress of fact / as desolation."

Susan M. Schultz | No guns, no durian | Tinfish, 2003

"Adoption adapts nature into construct, intervening in myths of origin, the rivers of the breast."

"[John Ashcroft, he do the police n many voices.
The enforcer, Miss Clavel, goes faster and faster
as her minions gather before the first with the heroic
dog who saved Madeline's ass from the Seine.]

Elizabeth Robinson | Pure Descent | Sun & Moon, 2003

The key is in the lock, but
that signifies only interruption.

Keith Waldrop | The House Seen from Nowhere | Litmus, 2002

I'm the one who's
running out

and then

time's
on its own

Craig Watson is the author, most recently, of True News and Free Will. With Michael Gizzi, he publishes Qua Books.

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Peter Gizzi

Anselm Berrigan | Zero Star Hotel | Edge Books, 2002

Lee Ann Brown | The Sleep That Changed Everything | Wesleyan UP, 2003

Lisa Jarnot | Ring of Fire | Zoland Books, 2001

Julie Kalendek | Our Fortunes | Burning Deck, 2003

Mark McMorris | The Blaze of the Poui | Georgia UP, 2003

Jennifer Moxley | The Sense Record | Edge Books, 2002

Pam Rehm | Saving Bonds | The Cultural Society, 2002

Michael Scharf | Vérité | Ubu Editions, 2002

Juliana Spahr | Fuck You, Aloha, I Love You | Wesleyan UP, 2001

Rod Smith | The Good House | Spectacular Books, 2001

Elizabeth Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003

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Benjamin Friedlander

Here are eleven titles that kept me occupied over the last year. I regretfully left out another eleven that I cared for just as much, and I arbitrarily excluded the seven I blurbed or otherwise wrote about elsewhere.*

Rae Armantrout | The Pretext | Green Integer, 2001

I think of Rae's work as a kind of "Jumble" for pissed-off intellectuals, but without the satisfaction of a single solution. In a better world, it would be distributed for free in holding cells and waiting rooms. But of course, if this were a better world her work would lose much of its purpose. I feel a certain kinship in that.

Paula Bennett | Poets and the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900 | Princeton UP, 2003

I acquired this just as I was leaving town for the summer and was only able to read bits and pieces. But Bennett's 1997 Blackwell anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Woman Poets, is the quirkiest and most learned of several on the same or similar themes, and the present book has the virtue of building on that research as well as on an astonishing collective re-imagination of nineteenth-century American poetry begun by feminist scholars in the 1970s but adopted since then by the field at large. This book looks to be a major push forward.

Stephen Burt | Randall Jarrell and His Age | Columbia UP, 2003

Jarrell is a poet I took up and loved with the accidental and oblivious taste of high school, then forgot about for twenty years. When I rediscovered him a few years ago, it was with a deep but embarrassed affection. His faults are obvious enough, but his strengths are entirely his own, and precious for those of us who care for them. Burt's book follows superb studies by Richard Flynn and Thomas Travisano (and a fine appreciation by Ellen Bryant Voigt) in reestablishing Jarrell's reputation on a basis other than his criticism. The particular value of this book is its thorough engagement with the unpublished papers and Burt's detailed identification of Jarrell's intellectual projects. The title, in other words, is a misnomer: the book isn't really about Jarrell's "Age," but about his poetics—and so much the better.

John Caputo | On Religion | Routledge, 2001

My favorite of the many bite-sized monographs flooding the market in recent years: I even like the dorky use of Robert Duvall's The Apostle. It's a book that makes me want to write one of my own, so I look at it from time to time for cues and inspiration.

Elaine Equi | The Cloud of Knowable Things | Coffee House, 2003

No one really believes that intelligence has to be ponderous or grace without point. But why then is so much intelligent or graceful writing so ponderous and pointless? Elaine is a treasure, not treasured nearly enough.

Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan | Swoon | Granary Books, 2001

I'd love this book if only for the chance it gives me to lecture my students about the crazy ways my friends conduct their private lives. It's also, I think, the most meaningful book so far on the Internet. The first half—leading up to and through Nada's initial meetings with Gary—is utterly fascinating even after three readings. The last half is a letdown, but the letdown is itself worth pondering for its insight into the perennial question, "What next?"

