Poetry in Trying Times
In his essay The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Crippled Poetics, Jim Ferris writes of the poem ‘as a body unto itself’. (1) Spinoza, in turn, writes of the body: ‘no one has yet determined what the body can do’. (2) Finally, the conclusion I drew from these two statements came from a doctor’s remark years before I would read either Ferris or Spinoza: ‘Още не знаем какво може да поема тялото му.’ (3) He was answering my grandma’s questions about what I could and could not eat now that the flu had upset my stomach.
The verb ‘поема’ struck me as an awkward word choice. It meant both ‘consume/digest’ and ‘bear’ and it was a rather dramatic way to talk about an upset stomach. Now, however, the verb strikes me with its homonymic resemblance to the Bulgarian word for ‘poem’ and how the doctor talks of ‘how the body poems’ and ‘how little we know of this poeming’. There is something the poem can tell us about the body and something the body can tell us about the poem.
Jim Ferris’ essay considers the role of the embodied experience of the author in the composition of the poem in order to establish a metaphorical association between the body and the poem. When he discusses questions of form, for example, Ferris narrates his own experiences of leg length discrepancy alongside his experience with writing poetry: ‘Though I claim to be a poet - at least, I try to make poems - traditional poetic forms have mostly baffled me. I don't do set forms – received forms – particularly well.’ (p.220) The essay does well to establish the poem as a body extended in space – a body with its own form (‘whether it is a sonnet or villanelle, a limerick, a prose poem, or one that seeks to describe and define its own form’) and a body which cannot conform to a given form (‘We speak of the sonnet as "a form," when no two sonnets, however similar their structures, have the same form.’). (pp. 220-22) There is, however, the question of the body extended in time. Ferris gestures to the effects of time on the body (‘our bodies are meat, shaped by genes, by chance, by surgeons, and by time’; ‘I know that no body goes through this life unscathed, that life marks and wears us all’), but he does so in order to point to a body’s timely limitations when I think such thoughts could be extended to the body’s - and in turn the poem’s - timely excess. (p. 221)
To continue from where Ferris left off, the body wears out and rots, but it also does something more or less poetic (and I mean this in the literal sense). Art O'Leary’s bleeding body, for example, briefly finds itself haunting the ‘pierced hearts in the margin’ of a teenage girl’s poetry assignment and reappears for a moment again in Angela Bourke’s reflection on the reception of Eibhlín Dubh’s poem ‘as radically different in kind, a unique production’ instead of one of the ‘finest surviving [realizations]’ in a long tradition of women’s spoken word poetry. (4,5) Bodies haunt slivers of time and find themselves contextualised and re-contextualised in new readings. The poem is no different in its trespassing of cultural and historical boundaries. It finds itself in the lament of Eibhlín Dubh and on the pages of this essay. That is why the body poems and in turn the poem bodies. They have no choice indeed. They will always find themselves in one context or another, celebrated in their many different presents and anticipated for their unpredictable futures. ‘No one has yet determined what the body can do’. In time, the poeming body and the bodying poem move and come alive again and again. Now that the bodies of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, of the millions dead from COVID-19 and dysfunctional governments, of the unnamed refugees washed up on Italian beaches have come to haunt the world, what does the bodying poem of Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs do with the poeming bodies of our times? What does a collection of poems written alongside and reflecting upon its current disasters like 9/11 and the beginning of the US war in Afghanistan tell us about our own struggles with global disaster? I am writing this piece partly as my own attempt at consolation and partly as a way to encourage a reading of poetry which rediscovers activism and hope in trying times.
November 21, 2020
On the day Guatemalans set their congress on fire, my brother called to tell me about his first confession to his crush. He hurried past information which recounted the space and the time of the confession (the schoolyard, lunchbreak) and told me how he had asked a girl from the debate club if he could kiss her. I envied the parenthetical treatment of the ‘whens’ and ‘wheres’ of his ‘what’. Those circumstantial details were there solely for the build-up. By the time he had reached the point of the kiss, I was already stuck in the schoolyard at lunchbreak. The space (a public one) and the time (Bulgaria during a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ protests and violence) for me occupied enough of a narrative on their own. This position of being stuck is not, however, one of immobility. It is a position which persistently repeats itself, inevitably opening itself up to becoming otherwise in the process.
Throughout This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, repetitions move through time (the dates of each poem) and slowly unravel the events of the time in which they appear. Because those events exist in language, an opening presents itself to the reader’s imagination. Namely, is there a point at which the utterances (‘When I speak of […] I speak of’; ‘We did not speak’; ‘Some say’; ‘I say’; ‘They sing of’), stuck in their repetitions, produce something more than a report of the events they refer to? (6) I would say yes. The act of speaking at some point can be imagined as a condition which gives rise to the events in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. That is not to say that the ‘US attacks on Iraqi air defense sites’ or ‘the ninety-five-year old woman who was shot by Israeli troops while driving her car from Palestine into Israel’ are made any less of this world in Juliana Spahr’s poetry, but that language and the ‘I’ have a hold over the event as much as the event has a hold over language and the ‘I’.
