Reading prompts for December 6
Comment on the poems of Juliana Spahr, Evelyn Reilly and/or Brenda Hillman having in mind one (or both) of these topics
1. modes and forms of relation with the atmosphere present in them; types of atmospheres; ideas about air and relations between humans and other organisms and inorganic agents in air that the poems work with
2. practices of activism, or ecopoetics as activist practice.
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ReplyDeleteJuliana Spahr’s poem “There are these things,” zooms in and out of the atmosphere. To begin with, the poem begins by describing cells and a body, - which one can not know if it's human or not. This is, the poet can anthropomorphize another being, which can be read into through the word “feet,” which seems to be a universal term between species. After zooming in on this being, the poem zooms out into space. “There is space in the room that surrounds the shapes of everyone’s/ hands and body and feet and cells and the beating contained/ within.” Everyone seems to be connected by space, and by possessing the same bodily elements. Therefore, the air connects everyone it touches, and everyone is touched by air. We can also see this in: “Everyone with lungs breathes the space in and out as everyone/ with lungs breathes the space between the hands in and out […]” The anaphoric repetition of “as everyone with lungs […]” becomes an amplification, expanding into the cities, islands, regions, and continents until it reaches the mesosphere, a layer of the earth’s atmosphere. After reaching its climax, the poem starts to zoom in, from the mesosphere to the space between the hands. The conclusion appears to be that we are interconnected with everyone, through air or oxygen: “How lovely and how doomed this connection with everyone with/ lungs.”
Brenda Hillman’s “Air in the Epic” carries many epic elements. The protagonization of the wind unites contemporaneity and ancient divinities. According to the speaker, the contemporary world is “under-mothered” and in crisis, which has been foretold by the omens. The poetic voice is a teacher, and they are trying to make the children explain what is the world. However, they seem to struggle to do it. After that, the poetic voice explains that the children might not be aware of mythology, since the “winds have rarely visited” them. How can they when “Their/ President says global warming doesn’t exist”? Everyone is aware that the Epics are still read other than because of aesthetics; they still matter because they carry stories that describe human nature.
Furthermore, there are multiple mentions of myths in this poem, either Greek, Chinese, and/or Egyptian. From what I gathered, the message of the poem is that the wind acts as a spreader, it carries sound, and words are made of sound. Therefore, it is thanks to the winds that humans were able to spread epic poems, which began orally. Moreover, this is what is connecting humans. Thus, Spahr’s “There are these Things” and Hillman’s “Air in the Epic,” are similar in the sense that they highlight the wind’s importance.
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ReplyDeleteIn Brenda Hillman's "6 Components from Aristotle", straight from the title, makes the reader think of Aristotle's "Poetics" and about his conceptions of the dramatic genre of tragedy. Brenda Hillman, just with the title, has already set the mood/ atmosphere for the poem: tragedy.
Aristotle pinpoints 6 fundamental storytelling mechanisms that should be used when writing tragedies: Plot, Character, Thought (theme), Diction, Melody (Song) and Spectacle. This poem is also divided by these 6 topics.
Brenda Hillman starts with "Plot", in which she gives the context of the August 12th of 2000 disaster: The Kursk Submarine. A Russian naval exercise that went wrong and left no survivors. The British and the Dutch naval forces helped finding and recovering the submarine, but only 5 days later when Putin allowed it, until then the Russian Naval forces were incapable of doing so. So, Putin's isolation of Russia cost him the lifes of many Russian citizens in that submarine.
Next comes "Character", where two characters are differentiated, the Captain and the Men. The captain that will not be returning and the men that are like Dido, because their hope keeps getting lost over and over again. So, the men inside the submarine are awaiting their doom. On the 'outside' world, a ladder is being brought down during a storm. So help coming, but with the storm they are not able to save them. Furthermore, the Cold War had not been forgotten, the tension between Russia and America was still high. And, Hillman nods to this tension when she says "perfecting the weapon that makes no mistakes- / the place power can't know about." Perhaps, this is one of the reasons Putin wasn't comfortable with accepting international help in the first place, because he didn't want anyone else knowing his "weapon that makes no mistakes".
