The bow tie pattern This week class blogger. by Juliana Spahr, University of California Press, 2005. a ship fuels up and slips out of port. About the Book Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. Like a monument to war heroes, these poems attempt to connect the dead all over the planet to each other and to those still living—those, like Spahr, struggling to make sense of so much death. These passages, in which Spahr imagines the children and pets and lovers separated from their dead, are some of the most difficult to read, because they look unfalteringly into the very real connections between all of us. Your email address will not be published. Lungs – review 4 / 5 stars 4 out of 5 stars. Catalogues. These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and … Chances are that each of those one hundred and thirty-six people And comforting because Spahr has written a book that will doubtless be read for as long as humans exist, to understand what the hell happened in the early part of the twenty-first century. Over one hundred and fifty years later, we have seen what can be done in the name of democracy. It is difficult to watch this world—in the various media available to us—without lapsing into pessimism, cynicism, sarcasm, ennui, or apathy. hands and body and feet and cells and the beating contained and their green colors, love and their squawks, love and the The lungs are the center of the respiratory (breathing) system. Spahr responds to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war in Iraq. as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the space of the … Marc Anthony and Dayana Torres renew their vows in Puerto Univ. invading Kuwait, United Airlines continues to lose eight million It is a connected universe as Spahr so forcefully and powerfully reminds us. Spahr’s credentials as a leftist-postmodernist-feminist artist and critic were impeccable, and now her poetry brought these cognitive, ethical, and political predilections to bear against the weightiest of game-changing world events. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is a sustained and anaphoric meditation, a catharsis for our predicament.--Anne Waldman show more In her first poem, A poem written after September 11/2001, Spahr hypnotizes the reader in a … As the opening poem, it offers a way to read the following poem cycle: as an attempt to engage that shifting perspective in viewing the horrifying, maddening, tragi-comic chronicle of daily life on the planet “after September 11, 2001.” Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs was published in 2005 by the University of California Press. someone somewhere tells ships to refuel and then to slip out of Spahr attempts to put words to an unthinkable tragedy and controversial conflict. Alexis M. Smith is the Reviews Editor for Tarpaulin Sky. Others look steadfastly outward—tailoring foreign characters and locales to fit an American epistemological stance. The reader shares the bed, the house, the island, the ocean, and the collective “discord” of the world beyond. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought. Eschewing grand conclusions, moral indignation, and political screeds, she tries to measure the impact in personal terms that are neither hyperbolic nor trivial and mundane. They are the main organs of respiration, or breathing. School HKUST; Course Title LANG 1002; Type. Thus, we encounter genocide alongside celebrity lawsuits. It is a book of two poems written after 9/11 up to the United States invading Iraq. stand the swirls of patterns. "―Anne Waldman From the Back Cover In a time of war, dirty air, missile worship when all oracles seem silenced, from every eco-lyric pore these fine auroras of This Connection of Everyone With Lungs have been streaming. Berkeley: U of California, 2005. A line such as, “We slept soundly during the night, beloveds, and when I woke / yous were wrapped around me….” is fine by me without the linguistic embellishment. a day, Mars might have been a cold, dry planet when it was first This blog explores art, music, film, and literature about America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st-century. The “yous”—this odd extra-pluralizing of the second person plural—marks the separateness and togetherness of the audience: the lovers, who occupy the same role, separately and together, and the readers, who read alone, and imagine others like themselves, others for whom reading this book of poems is perhaps not possible, but who are embraced in the “yous” as well. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. passengers continue to have diarrhea and nausea and yet continue Rico and still a ship fuels up and slips out of port. The most noticeable stylistic tic is her use of plural forms of address in places where convention would have her addressing a single listener. Like the Eames’s film, Powers of Ten, which zoomed out and out from the picnicker on the grass in the park, into the sky, into the atmosphere, into space, out and out and out, one hundred times, and one thousand times, and on and on, to our galaxy, and to the universe, then zoomed in and in and in, back in to the picnic, to the picnicker, to his skin, to his cells, the molecules, the atoms, one hundred times in, and one thousand, and so on, so Spahr’s poem expands and contracts, somehow expressing the smallness of all of us, and the immensity of us all. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Poetics of weak liberalism. But in this first line, the direct address and the term of endearment feel as though they belong to the reader. Death is something that both separates us and connects us. