Juliana Spahr’s latest poetry collection moves freely from the distant calamities of the postwar period to the climate crisis and the rise of the alt-right.
Juliana Spahr’s latest poetry collection “Ars Poeticas” opens looking backward from a great height:
To write poetry after Castle Bravo. Then to write poetry after 1,500 feet. After high-quality steel frame buildings, not completely collapsed, except all panels and roofs blown in.
In 1954, the United States, having already detonated atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a decade earlier, tested its largest thermonuclear weapon in the Pacific Proving Grounds. A treaty with more than 100 signatories halted the practice in 1963, largely due to the environmental devastation wrought by Castle Bravo — the most powerful nuclear device to be detonated by the U.S.
It was a jumping-off point for Spahr, an English professor at Northeastern University’s Oakland campus, whose new book moves freely from the distant calamities of the postwar period to the unfolding disasters of the present: namely, the climate crisis and the rise of the alt-right.
Though the poems themselves don’t adhere to any particular chronology, Spahr says there were a few seminal events that propelled them: one being the 2017 protests in Berkeley, California, that saw far-right groups clash with leftist activists, such as antifa. Those protests began in earnest in February 2017 after a group of University of California students in Berkeley organized to shut down a talk by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who had been invited to speak on campus by the Berkeley College Republicans.
“I feel like the question of the book is: what does poetry do in these moments?” Spahr says. “What role does it have in this moment of ecological crisis? And I think there’s a slightly more complicated answer to this question — to the question of ecological crisis — than the answer to the alt-right.”
The complication, she says, has to do with the fact that nature is one of poetry’s oldest subjects. But admirers of so-called nature poetry face the difficult irony of squaring the passive act of poetic description with the ongoing destruction of the natural world. (Even Horace, who “did not / even know about coral barges and / capitalism, much less the / late capitalism that blossomed while you sat around thinking about / the cuteness of a bobcat,” ridiculed those who wrote of “babbling brooks.”)
The poet, then, bears some responsibility for the social moment. And while Spahr departs rather swiftly from Castle Bravo, she keeps to its implications throughout the book. The nuclear detonation caused extensive radioactive contamination to aquatic systems and nearby islands. One person is said to have died from radiation sickness that same year, and the detonation “vaporized some 10 million tons of sand, coral and water.”
The coral reef, once mistaken for stone (“That is what confused Ovid”) and possessing “all the symbiosis / that a Bakuninist could want,” becomes a central metaphor representing, not just the folly of mankind, but the impulse toward fellow feeling, toward “living in or on one another”:
The lesson here is one of living in or on one anotherso as to build, maintain, and defend.One could make a politics out of it.
Long interested in the relationship between poetry and politics, Spahr also turns to playwright Bertolt Brecht in “Ars Poeticas” to work through questions about poetry’s broader functions and societal connection. She writes: “I picked up Brecht to understand how to write all the peace and the war, the order and the chaos, the joy and the despair at the same time.”
“If there’s any argument embedded in the last couple of books, it’s that poetry can be a singular political response,” Spahr says. “In a lot of these political moments, poets sort of rush in and read their poems at the protest, which is great and fine.
“But then they go home — and it’s sort of an argument with that,” she says. “In these moments of social movements and protest, there is no ‘poet position’ that’s independent of doing that other sort of work.”
What does it look like to write poetry in the atomic age, in the “Anthropocene,” “in a world with few nutrients?”
For Spahr, the results at times seem to embody what they describe: a poetry “that knows a hard, cup-shaped skeleton;” that professes to be a “form of atypical thinking;” that is “trying to pick up the pieces” — if only to watch them fall away again. (“It is hard not to think there is art again, failing us.”)
For all its relentless straightforward inquisition (“I couldn’t find the singing. What I found instead were a series of questions”), “Ars Poeticas” is also a rekindling of the poet with early loves or forgotten influences — or reads as such — one in which the mundane exercise of naming in sequence achieves a kind of off-center lyric:
That day as the breeze blew and the beer we drank was vibrant, bubbly, and we were delighted with it, I said, I love Césaire. I said this to them in that late afternoon light, the sort that throws it patterns on the walls. I love Césaire, I said, because he had neither facebook nor twitter. And then added Shelley. Césaire, Shelley, Rukeyser I mumbled later, as we walked home. Brecht, Fodeba Keïta, Blake. Oh, Rimbaud also, of course…
“Ars Poeticas” is part of the Wesleyan Poetry Series.