Then comes "Thought", the theme of the tragedy and thought-provoking concepts for the audience. Here Brenda Hillman presents the idea of the blending of the men into one and of herself into one of them because of her concerns about them. She brings a unity and an empathetic approach to how we see tragedies, wherever they might have happened. In addition, she also talks about the different atmospheres, the one within and the outside one. She talks about how pure we come into the world because of the lack of air, but then we have to breathe the "blurry *'s" and we recover. The air is polluted, and maybe she is going as far as saying that the pollution is society, and how we bring the worst out of everyone and vice-versa. She questions whether it was worth it, for these 'Dido men' to be born. If it was worth it for them to leave the womb just so they would die within a submarine, 108 meters below. It is all about them, about "Private Dido. She's the plot, the men" and still their hope gets getting lost over and over again.
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DeleteAfter that is "Diction", where Brenda focuses on the power of the word, as Aristotle does. The Narrator says that every word from these men was not inevitable and that this tragedy of the Kursk Submarine is relatable with everyone around the world, in a time of need, they were not saved, when we are in our time of need, will we be saved? And here Brenda Hillman criticizes the Cold War and how "what it meant to be an American and not save Russians." they did not even considered saving them because they were Russian.
In "Melody", Brenda Hillman gives the global context of this tragedy and how "what you were afraid of happening, happened.", the governments pretended to help, and wanted to look like they were helping and trying to contact them, but only "on the shore might [they] be sung. Burned." Only when the bodies are retrieved will they be sung to, in the funeral, but while alive, there was never any song. The men “assumed someone would rescue them, exchanging their fate for happens to be born.” Here, Brenda Hillman, once again, questions whether it was worth it trading their lives and fates just to die in a naval project. They probably should never have left their mothers womb if this was their final moment.
And, the final Aristotelian component, "Spectacle" talks about how these stories are used for entertainment for the capitalistic consumer society and circuses, but how, when it went wrong, "all governments failing them into news then putting a tube of silence down". How the governments were silencing these stories and making people forget these tragedies, it's almost an anti-spectacle aspect of the tragedy, not recognizing it as what it is. Unquestionably, it is purposeful, it is not a mistake that governments do this, they have the form all down, it is just that the "submarine as a tube of air meant nothing to them." In the final tensions, the poetic voice reminds us that the Cold War is still and ever present and that these tragic occurrences are regulated by the government in terms of wanting to let information out to the public or not.
All in all, this poem is an activist poem because it resurfaces the tragedy of the Kursk submarine which, personally, I knew nothing about and treats it as what it is, a tragedy. Comparing it to Aristotle's main points for a tragedy and remembering the wrong doings that have happened in the past and that we must not allow to repeat.
In her poems Juliana Spahr uses the atmosphere, the air around people and all beings with lungs, to explore boundaries. Conceptual boundaries of form as well as trying to go further into an all encompassing earth. Starting at the space between our hands, to the mesosphere in the atmosphere. Looking at the micro and macro.
ReplyDeleteBrenda Hillman plays with vowels – her form is the wind, and the sound of the wind – as she says in her poem, Air in the Epic: “6th vowel sounds yyyyyy …. As into the word and they go …” She connects the wind with myths from all around the world – such as “Egyptian birds where thought to be impregnated by winds. The Chinese god of wind has a red and blue cap like a Red Sox fan.” She let's these myths and bird be a connection between worlds, like the wind in a way.
A similar idea is encapsulated in Juliana Spahr’s line in the poem written from november 30/2002 to march 27/2003: “I speak of boundaries and connections, locals and globals, butterfly wings and hurricanes.” The idea of the butterfly effect is a scientific idea that connects the global and the local. It connects the small with the big in a chaotic causational way all around the world – which is something that Spahr also does in her poem, while concentrating on a breath-like form, that at the end has swapped the “in” with the “out” and vice versa, and thus erasing boundaries.
In Evelyn Riley’s poem Styrofoam we get the line: “which can be molded into almost anything.” Here referring to “foam” as well as the poem itself and also, when she references the manifold, or manifold hypothesis, the human neuron. So the foam has no boundaries, and as Evelyn Riley says: “cousin to.thingsartistic:”.
She is, in the poem's words, working with the formation and deformation of matter, both chemical, biological and linguistic and, like Spahr, looking at how these chemicals break our boundaries, irrespective of our consent.