Allen Grossman | How to Do Things With Tears | New Directions, 2001

Ridiculous in places, but the only serious attempt I know of to respond with equal intensity to two primary and contradictory theses regarding poetry "after Auschwitz": that one must speak about what happened, lest its memory die with the survivors; and that one must approach it with a language approximating silence, lest speech recuperate what happened as a mere material for art, or—much worse—render it into something too banal for art.

Adrienne Kennedy | The Adrienne Kennedy Reader | U of Minnesota P, 2001

I've yet to read "She Talks to Beethoven" without tears streaming down my face—it's like a doctor tapping my knee with a hammer. The "Reader" in question is a Collected Plays supplemented with several valuable prose pieces, most notably a quasi-fictional "Letter to My Students on My Sixty-first Birthday," which extends the Alexander cycle deeper into the psycho-historical terrain that makes Kennedy the most powerful writer of our time.

Ruth Kluger | Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered | Feminist Press, 2001

Not so much a translation as a re-imagination of her 1992 Weiter Leben: Eine Jugend, and as much an essay (or better: disputation) as an autobiography. Which is what we need at this late date: not another recitation of facts, but a wrestling with the fact's afterlife. I've never read a book that captures so well the personality of certain survivors I've known, or attends so rigorously to the temporal displacement we mean by the word "survival." For a sample of Kluger's work with some of the same qualities, see her essay on SHOAH, published under the name Ruth K. Angress and now available online: http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/resources/books/annual3/chap10.html

James Merrill | Collected Poems | Knopf, 2001

Merrill's work is roundly detested by a great many poets I admire and by a great many fools who write about the world as if they were spying through a keyhole. When I first began reading him—about six years ago—I felt with a pang that I'd let my craft atrophy, and that I'd become, in spite of myself, another one of those peeping toms. Now, whenever I come home from a lousy reading, I open my Merrill to remind myself why I care about this art, and what I might use it to accomplish.

Marianne Moore | Becoming Marianne Moore: Early Poems 1907-1924 | Ed. Robin G. Schulze | University of California Press, 2002

The heart of this book is Observations, one of the two or three most perfect volumes of poetry published in English in the twentieth century, and for all practical purposes an unread book since 1935 (when Moore's Selected Poems, the basis for all subsequent editions, appeared under T. S. Eliot's aegis). Schulze's presentation of this material is impeccable: the book is a model of contemporary textual scholarship, reproducing photographically all of Moore's early publications, leaving intact all the interesting and even essential "bibliographic codes" (to borrow Jerome McGann's phrase) that make it such a perpetual joy to visit libraries, archives, and old bookshops. Expensive, but worth it.

* Here are the seven I wrote about elsewhere, smuggled in as a list: Tony Brinkley, Stalin's Eyes; Daniel Bouchard, Diminutive Revolutions; Dan Davidson, Culture; Philip Jenks, On the Cave You Live In; Joanne Kyger, Again; Paul Muldoon, Poems; Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment.

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Eileen Tabios

Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue, eds. | The World in Time & Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time | Talisman, 2001

Barry Schwabsky | Opera: Poems 1981-2002 | Meritage, 2003

Gabriela Mistral | Selected Prose and Prose-Poems | Ed. and trans. Stephen Tabscott | U of Texas, 2002

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge | Nest | Kelsey St., 2003

Leza Lowitz | Yoga Poems | Stone Bridge, 2000

Barbara J. Pulmano Reyes | Gravities of Center | Arkipelago, 2003

kari edwards | a day in the life of p. | subpress, 2002

David Mura | Songs for Uncle Tom, Tonto, and Mr. Motto | U of Michigan, 2002

Christian Bök | Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science | Northwestern UP, 2002

Sharon Dolin | Serious Pink | Marsh Hawk, 2003

Paul Celan | Selected Poems and Prose | Trans. John Felstiner | Norton, 2001

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Alan Gilbert

Currently Provisional Top Ten List (Poetry & Otherwise)

DJ/rupture | Minesweeper Suite | Tigerbeat 6, 2002

If cultural syncretism in the 21st century sounds anything like this, then various sectarianisms inherited from the 20th century have serious cause for concern.

