#Juliana Spahr

[milksockets]

[abellinthecupboard]

Here is a google docs folder with over 75 scanned books in pdf form, almost entirely poetry collections. Featured poets include Mary Oliver, Louise Glück, Myung Mi Kim, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Billy Collins, Jericho Brown, Jane Kenyon, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Ruth Stone, Naomi Shihab Nye, Robert Bly, Carol Ann Duffy, Juliana Spahr, and more. New books are added occasionally so try checking the folder every few months for new additions. Here is the poetry folder if the first link isn't working.

[field-cryptobotanist]

Reading Unnamed dragonfly species from the book Well then there now by Juliana Spahr is such an emotional rollercoaster. It perfectly gives off the feeling of urgency about climate change while also showing all the biodiversity we are losing every day! Such a good poem. Half way through you stop noticing the difference speces so you can see the big picture which works so well with the message the scientific facts and the writers personal experience!!!!

[tribalephemeral]

Acknowledgement to Juliana Spahr for her book "Well Then There Now"

Some notes on where the names We all the small ones and Demonoid Picotent came from and also stylistic influences on Synaptic Syntactic In retrospect, I probably should have included Juliana Spahr in the dedication or done acknowledgements in my 2017 book Synaptic Syntactic, since the style of some of the poems was significantly shaped by re-readings of the poems (but not the prose) therein. And…

[outlawarchive]

2 de dezembro de 2002

Como acontece todas as noites, queridos, enquanto dormíamos inquietos, o mundo seguia sem nós.

Vivemos em nosso próprio fuso horário e existem apenas alguns milhões de nós nesse fuso horário; como resultado, o mundo tende a começar e terminar sem a gente.

Enquanto dormíamos inquietos, pelo menos dez pessoas foram atingidas por um bombardeio em Mumbai e quatro foram mortas na Palestina.

Enquanto dormíamos inquietos, um depósito de alimentos para doação foi destruído, as vendas de ações dispararam, a Austrália ameaçou realizar os primeiros ataques, houve um intenso tiroteio em Manchester, o embaixador de Belarus no Japão desapareceu, um navio de cruzeiro pegou fogo, em outro navio de cruzeiro muitos passageiros ficaram doentes e o papa fez uma declaração contra a xenofobia.

Enquanto dormíamos inquietos, talvez J Lo tenha exigido de Ben sexo quatro vezes por semana em um acordo pré-nupcial.

Enquanto dormíamos inquietos, Liam Gallagher criticou e fãs revoltados reclamaram que Popstars: The Rivals era armado.

Enquanto dormíamos inquietos, a Suprema Corte concordou em examinar o caso das cotas raciais para acesso à universidade.

Enquanto dormíamos inquietos, caçadores ilegais pescaram esturjões no Cáspio repleto de juncos, onde moram javalis e lobos, e alguns dos residentes do ônibus espacial planejaram um voo de volta para os EUA.

Queridos, nosso mundo é pequeno e isolado.

Vivemos nossas vidas em 55 metros quadrados, uns 400 metros da costa, em uma terra que tem 1.800 km² e está a 8 mil km da porção de terra mais próxima.

Apesar do nosso isolamento, não há como escapar das notícias sobre quantos dias de inspeções no Iraque restam.

A enquete no jornal hoje foi devemos invadir o Iraque agora ou devemos esperar até que as inspeções sejam concluídas? Tentamos rir juntos dessa pergunta, mas nossa risada era preocupada e decidimos apenas desligar a televisão que chega para nós desses outros fusos horários.

Queridos, não sabemos como viver nossas vidas com qualquer poder fora da nossa cama.

Fico brava que, a forma como vivemos em nossa cama – cheios de amor conectado e cheios de sono e sonhos isolados também – não tem nenhuma relevância para o resto do mundo.

Como pode o poder da combinação da nossa intimidade e nosso isolamento ter tão pouco impacto fora do espaço da nossa cama?

Queridos, o ônibus está pronto para voltar para casa e pela janela do ônibus dá para ver a Terra.

“A Terra é imensa; a atmosfera é minúscula”; um dos astronautas percebe.

Queridos, o que podemos fazer senão continuar respirando o melhor que conseguirmos nessa minúscula atmosfera?

Juliana Spahr - Traduzido por Victoria Viana

[alightinthelantern]

Books read and movies watched in 2024 (January-June): Should you watch/read them?

Poetry:

In the Next Galaxy (Ruth Stone): No

Selected Poems (Mark Strand): No

In the Dark (Ruth Stone): Yes!

Response (Juliana Spahr): Yes

The Unicorn (Anne Morrow Lindbergh): No!

