ILX BOOKS OF THE 00s: THE RESULTS! (or: Ismael compiles his reading list, 2010-2019)

Basically all this means I can go with the intransigent opinions, but I haven't got a shred of experience to back them up (unless the expertise has been provided by alcohol), thus wd quickly be revealed exposed. This is no good for extended trolling.

& this absolutely otm. There are surprisingly often clear winners & losers in aggressive literary arguments, & it does often come down to who can actually talk concretely about the works in question. After many years getting caught out in the ring, I now need alcohol to drop the scruples & get to that 'No Haruki, let ME tell YOU a thing or two about Japanese literature' stage.

There's the answer to livening up this thread right there.

I'd like to see BookGeir confronted with a pile of pomo fiction. Sparks would start coming out of his ears and his head would spin round.

No, he breaks out the zings.

Just finished The Line of Beauty and adored it. But I can see how a TV adaptation wouldn't necessarily work. The joy of it is in Hollinghurst's eye for detail and human motivation and his ear for a turn of phrase.

Liked Heartbreaking Work at the time, being 10 years younger, recently bereaved myself and more tolerant of the cutesy, smart-alecky bullshit that would come to bedevil the 00s, but I can't imagine ever rereading it. His subsequent novel was horrible but I hear that his non-fiction books about Africa and Katrina are an improvement.

Re: House of Leaves, I don't see how it's important, or radical, or dissertation-worthy, but it's a fun way to tell a horror story. Channelling Eco, Calvino, Nabokov et al into a genre story with real scares was just enormously entertaining, and if for some people it acts as a gateway drug to other pomo fiction that's great. I'd imagine that encountering people who are really obsessed with it would get on my nerves, but if I'd read it when I was 19 maybe I'd have gone that route, who knows?

22. Pattern Recognition - William Gibson (2003)
(77 points, four votes)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_f1mNt1Xz9QQ/Sqkw28l6GwI/AAAAAAAAAX4/tkuG72uBsZQ/s400/20080515235626_pattern_recognition.jpg

EZ Snappin:
This is the first time Gibson seemed to love his characters as much as
his ideas, which made them and him all the better

woofwoofwoof:
I find Gibson so mysterious - like he's always got this great eye, and
scrubbed, precise style built on the eye and amazing cultural sense,
but I can pick up one book (eg Spook Country, All Tomorrow's Parties),
simply not give a shit and stop reading; then start Pattern
Recognition and just find it storming entertainment, great fun and
completely engaging. The forum addiction stuff should of course means
this wins.

c/d: pattern recognition
William Gibson C/D

"Pattern Recognition" is great. If you live in London, Tokyo or NYC and read message boards, you will love it.
― Simeon (Simeon), Thursday, January 30, 2003 5:30 PM (7 years ago)

I LOVE Pattern Recognition. It's set in the present day, but it still feels like the future when he's talking about iMac's and e-mail. Not that that's the point, it's just a great book...I can't tell if his writing has gotten better or if I can just appreciate it more now.
― Jordan (Jordan), Sunday, February 9, 2003 8:05 PM (7 years ago)

I sorry but I gotta disagree about Pattern Recognition... I am only about 80 pages in but I am *this* close to giving up, it is so shockingly badly written... I really liked Neuromancer and Mona Lisa, but PR just feels like he's way out of his depth. A few choice examples -
1. Appalling attention to detail (though I only have an uncorrected proof so maybe this will change), eg Bow Road changes into Bow Street mid-story
2. Set in London and Gibson clearly has no grasp of how the city works - he refers to Camden as Camden Town throughout (surely no-one really does this?!), but gives street names without the suffix, eg, "down Parkway and over to Aberdeen, the market street that runs it's single block into Camden." Has a bigwig character supposedly rolling in it living in Bow Quarter, oh dear.
3. Technological details are hamfisted - endless references to googling which come across very badly. On the plus side, the story revolves around an ILX-style online community which is pretty well observed.
4. The main character is supposedly fixated with logos to the extent that she has the buttons on her 501s filed down to remove branding - why the fuck doesn't she just buy them from George at Asda then?? no problems with evil logos then. Her motivations appeared to have no internal logic.
The whole thing just has the feel of something that your dad would write which you would roll your eyeballs at - a shame because the central premise (no spoilers) is fascinating, but I just can't get beyond the clunky prose.
Oh well, just my tuppenceworth.
― reclusive hero (reclusive hero), Thursday, February 13, 2003 2:23 PM (6 years ago)

