Callie's Take on Thomson

Jeffrey Thomson’s poetry in his book Birdwatching in Wartime is filled with nature, usually that of the Amazonian jungle, and Biblical references. His poetry points to the world, especially the dangers in the natural world, but it also points to language in several different ways including the usage of foreign words, usually Spanish and Latin, the use of Latin genus and species names, and the overabundance of dependent clauses which makes the poetry extremely layered so that the reader must focus on language in order to understand what is happening in the poem. Even though the poems are layered they are written with proper punctuation and sentence structure which makes it easy to read through the poems.

Thomson’s poems are full of layers piled on top of layers. There is always a deeper meaning to be found in his work. This is apparent throughout his poetry and is accented by the various forms of the poems. Sometimes the form helps to decipher meaning and ideas like in the poem “Landscape with Pigeons and the Tree of Heaven” (53) where the poet uses indents to set off ideas within the poem which is one long sentence. In other poems the form accents the layers of the poem by breaking up thoughts with line and stanza breaks like in the poem “The Blue Dolphin” (81) which causes the reader to read slowly in order to better grasp what the poet is doing.

Another technique Thomson uses is that his poetry is more lyrical than narrative which makes it more universal and not just about the poet and how the poet is feeling or how the poet felt at a certain time in his life. It also allows the poet to write about the world in a more objective way than just how he is affected by it. Obviously it is still filtered through him and is written based on how he sees the world around him but the reader is given the opportunity to take it how they will instead of just being told how to view the world.

Jeffrey Thomson’s poetry is successful in that it is constructed with multiple layers that are imbedded within each other. The poetry isn’t just one thing but is so many things all at once. His poetry is also unsuccessful for the same reason. Because of all the layering it is very difficult to read and it must be analyzed and pulled apart in order to get any meaning out of it. It doesn’t tend to have a basic value or meaning on the surface to be readily understood by the reader. One must read and reread and do research and then read again and then do some more research in order to take anything away from this poetry. Without access to the internet or a set of encyclopedias it is difficult to understand what the poet is trying to do and this is what makes it unsuccessful to me.

Emily M.'s response to Thomson

Jeffery Thomson’s book Birdwatching in Wartime is a unique collaboration of nature, language and culture. He utilizes the environment to create dense layers of language for his readers to work their way through. His presentation of foreign landscapes is both beautiful and dark, with rich language describing scenes that have both the good and bad aspects of reality. When describing his work Thomson cites the “softness” found in most nature-based poetry, as what he is working against, to create poems that are “real”. This idea of what is real is found throughout the book, beginning with the contemplation of his death in “Landscape with Swelling and Hives” to the presence of pain with actual consequences in “Ars Poetica with Pain.”
Thomson’s work is a collection of what he took away from his trip to South America. It is filled with knowledge, language, culture, beauty and pain. His experiences shape the book and create a very real setting for his reader that presents nature in a new light. Nature however is not always the focus, but sometimes just the muse as in “Twin” where the layering of ideas, stories and dense language mimic his description of the rainforest given during class. As he discussed the rainforest he said, “there is a lot of ‘stuff’ happening in the forest, animals behind animals, leaf behind leaf, and story behind story.” It is easy to see the over lapping of stories in “Twin”, and a second read through will give light to the play on words along with previous perceptions of the correlation between insanity and being poetic.
There was an attempt to catalog the landscapes, culture and language that Thomson encountered. “The bees that will strip every hair/from your head instead of swelling/ your hands with a thatch of venom,” says “Amazon Parable” presenting the facts in a very upfront way. This technique of bringing information into the light was also used in poems such as “Landscape with Footnotes” which supplies information he gathered and had referenced some in the book, as well as some historical matter that he merely found interesting. Writing this way was almost to take an impartial point of view, showing the good with the bad, creating poetry that had substance beyond the appreciation of natural beauty. This list like quality was used again in the poem “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: a Sequence”, where the listing seemed to be never ending and sometimes disconnected. Lines such as “But benevolence/must be the oceanic color of the tear/the streaks the emerald iridescence” and “This encyclopedia of articulate nothing, / taxonomy of damage, library of sand. / Manuscript of clouds, archipelago of crabs” point at language in a way that makes his readers question its meaning. These lines also display how nature and language are intertwined.
Thomson affectively created a book that changed the idea of poetry about nature. He gave the facts, created language that related back not only in description, but also in density and format, and worked to bring in all aspects of language (i.e. sound, look, complexity etc). He wrote about the reality of what he experienced in South America while also leaving his writing open to his readers to relate to on their own.

