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This
Connection of Everything with Lungs comprises two sequences of free-verse
/ prose-poetry: 'Poem Written After September 11, 2001' and the longer 'Poem
Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003'. Still reading? Good. The
latter is quite wonderful, but I feel ambivalent about the collection as a
whole, so I'm going to give it the Good Critic/Bad Critic treatment.
In a note on the text, Spahr says:
...on November 30, 2002, when I
realized that it was most likely that the United States would invade Iraq
again, I began to sort through the news in the hope of understanding how this
would happen. I thought that by watching the news more seriously I could be
a little less naive. But I gained no sophisticated understanding as I wrote
these poems.
The bad critic is wondering if, that being the case, I really want to read
said poems - if maybe I shouldn't spend the afternoon wrestling with the London
Review of Books instead.
But actually I've been approaching the print and broadcast news with a new
kind of earnest recently and it's got me precisely nowhere save for a little
closer to needing bifocals and even more cynical about journalists. Spahr
continues, 'I felt I had to think about what I was connected with, and what
I was complicit with, as I lived off the fat of the military-industrial complex
on a small island [Hawaii].' This strikes me as a fine and noble
pursuit Ð and what's more, the poems are good.
We live in our own time zone and there
are only a small million of us in this time zone and the world as a result
has a tendency to begin and end without us.
Spahr's poetic prose is meditative but discomfiting, consistently,
insistently locating the political in the quotidian:
We get up in the morning and the words
'Patriot missile systems,' 'the Avengers,' and 'the US infantry weapons'
tumble out of our mouths before breakfast.
It may be worth adding that one only has to watch an American news broadcast
for two minutes before feeling really rather blessed with the BBC, ITN and
Channel 4; suffice it to say, The Simpsons is closer to
documentary than satire. The poet's own disillusionment with reported news is
aptly justified through the juxtaposition of catastrophe with flimflam:
While we turned sleeping uneasily a
warehouse of food aid was destroyed, stocks on upbeat sales soared, Australia
threatened first strikes, there was heavy gunfire in the city of Man, the
Belarus ambassador to Japan went missing, a cruise ship caught fire, on yet
another cruise ship many got sick, and the pope made a statement against
xenophobia.
While we turned sleeping uneasily
perhaps J Lo gave Ben a prenuptial demand for sex four times a week.
I've always loved wilful undercutting. In fact, the poem is all about
juxtaposition. Parrots and the Dow Index; Zoe Ball and AS90 self-propelled
guns; David Letterman's shingles; the Sri Lankan Navy sinking a Tamil Tiger
ship. All is intricately connected, everything happens at the same time.
The juxtaposition also works as inversion. In Spahr's vision, the lyric
directly clashes with the brutality of the world; it founders on the glut of
information, the glut of injustice. 'I mean to speak of beds and bowers and
all I speak of is Barghouti's call for a change of leadership and the strike
in Venezuela against Chavez and the sixty-six ships on the fleet of shame.'
She skewers our reactions - easy cynicism - to global events precisely:
Oh sure, we say, oh yeah, we say over
and over while watching some general talk about something, as if mocking
inarticulate expressions of dissatisfaction from childhood will save us.
Bad Critic:
Juxtaposition of catastrophe with flimflam? Could it not be said that the
newspapers illustrate this rather well by themselves? That the comical
page-sharing of invasion, insurgency and suicide attacks with the collapse of
the Pitt-Aniston marriage contains its own absurdity that everyone was pretty
much aware of anyway?
Perhaps 'During the bombing, beloveds, our life goes on as usual.' is not
such an original thought. What does it mean, really? That we should feel
guiltier for having breakfast and reading novels, unperturbed by the
explosions? Is there really any moral superiority in being a victim? I guess
when one's uninterrupted breakfast is thanks, in part, to a multi-billion
dollar military machine, then yes. We should at least feel grateful. Or
racked with culpability for not marching on the useless protest. Or
something. So yeah, sure, Spahr is good on pointing out how one thing leads
to another, and she's right: we could all stand to be a little more global in
our outlook. But I could have got the same message from any one of a thousand
amateur-politico weblogs or, like, a wrist-band or something.
Furthermore the insistence on pluralising 'you' as 'yous' starts to grate
after a while, and coupled with the sporadic absence of punctuation, can get
downright clumsy: 'And when I say this what I mean is that I am attempting to
speak to yous of these things...' It's just so bloody Poetic.
These
things notwithstanding, the September 11th poem is comparatively poor. You
know when you're seven years old and you address an envelope:
Luke Kennard
England
Earth
The Solar System
The Milky Way
The Universe
and feel quite pleased with
yourself? Well, poetry hasn't quite got there yet.
Everyone with lungs breathes the space in and out as everyone with lungs
breathes the space between the hands in and out
as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space
around the hands in and out
as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space
around the hands and the space of the room in and out
as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space
around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that
surrounds the room in and out
This
continues all the way to the troposphere, the stratosphere and the
mesosphere. The literary precursor to this is 'There Was an Old Woman Who
Swallowed a Fly' - or perhaps that game 'I went to the shop and I bought...'
which is played on long car journeys to the chagrin of bad-tempered drivers.
Thankfully, I got wise to Spahr's concept pretty fast and started skipping to
the last line of each accumulating passage. For effect, I imagined the whole
thing being incanted in a monotonous 'poetry voice'.
'Poem Written after September 11, 2001' was first published as 'Poem' - which
is a universal, multi-conscious sort of title, implying that this is what
poetry does:
raises a vague sense of unity with one's fellow man through a full detail of
the respiratory system. The applied association with the terrorist attacks of
September 11th adds little to this for me. 'How connected we are with
everyone' the poem observes, and concludes, 'How lovely and how doomed this
connection of everyone with lungs.' It's not trite, certainly, but neither
does it strike me as especially profound. I think I've talked about preaching
to the converted before. As a poet, your audience are people who buy
poetry books.
If you haven't grasped the whole Banality of Evil thing yet, you're probably
a tabloid journalist.
Good Critic:
In
interview with Michael Boyko, Juliana Spahr says, 'I especially like the list
as lament. As a sort of recognising or call out of what is becoming lost.' In
this case it seems to be our very connection with one another that is feared
lost. The cyclical nature of the list in 'Poem Written after September 11,
2001' reflects the very process of respiration it describes: the way it
repeats and doubles back on itself. Spahr places the reader directly in his
or her own room Ð and turns the focus outwards; if you have the patience and
the wherewithal to follow, it is a powerful and disorientating meditation.
The relevance to September 11th is actually quite solid. There is a shift
towards the end of the poem wherein another list of elements turns
specifically nasty:
The space of everyone that has just
been inside of everyone mixing inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen
and water vapor and argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and
bacteria mixing inside of everyone with sulphur and sulphuric acid and
titanium and nickel and minute silicone particles from pulverised glass and
concrete.
Claiming indifference to this seems to me nothing but wilful cynicism and a
pretext for some snarky gags.
Bad Critic:
[Wallows
in guilt and self-doubt.]
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