Literary Salon--Juliana Spahr

On Nov. 9 the Mills College Library hosted a literary salon featuring Juliana Spahr. It was one of the more unusual poetry readings I've been to in the past year. In a traditional reading, the poet stands at a podium and reads a series of poems, selected by the poet, from her most recent book. Then she takes a few (inane) questions from the audience.

By contrast, in the salon, the poet was seated, flanked by two panelists/interrogators. She read poems requested by the panelists and discussed the work and the process of producing the work. Questions were asked by the panelists over the course of the event, and were (somewhat) less inane than the usual.

The literary salon at Mills was held in the Library's Special Collections room. Juliana Spahr was questioned by librarian Clarence Maybee and MFA candidate Remy Thompson. Spahr read from This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, begins with a poem that is a response to September 11th, uses repetition (including the phrase "this connection of everyone with lungs") and anaphora to great effect. Then she read selections from the book's second (and much longer) poem, "Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003," which was written in the days leading up to the war in Iraq (when that war had begun to seem both inevitable and misguided). The poem mixes the tradition of the lyric love poem (she addresses "beloveds") with the daily news. (Spahr said she used Google News to survey the headlines of the day.)

Here are my notes from the reading:

anaphora
breathing as she breathes
"it was very hard to get around after the buildings fell down, as you might imagine"
how metaphor changes your body
the negative image--shifting your perception
hypnosis is optional
this focus on structure--how does it come together--process oriented
a growing peace--more utopian but recognizing the myopia of the local
more intimate with our complicity
writing to distance--this constant inventoryingin the news--a checkout stand experience
wanting to write something intimate and profound without sharing any details
that factcheck question is really--do I need to edit real things out

And here is a poemlet I wrote during the reading:

those yellow turned leaves, a flat-out rejection of his proposals and it gets you out of that complicity. trying to take back that sadness in her inclusion and the way it becomes just words and layer upon layer of deceit and what do I need to think aobut now. an impossibility not to let a part of yourself in.