Emily C's Response to Spahr

Juliana Spahr, like every author we've read so far, brought something completely new to the discussion of poetry. Her book, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is a collection of two poems titled "Poem Written after September 11,2002" and "Poem Written from November 30,2002, to March 27, 2003." The first poem is significantly shorter than the second but both share similar qualities. The poems are displayed in a way that is almost like a live-stream news feed. She documents current events and pop culture but really only mentions them, without reflecting on them deeply. The documentation is more of a second hand account, as if she is transferring the information from the television, filtering it through her mind and what it really means to her personally, then writing it in a journal. There is a lot of repetition in her writing as well as pretty fantastic imagery and all of it loops back to the central theme of a universal connectedness between everyone whom exists on this earth. Because everyone, on some level, shares basic entities whether they are biological, psychological, or physiological.

The documentary style of her poems are extremely inclusive. They are meant to draw the reader in in the sense that we can all remember where we were exactly when the tragedy of 9/11 occurred and how we felt. She is not only trying to perceive the message that the news portrays, but rather try and make us feel it as well by pointing to us through language, ie: "yous," and "beloved."Her poems are unpredictable because we as the readers are on the same level as she for we are soaking the information as it is provided, having no preconceived notion or guess as to what will be "said" next. The repetition in the poem causes a hypnotic, breathing effect which is calming but disorienting at the same time. There is a sense of comfort in knowing that "as everyone with lungs..." will appear at the beginning of each stanza but as you keep reading this repetition turns into hypnosis which, if you think about broadly, is a manipulation or change in your physical body but also mentally changes your perspective and makes you vulnerable. I think vulnerability is an overarching effect of Spahrs. A lot of her references and specific events that she brings up the reader might not necessarily understand or have heard of. But given the context of the poem, one can usually (with google's help) figure out the event's connection to her point. It is important for the reader to keep in mind that these events are occurring after the 9/11 attacks, which is really what brings each reader back into the poem.

I think Spahr succeeds in drawing in the audience. Although some of her references may seem random and unnecessary, it is extremely difficult to argue that humanity doesn't share similar strife and experiences, especially surround a time of such national despair. By putting an emphasis on the process of her poetry (repetition, lists, "live news stream-feel") she is allowing the reader to become a part of the experience with her but also allowing room for the reader to create their own relationship with the events brought up. I think the book really makes people think. In a time that will most certainly never be forgotten, it is interesting to look at what was going on in other parts of the world; news which we might never have known had it not been for Spahrs intricate documentation.

Joana response to Spahr

Julianna Spahr's This Connection of Everything With Lungs was written shortly after the events of 9/11 occurred. Even though they're separated by dates, the book contains only two poems. Spahr wrote them as the events leading to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan occurred, taking many of the things she talks about from relevant news headlines that she had seen that day.

Spahr's poetry is almost basic in the way it's written. It's not entirely wrought with symbolism like most of the poets we have read so far, but it's not stripped down so that the reader has to come up with an idea of what the poem's saying on their own like we often had to do with Armantrout. There are many pop-culture references that help ground the reader in the time frame. These are things that were out-dated even when she published the book, but it doesn't really matter. These poems are specifically supposed to be talking about the years of 2001 and 2002, and so the references make sense within the context of the poems.

Another big thing in the poems is repetition and text that has the effect of repetition. At one point she is naming off all the countries that are marching in protest against the mobilization in Afghanistan, and she names several cities. These are probably cities that she was able to find in the news that were protesting, but she names them all, one right after the other. The first poem has true repetition, where the lines are repeated before adding something new several times over.

Despite the simplicity of her poems, Spahr has managed to get her point across very well. She has the kind of emotion that she should have while writing poems about an event that she isn't sure how it will end.

Caroline's Response to Spahr

Juliana Spahr wrote her piece, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, as a reaction to the events on 9/11. Set up much like a personal journal, with each poem titled by the date on which she wrote it, we get a true sense of Spahrs process of dealing with the aftermath of the attacks. Spahr herself is clearly the narrator, as she documents things she observes in the media as she awaits the inevitable beginning of the war. In the end, we are left with a poetic account of that eerily foreshadowing time in our nation’s history, as Spahr observes, “When I speak of skin I speak of lighting candles to remember/ AIDS and the history of attacks in Kenya. / 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. / I speak of the four dead in Palestine” (19).