Everything Else in the World (Stephen Dunn): Yes

Words Under the Words (Naomi Shihab Nye): Eh

On Love and Barley (Matsuo Basho, trans. Lucien Stryk): Yes!

The Transformation (Juliana Spahr): No

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Matsuo Basho, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa): No

The Book of Taliesin (anon., trans. Gwyneth Lewis & Rowan Williams): No

What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems (Ruth Stone): Eh

Face (Sherman Alexie): NO

No Surrender (Ai): Eh

The Summer of Black Widows (Sherman Alexie): Yes!

The Afflicted Girls (Nicole Cooley): Yes!

Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (Jimmy Santiago Baca): No

American Smooth (Rita Dove): No

Elegy (Mary Jo Bang): No

Angel (Giles Dorey): NO

Collected Poems (Paul Auster): Eh

June-Tree (Peter Balakian): Yes

We Must Make a Kingdom of It (Gregory Orr): Eh

Only as the Day is Long (Dorianne Laux): No

Grace Notes (Rita Dove): Yes

Bathwater Wine (Wanda Coleman): Yes

My Soviet Union (Michael Dumanis): No

American Milk (Ruth Stone): Yes

The Drowned Girl (Eve Alexandra): No

A Worldly Country (John Ashberry): No

The Complete Poems of Hart Crane: No

One Stick Song (Sherman Alexie): Yes

If You Call This Cry a Song (Hayden Carruth): No

Doctor Jazz (Hayden Carruth): No

The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Gabrielle Calvocoressi): No

And Her Soul Out of Nothing (Olena Kalytiak Davis): No

Prisoner of Hope (Yvonne Daley): No

The Other Man Was Me (Rafael Campo): No

My Wicked Wicked Ways (Sandra Cisneros): No

On Earth (Robert Creeley): Eh

Genius Loci (Alison Hawthorne Deming): Eh

Science and Other Poems (Alison Hawthorne Deming): Eh

Voices (Lucille Clifton): Yes

A New Path to the Waterfall (Raymond Carver): Eh

Where Shadows Will (Norma Cole): No

The Way Back (Wyn Cooper): No

A Cartography of Peace (Jean L. Connor): No

Minnow (Judith Chalmer): Yes!

Postcards from the Interior (Wyn Cooper): Yes

Natural History (Dan Chiasson): Eh

The Ship of Birth (Greg Delanty): Eh

Madonna anno domini (Joshua Clover): NO

The Terrible Stories (Lucille Clifton): No

The Flashboat (Jane Cooper): Eh

Book of Longing (Leonard Cohen): No

Streets in Their Own Ink (Stuart Dybek): Eh

Different Hours (Stephen Dunn): Yes

I Love This Dark World (Alice B. Fogel): Eh

Baptism of Desire (Louise Erdrich): Yes!

The Eternal City (Kathleen Graber): Eh

Monolithos (Jack Gilbert): Yes

Crown of Weeds (Amy Gerstler): No

Blue Hour (Carolyn Forché): No

Place (Jorie Graham): No

Meadowlands (Louise Gluck): Yes!

Dearest Creature (Amy Gerstler): No

Loosestrife (Stephen Dunn): No

Little Savage (Emily Fragos): Yes

The Living Fire (Edward Hirsch): No

On Love (Edward Hirsch): No

Human Wishes (Robert Hass): NO

Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (B. H. Fairchild): No

Sinking Creek (John Engels): No

Alabanza (Martín Espada): Yes

Saving Lives (Albert Goldbarth): No

All of It Singing (Linda Gregg): No

Green Squall (Jay Hopler): No

Tender Hooks (Beth Ann Fennelly): No

After (Jane Hirshfield): Eh

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (Tony Hoagland): NO

These Are My Rivers (Lawrence Ferlinghetti): No

Fruitful (Stephanie Kirby): No

Jaguar Skies (Michael McClure): No

Song (Brigit Pegeen Kelly): No

Roadworthy Creature, Roadworthy Craft (Kate Magill): No

Life in the Forest (Denise Levertov): No

Viper Rum (Mary Karr): No

Questions for Ecclesiastes (Mark Jarman): No

Brutal Imagination (Cornelius Eady): Yes

Alphabet of Bones (Alexis Lathem): No

Handwriting (Michael Ondaatje): No

Sure Signs (Ted Kooser): No

Sledding on Hospital Hill (Leland Kinsey): No

Between Silences (Ha Jin): Yes

House of Days (Jay Parini): No

Bird Eating Bird (Kristin Naca): Yes

Orpheus & Eurydice (Gregory Orr): Yes

Another America (Barbara Kingsolver): Yes

Candles in Babylon (Denise Levertov): Yes

The Clerk's Tale (Spencer Reece): Eh

Still Listening (Angela Patten): Yes

A Thief of Strings (Donald Revell): No

Wayfare (Pattiann Rogers): No

The Niagara River (Kay Ryan): No

The Bird Catcher (Marie Ponsot): No

Easy (Marie Ponsot): No

Human Dark with Sugar (Brenda Shaughnessy): No

Chronic (D. A. Powell): No

Novels/Fiction:

