The Wake

In an era of question marks surrounding the United States’ involvement in international affairs, it is refreshing to acquire a viewpoint such as that from Juliana Spahr. Her latest work, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs offers to her readers an opportunity to reflect on the flow of the current tumultuous global narrative through her viewpoint, as a citizen, starting with the attacks of 9/11 through the onset of the Iraq war. A collection of two poems, “Poem Written after September 11, 2001” and “Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003” Spahr offers her readers a chance to reflect on the silencing of the protests against the war in a world interconnected by an age of information, whether via internet, television, radio or newspaper. This failure on such a global scale to mobilize against such an evil influence is explored through saturating details of conflict from various points across the globe.

Spahr begins by first setting a commonality between all people of the world; the movement of cells, the division of cells, to the very air we breathe. By doing so, she links every human being to a very important equation: the human condition, and our effects on a global scale. This interconnectivity, from the minutest of cells that form our structure to the barrage of information from our media resources, presents the complexity of the issue and our desire to solve it. This barrage of information arrives in various forms, from the NASA shuttle launches, to the melting of glaciers world-wide, to the existence of pop-culture icons like Fatboy Slim, Ben and J-Lo, to Renée Zellweger and Richard Gere in Chicago, to the existence of cell phones and the existence of tunnel vision – we as a people are caught up in too much to achieve a focused goal.

By writing from an intimate perspective, she juxtaposes the relationship we have between the comfort of our beds to the way we ignore a similar love we share on a global scale, “Beloveds, we do not know how to live our lives with any agency outside of our bed”. She emphasizes this notion with images of our silence to the news of North Korea and their nuclear weapons program, to the mobilization of troops to boarders around the world, to the deployment of warships and Patriot antimissile batteries. She then brings the readers back to bed, a place where comfort can be found – and silence, “we do not speak of it and instead press up against one anothers / reveling in the pleasure of being back together.”

By naming the atrocities that continue globally, Spahr offers comparisons of the viewpoints of beauty, from the eyes of the most sinister, to hers, “On this dark earth, some say the thing most lovely is the thirty / thousand assault troops from Britain today joining the sixty-two / thousand from the US mobilized in the past ten days and a further / sixty thousand from the US on their way.”

“But I say it’s whatever you love best. / I say it is the persons you love.”

Juliana Spahr lyrically pleads to her readers to focus, speak out and assert the ethics which we, the people, demand: to coexist in peace, not use bloodshed as peace. Juliana says it best, “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 is time for change.

Juliana Spahr will be reading at the Weisman Art Museum with Claudia Rankine on September 27 at 7:30 pm. Be prepared, read the book, reclaim your voice.

Further Reading:
Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You
Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity Response, winner of the National Poetry Series Award.