I think that as we’ve come to see in this class, often times the hardest part of reading poetry is figuring out exactly what the author’s purpose is in writing their poetry. It’s one of those big questions that we sometimes end up feeling like we may never know the answer to. However, in Spahr’s case, her intentions are quite obvious. She set out with a specific goal to document the media as it follows the progression from the attacks on 9/11 right up until the beginning of the war. She is using her poetry, her process of creating poetry as a means of grappling with this larger than life disaster. In doing this, she calls our attention to the media, to the things in the media with which she had trouble. She confronts us with everything from staggering lists of casualties and countries to seemingly frivolous news stories of celebrity drama. In this way, she recreates her experience for us, as we remember that day and its aftermath and reflect on each statistic she puts forth. She demands out of us some level of what she put into this project, that we come to our own conclusions about her observations.

I have to say that, for me, Spahr was totally successful. As I was saying, I understand her to be relaying a set of facts and observations, tinted with her opinions, and asking that we live in those moments and come to some sort of conclusion about the media and its affect on humanity in the wake of such an event as 9/11. In my reading of this book, I was completely taken aback by each page that I encountered. I don’t often take time to remember that day or the years immediately after it for whatever reason be it selfishness, laziness, forgetfulness or what have you. Having to confront those images and statistics for the first time in a while was emotional. The first poem hit me hard, as I imagine Spahr intended it to. I felt the inherent meditative quality of it, followed the breathing to wherever she took it and back. The second poem, or series of smaller poems, was just as successful to me. Maybe I never knew most of these facts in the moment, and perhaps I still don’t fully grasp them all, but I think that’s also part of her master plan. Whether or not I understand everything she mentions, I am now, after reading this book, aware of them and perhaps hyperaware of my lack of knowledge. Spahr has successfully documented an important snapshot of our nation’s collective history. She’s done it poetically, informally, and thoughtfully in a way that reaches beyond the political to the rest of us who may have never been reached before. Perhaps some of her allusions are quite narrow and don’t fit under the category of universal, but the emotions and ideas that they provoke certainly are. In this way, I feel like Spahr has achieved her goal, as I see it, to spark thought, reflection, and change, even if in the most minute way.

Benjamin's Response to Spahr

Writing in the Wake of September 11th and the lead up to the War in Iraq, Julian Spahr utilizes a repetitive but almost dream like style to depict the sense of confusion and chaos surrounding the world as the United States was attacked and then prepared for and launched a massive campaign in the Middle East. Of all the poets we have read thus far, Spahr is the most political. Depending on where you fall on the divide on “the war” that has come to dominate our lives this decade, you’ll either find her agreeable or a flaming liberal who clearly should be silenced. Should your feelings on the war sit somewhere along the proverbial fence, you should feel right at home as well, because there’s enough sense of center-left to not make for too uncomfortable an enterprise. Because despite Spahr’s political leanings, A particular theme of Spahr’s “This Connection of Everyone With Lungs” is this:

Even on this small island we gathered [against the war]
Of course other things happened (55)

Spahr’s “Lungs” doesn’t merely focus on the war, on battles or on missiles and tanks (though she does dedicate some time to these elements) it revolves around it in a wide but intense orbit, encapsulating what was going on during the war. I cannot say that she did this impartially, as impartiality is impossible really to achieve, but the manner in which she writes almost lends itself to that sense.
Spahr’s mission is to really document, from the start of WMDs to the invasion, to record the world’s response to the war in Iraq. Spahr calls the world “a serious of isolated, burning fires as it is every morning” and she manages to bring these fires together and gives them some context by exposing patterns (millions marching) or bombings, all forms of strife that Spahr herself admits she has trouble connecting to when she is faced with the “unanswerable questions of political responsibility” (58).
Spahr utilizes repetition to a much greater degree than the previous poets in this course. Spahr will divide her poems with repeating lines beginning with “Oh, I Speak, Those are, These are, As I Thought, Beloveds” and so forth. And while listening to listening to this aloud would obviously prove to be a little grating, it hammers home its point effectively. Spahr will begin by listing off facts of the war, making for an extremely somber picture with images of fighter jets and bombs. She’ll recount facts leading up to the war which almost made me experience again that sense of dread of what was coming, simply by stating something like:

We did not speak about the December 24 deployment of twenty five thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines to the Gulf Region.
We did not speak about the loading of M1 Abrams tanks...

