Books by Juliana Spahr
Mixed Blood: Number 1
by Howard, II Rambsy, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Jen Hofer, Erica Hunt, Ed Roberson, Juliana Spahr
Mixed Blood is interested in the contemporary African-American avant-garde, writers experimenting with form and content in the post-Black Arts moment; but it is also interested in experimental practices (post-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Oulipo, etc.) more commonly associated with white writers. The publication--based on an ongoing Penn State readings and talks series--is unusual in its emphasis on literary innovation and its deliberate and very aggressive emphasis on race and the languages of and about race. This inaugural issue features new work by Erica Hunt, Juliana Spahr, Amiri Baraka, Jen Hofer, and Ed Roberson, Essays by the writers--on neo-colonialism, African-American verse practices, translation and cross-cultural collaboration, and more--are paired with their poems. From Amiri Baraka's essay: Coming to New York, the fundamental thing was that we put together a kind of united front against academia, in terms of poetry. The different schools you heard about--the Beats, the New York School, the San Francisco School, the Black Mountain School--those were all young people like me who were looking not to write like the Pack-Simpson anthology, to try to write a different kind of poetry.
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Well Then There Now
Accretion, articulation, exploration, transformation, sentiment, private and public property these are just a few of Juliana Spahr's interests. In this collection of poetry, she is performing her characteristic magic, turning these theoretical concerns into poetic odyssey.
From her first poem, written in Honolulu, to the last, written in Berkeley, California, about her childhood in Appalachia, Spahr takes us on a patchwork journey backwards and forwards in time and space, tracking change in ecology, society, economies, herself. Through a collage of “found language,” a curiosity about place, and a restless intelligence, Spahr demonstrates the vibrant possibilities of an investigatory poetics.
She includes grape varietals, the shrinking of public beachfront in Hawaii, 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.
We come into the world.
We come into the world and there it is.
The sun is there.
The brown of the river leading to the blue and the brown
of the ocean is there.
Salmon and eels are there moving between the brown
and the brown and the blue.
The green of the land is there.
Elders and youngers are there.
We come into the world and we are there.
And we begin to breathe.
We come into the world and there it is.
We come into the world without and we breathe it in.
We come into the world and begin to move between the
brown and the blue and the green of it.
From “Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache”
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That Winter the Wolf Came
That Winter the Wolf Came is written for this era of global struggle. It finds its ferment at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Its feminist and celebratory energy is fueled by street protests and their shattered windows. Amid oil spills and austerity measures and shore birds and a child holding its mother’s hand and hissing teargas canisters, it reminds us exactly what we must fight to defend with a wild ferocity, and what we’re up against.
"In her poems, love does not resist the world beyond; love lets it in. Politics demands feeling rather than denuding it." Los Angeles Review of Books
"Geography, economics, ecology, hydrology, local and international history; repetition, flat limited diction, lengthy chant; intersections of incompatible discourses, such as a field biologist’s checklist plus memoir, medical record plus ode, incantation plus site report: Spahr draws on these resources and procedures to make poems that feel like bizarre, careful essays, and essays that feel like sad, extended poems." The Nation
"...a work of crisp wit, bizarre conjunctions and ultimately enduring moral authority." Publisher’s Weekly
Excerpt:
It was Non-Revolution. Or it was me. Or it was Non-Revolution and me. I was unsure what it really was. Maybe it was my thoughts. My thoughts at one minute about Non-Revolution. About the smell of Non-Revolution. Sweat, urine, sage, pot, rotting food, hay, all mixed together. Perhaps about Non-Revolution’s body. I am sure I am not the only one who has thought it exceptional, but I am also just as sure that by the standards of bodies, Non-Revolution’s is fine but not exceptional. That is the point. That is why Non-Revolution is called Non-Revolution, why they have revolution as a possibility in their name but it is a modified and thus negated possibility so as to suggest they are possibly neither good nor fucked. Still something about Non-Revolution’s smell and body had gotten into me.
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American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (American Poets in the 21st Century)
by Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr
A thought-provoking mix of poetry, creative manifesto and criticism.
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.
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Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment
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.
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This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems (Volume 15) (New California Poetry)
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.
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An Army of Lovers
"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.
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A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism
by Juliana Spahr, 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.
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