Julian LaVerdiere | Lost Cornerstone | Lehmann Maupin, 2003

A replica of a 5' tall eagle from the façade of New York City's original Penn Station swings through space, breathlessly reflecting the brute force of current US imperial aggressions.

Ammiel Alcalay | From the Warring Factions | Beyond Baroque, 2002

It may take poets a few years to catch up with the methodology employed in Alcalay's book.

Muslimgauze | Hummus | Soleilmoon, 2002

I put it on every time Bush gives a speech. And every time I think about Bush giving a speech.

Muhammad Said al-Sahaf (Iraqi Information Minister) | various proclamations | Baghdad, Spring 2003

As US troops were rolling into Baghdad, al-Sahaf was proclaiming in solicitous yet belligerent press conferences that: 'I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad,' along with even more memorable quotes such as, 'I now inform you that you are too far from reality,' and, 'We're going to drag the drunken junkie nose of Bush through Iraq's desert, him and his follower dog Blair.' The ravings of a lunatic? Surrealist theater? Or a brilliantly self-reflexive exposure of the workings of ideology and propaganda, as well as the media's complicity with, and manufacture of, their embedded lies?

David Rees | Get Your War On | Soft Skull, 2002

'Oh yeah! Operation: Enduring Freedom is in the house!' 'Oh yeah! Operation: Enduring Our Freedom is in the motherfucking house!' 'Yes! Operation: Enduring Our Freedom To Bomb The Living Fuck Out Of You is in the house!!!'

Bowery Poetry Club | 308 Bowery Street, New York City | since 2002

Proprietor Bob Holman's pluralistic vision proves that independent poetry can thrive outside of the MLAs, AWPs, MFAs, and the deadening effects of workshop experimentalism.

World Bank, WTO, IMF, G8, and anti-war protests | Various locations, ongoing

Quite possibly the largest combined series of worldwide public demonstrations in history are one of the few reasons to be hopeful during what is quite possibly one of the darkest points in world history (economically, socially, and environmentally), only further aggravated by the replacement of Cold War detente with the clash of Christian and Islamic eschatology.

Walid Ra'ad | The Atlas Group | Whitney Biennial, Documenta 11 (2002), Venice Biennale (2003)

Raíad's sophisticated and formally pristine conceptual documentary project focusing on the Lebanese Civil War reveals him to be one of the most compelling visual artists working today.

Sophie Aster Prevallet | born 18 April 2003

'There will be no other words in the world / But those our children speak' (George Oppen, 'Sara in Her Father's Arms').

Alan Gilbert's writings on poetry, art, culture, and politics have appeared in a variety of publications, as have his poems. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Noah Eli Gordon

John Godfrey | Push the Mule | The Figures, 2000

These long prose poems eke out a wounded masculinity from the twisting musculature of every sentence.

Michael Friedman | Species | The Figures, 2000

Gestural and witty, small prose poems whose deceptive surface clarity is muddied via subtle parataxis.

Lisa Jarnot | Ring of Fire | Zoland, 2001

This book just might be the brightest star over the battlefield us 20something poets are just beginning to get our bearings on, mostly because it feels like a re-centering of the numerous routes avant-garde poetries have taken in regards to the "I" in the last 50 years.

Albert Mobilio | Me with Animal Towering | Black Square / Hammer, 2002

Mixes poems having gone through the syntax grinder, where "we hydrogenate the voice" with the best parts of surrealism, a pinch of abstraction and a straightforward tough talker.

Rosmarie Waldrop | Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes | Wesleyan, 2002

A beautiful book! Part memoir, part biography, part explication of the poems, part exploration of the problems of translation, but all done with an endearing love.

Anselm Berrigan | Zero Star Hotel | Edge, 2002

Five Stars!!!

Ann Lauterbach | If in Time: Selected Poems, 1975-2000 | Penguin, 2001

The only poet I can think of who is able to make adjective traffic pay off.

David Shapiro | A Burning Interior | Overlook, 2002

There is a variance here between Shapiroís reverent erasures and the more truncated musicality of the long title poem.

Fanny Howe | Selected Poems | U of California, 2000

Everything I ever wanted to know about line breaks I learned from Fanny Howe.

Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh, eds. | The Angel Hair Anthology | Granary, 2001

Ample evidence of the importance of community and a history lesson for us youngsters.