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Required fields are marked * Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Leftist-Postmodern-Feminist Non-Veteran War Poetry, Her Own Private Ithaca: Jehanne Dubrow’s Stateside | Time Now, 39 American Iraq-and-Afghanistan War Poets, Toni Morrison's Home: The Africanist Presence in War Literature, On War Photography: Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, Ariella Azoulay and the Photographic Situation, War Poetry: Brian Turner's "A Soldier's Arabic", Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Leftist-Postmodern-Feminist Non-Veteran War Poetry. Make of that what you will, but Spahr gets full credit for being first into print with her abundant use of that modern magical military lingo that has saturated everyday speech and beguiled poets and writers who have written on war subjects since 2001. Reading this connection of everyone with lungs, now, in a period politicians and pundits constantly refer to as “post-war,” is both heartbreaking and, somehow, comforting. Though we don’t know if Spahr was in New York on 9/11, we feel the force of the poet’s physical proximity to lower Manhattan urging her to connect her own feelings about the attacks, colored by her own national identity and anti-war politics, with a global consciousness in a relationship not permeated by fury, fear, and greed. It is difficult to read Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs without thinking of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: they are both expansive, prosaic, deeply moving monuments to their times. More By and About This Author. But what else? : This Connection of Everyone with Lungs by Juliana Spahr (2005, Trade Paperback) at the best online prices at eBay! Print. Smoking tobacco is the biggest cause of lung … These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought. About This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. their lovers did this that this is all that matters in the world yet still For example, the opening line of the poem is “Beloveds, we wake up in the morning to darkness and watch it / turn into lightness with hope.”  Later, she writes, “Beloveds, yours skins is a boundary separating yous from the rest / of yous.”  I’m not naïve enough not to recognize Spahr has little interest in placating readers’ conventional tastes, but I won’t kid you, either; this technique is distracting. Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. The critical consensus in New Orleans was that This Connection of Everyone with Lungs expressed an impulse to escape the lyrical and the subjective and the humanistic to conceptualize a collective (if not a consensus and consensual) response to the fall of New York City’s Twin Towers and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The lungs are elastic; therefore, when air fills the lungs, the elastic recoil within the tissues of the lung exerts pressure back toward the interior of the lungs. In 2008-2009, I was an advisor to Afghan National Army forces in Khost and Paktya provinces in Afghanistan. Here Spahr creates a feeling of intimacy between the lovers and between the poet and readers, so that throughout, “beloveds” is both an address to loved ones and an address to everyone. Regarding poetry, Brian Turner as might be expected received a fair amount of scrutiny, but non-veteran Juliana Spahr’s 2005 collection This Connection of Everyone with Lungs seemed the most enticing object of attention among the assembled scholars. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *. The Greenland glaciers and the Arctic Sea ice melt at unprecedented Looking back, we might remember that the publication of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs in 2005 was a major event in the poetry world—an important statement on war by a poet who mattered. Most commonly the phrase is used in reports such as, “We’re returning to base, time now,” or, “Request artillery support, time now.”. Microreview: Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs. She excludes virtually nothing of the American media experience. slipped yours hands between their thighs and who thought when This essay looks to the American poet Juliana Spahr’s 2005 collection, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, for the rewards of re-assessing long held conceptions of witnessing and proximity. Heartbreaking because we are still, years later, powerless and bereft, grappling with losses half a world away, trying to make sense of them in a country intent on keeping its distance. On the fiction side, papers and panels addressed works such as Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen. Your body also needs to get rid of carbon dioxide. Crucible Studio, Sheffield Lyn Gardner. with lungs breathes the space between the hands in and out, as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and Light and aromatherapy might help treat dementia, a patient sues In particular, her use of the direct address stands out as an act of courage and an expression of humility and vulnerability. What some writers do—and what Spahr does here—is look squarely at the position of remote witness/intimate relation to what happens on the planet, to our fellow human beings, examining the complicity and helplessness inherent in this position. The idea here is that poetry’s association with the lyrical, the subjective, and the humanistic makes it complicit with the imperialistic and war-mongering forces that brought the nation to war. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is a sustained and anaphoric meditation, a catharsis for our predicament. 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