Juliana Spahr’s “This Connection of Everyone with Lungs” describes air as the all-encompassing force that binds and entangles us all. Her poem demonstrates how the most universal of human behaviors, breathing, connects us not just to one another but to all of our co-movers in a universe of creatures, chemicals, and even dust. Air represents life, but it also contains remnants of what humans have done to the earth, thus it serves as a metaphor of both beauty and devastation.
ReplyDeleteThe poetry of Spahr is in itself like breathing with its rhythms and repetitions. She writes: “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 continents and islands and the space of the oceans in and out.” This repetition just gives us the sense that our air extends from our skin out to the stratosphere. It brings into mind that what one breathes in is the very air that crosses away by all-the cities, across oceans, and even way past borders.
Her words are both intimate and global. She brings the air that we share with what it carries: “nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid.” Likewise, the air carries not the pure, the clean, but the burden of human life and action: traces from wars and pollution and destruction. Yet, it carries within it the breath of others, a subtle intimacy that cannot be evaded. Also, the same air that sustains also accepts the weight of our harm; it is filled with particles of destruction alongside whispers of our connection. With every exhalation, it becomes a quite meeting, a shared moment with the beauty of the world and its wounds.
Spahr makes this connection palpable with these words: “How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs.” It is tender yet troubled: air is full of life; it is also full of injury; so, every breath is an act of connection, but complicity too. It is a reminder that we are never separate from each other or from the world’s wounds. Her poetry maintains a very delicate balance, asking us to weigh the weight of our bonds and to measure the degree to which the world itself moves through us as much as we move through it. Spahr shows us the quiet, immense truth of air: it binds us, holds us, and makes us every individual within a phenomenal phenomenon.
I would like to mention one moment from each of the three poets that I think shows a possible relation between their poetical texts and their compromises with activisms.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of Reilly I was thinking of the poem “Hence Mystical Cosmetic Over Sunset Landfill” I think there is a hidden political action concerning the reader. The whole poem, due to the various usages of scientific data not explained and the cryptic form, might seem difficult to the untried eye. It feels like you have to learn a new different language to understand it. But in a way, is a very radical method to force only its public to read it. The poem is an arm that when fired turns reader into activist, or at least wakens them, pushes them to that road. Moreover, this arm is only activated if the reader itself has the attitude to change themselves, is ready to do so or lets themselves be titillated by the poem. I think this is a very risky action from the poem, but at the same very rewarding.
From Hillman, I wanted to point out to the vert last line of her “Ecopoetics Minifesto”. In point E she says that “a poem is its own action”, paraphrasing the avant-garde slogan of “art for art’s sake”, and nothing else. Then, she finishes the text by saying “The poet can accompany acts of resistance so the planet won’t die of the human”. It can be read as a very loosely invitation, like if your partner was going out to the store and just when they are at the door you tell them to buy a thing you just remembered, neither at normal volume nor shouting since it is not a very strong demand and it will be okay if they forgot. But at the same time it will be the best thing in the world if they manage to hear you and actually brought it home. I think this last line, which can be read with this attitude, is very ironic. I mean ironic as Haraway means it at the beginning of “Cyborg Manifesto”. Hillmans minifesto seems too optimistic to be reasonable, even too clean to be earthly. It is not a manifesto, clearly seen in the title; it is not a pamphlet for shouting at the streets. Haraway defines irony as «the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true»; it is about meaning to say what you say but also with the intension of saying the opposite meaning of what you said. The last line of Hillman “Minifesto”, who appears to almost fall tediously at the poem, is ironic. I think the poet really means that, if you take things seriously, a poet will not change anything, it is just a piece of text, the most useless activist thing in the world, it will never save an endangered species or clean the ocean. But at the same time, poems are written by people and for people. These people are the ones who are doing the acts of resistance, even a poem can be an act of resistance, like education or collective memory.
Finally, I would like to mention one actions that is activated by Juliana Spahr. In the poem that starts with the date “December I, 2002”, she opposes to the skin, that separates, and the voices. I think by starting almost every stanza with “I speak” she utilizes voice, or air, to connect. The reader in these moments is forced to be the one who speaks of “US attacks on Iraqi air”, of “those dead in other parts of the world who go unreported”, of aids in general of all the ideas the poem contains. If Reilly’s poem kept to itself the information waiting for the activist to show, Spahr’s poem abruptly transforms the reader into a speaker (the one who speaks or the device that throughs sound into the air) and therefore an activist of the things the poem states.