Michael Palmer | The Promises of Glass | New Directions, 2000

Still life with Epistemology and Bits of Mirror—Palmer consistently pokes holes in both the real and imagined world until it is unclear which is which is which is.

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Juliana Spahr

I've fallen off the reading map due to writing criticism (isn't it funny how they are contradictory?), but here are some thoughts...

Dan Beachy Quick | North True South Bright | Alice James, 2003

The back compares it to Hopkins, but the real debt seems to be to Susan Howe. The poems are a little more conventionally lyrical than Howe's work, but similar interests in crossed out lines and fragmented words and Rowlandson and Hutchinson (and how to make sense of America's history of contact--or perhaps an exploration of how it does not make sense and tears things apart).

Ernesto Cardenal | Zero Hour | New Directions, 1980

I'm just getting around to this years late. Still trying to think my way through what documentary poems might be and how they might work. At moments these ring false (too declaratory; too easy?; not sure what it is). At other moments are fascinating.

Norma Cole | Spinoza in Her Youth | Omnidawn, 2002

It has taken me years to begin to understand Cole's references but I'm beginning to get it--getting it has something to do with relaxing into the work's mind--and I'm glad I stuck it out.

Lisa Kanae | Sista Tongue | Honolulu: Tinfish, 2002

Part personal essay, part history of pidgin, part defense of the pidgin writing scene. I tend to read the essay as a reply to the complaints of racism and exclusion in the pidgin lit scene made by critics such as Candace Fujikane and Rodney Morales even though the book does not directly engage the critcs.

Walter Lew | Treadwinds | Wesleyan, 2002

Wild and wacky; polylingual and perverse.

Hoa Nguyen | Your Ancient See Through | Subpress, 2002 | Chosen for Subpress by Anselm Berrigan (disclaimer: I am also a member
of Subpress).

Tight, often nasty little poems. They completely weird me out. Which is what is good about them. They seem almost without influence, as if they have sprung from Nguyen's head fully formed.

James Thomas Stevens | Combing the Snakes from His Hair | U of Michigan, 2002

His work is also frequently an exploration of America's history of contact, but from a Mohawk perspective. Especially interesting: "A Half-breed's Guide to the Use of Native Plants."

Robert Sullivan | Captain Cook in the Underworld | Aukland U, 2003

A libretto by Maori poet about the arrival of Cook told through/as the Orpheus myth. Sullivan is writing some of the most accomplished mixes of lyric and cultural writing in the Pacific.

Lee Tonouchi | Living Pidgin | Tinfish, 2002

Short talks and concrete poems on pidgin. Tonouchi, calls himself da pidgin guerilla, is also tireless in his defenses of pidgin.

Truong Tran | Dust and Conscience | Apogee, 2002

Something about what Silliman deemed the "new sentence" seems have allowed it to become an ideal form often used for exploring cultural complication (often immigrant or second generation but still immigrant identified experience). Beautiful and sharp and aestheticized exploration of self in cultures.

Craig Watson | True News | Instance, 2002

I'm a bigger fan of Free Will but this book is good also.

Elizabeth Willis | Turneresque | Burning Deck, 2003

Long awaited and lyrical. Don't read too fast or you'll miss the sense of humor that is so subtle and makes the poems last.

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Michael Scharf

Ammiel Alcalay | From the Warring Factions | Los Angeles: Beyond Baroque, 2002

Brent Hayes Edwards | The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism | Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003

Kiosk No. 2 | Edited by Gordon Hatfield, Sasha Steensen & Kyle Schlesinger | Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo, 2003

Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally | Edited by Romana Huk | Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003

Laura Moriarty | Spicer's City | Poetry New York/Meeting Eyes Bindery: New York, 1998

Marcel Proust | Swann's Way | Trans. Lydia Davis | New York: Penguin, 2003

Leslie Scalapino | Zither & Autobiography | Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003

Rod Smith | Music or Honesty | New York: Roof, 2003

Brian Kim Stefans | Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics | Berkeley: Atelos, 2003

Michael Taussig | The Nervous System | New York: Routledge, 1992

Rodrigo Toscano | Platform | Berkeley: Atelos, 2003

Comment | I'd place with Alcalay's volume listed above the following titles: Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001 by Benny Morris (New York: Vintage, 2001); The Next Jerusalem: Sharing the Divided City edited by Michael Sorkin (New York: Monacelli, 2002); The Politics of Collective Violence by Charles Tilly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Prisoner of Love by Jean Genet (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003 [1986]); A History of Arab Peoples by Albert Houari (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002 [1991]); Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews by Melvin Konner (New York: Viking, 2003 [forthcoming]).

