rob mclennan : Ars Poeticas, by Juliana Spahr

Ars Poeticas, Juliana Spahr
Wesleyan University Press, 2025

 

 

 

The latest from American poet Juliana Spahr is Ars Poeticas, a self-described collection of “lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism,” exploring how to write in and through and around the current ecological and political climate. Across numerous collections over thirty years—including That Winter The Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015), When Then There Now (Black Sparrow Press, 2011), This Connection of Everyone With Lungs (University of California Press, 2005), Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another (Palm Press, 2003), Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism (Explosive Books, 1998), Response (Sun & Moon Press, 1996) and Nuclear (Leave Books, 1994), as well as a handful of fiction and critical titles—Spahr has engaged structures of repetition and accumulation, offering rhythmic loops and repeated movements across the lyric. As the first piece, “ARS POETICA 1,” a two-page extended poem subtitled “coral,” begins: “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. / After 2,000 feet. / After reinforced concrete buildings collapsed, / or standing but badly damaged. / After 3,500 feet. / After church buildings completely destroyed. / After brick walls severely cracked. / After 4,400 feet. / After 5,300 feet. / After roof tiles bubbled and melted. / After 6,500 feet.” As with the other pieces in this collection, this opening poem moves slow, incrementally building, moving from a set of simple thoughts into such wonderful complexity. “To write poetry in the blue / that is the absence of green.”

Ars Poeticas is constructed out of seven numbered and themselves accumulated sections of “ARS POETICA,” with subtitles “coral,” “scotch broom,” “bluebird-ghost,” “bison,” “goby,” “coral, again” and “acknowledgments,” through which Spahr questions the purpose of poetry through poetry. “For years I loved for what was // poetry.” the second poem offers, “I used poetry to shimmy / in, during these years, to build the compounded // patterns of song, even if I recognized / poetry’s verses as songs that tend toward // institutional. I though that poetry / could be apart from the nation still.” Further on in her eight page poem, couplet set upon couplet, as she writes: “I lived not just for the reading but for that / moment after the reading too.” There is the way she articulates how she landed at poetry, explored and engaged the form as reader, moving slowly into engagements as writer and critic as well, articulating her lyric with the world, and into a conclusion that the world is not separate from literature, even if we wish it to be. “A poem,” she writes, “I understood. Just as one day / I looked inside a lily, Catalina // Mariposa Lily. One day I said, oh // there is an entire world in the throat, a high- // contrast zone, as they say, and it was so like / walking out into a field at night and there// looking up at the stars.” Even if we want the world to be separate, at certain times, it isn’t possible, nor should it be. Spahr’s Ars Poeticas offer insight into a conversation on and through the paths lyric pushes us to highlight, both light and dark, and how one might best move through it, even across the failures art provides. Can or should art, specifically poetry, save us? Is that even possible? In the end, Spahr’s lyric might just be about survival. If we are willing to work for it, of course.

The reasons why there are thousands of representations
of buffalo hunts in state museums
and none of a bison on its back making the wallow
probably have to do with how Buffalo Bill Cody killed
over four thousand in eighteen months.
He shot sixty-eight in an eight-hour period.
The railroad and the gun.
There is human ingenuity again, failing us.
And here is human ingenuity
trying to pick up the pieces,
hundreds of years later.
Still, that Remington.
It is hard not to think there is art again, failing us. (“ARS POETICA 4, bison”)

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan is behind on more things than can be dreamt of in your philosophy. His latest poetry title is Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025). Later this year sees the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press), a follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022).

 

 

Gary Barwin & Lillian Nećakov : from The Sum of my Badgers

 

 

 

Dear Badger,

 

A fox axes red through the forest. An ox foxes the plough. Badger, you bade me bide time till spring when the buds burst, small fists punching pollen, knocking bees into honeyed senselessness. Spring like a butterfly, spring like a bee, the woods are a horse with a thousand sap-filled legs, and some galoot with a nightshade eye hunched in the corner, waiting to rope-a-dope the understory with a green fuse rumble. And felled by some Peter Rabbit felon, the fallen corpse of the farmer’s wife wears a copse-copulating coat of rabbits—ears, thumping legs, velvet dicks and vulvas mad like dulcimers, furious vibrating whiskered noses and you, Badger, placid, metaphysical, playing clavichord on a log. Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B-flat major, movements 1 to 4, Allemanda, Corrente, Sarabande, Tempo di Borea and I’ve set up a chess set, waiting for a friend who will never come because of the dictator. Badger, you and me have this hide-out, this wait-out, this blind. When the new world hatches, we’ll be ready for eggs.

 

Dear Badger,

 

My dear, gentle, bantam Druid, call in the light, call in the fire of waxing badgers. Call to your great grand badgers, forget your marrow bones and walk with me through the snowdrops.

I’ve been seeing you out of the corner of all my eyes. Unfurl yourself from yourself, badger, and schlepp with me though the glistening thicket.  