it's great. started it late last night and am 222 pages into it already, would've been more but i had to go and sign on 8)
particularly fond of the cover and the way all the london places he mentions (apart from the vegan restaurant) are places i know well. and the way that every other page he'll just throw a phrase in that has never been coined before but which is just perfect and instantly recognisable ('Zaprudered', the whole 'mirror-world' thing...)
― koogs (koogs), Tuesday, May 20, 2003 5:43 PM (6 years ago)

Shit, I stopped reading him after Mona Lisa Overdrive, or was it maybe a bit of The Difference Engine. Sounds like a I shd give him another go. Neuromancer is amazing, nothing's quite had the same effect since.

Re: House of Leaves, I don't see how it's important, or radical, or dissertation-worthy, but it's a fun way to tell a horror story. Channelling Eco, Calvino, Nabokov et al into a genre story with real scares was just enormously entertaining, and if for some people it acts as a gateway drug to other pomo fiction that's great. I'd imagine that encountering people who are really obsessed with it would get on my nerves, but if I'd read it when I was 19 maybe I'd have gone that route, who knows?

I'll read it. But I remember when it came out -- the jacket copy seemed to have that 19-year-old reader in mind. Here is the ambitious formal writer of your own generation bursting onto the scene, seemed to be the message.

Did pick up his subsequent two-sided novel and quickly put it down as unreadable.

So glad Safe Area Gorazde placed so high!

Strangely I haven't read "A Heartbreaking Work..." but "What is the What" greatly exceeded my expectations; I think I said this about "The Road" too but I'll say the same thing here, a book with simple goals that meets them and is a well-made piece of fiction with all the traditional virtues .

"the cutesy, smart-alecky bullshit that would come to bedevil the 00s" — this is kind of egregious imo, given how big of an egg Eggers makes about sincerity and meaning it. Yeah, there's a deal of formal cuteness hanging around, but if you look back at the last decade and think 'formal cuteness' is any kind of cultural dominant you're looking through a very odd-shaped lens

woofcubed: i guess, if i wanted to defend it, i'd probably claim the 'meta stuff' in HoL is there to orient the scary-house story in the world of the reader maybe? it's been ages since i read it and i'm not a rabid fan, but it's another one that's, you know. quality first book.

i did find it randomly on a library shelf circa age 15 which probably helped.

Sorry, strange day today - I should put one up at least...

21. Pastoralia - George Saunders (2000)
(79 points, nine votes)

http://i49.tinypic.com/10zvms2.jpg

woof woofwoof:
My favourite recent American. There's a bit of life-lived in there -
snippiness, domestic annoyance, tiredness. A fun sense of empty modern
language too. Seems to enjoy playing with the vocab of corp-speak or
self-empowerment or w/e, rather than glumly satirising it. Humane -
that's what I like about him. Humane and funny.

george saunders

George Saunders has written a couple of short story collections ('CivilWarLand in Bad Decline' and 'Pastoralia') which deal with, erm, sad people working in theme parks. But don't let that put you off! He's very post-Barthelmian (but the humanist, later Barthelme), and Pynchon came out of hiding to rave about the first book. But don't let that you put off either! He has real heart: he's very funny and touching and poignant, and writes about the way humans bump against corporations and corporate language in a way I don't think anyone else really does. He seems to be feeling towards writing a novel, but (like Don B) never seems to quite get there. There's a terrific piece '4 institutional monologues', which was in one of the boxed McSwy's, which may be the best thing he's done. He's also written a kid's book 'The very persistent gappers of fipp' or something - I've never seen it, but Andrew L probably has a copy : )
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Thursday, November 14, 2002 9:35 PM (7 years ago)

