Juliana Spahr

"In a time of war, dirty air, missile worship when all oracles seem silenced, from every eco-lyric pore these fine auroras of This Connection of Everyone With Lungs have been streaming. Registering 9/11 as cellular rupture, this is a work of full globality which redeems our time, makes us remember all that poetry is capable of as form, frame, syntax linking air, earth, lung; what Emerson meant by lyric language as nothing less than externalization of planet's soul."—Rob Wilson, author of Waking in Seoul "By listing, by naming, the atrocities—the harrowing stats, the scary particulars—in our world-at-endless-war—we might at least exert control over our sanity and extend our mind and compassion to others. It is a connected universe as Spahr so forcefully and powerfully reminds us. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is a sustained and anaphoric meditation, a catharsis for our predicament."—Anne Waldman

Poems

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

Renewed poetry of struggle at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe--feminist, ferocious, and finally celebratory.

That Winter the Wolf Came

This book of "documentary poetics" is by an important up and coming female experimentalist.

Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You

Accretion, articulation, exploration, transformation, naming, sentiment, private and public property these are just a few of Juliana Spahr's interests. In this, her third collection of poetry, we find her performing her characteristic magic, turning these theoretical concerns into a poetic odyssey. From her first poem, written in Honolulu, Hawaii, to the last, written in Berkeley, California, about her childhood in Appalachia, Spahr takes us on a wild patchwork journey backwards and forwards in time and space, tracking change in ecology, society, economies, herself. Through a collage of ''found language'' a deep curiosity about place, and a restless intelligence, Spahr demonstrates the vibrant possibilities of an investigatory poetics. This verse is more inclusive than exclusive; consistently Spahr includes grape varietals, the shrinking of public beachfront in Hawaii, endangered plant, fish, and wildlife species, the melting of the polar ice caps, and comparative poverty rates in her eclectic repertoire. She also knows how to sing in the oldest tradition of poetry of loss, and her lament for nature is the most keen.

Well Then There Now

David  Buuck

In the age of Occupy, An Army of Lovers reasks the question, what is the relationship between poetry and politics?

An Army of Lovers

Taking her cue from W. E. B. Du Bois, Juliana Spahr explores how state interests have shaped U.S. literature. What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous or is escape from nations and nationalisms impossible? As her sobering study affirms, aesthetic resistance is easily domesticated.

Literary Resistance and State Containment

Du Bois's Telegram

The Transformation

A poetic memoir covering the years 1997-2001. It addresses a couple becoming three, a move to Hawaii, and a move to New York just in time for 9/11.

Response is a gathering of five works which together bring into play some of the very elements which allow us to utilize poetry's powers - open-endedness (option) and specificity, mindfulness and provocation, intelligence and an invitation to invention. It is possible to read the 'response' of the title in reference to the poems and to take them as answers to calls and queries from the world. But it is equally and simultaneously possible to regard the works as themselves incitements to response. Reading these edgy, beautiful, and smart works is not passive nor summary but 'in answer, ' and that, in turn, means that one reads them 'in excitement.'.

Response

Everybody's Autonomy is about reading and identity. Experimental texts empower the reader by encouraging self-governing approaches to reading and by placing the reader on equal footing with the author.

Connective Reading and Collective Identity

Everybody's Autonomy

Poetry. Australian ethnohistorian Greg Dening argues that there are two views that define the Pacific: a view from the sea (the view of those who arrived from elsewhere) and the view from the land (those who were already there). THINGS OF EACH POSSIBLE RELATION HASHING AGAINST ONE ANOTHER is a series of poems that opens with the view from the sea and ends with the view from the land and are about the ecological hashing that happens as these two views meet in Hawai'i.

Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another

Stephanie Young

Literary Nonfiction. Feminist Studies. Poetics. A MEGAPHONE collects a number of enactments that Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young did between the years of 2005-2007. In these enactments, they attempted to think with the playful dogmatism of a feminist tradition that they call "crotchless pants and a machine gun" (obviously referencing Valie Export) in order to locate what might still be useful today about the somewhat beleaguered "second wave" feminist traditions. To that end, Spahr and Young lectured in Oulipian slenderized baby talk about figures such as Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramovic; they counted the numbers of women and men and tansgendered people in various poetry anthologies; and they invited writers from outside the US to talk about being a writer where they live (over seventy-five writers from Puerto Rico to Morocco to Croatia to South Africa to Syria to Micronesia to Korea responded). Also included in A MEGAPHONE are discussions of that always contested relationship between feminism and "experimental" poetry by Julian T. Brolaski, E. Tracy Grinnell, Paul Foster Johnson, Christian Peet, Barbara Jane Reyes, Dale Smith, and A. E. Stallings. The book ends with a (soma)tic writing exercise from CAConrad, one designed to encourage readers and writers to create open, yet still meaningful, feminist alliances.

Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism

A Megaphone

Spiderwasp Or Literary Criticism

Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought. They move through concentric levels of association and embrace —from the space between the hands to the mesosphere and back again—touching everything in between. The book's focus shifts between local and global, public and private, individual and social. Everything gets in: through all five senses, through windows, between your sheets, under your skin.

Claudia Rankine

Any serious poet or lover of poetry will welcome this anthology which shows the rich diversity of perspectives in which women poets expand and contest the current state of the art.

Where Lyric Meets Language

American Women Poets in the 21st Century

Poetry in America is flourishing in this new millennium and asking serious questions of itself: Is writing marked by gender and if so, how? What does it mean to be experimental? How can lyric forms be authentic? This volume builds on the energetic tensions inherent in these questions, focusing on ten major American women poets whose collective work shows an incredible range of poetic practice. Each section of the book is devoted to a single poet and contains new poems; a brief "statement of poetics" by the poet herself in which she explores the forces — personal, aesthetic, political — informing her creative work; a critical essay on the poet's work; a biographical statement; and a bibliography listing works by and about the poet. Underscoring the dynamic give and take between poets and the culture at large, this anthology is indispensable for anyone interested in poetry, gender and the creative process. CONTRIBUTORS: Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lucie Brock Broido, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Harryette Mullen.

Juliana Spahr

Books

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