Juliana Spahr

Ars Poeticas

Poetry, 2025

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.

Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment

Criticism, 2018

n 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.

That Winter the Wolf Came

Poetry, 2015

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.

Well Then There Now

Poetry, 2011

Accretion, articulation, exploration, transformation, naming, sentiment, private and public property – these are just a few of Juliana Spahr’s interests. In this, her fourth collection of poetry, we find her performing her characteristic magic, turning these theoretical concerns into a poetic odyssey. From her first poem, written in Honolulu, Hawaii, to the last, written in Berkeley, California, about her childhood in Appalachia, Spahr takes us on a wild patchwork journey backwards and forwards in time and space, tracking change – in ecology, society, economies, herself. Through a collage of “found language,” a deep curiosity about place, and a restless intelligence, Spahr demonstrates the vibrant possibilities of an investigatory poetics. This verse is more inclusive than exclusive; Spahr writes of grape varietals, the shrinking of public beachfront in Hawaii, endangered plant, fish, and wildlife species, the melting of the polar ice caps, and comparative poverty rates. She also knows how to sing – in the oldest tradition of poetry – of loss, and her lament for nature is the most keen.

The Transformation

Non/Fiction, 2007

Juliana Spahr has lived in many places, including Chillicothe (Ohio), Buffalo (New York), Honolulu (Hawaii), and Brooklyn (New York). She has absorbed, participated in, and been transformed by the politics and ecologies of each. This book is about that process. The Transformation “tells a barely truthful story of the years 1997-2001,” a story of flora and fauna, of continents, islands, academies, connective tissue, military and linguistic operations, and of that ever-present we, to name only a few. At once exhilarating, challenging, and humbling, THE TRANSFORMATION is a hefty book in its honesty and scope, a must-read.

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

Poetry, 2005

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.

Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another

Poetry, 2003

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.

American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language

Anthology, 2001

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.

Everybody's Autonomy Connective Reading and Collective Identity

Criticism, 2001

Experimental texts empower the reader by encouraging self-governing approaches to reading and by placing the reader on equal footing with the author. Everybody’s Autonomy is about reading and identity.

Contemporary avant garde writing has often been overlooked by those who study literature and identity. Such writing has been perceived as unrelated, as disrespectful of subjectivity. But Everybody’s Autonomy instead locates within avant garde literature models of identity that are communal, connective, and racially concerned. Everybody’s Autonomy, as it tackles literary criticism’s central question of what sort of selves do works create, looks at works that encourage connection, works that present and engage with large, public worlds that are in turn shared with readers. With this intent, it aligns the iconoclastic work of Gertrude Stein with foreign, immigrant Englishes and their accompanying subjectivities. It examines the critique of white individualism and privilege in the work of language writers Lyn Hejinian and Bruce Andrews. It looks at how Harryette Mullen mixes language writing’s open text with the distinctivesness of African-American culture to propose a communal, yet still racially conscious identity. And it examines Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s use of broken English and French to unsettle readers’ fluencies and assimilating comprehensions, to decolonize reading. Such works, the book argues, well represent and expand changing notions of the public, of everybody.

Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You

Poetry, 2001

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.

Response

Poetry, 1996

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.’