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University of California Press
$16.95
/ 76 pp / paper / isbn 0-520-24295-5
http://www.ucpress.edu
Review by Maureen N. McLane
William Carlos Williams famously wrote
that “it is
difficult/to get the news from poems,” but Juliana
Spahr’s latest book would seem to suggest otherwise.
An explicitly post-9/11 work, preoccupied with the run-up
to the war in Iraq, This Connection of Everyone with
Lungs consists of two poems, “Poem Written After
September 11, 2001,” and an extended, diaristic sequence
of fifteen dated movements, “Poem Written from November
30, 2002, to March 27, 2003.” In this book Spahr continues
her singular project of hybridizing the lyric and the political.
It would be interesting, in fact, to consider her book alongside
Eliot Weinberger’s What I Heard About Iraq (Verso,
2005): Weinberger weaves a tapestry of public speech-acts,
quotation and assemblage functioning as mordant critique,
while Spahr moves us within and along a dispersed lyric “I,” absorptive
and reflective, a plural I dwelling within and moving through
the media nimbus of popstars, radio reports, newspapers,
and TV shows we collectively share and breathe in.
Spahr makes her basic lyric wager on a
porousness of self and environment—thus her title,
and the similarly complex interconnectivity of her previous Things of each possible
relation hashing against one another (Palm Press, 2003).
That we share a communal air, that we are one of many breathing
species: these are premises that ramify throughout the poems.
Here she opens with an incantation moving from the cellular
(“cells and the division of cells”) to the cosmic—“the
space of the oceans and the space of the troposphere and
the space of the stratosphere and the space of the mesosphere
in and out.” Spahr works with the oldest poetic tropes—inspiration,
expiration—itemizing in vertiginously expanding strophes
the movement of “everything turning and small being
breathed in and out by everyone with lungs during all the
moments.” This profound connectivity suggests
a kind of bio-erotics but also an extended vulnerability.
Increasing connectivity means increasing the available surface
for injury: planes become bombs, radio incites genocide,
Yahoo gives up Chinese dissidents. With “[t]he space
of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing
inside of everyone,” it is no surprise that, on September
11th and after, New Yorkers were admixed “with suspended
dust spores and bacteria mixing inside everyone with sulfur
and sulfuric acid and titanium and minute silicon particles
from pulverized glass and concrete.” The Towers have
fallen, the citizens breathing in and out the atoms of the
dead and the destroyed structures.
Is it possible to write a good post-9/11
poem? Is
this question impossibly vulgar?
Spahr’s governing tropes here and elsewhere in the
book are anaphora and accumulation: her Steinian unspoolings
induce a quasi-liturgical trance, their commitment to itemization,
to collecting and then dispersing the world (or inhaling
and then exhaling it) a remarkable project. It is as if Whitman
were crossed with Sappho—his radical encompassing conjoined
to her fierce, delicate erotics.
Yet Spahr reminds us that Sappho’s erotics were always
already engaged with the military and political values of
her epoch and of epic—viz. her famous fragment 16,
translated in the Loeb thus:
Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others
of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth,
but I say it is whatsoever a person loves.
Spahr brilliantly mobilizes this poem, adapting it to her
own critical, very contemporary ends, as she contemplates
the movement toward war:
Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others
call a fleet. . . .
Some say one hundred and twenty Challenger Two tanks, or
infantry, or a fleet of ships. . . .
But I say it’s whatever you love
best.
I say it is the persons you love. (“January
20, 2003,”)
This pluralizing of address recurs throughout
the book. One could, and should, dwell on what this book
is “about,” but
its means are in large measure what it’s about. The
book offers a lyric remediation of the news, and it also
insists on a plurality of consciousnesses, such that the
I/you relation typically structuring lyric address becomes
something far more expansive: We/yous. Thus the recurring
play with pronouns throughout, and the beautiful extended
apostrophes to “beloveds”: “Beloveds, those
astronauts on the space station began their trip from home
a few days ago”; “Beloveds, I haven’t been
able to write for days”.