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Rae Armantrout

Jenny Penberthy | Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works

Fanny Howe | Gone

Lisa Robertson | The Weather

Lydia Davis | Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

Harryette Mullen | Sleeping With The Dictionary

Jennifer Moxley | The Sense Record

Alice Notley | Disobedience

Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr | American Women Poets in the 21st Century

Lyn Hejinian | Slowly

Jordan Davis | Million Poem Journal

Elaine Equi | The Cloud of Knowable Things

Comment | I guess Jordan is the token male. It wasn't planned that way. If Perelman's Playing Bodies was out it would have been high on the list. And I know I will like Kit's new book, The Crave and Barrett's critical book — but I don't have those yet.

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Joshua Clover

Kevin Davies | "Lateral Argument" | The Alterran Poetry Assemblage 7.0 | December 2002 | http://members.rogers.com/alterra/davies.htm

I'm still trying figure out what the web is good for re poetry, beyond being a place to put it. It seems felicitous for long poems. When I read a long poem in a book or journal, I find that I skip ahead to see how far I have to go, and intensify my attention when I know I'm nearing the end. Online, I somehow find it easier to pay close attention to passages as they appear.

Juliana Spahr | Series of dated poems spanning 11/30/02-3/20/03 | Heard at reading and requested of author. They have been published all over: Shampoo, The Baffler, PoetsAgainstWar website, Village Voice, some journal at Chicago School of Art, and the anthology enough! (eds. Scalapino, London).

These made me really happy. It seems like a fulfillment of the promise of Spiderwasp. The application of lo-affect language to hi-affect concerns is a big trope these last several years (is this the opposite of archness?) but not always so motivated, or so expressive of something beyond the disparity itself. That these could (thusly?) bear equally the telos of being overt political engagements and love poems...I could not love these more.

"Zone" | Guillaume Apollinaire | Beckett trans. in Auster's Random House anth.

There are as many good ways to translate as to write poems blah blah blah. Twice as many bad ways. Still, I get the feeling you could teach an entire translation course using nothing but this poem, comparing Beckett to Revell and Fitts. Also, this is a good poem to read while washing the dishes.

Rem Koolhaas | "Junkspace" | October 100 | I think this is a fragment of a larger piece or aggregate

As architectural writing, dull and redundant; one of my favorite poems of last year. Perhaps unconsciously influenced by the Atelos project, I am more and more likely to get excited by poetics found in non-poems. Similarly: "Theory of Distraction," Walter Benjamin (Selected Writings Volume 3, Harvard 2003), and filmscript for In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni, Guy Debord (Pelagian Press).

Ed Roberson | Atmospheric Conditions | Sun & Moon, 2000

Ange Mlinko | A Book Called Odile | to be published at some point in book form by The Germ

Missy Elliott | Under Construction

Much more liberating than being under erasure.

Durs Grunbein | Various poems | Trans. Rosemarie Waldrop

He's a German poet. Someone sent me a bunch of xeroxes last fall; I guess some or all were from Chicago Review.

David Buuck | "Stanzas in Mediation" | ongoing project, requested of author; a part is in enough!, eds. Scalapino & London

Poetry blogs

Don't these exist, at a superstructural level, so that when poets google themselves, they get more hits?

Andreas Gursky exhibition | SFMoMA | 2003

I find that the psychic labor of many major exhibitions involves balancing the aesthetic pleasure of the stuff, and the embarrassment with my own trendiness. It's sort of like being really wowed by some scenic place you're visiting, all the while devising in the back of your mind a rationale for why you're not like all the other gawkers, who are just tourists.

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Pam Brown

Kate Lilley | Versary | Salt

Kate Lilley's poetry is resolutely 'literary' and although it's probably preferable to have some knowledge of rhetoric, semiotics, and postmodernism it's also quite possible that you can get a huge variety of pleasures from reading Versary whether or not you know anything at all about poetics and its influences. read full review here

Ron Silliman | Tjanting | Salt (rpt.)