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Yiyun Li): No

The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories: Yes

Movies:

What Dreams May Come (1998, Vincent Ward): Yes

The Cat's Meow (2001, Peter Bogdanovich): Yes

The Birdcage (1996, Mike Nichols): Yes

The Color of Pomegranates (1969, Sergei Parajanov): No

The Eve of Ivan Kupalo (1969, Yuri Ilyenko): Yes

And here's my 2023 list!

[kenyatta]

The game is rigged. It is rigged like capitalism is rigged. There is no puppet master, no conspiracy, only a field where advantages, to begin with, are distributed unequally. You can beat the long odds, but you have long odds to beat; a team of scholars has been working for almost 10 years to detail exactly how the rigging works. Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, later joined by Claire Grossman, began by noticing that poetry readings they regularly attended were held in “mainly white rooms.” They wanted to know why. To find out, they would need to widen their purview. The wider they went, the hungrier they became to understand who gets to succeed as a writer in the United States today. They wanted to reveal the system, to see all of it.

So, they collected data. Because prizes are a normative standard for success, they collected data on prizes — every prize since 1918 worth $10,000 or more in 2022 dollars. They recorded who won, what their gender and race were, where they earned their degrees, and who served as judges. Then they published what they found in aseriesofessays. What did they find?

They found that writers “with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.” They found that half of the prize-winners with an MFA “went to just four schools: [University of] Iowa, Columbia, NYU, or UC Irvine.” Iowa has special clout: its alumni “are 49 times more likely to win compared to writers who earned their MFA at any other program since 2000.”

They found that “in recent years, about a quarter of the titles that won prizes were published by […] imprints of Penguin Random House; about half were published by an additional four presses: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (an imprint of Macmillan), Copper Canyon, Graywolf, and HarperCollins.”

They found that race is more complicated than they initially thought. Prizes were — for long stretches exclusively — white throughout the 20th century. But that has changed in recent years: “From 2000 to 2018, 33 percent of prizewinners identified as other than white, coming close to the 36 percent of the population who did in the 2010 census.” (Publishers did not keep up; their lists remained far whiter.) But nonwhite writers needed elite credentials more than white ones. Black writers who won prizes, for example, were much more likely than white writers to hold Ivy League degrees and MFAs.

All this power is routed through people. Grossman, Spahr, and Young show how a small group of writers who served often as judges wielded disproportionate influence; in poetry, these figures include Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, and Richard Wilbur. Grossman, Spahr, and Young show how often prizes appear reciprocal: those who give later receive, and vice versa.

[jacobwren]

Ten Favourite Books: Islands of Decolonial Love – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Houses of Ravicka – Renee Gladman Aliens & Anorexia – Chris Kraus LOTE – Shola von Reinhold I Hotel – Karen Tei Yamashita The Transformation – Juliana Spahr The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll – Alvaro Mutis The Manuscript Found in Saragossa – Jan Potocki Third Factory – Viktor Shklovsky The Hills of Hebron – Sylvia Wynter

[livmoose]

excerpts from “Will There Be Singing”

Juliana Spahr

^

During these days,

I would wake up and my head would hurt

and then I would realize that in my dream

I had said to myself that I should write some poetry.

But my dreams never explained to me why.

Or how.

How to sing in these dark times?

It is true that I have been with poetry for a long time.

Since I was a teenager.

Those loves of many years and our bodies changing together.

And yet also the deepening of this love. Despite.

That day with the breeze in the bar

And we said together, there needs to be some pleasure in the world.

And next, poetry is the what is left of life.

And we pledged, more singing.

And we referenced by saying,

In the dark times. Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.

“I was trying to figure out what it was that I valued about poetry. I have had trouble the last few years remembering that I liked poetry because I had been for so long confusing the sociality around poetry for the poem. And I had spent the last few years writing a lot about poetry and its role in soft diplomacy and the genre seemed more and more suspect to me. So I decided to write an ars poetica, a meditation on poetry, to see if I still liked poetry or not.”

