This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems [Paperback]

We can get a sense of the grand, encompassing scope of this book from its title alone, a phrase drawn from the opening poem: "Poem Written After September 11, 2001." This poem's central task is to articulate the model of radical interconnectedness upon which the rest of the book depends. Over its eight pages it performs this task through what essentially amounts to a slow zoom-out, from the microscopic level ("cells, the movement of cells and the division of cells") all the way out to global scope ("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"). To call oneself a "global citizen" is slightly pollyanna-ish, but this poem still functions as a lovely vision: the way it is made elegiac by its positioning as a "post-9/11" poem feels slightly predictable, but that makes the elegy no less real. One of the more "important" poems in recent memory (let's set aside, for now, the question of whether poetry should aspire to importance).

More interesting and important still is the book's remainder, a single long poem (broken into discrete chunks), entitled "Poem Written From November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003." I think this poem is more interesting because it's doing the thornier work of dealing with the consequences of the first poem: if "everyone with lungs" is connected in a "lovely [and] doomed" global matrix, then what does this mean? If we can successfully expand our consciousness to the point where it encompasses the whole earth as a system, then what does it mean when part of that system (including but not limited to "our part") is attempting to kill another part of that system (including but not limited to "their part")? Is it possible to love humanity in an all-encompassing way when some of the humans that we're connected to behave murderously? Is a person killed in the Burij refugee camps important? What about someone killed in the Monoko-Zohi civil war? What about Justin Timberlake? How important is the weather? If you can make your own bed a place of "connected loving" and "pleasure" and "agency," what relevance does this have to the rest of the world, if any? How can you consider these questions seriously in a world at war without going insane or succumbing to crippling grief?

I don't think that the book answers these questions, but I think they're the right ones to be asking, and any book that represents a sustained attempt to address them (lyrically no less!) gets my recommendation.

I read this book for my Writers on Writing Class, and the author paid the class a visit to discuss the book. Here is my response:

Juliana Spahr compiled poetry for her collection, this connection of everyone with lungs that is part creative non-fiction and part political statement. Not including repetition, the poetry follows no form or scheme (except for line breaks/double spacing here and there) and the collection literally consists of two poems. The first, "Poem Written After September 11, 2001," is a single piece that spans eight pages. The second, "Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003," spans 61 pages, but is broken up chronologically by date fifteen times. This unusual format speaks of a postmodernist approach to poetry, one that Spahr herself admits to not fully understanding. But she says, "it was the way it had to be written."
The poems in the book read less like poetry and more like a diary, or rather like an intimate conversation. This comes from the conversational, albeit unhappy, tone and the use of addressing the reader as "beloved," The conversation topic couldn't be clearer: 9/11 has emotionally shaken up Spahr, and she's against the war. This seems fair enough; this is her book and her poetry, thus she can talk about whatever she feels like. However, the constant reiteration of her position on past- and present-day politics becomes tiring. Spahr told the class, "I sometimes feel like a hammer, because I feel like I'm always hammering in my point." And in this book, she has done just that. Her repetition of words, and constant list-making, such as the list of major cities in various countries on page 54 which felt exhausting and unnecessary, seemed to be more distracting than powerful. For example, one couldn't help but anticipate the upcoming word or phrase ("I speak for..." or "...exists"), and ignore the accompanying sentences.
And yet another distraction was her use of pop-culture references. It appeared to make a point in the beginning: the American people were more aware of Snoop Dogg's affairs than world affairs. But as the "time" went on, and more pop-culture references thrown in, it was even more distracting, as it caused my mind to start thinking about the famous actor that was jus mentioned.
However, the author does have many admirable qualities within her words. The strong, steady voice and tone within the poems, keen word choice and her ability to articulate pressing questions made reading enjoyable.
In the end, this connection of everyone with lungs was an ambitious and noble project. Spahr attempts to put words to an unthinkable tragedy and controversial conflict. However, it seems almost inappropriate to read these poems if you are not a left-wing political affiliate. Her viewpoint on the war is made so abundantly clear that it becomes a hindrance to the beauty of her writing. I find that she was at her strongest when she was posing questions and observations about all people and human beings, of course, "everyone with lungs." It was when she made connections between people, and the simple beauty in things like love, is when she truly had my attention. Alas, with her many disheartening facts thrown in, and strong political views masquerading as poetic voice, she lost a potential fan.

Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2005)

There are a handful of books I defenestrate each year. (Since June of 2007, thirty-six books have been forcefully ejected from the window in total.) Usually they're either awfully-written fiction or dry, ponderous, textbook-like nonfiction. It is very, very rare that I do it with poetry. (The exception are those hideous "verse novel"s that are taking hold of kidlit these days, not a single one of which I've tried to read has even a passing knowledge of poetry.) But every once in a while I come across a book of poetry so outright horrendous that I simply can't bring myself to read one more word of it, no matter how little I have left. And to narrow this field further, in almost every case I have sent such books flying, they've been self- or vanity-published collections larger than any single-author collection you've seen outside Bukowski or a Collected Poems from someone very famous. In all my years of reading, I have defenestrated only two major-label poetry collections. Jill Scott's book went out the window in 2006. This morning, it was joined by Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs.

I've read Spahr before, and wasn't quite sure what to make of her back then. This book erases all of my doubts; she is far more interested in getting a message across (a message, no less, you've heard hundreds of times before, with nothing new added to the mix) than she is with crafting poetry. If you've read my reviews for any length of time, you'll know where I stand on that issue. To Spahr's (minuscule) credit here, she doesn't really attempt to make this even look like poetry, which makes me wonder why California released it as such instead of, say, a micro-book of political ranting (which is exactly what this is). You want an example? Here you go:

"I speak of toxic fumes given off by plastic flooring in a burning nightclub in Caracas.

I speak of the forty-seven dead in Caracas.

And I speak of the four dead in Palestine.

And of the three dead in Israel.

I speak of those dead in other parts of the world who go unreported."
("December 1, 2002")

There's not even an attempt at rhythm to be had there. No attempt to elevate language. No form. Nothing but a list. And while I only managed to choke down forty-one pages of this mess, I can't imagine the remaining thirty-five were all that different. A shoo-in for my worst reads of the year list in 2010. (zero)

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