It’s Imbolc, the milking, the feast of purification. See, the old badger woman has thrown off her rabbit ears. She’s breaking her bones collecting firewood.

Brushing against the understory of this place with sapling-thin thighs. Sighing, blood to blood and bone to bone and every sinew in its own place, to every branch broken.

I’m sorry dear Buddy, I thought you and I were on the far side of winter. I’ve baked you a bread made of the velvety teats of a swan

Lift your frowsy paws towards the skyline, call in the glim. Never mind this false spring, come feast with me.

Later there’ll be hell to pay - a big bad hunchback of a snow. But for now, my darling dwarfish druid, there are rowan berries and persimmons and nightshades and these woods, hoarse with laughter.

 

 

Dear Badger,

 

O dulcimer blood of thirteen strokes at midnight, a velvet grimoire of the blue skin lining of the cadaver’s casket. Badger uterus. Badger rapture. Badger mirror divination. Badger knee fracture. Knife of badger, badger hatchback. O ash of swan where swoons snowmen made of badger semen. The legible ledger of long life. The ineligible mandible of the minotaur. Leather hewn from badger organs—gallstones and duodenum—Badger we magic time into bodies, give berths to life, cross section the possible to house the boundaryless, make from impossible Schrodinger souls a meaning: to be human, friend, badger. To be born, give birth, to break the bones of the potential only to heal as phenomenon. The snowdrop bones, the blizzard bones, the sleet of bones in the fishes of the actual, the milk gills and swan copulation of the moon-eyed written in sinew. A human sliced in two by guitar string is a song on the left, a song on the right, the severed melody nothing a badger could sing.

 

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Dear Badger,

 

Four fathoms past midnight. I’ve been reading The Soul of an Octopus, a kind of compendium of enchantments, untamed and full of wild magic. A twisted, gelatinous, devil-fish grimoire. Badger, I learned that some creatures taste with their skin, their entire body. O to be other, to be slug or mollusk, to be free from this gulag of bones.

Badger, I dream I shake hands with an octopus named Stella. Can I call you Stella? Each arm, each sucker is a brain, Stella. What you think, I think, what I see you feel. How can this be, Stella? Each inkling you ponder, oozing, leaking, flooding into me like a renaissance.  

Stella, I am no more than the sum of my badgers. All these letters I’ve been writing you, I write from the left-hemisphere. I imagine you reading them, Stella, in a bottomless house made of tentacles. O Stella, can you see the edge of the rest of my life? Can you, with your astral eye?

O to be other, to be born a guitar, a stick, to be free from the big house of cognizance. Thank you, Stella, you’ve cast your sortilege, worked your magic. Thank you, I know now that the mind is both Sisyphus and the rock.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lillian Nećakov is the author many chapbooks, including, The Lake Contains and Emergency Room (Apt. 9 Press; shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award), as well as the full-length collections il virus (Anvil Press; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Hooligans (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books) and The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn). Her book, Midnight Glossolalia, a collaborative poetry collection with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag was published in 2023 (Meat for Tea Press). Her book, Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses eye, a collaborative poem with Gary Barwin was published in May 2023 by Guernica Editions. She has also published in many print and online journals in Canada and the U.S. Lillian lives in Toronto.

 

Gary Barwin is a writer, multimedia artist, and musician, the author of 33 books including, recently, Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 (Assembly Press) and Ovaryman (a play written with Tom Prime, published in Dead Code and other dramatic entertainments, Anti-Oedipus Press) and The Fabulous Op (with Gregory Betts, Downingfield Press.) His interactive video installation, Bird Fiction, created with Sarah Imrisek, was part of Toronto’s most recent Nuit Blanche and his multimedia poetry projection was on display on a vast wall in downtown Hamilton in February. He lives in Hamilton ON. garybarwin.com

Gregory Crosby : PARALLAX DAYS COPY

 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t join Twitter until 2010; casting about for a username, I was stunned to discover that “monostich,” the technical and often misspelled term for a one-line poem, was somehow still available. How is that a platform seemingly designed for aphorisms and one-line poems did not already have a dozen variations on that handle? I scooped it up and proceeded to tweet out the monostiches that I’d been collecting in a little notebook.

No one cared.

Later, I found that my thirteen word horror stories gained slightly more traction, in part perhaps because they were termed “stories” instead of poems. I wrote over 300 of those, and duly collected them into a manuscript later, but the original monostiches I’d tweeted out over 2010 and 2011 gathered the fine digital dust that most things on the Internet gather.

It was only after I’d downloaded my tweets and deleted myself off that site that I, unexpectedly and thankfully prompted, began to go over them and pluck some out and revise them into what became Parallax Days, rescuing them from their electronic oblivion to return them to the thin but immortal arms of print. I’m glad they have a potential new life... and I’m just as stunned that the handle of monostich was still available when I signed up for Bluesky.

 

 

 

 

Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System). He is currently the poetry editor for the online journal Bowery Gothic.