anyway, i feel i should explain the george saunders thing. i started a few weeks ago with the freestanding novella about GWBush, which someone gave me for christmas. and i hated it. funny and inventive, but infuriatingly constricted by its crazy simplified politics (or whatever we're supposed to call these sorts of dumbed-down "ideas about stuff"). then i read the braindead megaphone, which the same someone gave me for the same holiday, and i LOVED parts of it, but hated others. i got the idea that he is what he complains about: megaphonic. an incredibly talented and clever writer in the sense that he seems to view the task set to him (engineer of gas stations), but also a frustratingly narrow and self-congratulatory thinker speaking exclusively to an audience who already shares his general POV. i know that sounds shitty: forgive me. weird thing is that i'm now hooked. have read in persuasion nation and am working on pastoralia. i'm sure that in the long run i will count him among my very favorite of contemporary writers, but for the moment, i am very much enjoying being annoyed by his "limitations". if that makes any sense. (plus this is also how i conduct the romance. fair warning.)
― Calling All Creeps! (contenderizer), Thursday, February 5, 2009 7:20 AM (1 year ago)

^ re: Saunders: I like a lot how Saunders latches on to a thought and spins a good yarn about it, losing his mind in some weird, fantastical short story that somehow sticks to a rigid idea. He sure is topical, but I think he uses about as much freedom as he can get vs. a nonfiction political thinker/writer. I do agree, though, that to a certain degree he's loudly voicing single ideas at some points, which can be shticky. A lot of contemporary writers (Franzen, Mitchell, Chabon) seem to stick out in my mind in that way - sometimes limited. I do like most of the books, though.
― throwbookatface (skygreenleopard), Thursday, February 5, 2009 8:00 AM (1 year ago)

saunders is great in person, don't miss him.
― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Monday, August 28, 2006 5:07 AM (3 years ago)

Read "Al Rooster" -- don't think it's as good as similar stuff from around Pastoralia, but I really don't think of the tone or the character as particularly cartoonish! I mean, that kind of character works best for Saunders when he's got a person who could seem cartoonish and he invests them a level of dignity, so they're constantly teetering around the possibilities of being noble and being pathetic, and he winds up with lines and turns that are either incredibly hilarious or incredibly sad and usually both at once. Not at lot of that in this one -- it's definitely not his best -- but there are plenty of bits that don't strike me as cartoonish at all, if you're accepting the character as someone extant a dignified.
(Out of curiosity, does something like this strike you as cartoonish?)
"The sickness of a kid was—the children were the future. He’d do anything
to help that kid. If one of the boys had a bent foot, he’d move heaven and
earth to get it fixed. He’d rob a bank. And if the boy was a girl, even worse.
Who’d ask a clubfoot or bentfoot or whatever to dance? There your
daughter sat, with her crutch, all dressed up, not dancing."
― nabisco, Thursday, February 5, 2009 7:30 PM (1 year ago)

it is cartoonish -- we see immediatly that the POV character is self-deluding, narcissistic and perhaps a bit simple-minded: telling himself nice though untrue things in order to sustain his ego. and it's cartoonish in that this simplification is meant to be funny (on that level it works: this is one of the story's best, funniest passages).
... there's something sentimental in the approach, something indie-schmindie. i mean, saunders seems to view sentimentality, hopefulness, and delusional comfort-lying as essential to the human experience, and i guess i agree with him there. but on the other hand, the baby-talk feels like device designed to short-circuit accusations of simplicity/sentimentality in the writing by declaratively foregrounding these qualities, making them the character attributes he's observing? (or something less cynical than that, but similar in effect...)
― Calling All Creeps! (contenderizer), Thursday, February 5, 2009 7:48 PM (1 year ago)

Yeah okay contenderizer I just disagree with you entirely on that point, and possibly in larger view-of-the-universe stuff. I find that quoted paragraph to be ... well, kinda flatly true, in exactly the terms many average people would think about it. And weighty and complex, really, if you allow the thought the dignity that's inherent in the thought! There's often a lot of funniness in the tone he uses to boil those things down, it's true, but for me it tends to be the funniness of recognition, the funniness of these things seeming shared.
― nabisco, Thursday, February 5, 2009 7:55 PM (1 year ago)