—Juliana Spahr

[thesefevereddays]

Ode to Goby

By Juliana Spahr

Here, floating with the water

I escape. I float. I immerse in the richness

of the forest; fade into the dark greens

of the ferns and reeds of the shore,

the light greens of the new leaves on the trees,

the water rushing, and oh the bird calls too.

Came to sedate, cleanse, escape.

Came to clear out my dreams

filled with bears that each night enter

my room, tearing it apart

so as to let me know there aren’t enough

fish this year and likely the next too.

Came for water so clear

that I could wash, that I could see.

Came to see a goby,

a blue, a purple, a turquoise

too when seen from the side,

then a clear that is as a pink when it turns.

Even as it is getting dark so fast

that there is almost nothing left to see

still, we together swim on, into some world

not yet imagined, not yet understood.

Oh goby, I am sorry we have made things

so impossible for you, for all of us.

Sorry that we have done so much that

you are few; sorry to be so lost, imageless,

confused; sorry that I do not know how to be

other than Grendel, swamp-like, dwelling in fen

and moorland, up to his knees in the water

wandering the outskirts of town, angry,

unforgiving of those who still find happiness

amidst loss. Goby, even the very things

that would cure us we put at risk:

the tall tapering racemes of white midsummer

flowers on wiry black-purple stems

that is the black cohosh; the blood red sap

of the bloodroot and its small white petals that

open up in sunlight; the hairy deep purple

stems of the goldenseal that support two hand-shaped leaves.

This world that once was so much, now less.

This world that was once a luminous archive

of things evolved and adapted in slow moving

specificity. This world that Césaire wrote

when there was the possibility

that it might turn some other way than the nation,

a world not of enclosure but of predatory

celebration, liberation, a world of the sparrowhawk,

the cynocephalus, the dolphins, and the wolves

who feed in the untamed openings.

Fled is that music, that world, that rhetorical question

and yet we continue on, angry, unforgiving, unsure.

[finishinglinepress]

FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) by Karla Brundage

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/blood-lies-race-traitor-by-karla-brundage/

In “Blood Lies: Race Trait(or),” Karla Brundage offers a thought-provoking journey through the intricate nuances of #race, particularly the various facets of #Blackness. This collection asks at what point does this mathematical inquiry become traitorous? She takes readers on an exploration of #ancestry, unraveling the complex #history behind terms like “mulatto,” “octoroon,” and “quadroon,” while also delving into Brundage’s personal experiences as a 21st-century woman. With rich, at times brutally honest, lyricism and clever wordplay, Brundage examines the multifaceted nature of race, viewing it through the lenses of history, culture, sexuality, and politics. By the book’s conclusion, “Blood Lies” challenges the conventional notion of race, illustrating that it’s not simply a matter of bloodlines but a global phenomenon that encompasses the diverse dimensions of blackness, whiteness, and womanness.

Karla Brundage is a Bay Area based poet, activist, and educator with a passion for social justice. Born in Berkeley, California in the summer of love to a Black mother and white father, Karla spent most of her childhood in Hawaii where she developed a deep love of nature. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Fulbright teacher she has performed her work onstage and online, both nationally and internationally. Her poetry, short stories and essays can be found in Tribes, Konch, Hip Mama, sPARKLE & bLINK, Bamboo Ridge Press, and WriteNow. She is the founder of West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange (WO2WA), which has facilitated cross-cultural exchange between Oakland and West African poets and the publication of three books Our Spirits Carry Our Voices, Sisters Across Oceans and Black Rootedness: 54 Poets from Africa to America.Her musical loves include Hawaiian, West African, and Hip Hop sounds. Her work can be found at http://westoaklandtowestafrica.com/ as well as on https://www.karlabrundage.com/ .

PRAISE FOR Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) by Karla Brundage

Karla Brundage’s Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) is about race. It is about the history of race, about imposed racial definitions like mulatto and quadroon. And then next to these historical poems are heart rending poems about how race is lived now, about the way these racial impositions continue to resonant. But it is not all about being caught. What makes this book so strong is that it is also about moments of escape from these terms too. It is a book that is biting and yet affirmative.

–Juliana Spahr

Karla Brundage unbends rivers in this poetic investigation of a settler colonial project that has gone on for too long. De-animated and alienated too many souls. In this collection, double consciousness is revisited and interrogated fiercely by an inspired, confident hand and unbroken psyche. Proving that messianic tasks are found, accepted and achieved in craft; Brundage continues to be a wonder we hope to be worthy of.