Breathlessly, seamlessly exciting. You can almost see synaptic flashes as you read. Each wordplay, thought, joke, sentence and phrase is express delivered. Ron Silliman avoids the word-salad effect that writing techniques like his can sometimes have. This seems to be due to his apparent ease of making language connect rather than being merely assembled. This work is dense, conceptual and yet more condensed than Lorine Niedecker's famous "condensery". Tjanting makes John Ashbery's poetry seem dimmer-switched to low. For me, this is a brilliant book to read.

Rod Mengham and Glen Phillips, eds. | Fairly Obsessive: Essays on the Works of John Kinsella | Fremantle Arts Centre Press

The Western Australian U.K./U.S.A.-based poet John Kinsella has raced into a slot in 21st Century English-language poetry and poetics like a new millennium rocket. This collection of essays attempts to chart his quixotic trajectory and his poetic multiple personality –as a pastoral poet, a traditionalist, a subversive, a post-modernist and so on. In the main, it succeeds. Most perspicacious essays are by Ann Vickery on Kinsella and screen memory – the effect and use of media in his poems and on his work as a "post pastoralist" in "The Radnoti Poems". In his essay, Glen Phillips calls this work "neo-pastoralist". Other essays noted for their imaginative liveliness are by Michael Brennan, Peter Minter, Nigel Wheale on Kinsella’s seemingly amphetamine charged novel "Genre" and Xavier Pons on post-coloniality in Kinsella’s poetry. Amongst the eleven other contributors, there’s an essay from Marjorie Perloff and an interview with John Kinsella conducted by Rod Mengham. Energising food for the universal curriculum.

Bruce Dawe | Towards a War: Twelve Reflections | Picaro

Bruce Dawe has been a topical poet publishing his commentaries in poems in Australian newspapers and journals since the 1960s. This is a pamphlet released as part of the "debate" regarding the recent U.S.A.-led conflict in Iraq. The poems are solid, traditional (modernist), serious, troubled and, as could probably be expected by so grave a topic, they never really "lift-off". Bruce Dawe’s dark humour about Australian society is quite well-known but it’s not employed in this instance. A portion of the proceeds from sales will go to the Red Cross in aid of Iraq. A worthy project.

Pam Brown is the author of fourteen poetry collections. Her most recent titles are Text thing (Little Esther Books, 2002) and Dear Deliria : New and Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2003). Web site link here

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kari edwards

Rodrigo Toscano | Platform | Atelos, 2003

Very exciting, broke from and language...

Stephen Ratcliffe | Sound / (system) | Green Integer, 2002

A wonderful use of the pastiche.

Christine Hume | Musca Domestica | Beacon, 2000

I can not believe it has taken me this long to find this...

Jen Hofer | Slide Rule | Subpress, 2002

Jocelyn Saidenberg | Cusp | Kelsey St., 2001

Heather Fuller | Dovecote | Edge, 2002

kari edwards | a day in the life of p. | subpress, 2002

If no one else will tell you this is a must buy, then let me, what are you waiting for, go buy it now.

Brian Massumi | Parables for the Virtual | Duke, 2002

A must for any cyborg, poet, or human.

Aphex Twin | 26 Mixes for Crash | 2003

Wonderful, have not taken it off my cd player

Jonathan Bepler | Music for Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 | 2003

See the movie, see all of them 1-5, then get the sound track you will
see what I mean. You can only get the sound track at the Guggenheim
museum

Darren Wershler-Henry | The Tapeworm Foundry | 2000

A hand book for life or something...

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Robert Creeley

With caveat that this is 'right now' —:


C.D. Wright | Steal Away: Selected and New Poems

Tom Raworth | Collected Poems

Kenneth Rexroth | The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth

Sam Truitt | Vertical Elegies 5 The Section

George Stanley | A Tall, Serious Girl

Martin Espada | Alabanza, New and Selected Poems 1982-2002

Carolyn Forche |Blue Hour

Jaime Saenz | Immanent Vistor, Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz | Trans. Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander

Joanne Kyger | As Ever: Selected Poems

Fanny Howe | Gone

Anne Tardos | The Dik-dik's Solitude

Susan Howe | The Midnight

And now for the next eleven...

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