i get that, and agree that he accords "ordinary thought" a kind of awkward dignity, while not denying its ordinariness (in fact he plays up the ordinariness for laffs/bathos, which is a fine strategy, but it can get precious/cloying).
... i mean, the paragraph IS true, and lovely, and funny, and human in a smudgy kid-fingerprints on the fridge door sense. but you have to admit that he's also boxing his "al roosten" character into a neat little moral cubbyhole: "If one of the boys had a bent foot, he’d move heaven and earth to get it fixed. He’d rob a bank." al constructs an imaginary problem that he can imagine himself heroically solving -- but even his "heroic" solution is pathetically unrelated to reality. he's not gonna rob a bank. he wouldn't know how. he wouldn't even try. and i would find this charming if, by the end of the story, saunder's condemnation of roosten were not so crushingly complete.
... it's an example of what i meant at first when i said i was bothered by the cuteness in combination with the intimations of profundity. gentle cuteness on its own doesn't bother me at all, so long as it's well-executed. in "the secret life of walter mitty" (published almost exactly 70 years ago in the new yorker, weird), thurber presents us with no less cartoonish a character. but thurber's fondness for mitty and his lack of interest in moral judgement makes the cartoonishness inoffensive, even pleasant. plus, you know, the snappy writing.
... i get why one might want to turn that idea on its head, to show how cruelly thoughtless escapist self-involvement can be, the horrible character flaws it can paper over, but i didn't get anything out of the experience. it felt more sneery than edifying or entertaining. like a lite comedy version of one of those bug-crushing michael haneke movies.
― Calling All Creeps! (contenderizer), Thursday, February 5, 2009 8:59 PM (1 year ago)

safe area gorazde is > palestine?

Yes.

kind of surprised i. that certain things i voted for haven't come up yet ii. how many of these books i actually voted for

Today went a bit awry due to real-life commitments. I've decided to save the top twenty for next week, but in the meantime...

__________________________________
            INTERLUDE
__________________________________

Here's our quickfire graphic novel top, um, nine:

8g=. Death Note - Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata (2005-2007)
(eleven points)

http://i50.tinypic.com/25kjwuf.jpg

whoever was yakking about Death Note being addictive -- you were correct. I love how I'll buy any cack-handed plot development because, "oh, it's just manga."
― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, November 27, 2007 7:53 PM (2 years ago)

FOR THE RECORD:
GOOD MANGA = COCAINE
DEATH NOTE = CRACK
I warned you. I certainly hope, for the sake of your bank account, you're libraryin' it.
― R Baez, Tuesday, November 27, 2007 8:45 PM (2 years ago)

8g=. Scott Pilgrim - Brian Lee O'Malley (2004-2009)
(eleven points)

http://nerdiest-kids.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/scott_pilgrim.gif
http://www.radiomaru.com/comics/short/scott_pilgrim_promo_comic.jpg

Scott Pilgrim!

Okay, so after a couple of friends of mine had been talking up Scott Pilgrim (by Bryan Lee O'Malley, from Oni), I finally read the first two volumes, and OH DEAR GOD WOW. I can't remember the last time I've read something this much fun. I mean, it's basically your drippy twentysomething dating angst semiautobio-type thing--except that it's HILARIOUS. And has Bollywood-and-Nintendo-inspired kung fu scenes/dance numbers. And then at San Diego I saw at least two people wearing homemade Scott Pilgrim T-shirts.
Anyway. Anyone else here read it yet?
― Douglas (Douglas), Saturday, August 6, 2005 4:28 AM (4 years ago)

believe it or not, my name really is Scott Pilgrim. Search my name on yahoo for the hell of it one time and ran across this band with a song title with my name. Kinda crazy. I'm curious about who the Scott Pilgrim they refer to is.
― Scott Pilgrim, Friday, February 20, 2004 5:54 PM (5 years ago)

7g. Black Hole - Charles Burns (2005)
(thirteen points)

http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/images/0908/zeigler/fig10.jpg
http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/images/0908/zeigler/fig9.jpg

Charles Burns' Black Hole
Can I start a thread for Charles Burns' BLACK HOLE (and anticipation for the in development David Fincher movie), even if there's already one on I Love Comics?