–Tongo Eisen-Martin

In the full-length poetry collection Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) by Karla Brundage, we find a wholly original clarion voice. This remarkable volume is proof of poetry’s power to illuminate, investigate, invoke. Read this book slowly, in sequence as a story of living at the delta of liminalities and navigating them through the rivers of history, language, lies, and fears born out. In the poem “Octoroon: (noun),” the author examines how language is used to colonize the Black female body: “Great Grandma Maude is quadroon, her mom mulatto, her grandma French / octoroon?/ Why then, do they call out Mulatto?” A case can be made that poetry is akin to the DNA tests, revealing essential truths and ineradicable history, in blood, shame, and beauty. Brundage uses eloquent concision to amplify big mysteries and truths. These poems link together to build a story–the poet's story. In “Underneath,” she writes of early childhood: “The first man to visit me after I was born was/ Eldridge Cleaver and his wife Kathleen/ I remember drawing castles with Angela Davis/ Laying in her lap while my mom gave a speech.” This bold and urgent collection reveals an important voice for social justice, earned insights turned into an intellectual koan. Karla Brundage translates her own journey into poetic testimony.

–Maw Shein Win, Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn)

In Blood Lies: Race Trait(or), Karla Brundage relates, contextualizes, complicates, and deconstructs her experiences as a mixed race woman living in the US. Brundage’s poems pulsate with an innate understanding that the social construction of limiting identities–mulatto, octoroon, quadroon, woman, wife–is troubled by a history that is scarred, scarring, and nebulous. This history includes the rape and ownership of Black women by men, creating a lineage in which ancestors cannot easily be traced and cycles of systemic oppression cannot easily be broken. The burdens of having one’s personhood measured and tiered according to constructs like race and gender wrestle with the inner, human truths that defy societal stereotypes: “One drop of African blood/Makes you legally a Negro in 1707/What makes you legally a Negro now?”

–Shilpa Kamat

Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) is imbued with a sense of searching for answers where there may never be any. None that are tangible or pleasant but determined by the evolution of language and the human propensity for categorizing others. Where do we fit, or “what makes you legally a Negro now?” Karla Brundage has the ability to write in a way that both draws you into its elegance while forcing you to deal with the weight and violent implications of mixed blood over generations. Brundage constructs the self through what constitutes the terms Black and woman, each encapsulated in conceptions of the past, in “unspoken rememories” we must sift through to enlighten our present and envision our future.

–Raihana Haynes-Venerable

With Blood Lies: Race Trait(or), Karla Brundage steps into the tangled knot of colonial histories and their resulting math–illogical, tortured, tortuous–of racial categories. Her poems go to the dictionary and find all the violence language holds, how it gets written and re-written onto the body. But Brundage does not stop there. At turns critical, mythic, full of wonder, grief, and rage, she uses the language of racist definitions to both uncover the past and “re member” what’s been violated. Blood lies transverses past and present, paying particular attention to what it means to be marked as mixed race and female, to be (or not be) a wife. This work asks its reader to confront all the relations where human life is reduced to property, the unbearable weight of that, and what it means to live through it. ­

–Stephanie Young

Do we live in two Americas? If so, what is life like within these different Americas, and how do they all interact? Karla Brundage’s Blood Liesexplores these questions, while raising others you didn’t know you needed answering. Blood Lies tackles the topics of race, love, sexuality, rape, and discrimination. This collection is meant to elicit discussions for those who want to understand self and others, and bridge the gaps of differences amongst us all.

–Brea Watts

Karla Brundage’s newest collection of poetry throws the reader into a labyrinth of history, family, blood, hurt and joy. “Blood” and “Mulatto” are not just provocative terms she sprays on her pages; instead, they represent a legacy of familial challenges and personal redemption that must be excavated and explored here. Karla Brundage. Karla Brundage. Say that name twice and commit it to memory since she is the poet to know now.

–Allison E. Francis, Professor, Playwright & Director of Ex-Colored Man

With Race Trait(or), Karla Brundage enters into the logic of racial math, whipping through its cunning calculus in search of the bodies, families, cultures and worlds that have been flung into psychic pieces by its absurd equations.

She journeys in words toward her fragmented family, an inheritance of mixing eons old for human kind. Yet in the US the mulatta’s arteries lay a labyrinth of haunted love and memorialization floored with black and white tiles, of hair and blood, and of genes and skins.

–Duana Fullwiley

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #read #poetrybook #poems #race #blackpoet

[chasedarren]

I just love this writing! There’s nothing to paste as an excerpt—it’s all crucial to the whole. Wow. Such wonderfully unbeautiful writing. TO THIS I ASPIRE !!!

[alightinthelantern]

The Transformation (Juliana Spahr).

Was expecting poetry, turned out to be a novel about a threesome relationship that moves to Hawaii. Pseudo-intellectual drivel told in an intentionally extremely vague way, stupid and intensely boring.