K. Lorraine Graham, Terminal Humming

K. Lorraine Graham, Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009).

Edge Books has got to be breaking some kind of record for the greatest number of stunning new books of poetry released within a year's time, what with recent titles by Kevin Davies, Cathy Eisenhower, Mel Nichols, Chris Nealon, and now K. Lorraine Graham, whose Terminal Humming came out about a week ago. All five of these books seem like shoo-ins for my 2009 Attention Span list when the time rolls around (my 2008 list is here).

The poems in Terminal Humming often take the form of an unregulated swirl of voices, as though from different sectors of some public space filled with furtive private dramas ... kind of like a humming terminal. Pronouns shift from singular to plural with breakneck suddenness, so that the speaker seems to be continually teleporting outside of her own embodied situation and observing its multiplication into disparate scenarios. This description makes it sound as if it could come off as a certain type of tired postmodernist "interrogation of the self," but it's much livelier than that. The emphasis is less on states of awareness than on unique actions and constellations of events--a continually shifting mise en scene for an unspecified production. From "An Attempt to Unleash Inner Badness Ends Thus":

As a person:

We are free and beautiful and assertive and we have a nice bike and nice bike gear. With organic vegetables we make jello even though we can't eat jello any more. Lob lob. Had several interactions, planning more, and also planning to put a roof on our cubicle. In this exercise I am alone, wearing flip flops or slippers, reading about Central Asian nomads, but I am not actually in Central Asia, unless it is the 1870s and I am a wealthy, virile and imperial anthropologist, sailing through the you-go-in-but-you-don't-come-out desert, Wagner on the gramophone, thinking of rooms of Rubens and breasts popping out of blouses, staring at the dunes.

As a thing:

In the supergirl outfit, I went to buy fruit to make a salad as a healthy dessert alternative to ice cream. In several fan fiction accounts supergirl and batwoman hook up. The supergirl cape is short and does not snag. What thing do we mean doing?

There has been a lot of talk about an emergent subgenre of "the Gurlesque" in the last few years, and in many cases I've felt either that the work attempting to effect it is superficially thematic and/or lacking in self-reflexive criticality, or that the truly interesting work the term is used to describe has been forced under its rubric by conceptual violence. I'm not sure if I'd want to call Graham's work Gurlesque (I believe she's somewhat skeptical about the category as well), but it certainly offers some of the most psychologically complex and arresting treatment I've seen of (among many other things) the concerns associated with that mode.

Bruce Sterling on Flarf in Wired

And Bruce Sterling on Flarf in Wired.

Franklin Bruno on Flarf in Bookforum

Franklin Bruno on Flarf in Bookforum.

David Buuck, The Shunt

David Buuck, The Shunt (Palm Press, 2009).

Stuttering, hemming, hawing, failing, flailing, and flopping, the comedian tries to coerce the narrative ideology of wartime into a punch line, but the punch is always awready pre-packed by Big Brother's Big Other. As Beckett almost observed, nothing is funnier (or sadder, depending on your tolerance for correct allegorical apprehension of permanent crisis) than someone trying repeatedly to slip on a flipping banana peel and getting shut down every time. The Shunt puts the "tic Alpo" back in "political poetry." Buy here or here.

Benjamin Friedlander on Rachel Loden and Nineteenth-Century American Poetry

Ben Friedlander discusses Rachel Loden's new book from Ahsahta, Dick of the Dead, beginning with this post at his recently launched American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and Dickinson blog.

Loden's book can be ordered here.

Craig Dworkin, Parse

Craig Dworkin's Parse (Atelos, 2008).

From the note at the back of the book:

Parse is a translation of Edwin A. Abbott's How To Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Principles of Scholarship to English Grammar. First published in 1874, the book played a leading role in the pedagogic debate over whether English should be analyzed as if it were Latin, and thousands of copies were printed as textbooks in the last quarter of the 19th century.

When I first came across the book, I was reminded of a confession by Gertrude Stein (another product of 1874): "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences." And so, of course, I parsed Abbott's book into its own idiosyncratic system of analysis.

What this means is that the bulk of the book consists of Abbott's sentences converted into descriptions of their own grammatical structure. Almost all the original content has been replaced by self-reflexive language like this:

Cardinal Roman Numeral period Preposition Noun parenthesis cardinal arabic numeral parenthesis colon dash

(I believe the capitalized words correspond to those that are capitalized in Abbott's text, but I'm not sure.)

At nearly 300 pages, even the most diehard conceptualist might balk at the prospect of actually reading Parse front to back, and in fact Kenny Goldsmith has used it as an example of conceptual texts that don't actually need to be read: the idea is enough. As appealing as I find this notion in many ways, I don't ultimately find it fully adequate to an assessment of Dworkin's work (or Goldsmith's, for that matter). What I think books like this do is ask us to reconsider what it means to read, and to find ways of actualizing new reading practices. This might mean something as simple as flipping around here and there throughout the book rather than reading straight through. It might mean reading one or more sections in an intense state of attention, and generalizing outward from such readings to a larger engagement with the total work. It might mean submitting for extended periods of time to the monotony of the governing structure, so that when there is some kind of variation in the pattern, it takes on an added value of surprise, as when Dworkin occasionally retains an entire phrase or sentence from Abbott without "translating" it, often creating the effect of editorial comment ("plural first person subjective case pronoun used in bad faith to suggest a camaraderie with the reader auxiliary verb adverb" etc.).

The truth is that the more one looks into Parse, the more one discovers in it--not "depths" in the familiar sense, necessarily, but details and complexities that activate underused and underappreciated areas of the intelligence. Highly recommended.