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.

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems (New California Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

SPAHR, Juliana

Poetry

University of California Press

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.

Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment

History & Criticism

Harvard University Press

Lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism 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. [Sample Poem] from ARS POETICA 1: CORAL To write poetry after Castle Bravo. Then to write poetry after 1500 feet. After high-quality steel frame buildings not completely collapsed, except all panels and roofs blown in. After 2,000 feet. After reinforced concrete buildings collapsed or standing but badly damaged. After 3,500 feet. After church buildings completely destroyed. After brick walls severely cracked. After 4,400 feet. After 5,300 feet. After roof tiles bubbled and melted. After 6,500 feet. After mass distortion of large steel buildings. To write the Cold War and doves. The Cold War and tapeworms. The Cold War and sails of ships. The Cold War and the steel of bridges. To write poetry after that. To write in a world with few nutrients, one that rocks back and forth. The same beginning in both the sea and the land. To write poetry that knows a hard, cup-shaped skeleton. And then poetry that knows the long, stinging tentacles capturing. Knows the water. The Atlantic and the Pacific. The connections between. The one moving into the other. To develop poetry in the stomach that then exits through the mouth which is the anus. To write poetry in the blue that is the absence of green. Light penetration. Whorls of tentacles. The slime earth too. Hunters and farmers. Shallow water. Few nutrients. High fecundity. Rapid growth. Multiarmed morphology and tube feet. To write tube feet. To write the exact place. Seaward slope place. Sea terrace place. Algal ridge place. Coral algal zone place. Seaward reef flat place. Islet or interisland reef crest place. Lagoon reef flat place. Lagoon terrace place. Lagoon floor or basin place. Coral knolls, pinnacle and patch reefs place. To write poetry after.

Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Wesleyan University Press

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

Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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.

An Army of Lovers

Buuck, David

Literary

City Lights Publishers

Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism

Spectacular Books

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

Palm Press

Testimony (Kindle County) [Paperback] [Jan 01, 1995] Spahr, Juliana

Genre Fiction

MEOW PRESS

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 (New American Poetry)

Sun & Moon Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by SPAHR, Juliana. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by SPAHR, Juliana

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by SPAHR, Juliana. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems (New California Poetry)

Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment

Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

An Army of Lovers

Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism

Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another

Testimony (Kindle County) [Paperback] [Jan 01, 1995] Spahr, Juliana

Response (New American Poetry)