I just want to second that David Dunn is a genius.
So don't miss hearing him.
He's amazing.
But we're also going to hear from an amazing person
tonight, Juliana Spahr.
It is hard to see Juliana's work objectively
when I know some of the biography when I came up
through the same graduate poetics program
that she did and shared some of the same mentors
and when so many of her concerns speak so closely to mine.
And yet, as I began to teach Juliana's work
in my ecopoetics classes and my students
discuss the nature of this "we" she is proposing,
and who exactly these "yous" are,
and exactly how many of them are in that bed there,
whether or not we feel comfortable with that address.
And the thing about a Juliana Spahr book
is that whether you like it or not,
you inevitably become her "you" after reading
beyond a certain point.
I sense the work taking on a dimension that
is completely beyond my imagination of Juliana Spahr,
pretty much beyond Juliana herself.
And this, I must say, is the mark of great writing.
I think that more than just about any poet
of my generation, through her work with the journal Chain,
her celebrated poetry collections, her prose
work, her work as a scholar, co-editing important
groundbreaking anthologies in pedagogy
and questions of gender and poetics.
I think that more than just about any poet
of my generation, Juliana has brought poetry
down into the everyday of deciding how to live, and act,
and think, and what exactly does it
mean to be alive and find yourself
in all sorts of compromising yet exciting positions in what we
call this 21st century.
It may or may not be significant that as early as 2004,
Juliana still did not identify as a poet.
Juliana's work helps us think through questions
about who does the dishes and who takes out
the garbage, about how to learn and respond without doing harm,
to what one is learning about or who one is responding to,
about how to write through the daily news feed,
about where to be happy and what to teach,
about what and where to write in the face of incredible class
divisions, about the schizophrenia of one's
desires in a capitalist culture, about,
well, what do you really think about loving
a species to extinction?
But then she transforms these questions
into a kind of song, a pattern, a list, a shifting of scales
up through the local to global connections and back.
There are the procedures, the fascinating translation
machines, the weaving that distills
rather than confuses individual words as one reads and rereads.
I like that Juliana's work--
I like that, over time, Juliana's work
deepens my sense of words like sell, and bed, and lungs,
and space, and bird, and attack helicopter.
Juliana says, reflecting on her first approaches to poetry,
"I viewed poetry as an extension of what was going on
in hardcore, both aimed for the transformation
of the everyday."
She also says "I like poetry because it helps me think.
It helps me resort data.
It lets me list things and think about the shape of the list."
In 2004, for an interview, Juliana mapped a trajectory
that begins with Pound, modernism, Dead Kennedys,
post-punk, Sonic Youth, onto Stein, Tender Buttons,
and through or around the New American Poetry,
to language poetry, conceptual art, fluxus, Harryette Mullen,
Cecilia Vicuña, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
to various cultural poetry debates, responsibility,
appropriation, pidgin, Hawaii's poetry, onto global local,
and finally, a return to clarity, larger structure.
Rethinking lyric is not necessarily tied
to emotion or intimacy.
You can view this map on Chicago postmodern poetry online.
I think the challenge in the almost hard assed raising
of the bar Juliana has done for all of us
writers and readers is to have accomplished this return
to clarity.
I like that she includes instructions and notes
with her poems.
Everything is very up front.
It's often a collaboration.
She's telling us, think about this.
It may change your life.
Here's what I've tried.
Sing through it a bit with me.
Let's lay it all on the line and see what happens.
Let's see, for example, what the lyric
can do in the era of thermobaric weapons.
Let's consider the contradictions.
Let's not simplify.
Let's be very clear.
Tonight, it's very clear that we were incredibly lucky to have
Juliana Spahr with us.
[APPLAUSE]