I've always liked Charles Burns art(who doesn't) but never cared for his story-telling, but Black Hole, which is up to issue 10 or so I think, is totally brilliant. Dark, moody and not kitschy like some earlier stuff. The thread seems to be getting lost now so I'm waiting for the final issues hoping it all comes together brilliantly. In a recent nytimes magazine article about comics, the one with the Chester Brown strip on the cover, it is mentioned as "black hole, which many comics creators anxiously read in a way similar to how James' Joyce's Ulysses was when it was serialized."
So if you were turned off by older Burns stuff, really give Black Hole a chance, it is super creepy and wonderful.
― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Sunday, October 10, 2004 3:35 PM (5 years ago)

Solely on the recommendation of friends, I asked my parents for Charles Burns' Black Hole graphic novel.
They must've glanced through the book after they bought it, since Mom took her name off the gift tag and Dad's been giving me funny looks all day.
― Stephen X (Stephen X), Sunday, December 25, 2005 11:52 PM (4 years ago)

6g. Epileptic - David B (2002)
(twenty-four points)

http://images.nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/reviews/bookreview050110_250.jpg
http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2002/0206/epileptic_page0618.gif
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/01/22/books/davidb-moody-span.gif

David B.'s _Epileptic_ is seriously like the best graphic novel I've ever read. Amazing.
― Douglas, Thursday, December 5, 2002 2:54 PM (7 years ago)

David B.'s graphic novel Epileptic is one of the best comics I've ever read--really visually and narratively original.
― Douglas (Douglas), Sunday, May 22, 2005 3:38 PM (4 years ago)

It is a graphic NOVEL in the geuine sense of the word, a huge, moving story with the most incredible graphics ever. I cried and cried at the end of it. I recommend it very highly.
― Trayce, Monday, August 20, 2007 3:39 AM (2 years ago)

5g. Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
(thirty points)

http://firstsecondbooks.typepad.com/mainblog/images/2008/03/28/funhome.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_uxA7EsdWhsM/Swa3FY5BwcI/AAAAAAAAAX4/mjaKGHZB1TE/s1600/fun-home-uma-tragicomedia-em-quadrinhos-pag-23.jpg

4g. Bottomless Belly Button - Dash Shaw (2008)
(forty points)

http://images.nymag.com/arts/books/profiles/dashshaw080623_2_560B.gif
http://www.thefader.com/ys_assets/0007/3005/dash_2.jpg
http://i49.tinypic.com/2d9pi8p.jpg

Bottomless Bellybutton

absolutely loved it - great snowy day reads. I used to work part time at a comic book store in college back in late 80s early 90s and I'm kinda daunted by choices out there from both indies and majors - so reading good suggestion threads on the ILC board actually opened my wallet to some value - thanks again.
― BlackIronPrison, Thursday, January 8, 2009 5:35 PM (1 year ago)

It shares the same obsessive detailing of minutiae as Ware's --- every detail of each person's backstories, all the house plans, coded letters. Certainly not the draftsmanship of Ware's drawing (which I find kind of distracting sometimes, actually --- it took me a long time to realize (and then to believe) Jimmy Corrigan hadn't been put together in Illustrator), or his extreme condensation of detail in space.
Hence the Ches comparison: same kind of thing he does (or did early on) with a lot of negative space on the page; loose placement of panels; itchy, narrow lines. Also totes had a "Ed the Happy Clown" looseness & weirdness, but matched his more intimate stuff, too. Full of those tiny one-panel surprise epiphanies that throw everything into a different perspective, esp. that one look at the youngest brother as seen from the perspective of his girlfriend. So good.
I liked that he just allowed some of the characters to be dumb, everyday dumbies without casting aspersions.
― Abbott of the Trapezoid Monks (Abbott), Monday, 1 December 2008 23:07 (1 year ago)

3g. The Perry Bible Fellowship: Trial Of Colonel Sweeto And Other Stories - Nicholas Gurewitch (2008)
(forty-six points)

http://www.c-ville.com/Image/1948_WEB/PBF%20INT%20PG%20007%20B%20-%20Nice%20Shirt%20FNL_V1.jpg
http://thedailycrosshatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/pbf1.jpg

2g. The Complete Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi (2007)
(fifty-one points)

http://dcscorpiongirl.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/satrapi1.jpg
http://www.wellesley.edu/womensreview/archive/2004/09/persepolis_p1.gif

Yay Bottomless Belly Button!

"The Complete Persepolis" - a marvellous graphic novel! Nice interlude Ismael.

All 40 of those points are from me, like I said in the noms thread, I think it hasn't caught on bcz it is so NEW (young new artist, published really recently). If it had been released in 2002 I think it'd be seeing a lot more attention.

