Juliana Spahr - Böcker

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.

In 1956 W. E. B. Du Bois was denied a passport to attend the Présence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. So he sent the assembled a telegram. “Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe.” Taking seriously Du Bois’s allegation, Juliana Spahr breathes new life into age-old questions as she 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?Du Bois’s Telegram brings together a wide range of institutional forces implicated in literary production, paying special attention to three eras of writing that sought to defy political orthodoxies by contesting linguistic conventions: avant-garde modernism of the early twentieth century; social-movement writing of the 1960s and 1970s; and, in the twenty-first century, the profusion of English-language works incorporating languages other than English. Spahr shows how these literatures attempted to assert their autonomy, only to be shut down by FBI harassment or coopted by CIA and State Department propagandists. Liberal state allies such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations made writers complicit by funding multiculturalist works that celebrated diversity and assimilation while starving radical anti-imperial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist efforts.Spahr does not deny the exhilarations of politically engaged art. But her study affirms a sobering reality: aesthetic resistance is easily domesticated.

Lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism_x000D__x000D_During the time of an increasingly powerful alt-right which was also the time when species extinction was ever increasing, Juliana Spahr sat down to read Brecht. She was looking for an answer to Brecht's question about the dark times, about whether there will also be singing during the dark times. The answer that Brecht provides is that yes, that poets will sing of the dark times. In the six ars poeticas that Spahr writes, she sings of the dark times but also of coral, the pop song's possible liberation, and the love of comrades. She writes not only of the rich history of what politics and poetry have done with each other, but what they might yet do together._x000D__x000D_[Sample Poem]_x000D__x000D_from ARS POETICA 1: CORAL _x000D__x000D_To write poetry after Castle Bravo._x000D_Then to write poetry after 1500 feet._x000D_After high-quality steel frame buildings_x000D_not completely collapsed, except_x000D_all panels and roofs blown in._x000D_After 2,000 feet._x000D_After reinforced concrete buildings collapsed_x000D_or standing but badly damaged._x000D_After 3,500 feet._x000D_After church buildings completely destroyed._x000D_After brick walls severely cracked._x000D_After 4,400 feet._x000D_After 5,300 feet._x000D_After roof tiles bubbled and melted._x000D_After 6,500 feet._x000D_After mass distortion of large steel buildings._x000D_To write the Cold War and doves._x000D_The Cold War and tapeworms._x000D_The Cold War and sails of ships._x000D_The Cold War and the steel of bridges._x000D_To write poetry after that._x000D_To write in a world with few nutrients,_x000D_one that rocks back and forth._x000D_The same beginning in both the sea and the land._x000D_To write poetry that knows a hard, cup-shaped skeleton._x000D_And then poetry that knows_x000D_the long, stinging tentacles capturing._x000D_Knows the water._x000D_The Atlantic and the Pacific._x000D_The connections between._x000D_The one moving into the other._x000D_To develop poetry in the stomach_x000D_that then exits through the mouth_x000D_which is the anus._x000D_To write poetry in the blue_x000D_that is the absence of green._x000D_Light penetration._x000D_Whorls of tentacles._x000D_The slime earth too._x000D_Hunters and farmers._x000D_Shallow water._x000D_Few nutrients._x000D_High fecundity._x000D_Rapid growth._x000D_Multiarmed morphology and tube feet._x000D_To write tube feet._x000D_To write the exact place._x000D_Seaward slope place._x000D_Sea terrace place._x000D_Algal ridge place._x000D_Coral algal zone place._x000D_Seaward reef flat place._x000D_Islet or interisland reef crest place._x000D_Lagoon reef flat place._x000D_Lagoon terrace place._x000D_Lagoon floor or basin place._x000D_Coral knolls, pinnacle and patch reefs place._x000D_To write poetry after.

Juliana Spahr uses details to explore Hawai'i's politics of location and her own place in it as an outsider: a hard-core show where the singer shouts out "fuck you-aloha-I love you" over and over; the pidgin word 'da kine;' native Hawaiian rights to gathering; Palolo stream; the similarities and differences between hotel rooms and conference rooms; and acrobats at a Las Vegas-style floor show in Waikiki. Spahr is attentive to specifics and she draws from documentary poetics in these five interconnected poems that move between lyricism, rhythmic repetition, and explanatory prose. Conceptually provocative and yet moving at the same time, Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You demands reading and re-reading.

"This experimental work is not for the faint of heart, but it is laced with meditations that will appeal to readers concerned with poetry's role in the world."--Publishers Weekly "I am fascinated by their attention to inequality, to questions of violence and community: something borne out by the collaboration itself."--Bhana Kapil's Best Books of 2013 on The Volta "An Army of Lovers explores the liminal spaces where cities and individuals come together and stand apart with strange, brainy grace."--Michelle Tea, author of Mermaid in Chelsea Creek "By means of a series of stylistically and tonally various prose segments (by turns reflexive and dialogic, ironic and depressive, unhinged and hallucinatory, wetly emotional and dryly wry, including a detournement of a Raymond Carver story), the book centers, emotionally, on the ebb and flow of what it calls 'struggle-force.' Signature drone strikes, torture, ecological collapse, environmental illness and chronic fatigue syndrome: it's all connected."--Miranda Mellis, Rain Taxi "The book offers many ways of approaching the age-old questions What makes something art and What makes someone a decent citizen, as well as (if not primarily) exploring the ways in which the answers to these questions might intersect. More impressively, it does so without being didactic and yet without being obscure, as so many efforts at high-concept art tend to be."--Evan Karp, SF Weekly "Fantastical, lyrical, whimsical and wildly experimental, An Army of Lovers is as serious as it is absurd."--Christopher Higgs, HTMLGIANT "Authors who co-write often produce two halves that refuse to coalesce, but East Bay poets Juliana Spahr and David Buuck fuse with fantastic results in this short experimental novel. It's the story of Demented Panda and Koki, two poets united by a desire to write politically engaged works. Wounded, bored, inspired and skeptical, they soldier on through a landscape of toxic spills, consumer excess, odd juxtapositions and trance states."--Georgia Rowe, San Jose Mercury News "Authors Spahr and Buuck, who appear in this novel as Bay Area poets 'Koki' and 'Demented Panda,' style it up all the way from magical realism to 'new journalism' and Raymond Carver Cathedralspeak, but it's the weary 'I can't go on. I'll go on' optimism at which wounded veterans of the army of lovers excel. Theirs is a rigorous book, and a book of marvels, with something funny, something painful, stirring on every page."--Kevin Killian, author of Spreadeagle "This picaresque story about the 'particular lostness' of poetry, the ways poems always win and the lives of self-described 'mediocre' poets is actually pretty hilarious! It's also smart, incisive and politically astute. Now, to the barricades!"--Rebecca Brown, author of American Romances: Essays An Army of Lovers begins with the story of two poets, Demented Panda and Koki, united in their desire to write politically engaged poetry at a time when poetry seems to have lost its ability to effect social change.Their first project is more than a failure, resulting in a spell that unleashes a torrent of raw sewage and surrealistic embodiments of consumerist excess and black site torture techniques. Subsequent chapters feature an experimental composer (Koki?) and a performance artist (Panda?) whose bodies are literally invaded with the ills of capitalism, manifested through leaking blisters and other maladies, as well as a radical remix of a Raymond Carver story, questioning "What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry." The novel concludes with Panda and Koki returning to the site of their failed collaboration to conjure up a more utopian vision of "an army of lovers." Fantastical, lyrical, whimsical and wildly experimental, An Army of Lovers is as serious as it is absurd.