When I speak of language, I speak of an event. I speak of the photograph of a Guatemalan flipping the finger in front of a burning congress building as their government decides to cut education and health spending. I do not speak so much of crackling wood or broken glass as I speak of the space which the photograph creates – a space which was not previously there in the same way. I speak of the experience of seeing that space occupied by someone who is not supposed to be there. I do not only speak of legality when I speak of who is and is not supposed to occupy a certain space. Domestic terrorists, storming the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. on January 6th, 2021 were legally prohibited from occupying that space, but the systems of white supremacy, bolstered by the repeated claims of a fraudulent election, expected them there.
When I speak of someone who is not supposed to be there, I speak of a marginality stuck in its insistence on occupying a space where it is neither legally, nor socially expected. ‘I say it again and again. Again and again. I try to keep saying it to keep making it happen.’ Spahr’s insistence on repetition is then an insistence on language as an event capable of re=contextualising the lyrical ‘I’, and so an event capable of opening up the space for ‘the condition of speaking’ itself – the ‘breath’ of ‘someone, somewhere in time’ – to insist on being stuck in a schoolyard. (7)
March 3, 2020
It is not lost on me that the title of Spahr’s work has acquired a more literal meaning in recent times. With the number of COVID-19 deaths nearing two million as of January 7, 2021, I have to ask of ‘this connection’. Although This Connection of Everyone with Lungs begins with an all-encompassing movement ‘in and out’ between cells, the shapes of our bodies, and the progressively unfolding space outside these bodies, the poem eventually asks: ‘How can the power of our combination of intimacy and isolation have so little power outside the space of our bed?’ The work at once confirms this space as a field of imminent connection as soon as, for example, something as simple as the act of breathing is invoked (‘Everyone with lungs breathes the space in and out’) and questions its reach outside the ‘1.4 to 2 square meters of surface area’. I do not think Juliana Spahr poses so much a question of contradiction as a question of excess possibility. It is not that the physical connection established between cells and the mesosphere in the very beginning is somehow illusory, but that such a connection always awaits the ways in which it can become intimate.
Heather Milne ponders on this question of intimacy in her essay Dearly Beloveds: The Politics of Intimacy in Juliana Spahr's "This Connection of Everyone with Lungs" and points out how ‘Spahr builds on this notion of skin as both site of intimate contact and boundary between self and other’. (8) I wonder then if a connection in search of intimacy is a connection which understands the physical delineations of the world and because of this understanding never ceases to desire to breach them. The ‘boundary between self and other’ is irrefutable. No one can occupy the space of another person’s lived experiences. Yet, it is this impossibility which drives the curious to desire to know what such a life could be. A curiosity which, in turn, becomes inexhaustible due to the fact that it cannot breach its own skin.
The necessary result of this curiosity of intimacy is then an increasing knowledge of boundaries: ‘I speak of the separations that define this world and the separations that define us, beloveds, even as we like to press our skins against one another in the night.’ Because ‘these separations have nothing and everything to do with the moments when we feel joined and separated from each others’, a reckoning with the conditions of separation becomes essential. The poem asks of us to differentiate between our skin and our beds even as it equates the two (‘I’ve said it before, our bed is a few square feet’) in order to palpate the boundaries which truly cannot be breached: ‘We say our bed is part of everyone else’s bed even as our bed is denied to others by an elaborate system of fences and passport checking booths.’ To what extent is the ‘system of fences and passport checking booths’ a necessary one? The bodies of COVID-19 patients and victims ask similar questions. To what extent are the medical bills of US citizens necessary? How are the school meals for children of vulnerable families up for debate in the UK? This Connection of Everyone with Lungs urges us to consider the excess of separation which stands in the way of the excess of intimate curiosity.
May 25, 2020
Even as we begin to acknowledge that certain separations can be breached, there nevertheless stands before us the task of breaching them. George Floyd’s murder was a result of the entrenched separations of white supremacy and the police state which allow for human suffering to be overlooked even as it is happening before us. There exist separations which do not interest themselves in the other and Juliana Spahr admits as much in her own work:
‘I felt I had to think about what I was connected with, and what I was complicit with, as I lived off the fat of the military-industrial complex on a small island. I had to think about my intimacy with things I would rather not be intimate with even as (because?) I was very far away from all those things geographically.’