Spahr sends epistles addressed to any
and all; these are lines both intimate and global. The
book envisions an alternative imaginative globalization,
in which a poet on “this
island in the middle of the Pacific” might invoke her
fellow citizens (and beyond that, any reader) via an erotics
of political, ethical, and visionary engagement. “Not
the specific in our bed at night but the globe in our mind,
a globe that we didn’t really see really until the
twentieth century.” Spahr thus aspires to make lyric
responsible to the global in all its dimensions—the
beautiful, integral earth-image viewed from space but also
the political-economic situation indicated by that increasingly
cant word “globalization.”
As she always has, Spahr writes as a specifically
situated poet: though she manifests some vatic tendencies
there is always a critical undercurrent cutting through
any efflatus. She addresses us in the second long poem
from Hawaii, where she lived and taught and protested during
these poems’ composition;
she presents herself as both geographically marginal to the
US yet completely imbricated in the state’s grim adventures.
Fantasies of escape or of lyric retreat are refused, though
the erotic and the everyday persist as a lure and a balm. “I
know there is no alone anymore here in the middle of the
Pacific. There is no uninhabited tropical island anywhere.” This
is what connectivity means—or, to put it differently,
this is what globality means.
In their attempt to redeem a relentlessly
banalized, industrialized language, the poems invoke jihads,
Billy Joel, AH-64 Apache attack helicopters. They encompass
the floating detritus of late capital but also offer an
alternative, a “circular
list”, as if including all, saying all, intoning all,
could transmute all. Witness and song combine: questions
of atonement float on her intonations.
In “January 28, 2003,” Spahr seems to be evoking
Inger Christensen’s astonishing work, Alphabet.
Like Christensen, the remarkable Danish poet whose alertness
to biological, sensual, and historical interfaces this poet
shares, Spahr offers in this movement a corrosive dystopic
litany: “Today on the radio, Christie Brinkley exists .
. ./U2 spy planes exist flying over the Koreas. . . /Aretha
Franklin exists. . ./Thalidomide exists.” The
old dream of poetry—that to name is to call into being—is
here complicated: acknowledgment is the labor undertaken,
everything that exists requiring attention.
Sometimes this effort nearly fails, and
sometimes the bald statements (e.g. in the note prefacing
the central long sequence) are tonally uncertain: “After September 11, I kept
thinking that the United States wouldn’t invade Afghanistan.
I was so wrong about that.” The politics
can seem too naïve, or faux-naïve, the earnestness
forced. This response is, I think, premature. Spahr’s
poems operate as if ritual incantation, slowing down the
reader, regulating her breath; their crescendos and diminuendos
are brilliantly controlled. You can imagine them read collectively,
and read aloud; I suspect they would be enormously effective
and affecting if read thus. Spahr is returning lyric to its
communal choral roots: some say Sappho’s girls sang
in a ring. Protest poetry can look like this too—subtle,
repetitive, aggregative, dissoluble. But then it would be
crude to label this “protest poetry” and leave
it at that: this is a poetry of strict, stricken, ravenous
attention.
Spahr’s project is risky and the
poems falter (only rarely) when they are unable to manage
the information they aspire to transform. Documenting,
recording, and cataloguing themselves encode politics,
as Spahr knows well, and the more critically-minded reader
might raise eyebrows at these lines about the international
anti-war protests of February 15, 2003:
Here is today./Over eight million people
marched on five continents against the mobilization/ .
. . Half a million in Berlin./The list goes on./Millions./And
if not millions then hundreds of thousands.” (53)
If not millions? Such wobbles
threaten the intellectual integrity and moral force of
the poem: counting is close to ethical accounting, and
getting things right—or
showing why it’s impossible to do so—is crucial
to a testimonial poetry.
What is remarkable is that Spahr largely avoids
these pitfalls. Insisting that lyric subjectivity is a collective
venture, refusing to privatize the erotic or to sloganize
the political, she sustains a difficult, elegant, moving
project. These poems arise from long and deep thought and
from responsive practice; this is a poiesis fusing
ethics and praxis, a poetry both completely accessible and
subtly profound.
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