Ars Poeticas, Juliana Spahr
Wesleyan, 2025
How do you put the poetic
aesthete in dialogue with the militant activist? Juliana Spahr shows some ways
this is (im)possible in her thin volume (barely 40 pages of text) with the
ambitious, definitive title: ars poetica. After a brief two-page lyric
introduction called “coral,” the second of the seven ars poetica that
make up this collection is the core of the book’s “argument,” a long hybrid
piece, alternating between discursive lyric couplets and blocks of chatty prose,
titled “scotch broom,” in which the speaker often questions her lifelong
investment in poetry:
“One thought I had as we talked was love the poem but hate being the poet, hate this frayed cloth called poetry community.” (19)
“I mean, so many poems are about the not liking of poetry, and here I am writing another one. Still, it would be easy to blame my failing relationship with poetry on poetry itself. Or that is what I told them that afternoon. I knew what poetry was, what it stood for, when I first started putting words into patterns and calling it a poem. Instead, I said, I’m concerned about these other things. This nation, our nation. How it was first something terrible and now something possibly more terrible. (20)
I can definitely relate to this, but maybe that’s why I sometimes feel diffident towards ars poetica. The jacket copy makes much of the fact that this book is inspired by Spahr’s reading of Bertolt Brecht, but for the most part it just engages one quote (perhaps the most famous) of Brecht’s, the one about writing poetry in the dark time, leaving his canon of political poems, with interventions in the material base and superstructure (from “The Shopper” to “Everything New is Better than Everything Old”) and theatre pieces, largely untouched. Such poems, in the American canon, are often called too strident, and Brecht’s work itself is often considered too obvious to most American poets and critics trained in MFA programs, often condemned as mere agit-prop or topical rhetorical prosaic editorialzing rather than high poetry in the post-poundian 20th century tradition. Yet not only did Brecht raise questions about the value relationship between the personal and the political in poems such as “A Bed for the Night,” he also invented new forms using accessible non-specialized language. At times, ars poetica similarly invents new forms, and widens the range of an overly narrow sense of poetry, especially poignantly in the book’s most elegiac sequence, “bison” (37-43), addressing the species extinction that is a result of the capitalist Anthropocene, or capital-cene:
There once was a prairie.
It’s never coming back,
as in it will never be whole again.
There’s the bison.
They can come back.
But the bison plus the prairie,
as in the bison moving over the prairie
with the rumored speed of a race horse,
that too is never coming back
until we change the well-intentioned
hopes of institutions and research,
the less well-intentioned grants
for rewilding from banks and governments,
into something psychotic and large
in its demands,
by which I mean the end of capitalism.
This is Spahr at her Brechtian best, but what makes it American and contemporary in this highly self-conscious age is what she writes next:
Really, I don’t want to land this poem so hard,
land it on a word so cliched as “capitalism,”
but I don’t know how to say otherwise
about the predicament we are in
where there is only one way out.
That it’s an idea that feels impossible
to include in a poem tells us something
about the new feats of imagining we
have yet to embrace. (43)
This is ars poetica at its Spahrian best, and I absolutely applaud her clarion call to widen the sense of poetry between stale aesthetic dictums as “no ideas but in things” and “show, don’t tell,” but when it comes to what she offers as alternative action, an intervention that may change, or reduce, the horrors of contemporary society, she can only offer the kind of action similar to that which fellow white academic leftist Joshua Clover advocated in his book about riots. A good portion of the piece “scotch broom” is devoted to a first-person account of participating in a riot-like protest in which violence is the only currency:
“When a stick
shot across the crowd, it landed at my feet. Then the kid next to me picked it
up and ran back into the fight screaming, take this antifa, stick raised over
the head. I saw it come down on two heads at the same time. that was all I saw
because someone chasing someone else ran between us, and they sprayed bear
mace, so I looked away, eyes tearing. What I mean here is that it was a time of
sticks, not of poems.” (150)
Although such activity may be considered one’s civic duty, as well as offer a respite from that too often inwardly turned “poetry community” mentioned earlier, it’s difficult to read this devoid of a racial politics, and the white privilege to be violent and destructive. Often, for instance, at antifa rallies in the wake of police killings of black people, many similarly violent white protesters would come in with sticks and stones and other weapons to cause violence, even though many of the black protestors, on whose behalf the white people claimed to be fighting, warned them not to. And why? Because black people would get blamed for the violence perpetrated hy whites. As a white person, this gives me pause; there has to be another way. This makes it difficult to fully endorse Spahr’ book, even though we share many concerns, and a desire and need to intervene in the standard business as usual of the poetry “world.” A skeptic may even wonder if Spahr would have won the Pulitzer had she advocated for the kind of resistance that targets the owners of the means of production rather than poor people attacking and looting other poor people.
Chris Stroffolino has published
9 solo collections of poetry, most recently Medi(t)ations (Blaze Vox,
2025); he’s also published a poetic collaboration with Steve Carll, Dreaming
to a Click (2026, Bathysphere). His most recent collection of essays is In The Here There (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). More recently, Periodicities
published his short essays on Virginia Konchan and Rae Armantrout; poems are
forthcoming in Hanging Loose and New American Writing. He lives
in Oakland, CA. where he taught at Laney College from 2008 until February 2025,
when he suffered a stroke.