Spahr does this for a whole page. The feeling that repetition generated inside me was one of mounting tension, like fingers dragged down a chalkboard or that ambient sort of music utilized in horror films that slowly builds up until the monster bursts through a window or out of a closet. Reading it to myself it is inherently terrifying, but loses much of its luster when read aloud, I feel.
When the inevitable finally does arrive, Spahr’s melancholy is obvious. She states, “a huge sadness overtakes us daily because of our inability to control what goes on in the world in our name” (71). If Spahr’s feelings towards the war were not evident before, they are made clear here.
Whether Spahr succeeds or not in documenting the lead up to the Iraq war I feel really depends on the reader’s political leanings. As a Democrat and anti-war proponent, I would whole heartedly say yes, the text is successful. But I know my Republican grandfather would not like it. Because Spahr drops lines like, “eleven million people across the globe took to the streets one recent weekend to protest the war and this gave us a glimmer” or “our hopes that the inevitable will not come true are endlessly dashed” revealing her anti-war position. And this I feel colors the whole text.
The publication of “This Connection of Everyone with Lungs” will be a comfort to those like me, who see the Iraq War as a crime, to those who adore Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and hate what the United States has become. But to those who see the United States through glazed eyes of ignorance clouded by right wing fascism, I’m afraid the profundity of Spahr will fall on deaf ears.

Shawn's review of Spahr

Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is a poetic account of the events of the September 11, 2001 attacks and those surrounding the March 2003 United States-led invasion of Iraq.

As her work’s title implies, Spahr’s scope is vast: her 75-page book is comprised of only two poems—one written after September 11 and another written continuously from November 30, 2002 until March 27, 2003, a week after the March 19 bombing of Iraq.

One thing that is striking throughout the book is the poetry’s lack of any real political agenda. One can tell that Spahr is opposed to the war, but her message is less political and more humanist.

Throughout the book, Spahr’s tone is almost hypnotic, with each line’s meditation marching inevitably closer to war. Perhaps most striking about the meditative quality of Spahr’s book, though, is her constant repetition of lines, words, and phrases to bring about this quality. Take, for example, these few lines from her “Poem Written After September 11/2001:” “as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and / the space around the hands in and out / as everyone breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room in and out…” (5).

This continues for a couple pages until the phrases grow and connect ever so gradually as to eventually include words such as “troposphere.” We see in Spahr’s ever-widening picture a connectedness that becomes a theme throughout the book. The world, in Spahr’s eyes, is smaller than most people care to believe; it is a world in which every action affects everybody since the human race is connected by something as simple as the space between them.

Spahr’s poem “Poem Written from November 30/2002 to March 27/2003,”—which comprises most of the book—is written as a sort of journal entry on a somewhat daily basis. She includes happenings from the lead up to war, pop-culture references, and news of protests—all connected by their being reported on the same news network. It is here that Spahr’s poetry gets less like poetry in the traditional sense.

If there is something that Spahr’s poems are lacking, it’s a consistent deliberateness. For those used to more conventional poetry, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs will be a leap.

Spahr’s poetry is less cerebral and more spontaneous than other poets’ work—something that is perhaps most evident in “Poem Written from November 30/2002 to March 27/2003” which serves more as a diary composed of several poems. This is in no way deleterious to the effect of Spahr’s work, it just may be a hurdle for some to get over.

One of Spahr’s main objectives with This Connection of Everyone with Lungs is to show the, well, connectedness of humanity. By meshing together times in which celebrities make headlines next to troop deployments with an almost Zen-like concentration on the space that touches everything in our world, Spahr is able to effectively portray our small world.

Juliana Spahr's "This Connection of Everyone With Lungs"

“This Connection of Everyone with Lungs” by Juliana Spahr is a book of two poems. It is a summation of what happened after September 11th, 2001 up until the United States invaded Iraq. Spahr’s poetry is basically a combination of her thoughts and reactions to what the news says everyday. This compilation shows the change in news broadcasting over a period of about a year and 3 months.

Her first poem is very repetitive continually repeating “Everyone with lungs breathes the space in and out as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands in and out as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands in and out.” (Spahr, 4-5) She focuses on each individual’s connection to the world and our connection to those other individuals around us. I personally liked her use of repetition because she stated something then continually reinforced it through the repetition while still building on the original thought.
Her second poem focuses more on the day-to-day news and the ordinary way it is displayed. In her interview she mentions how she knew that the war was imminent yet she just didn’t know when it would occur. Because of this she noted everything that happened on the news whether it seemed pointless or important.