"This connection of everyone with lungs" by Spahr is a beautiful, meditative, and thematically very politically conscious poem that seeks for the possibilities of a collective breathing. She manages to do so not only through the content (looking for a moment to calm in this chaos full of wars and terror), but also through the form, functioning like building blocks which might be a reference to the buildings destructed in 9/11. But I think the more prominent function of the form lies within the repetitive structure embedded with catalogue, which feels like mimicking breathing. This might relate to the universality of breath as a shared biological necessity, emphasizing that everyone with lungs participates in this act. Breathing becomes a mode of relation that collapses boundaries between individuals, cultures, and even species. Air wanders through us all, linking repetitions while juxtaposing between "space" and one object /concept / body part. This insistence in repeating also sounds like counting - like trying to recall/memorize something. As if the speaker is trying to find her center by keeping herself in the moment around this recollection, and around what surrounds her - through air. This has a meditative function as this could be something to be done to stabilize oneself most probably after an anxiety or panic attack, as can also be understood on the following pages referring terrorism, wars, and epidemics. So this could be how the speaker tries to stabilize her mental health by maintaining a rhythmic harmony in the poem. Spahr is also connecting us through our skins by taking the subject from the racist scene to the results of it. This might indicate that such affiliation - this connection - is essential for our collective survival. Overall, it could be concluded that the poem illustrates air as both a life-sustaining and a politically charged element. It connects the personal act of breathing to global ecological, social, and political networks. As strengthened with the title, the repeated acknowledgment of “everyone with lungs” fosters a sense of collective responsibility, urging readers to rethink their relational dynamics with the atmosphere and other beings. In this sense, this poem also connects the first and the second topic in the prompt.
ReplyDeleteJuliana Spahr and Evelyn Reilly’s poetry brings the atmosphere to the forefront as a medium of connection and a site of ecological critique. Both poets weave the air into their work, exploring its roles as sustainer of life, carrier of contamination, and a symbol of human interdependence with the natural world. Through their experimental forms and thematic focus, Spahr and Reilly illuminate how the atmosphere intertwines human and nonhuman lives, urging readers to reconsider their relationships with this essential yet invisible element.
ReplyDeleteJuliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs frames air as a shared, communal force that connects all living beings. Her poems emphasize the paradoxical nature of air: while it sustains life, it also transmits the consequences of industrial and political violence. By repeatedly invoking “everyone with lungs,” Spahr draws attention to the shared vulnerability of all life dependent on air, creating a global sense of connection and accountability. The rhythmic listing of seemingly unrelated events—“bombings in the Middle East,” “ocean currents carrying plastic waste,” and “the air flowing over bodies”—mirrors the flow of air across boundaries, emphasizing its role in uniting disparate realities. Spahr’s work portrays air as not merely a physical substance but a medium of ethical and ecological interdependence.
In contrast, Evelyn Reilly’s Apocalypso examines the atmosphere with an urgent, critical lens, focusing on how human activities have reshaped it during the Anthropocene. Reilly’s fragmented, experimental forms mimic the destabilization of ecosystems, reflecting the precariousness of life in a polluted atmosphere. Her imagery of carbon emissions, industrial smog, and climate-induced disruptions transforms air into a polluted archive of human excess. For example, she describes “the air thickened with our exhaust” as a haunting reminder of humanity’s impact on ecological systems. The atmosphere, in Reilly’s hands, becomes a repository of human hubris and an ominous marker of ecological collapse.
Both poets, through different approaches, foreground the atmosphere as a critical space of interaction and reflection. While Spahr emphasizes air as a unifying force that calls for shared responsibility, Reilly critiques its contamination and fragility under human influence. Together, their works challenge readers to confront the invisible yet vital role of air in sustaining life and to reconsider their ethical obligations within a shared ecological framework. By presenting air as both a life-giving and precarious medium, Spahr and Reilly reveal its profound significance in understanding human and nonhuman interrelations in the Anthropocene.