Everyone’s Song: this connection of everyone with lungs
It is difficult to read Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs without thinking of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: they are both expansive, prosaic, deeply moving monuments to their times. But going back to Song of Myself after reading this connection…, I found myself wondering at Whitman’s optimism and his inspired belief in the ideals of democracy. Over one hundred and fifty years later, we have seen what can be done in the name of democracy. It is difficult to watch this world—in the various media available to us—without lapsing into pessimism, cynicism, sarcasm, ennui, or apathy. What most writers do is look away from the horrors—inward toward personal tragedies, or toward the comfort of manageable domestic dramas. Others look steadfastly outward—tailoring foreign characters and locales to fit an American epistemological stance. What some writers do—and what Spahr does here—is look squarely at the position of remote witness/intimate relation to what happens on the planet, to our fellow human beings, examining the complicity and helplessness inherent in this position.
The book opens with “Poem Written after September 11, 2001,” perhaps the most haunting and eloquent elegy for the nascent century as any writer has written. This is a poem that both invokes Whitman and silences him. The poem builds incantatory power spare verse by spare verse:
There is space between the hands.
There is space between the hands and space around the hands.
There is space around the hands and space in the room.
There is space in the room that surrounds the shapes of everyone’s
hands and body and feet and cells and the beating contained
within.
There is space, an uneven space, made by this pattern of bodies.
This space goes in and out of everyone’s bodies.
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
Like the Eames’s film, Powers of Ten, which zoomed out and out from the picnicker on the grass in the park, into the sky, into the atmosphere, into space, out and out and out, one hundred times, and one thousand times, and on and on, to our galaxy, and to the universe, then zoomed in and in and in, back in to the picnic, to the picnicker, to his skin, to his cells, the molecules, the atoms, one hundred times in, and one thousand, and so on, so Spahr’s poem expands and contracts, somehow expressing the smallness of all of us, and the immensity of us all. Distances become relative in this shifting perspective. As the opening poem, it offers a way to read the following poem cycle: as an attempt to engage that shifting perspective in viewing the horrifying, maddening, tragi-comic chronicle of daily life on the planet “after September 11, 2001.”
“Beloveds,” begins the poem cycle that follows, “we wake up in the morning to darkness and watch it turn into lightness with hope.” The beauty of the cycle, and this beginning—this first line—is that Spahr never names the “beloveds.” As the poem progresses, it becomes clear that the beloveds are the speaker’s lovers and partners. But in this first line, the direct address and the term of endearment feel as though they belong to the reader. Here Spahr creates a feeling of intimacy between the lovers and between the poet and readers, so that throughout, “beloveds” is both an address to loved ones and an address to everyone. The reader shares the bed, the house, the island, the ocean, and the collective “discord” of the world beyond.
Beloveds, the trees branch over our roof, over our bed, and so
realize that when I speak of parrots I speak about love
and their green colors, love and their squawks, love and the
discord they bring to the calmness of morning, which is the
discord of waking.
Spahr makes use of lists, and so the “discord of waking” is in the cacophony of the newscasts, headlines, protests, aircraft, bombings, glaciers, and cities listed. She excludes virtually nothing of the American media experience. Thus, we encounter genocide alongside celebrity lawsuits. Spahr does this with surprisingly little irony—or, at least, just enough irony to express the bizarre seriousness with which Americans absorb celebrity gossip and other trifles while other human beings starve, flee their homes, rise up, and die at the hands of their neighbors. But when she states the famous names, their tabloid dilemmas, their good intentions, there is a sadness in the tone that reinforces what irony, by contrast, usually annihilates: the human connection. These names, these familiar faces that flash across computer screens and through these poems, are just as “lovely and doomed” as the rest of us. How little good their celebrity will do them, the speaker suggests.
The Greenland glaciers and the Arctic Sea ice melt at unprecedented
levels and still a ship fuels up and slips out of port.
Winona Ryder has thirty prescriptions for downers from twenty
different doctors and still a ship fuels up and slips out of port.
Marc Anthony and Dayana Torres renew their vows in Puerto
Rico and still a ship fuels up and slips out of port.
Light and aromatherapy might help treat dementia, a patient sues
a surgeon who left in the middle of surgery to pay his bills, cruise
passengers continue to have diarrhea and nausea and yet continue
to go on cruises, fires burn in Edinburgh, Hussein apologizes for
invading Kuwait, United Airlines continues to lose eight million
a day, Mars might have been a cold, dry planet when it was first
formed, the Cheeky Girls knock Eminem off the charts, and still
a ship fuels up and slips out of port.
Into this cacophony—or perhaps above or below it, at a different frequency—the poet speaks. The tone with which Spahr “speaks” these poems lends them a grace and sincerity that marks just how graceless and insincere the collective voice of the American media is. In particular, her use of the direct address stands out as an act of courage and an expression of humility and vulnerability.
Beloveds, all our theories and generations came together today in
order to find the optimum way of lacing shoes. The bow tie pattern
is the most efficient.
I want to tie everything up when I speak of yous.
I want to tie it all up and tie up the world in an attempt to under
stand the swirls of patterns.
But there is no efficient way.
The “yous”—this odd extra-pluralizing of the second person plural—marks the separateness and togetherness of the audience: the lovers, who occupy the same role, separately and together, and the readers, who read alone, and imagine others like themselves, others for whom reading this book of poems is perhaps not possible, but who are embraced in the “yous” as well. This is a brilliant choice, rhetorically and poetically, on Spahr’s part because it expresses the speaker’s desire to “tie it all up,” all the separateness, and also the grammatical impossibility of expressing exactly who those “yous” are and what precisely their relationships are to each other and to the speaker.
There is another way in which these poems speak above the discord: they name the lost in whatever way they can. Like a monument to war heroes, these poems attempt to connect the dead all over the planet to each other and to those still living—those, like Spahr, struggling to make sense of so much death.
Chances are that each of those one hundred and thirty-six people
dead by politics’ human hands had lovers like I have yous who
slipped yours hands between their thighs and who thought when
their lovers did this that this is all that matters in the world yet still
someone somewhere tells ships to refuel and then to slip out of
port in the night.
Death is something that both separates us and connects us. Those who have already died become separate in very real ways to those left behind. These passages, in which Spahr imagines the children and pets and lovers separated from their dead, are some of the most difficult to read, because they look unfalteringly into the very real connections between all of us.
Reading this connection of everyone with lungs, now, in a period politicians and pundits constantly refer to as “post-war,” is both heartbreaking and, somehow, comforting. Heartbreaking because we are still, years later, powerless and bereft, grappling with losses half a world away, trying to make sense of them in a country intent on keeping its distance. And comforting because Spahr has written a book that will doubtless be read for as long as humans exist, to understand what the hell happened in the early part of the twenty-first century. |