1g. Safe Area Goražde - Joe Sacco (2000)
(seventy-two points)

http://www.lambiek.net/artists/s/sacco/sacco_joe_the_fixer_2003.jpg

Phew! And if you liked that lot, here's the Best comic of the 00s nomination thread, which seems to still be at the nominations stage.

Another interlude - I'm half way through Updike's "Terrorist". It was first published in 2006 so it would have qualified for our poll if it had been nominated. Thus far it has been superb and has really created a convincing world which attempts to explain why some educated young people are drawn to extremism in our western societies. Without knowing it until now it's a book I've been waiting for ever since 9/11 and even more so since British born terrorists attacked their own capital city. In some ways I thought that McEwan's "Saturday" attempted a similar thing in relation to the British perception of the Iraq war but Updike's prose is a notch above even McEwan's accomplished writing. To be totally frank I'm in awe of Updike's craft. He combines excellent story-telling with fantastic poetic and insightful prose together with ideas transmitted through his characters which offer suggestions as to how to understand different sides' motivations and pathologies. He manages to do all this in a straightforward way which is not pretentious or condescending to the reader.

That's interesting, because I recall it getting pretty much across-the-board bad reviews. I haven't read it myself probably partly as a result of that, though I think I do own a copy (my library's getting a bit out-of-hand).

The first Updike I read was Couples and to be honest I found it a bit of a slog. It was such an unexpected joy to find the Rabbit books and discover how easy and natural they are. In a way they have also put me off investigating other Updike - I get that sometimes when I find an album by a band which is so perfect that I feel no need to hear anything else they've done (e.g. Television, Joy Division, Jane's Addiction).

I just remember reading that Updike hired a driver to drive him around NJ or wherever the action takes place in that book so he could look out the window as 'research.'

Rabbit Run was fantastic as are many of his early stories, but beyond that I never got Updike.

Yes, I'm somewhat surprised that "Terrorist" is so good (thus far) too. It has sat on my bookshelf since last summer and like Ismael I was nervous to start reading it since I thought it couldn't live up to Rabbit. It may not actually be quite as good as the Rabbit books but thus far it is still top notch. Another reason why I was sceptical about it is that I've been constantly let down by books on fundamentalism. We'll see if it keeps this high standard up to the end of the book...

""the cutesy, smart-alecky bullshit that would come to bedevil the 00s" — this is kind of egregious imo, given how big of an egg Eggers makes about sincerity and meaning it. Yeah, there's a deal of formal cuteness hanging around, but if you look back at the last decade and think 'formal cuteness' is any kind of cultural dominant you're looking through a very odd-shaped lens"

Egregious? Hmm. Not best-placed right now to go into detail but I don't think cutesy and sincere are opposed in Eggersworld. I'm not talking about cold-blooded formal experimentation here. In certain novels, music and indie (or faux indie movies) sincerity is surrounded with gimmicks, tweeness, strained wackiness and knowingness as if can't stand on its own - see White Teeth, Foer, Little Miss Sunshine, etc. I found it refreshing in HWOFSG because it was a bereavement memoir but less so elsewhere.

oh, i wouldn't deny that a vein of that stuff exists ... if you think it is unavoidable enough to describe as 'bedeviling' the decade you are consuming the wrong media imo

also that comic book list is like the reverse of the order it should be in

Y'know, I feel like a poetry countdown.

15p. Landing Light - Don Paterson (3 points)

You make for the bog, but then wisely decide 
that essaying a moonlit, lugubrious slash 
à la what-his-puss might not be such a great move, 
given it could take a Gödel or Fermier 
to work out the spatiotemporal consequence 
of that act...
-
To the academy's swift and unannounced inspection: 
this page knows nothing of its self-reflexion, 
its author-death, or its mise-en-abîme. 
Relax! Things are exactly as they seem. 
The charge of being clever, coy or cute 
I will not even bother to refute, 
there being no I to speak of.

14p. Elegy On A Toy Piano - Dean Young (6 points)

You don't need a pony
to connect you to the unseeable
or an airplane to connect you to the sky.

Necessary it is to love to live
and there are many manuals
but in all important ways
one is on one's own.

You need not cut off your hand.
No need to eat a bouquet.
Your head becomes a peach pit.
Your tongue a honeycomb.