Intimacy suddenly feels painful and hopeless. As bodies reveal their anachronistic nature, their haunting legacy serves not only as a space for possible change, but also as totems of already established norms and contexts. In her lyric, Spahr implies how this simultaneity prevents the prospect for an intimacy whose only separation is the physical boundary of the human skin: ‘While we turned sleeping uneasily at least ten were injured in a bomb blast in Bombay and four killed in Palestine.’ The poem once again opens up the space for repetition, but this time the process of being stuck presents little opportunity for action. Instead, the repetition stretches across the spaces of ‘Bombay’ and ‘Palestine’ while the space of the bed offers only the position of the bystander.
The consolation in this kind of intimacy rests in the solidarity implied by Spahr’s specific use of pronouns. The repeated use of ‘we’ can be imagined not as a recurrence of the same referent, but as an additive force which increases the number of its referents with every repetition. In this sense, the unease of the ‘we’ gradually becomes a force prepared to tackle the ‘while’ we exist in. I should also mention Spahr’s use of ‘yous’ which does something very interesting in the poem. ‘You’ by itself serves the same purpose as a pointed finger – it directs the attention of the utterance outside the one who is speaking. ‘Yous’, on the other hand, implies a plurality which could now include the speaker in what is being pointed out. In this sense, repetitions of ‘we’ could be imagined as the building up of tidal forces, while the ordinary act of separating the self from the other with the use of ‘you’ is not pluralised to include and point out the act of othering. Juliana Spahr’s work then uses always leaves a sliver of time for more and more bodies to become stuck and re-contextualise the space they haunt.
January 12, 2021
As I am finishing this essay, I want to remark on the fact of a body completing this work – my body which has been assigned necessities like time and space and incidental attributes like gender and nationality. More often than not, I am horrified by how those facts of the body come together in this world. For example: a Bulgarian student who managed to squeeze onto an English literature program just in time before Brexit barred future EU students from even considering such a future. My mind wanders to my brother who is unlucky enough to incidentally be four years younger than me and who will never consider certain university programs because they are only available at UK universities.
My mind also wanders to a Bulgarian transgender man who had just enrolled in the English literature and French program around the time I came to Cardiff. I didn’t know he was transgender at the time. I only learnt he was saving up for hormonal treatment and surgery after the news of his suicide. When I read the news, I had a feeling in my gut that Bulgaria had haunted him even in the UK.
This Connection of Everyone with Lungs will serve as a constant reminder of two things:
So many times people throughout history have imagined, palpated, and anticipated the end of the times and so many times the consolation has been survival, the mere continuation of the species no matter how inhospitable the conditions, that we have started to fetishize living on the brink of extinction, completely forgetting that we are deserving of so much more.
The fact of this body exists in its own ‘while’ but not without ‘we’ and ‘yous’.
1) Jim Ferris, ‘The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Crippled Poetics’, The Georgia review, 58 (2004), 219-33 < https://www.jstor.org/stable/41402415> All subsequent references are from the same edition.
2) A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. by Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
3) ‘We still don’t know what his body can take.’.
4) Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat (Tramp Press, 2020).
5) Angela Bourke, ‘Performing, Not Writing: The Reception of an Irish Woman's Lament’, in Dwelling in Possibility, (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2018).
6)Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, (Berkley: University of California Press, 2005). All further references are from the same edition.
7)Angela Leighton, ‘In Time and Out: Women’s Poetry and Literary History’, Modern Language Quarterly, 65.1 (2004): 131-148.
8) Heather Milne, ‘Dearly Beloveds: The Politics of Intimacy in Juliana Spahr's "This Connection of Everyone with Lungs"’, Mosaic (2004)
Bibliography:
A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. by Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020)
Bourke, Angela, ‘Performing, Not Writing: The Reception of an Irish Woman's Lament’, in Dwelling in Possibility, (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2018)
Ferris, Jim, ‘The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Crippled Poetics’, The Georgia review, 58 (2004), 219-33 < https://www.jstor.org/stable/41402415>
Leighton, Angela, ‘In Time and Out: Women’s Poetry and Literary History’, Modern Language Quarterly, 65.1 (2004)
Milne, Heather, ‘Dearly Beloveds: The Politics of Intimacy in Juliana Spahr's "This Connection of Everyone with Lungs"’, Mosaic (2004)
Ní Ghríofa, Doireann, A Ghost in the Throat (Tramp Press, 2020)
Spahr, Juliana, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, (Berkley: University of California Press, 2005)
Recipes
Written by Georgi Georgiev
I’m a final year English Literature and Creative Writing student at Cardiff University who is passionate about social justice, poetry, and the occasional internet subculture deep dive. You can find me retweeting video essays @GVonedal