Chris Stroffolino : Ars Poeticas, by Juliana Spahr

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 20^th 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.

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).