Necessary it is to live to love,
to charge into the burning tower
then charge back out
and necessary it is to die.
Even for the trees, even for the pony
connecting you to what can't be grasped.

The injured gazelle falls behind the
herd. One last wild enjambment.

Because of the sores in his mouth,
the great poet struggles with a dumpling.
His work has enlarged the world
but the world is about to stop including him.
He is the tower the world runs out of.

When something becomes ash,
there's nothing you can do to turn it back.
About this, even diamonds do not lie.

13p. Jab - Mark Halliday (6 points)

Under my Administration
(in which each Cabinet member will have many, many long legal pads)

if you were standing frozen in sweated confusion
at the Personal Furnishings rack
in a giant department store five days before Christmas
wearing a woolly jacket that belonged to someone long gone
and trying not to seem dangerous
under silver and scarlet decorations with no conception
of adequate reply to tremendous departures

you'd be a notable American event.

12p. Second Space - Czeslaw Milosz (7 points)

Standing on flagstones of the sidewalk at the entrance to Hades 
Orpheus hunched in a gust of wind 
That tore at his coat, rolled past in waves of fog, 
Tossed the leaves of the trees. The headlights of cars 
Flared and dimmed in each succeeding wave.
-
Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
How will I live without you, my consoling one!
But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.

11p. The Ice Age - Paul Farley (8 points)

Dead fish in uniform, oblivious
to dinner-ladies’ sticks poking their ribs,
still wash up on my mind’s floor when it rains
in school hours. Blink if you remember this.
-
Your numbers fall and it’s tempting to think
you’re deserting our suburbs and estates
like your cousins at Pompeii; that when you return
to bathe in dust and build your nests again
in a roofless world where no one hears your cheeps,
only a starling’s modem mimicry
will remind you of how you once supplied
the incidental music of our lives.

10p. Hot White Andy - Keston Sutherland (9 points)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMTted_5tA

9p. Cold Calls - Christopher Logue (9 points)

Aphrodite (dressed
in grey silk lounge pyjamas piped with gold
and snakeskin flip-flops)
-
And now your bum!
Your Holy Bum! Your Sacred Bum!
The Bum of Paradise!
-
Your blubber-bummed wife with her gobstopper nipples
cannot stand Troy because Troy's Paris put her last
when we stripped off for him
-
Avoid humanity
Remember - I am God.
I see the bigger picture.

8p. American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (11 points)

Rae Armantrout “Generation”:

We know the story.

She turns
back to find her trail
devoured by birds.

The years; the
undergrowth.

-

Dean Young’s “Speck”:

What I have in common with the people of the future:
they don’t exist either.
What I have in common with people of the past:
Mother forgets me, I’m late for work.
Oh exquisite hammer, you liar.
The monkey do be loop da loop
in orthopedic shoes. Down monkey, down!
...

7p. Simon Armitage - Gawain and the Green Knight (11 points)

Gawain,' said the green knight, 'By God, I'm glad
the favour I've called for will fall from your fist.
You've perfectly repeated the promise we've made
and the terms of the contest are crystal clear.
Except for one thing: you must solemnly swear
that you'll seek me yourself; that you'll search me out
to the ends of the earth to earn the same blow
as you'll dole out today in this decorous hall.'
'But where will you be? Where's your abode?
You're a man of mystery, as God is my maker.
Which court do you come from and what are you called?
There is knowledge I need, including your name,
then by wit I'll work out the way to your door
and keep to our contract, so cross my heart.'
'But enough at New Year. It needs nothing more,'
said the war-man in green to worthy Gawain.
'I could tell you the truth once you've taken the blow;
if you smite me smartly I could spell out the facts
of my house and home and my name, if it helps,
then you'll pay me a visit and vouch for our pact.
Or if I keep quiet you might cope much better,
loafing and lounging here, looking no further. But
you stall!
Now grasp that gruesome axe
and show your striking style.'

woofwoofwoof:
This is a really nice fit: I'd given up on Armitage not long after
Book of Matches (thought he'd lost his spark, chasing posterity a bit,
and my own anti-indie turn didn't help me follow the indiest of
mainstream poets), but I think the Gawain-poet suited him: there's fun
in the story, and it shares Armitage's knack for understated flash
(showing off in a laconic tone, if you see what I'm getting at).