I think that through the repetitive nature of Spahr’s poems she establishes a sense of the basic so the reader can look past it, at the true nature of how people connect through the everyday of breathing and through our actions and what goes on. This connection means so much to who we are and we should base so much on it yet we get caught up and distracted in the stupidity and pointlessness of our sphere which we call our life.

Richard's Review of Juliana Sphar

"This Connection of Everyone with Lungs" written by Juliana Sphar is an account of everything that happened after the tragedy of 9/11 and before the war in the middle east began. It is divided into only two poems, the first entitled "A poem written after september 11/2001" which chronicles the camaraderie felt in the nation after the world trade center tragedy, and the second is called, "Poem written from Nov. 30/2002 to March 27/2003" which is a chronicle of all the news leading up to the declaration of the war on terror, which is written on a day by day basis.

Sphar's style is a very hypnotic one, presenting facts in a more roundabout way. The first poem relies on repetition to ingrain itself into the mind of the reader, repeating itself and adding to itself over and over. Consider this excerpt from the beginning of the first poem:
"as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and
the space around the hands in and out

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and
the space around the hands and the space of the room in and out

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 in and out" (pg. 5)
It's similar to a child's nursery rhyme, such as "The House that Jack Built" but at the same time it is referencing such a tragic event that it draws the reader in and sends the mind into a spiral, helping it to remember the poem. The second poem also uses it, but it is more varied since it is a day-by-day log of the different news reports that were given leading up to the start of the war in Afghanistan, and as such the repetition and subject changes from date to date. For example, in the second poem, an entry for December 2, 2002 has many of its stanzas beginning with the words, "While we turned sleeping uneasily" and then going on to mention something that happened on the news. While the repetition does not extend as the first poem does, this is still an effective use of repetition. Consider two adjacent stanzas from the entry that was just mentioned:
"While we turned sleeping uneasily perhaps J Lo gave Ben a prenuptial demand for sex four times a week.

While we turned sleeping uneasily Liam Gallagher brawled and irate fans complained that "Popstars: The Rivals" was fixed." (pg. 24)

But the ultimate question is does this repetitive, hypnotic way of writing accomplish what it sets out to do? Does it accurately portray the feeling of what was happening after 9/11 in the media? This reader says yes. the repetition of the poems, or at least a single phrase within the poem gives it a very hypnotic feel. It helps the poem to stick with us and helps us to think about it on a grander scale. It presents the events that she saw in an interesting and interpretive way that causes us to pause and consider what we had read and what was happening in both our own country and abroad. It is a fine example of how language can be used to interpret the same event in a different way from everyone else and this book is a great showing of how the country quickly lost its feeling of camaraderie and became divided over the war.

Juliana Spahr’s This Connection Of Everyone With Lungs describes events that happened after the attack on September 11^th that led up to the invasion of Iraq. Spahr uses facts and news reports to help the reader understand what was happening at this time and to show the readers the world. There are two major themes in the collection, besides the facts leading up to the invasion of Iraq, Spahr also reveals how people in our world come together but also separate themselves. There is always the undertone of that connection in her poems to show that although we are all different, we have a connection that cannot be broken.

This collection is split up into two poems; one is called “Poem Written after September 11, 2001” and “Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003”. The first poem is much shorter than the second, within the second poem, there are sections represented by different dates. In each of these sections, Spahr makes references to different news stories and then describes either the connection we have as humans or the fact that we separate ourselves. Repetition is another technique that Spahr uses in her work to make a point. In her first poem, “Poem Written after September 11, 2001”, the entire poem is set up so that whatever was said in the stanza before is repeated in the next and then added onto the next stanza, “Everyone with lungs breathes the space in and out as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands in and out as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands in and out.” (Spahr, 4-5). Spahr’s repetition causes the reader to really take in what she is saying. In the second poem, Spahr’s use of facts provides the reader with background information. Almost all of the sections of the second poem are split up by the facts and I think this allows the reader to fully understand her feelings and what she wants the readers to feel. As a reader, you have to look at each piece as its own separate thing, and in turn, you get the effect that all of these things are important.

I believe that Spahr was successful in her attempt to educate her readers. Her use of facts and headlines leading up to our invasion of Iraq shows her readers what our world is capable of whether the statements were about people coming together or separating. I think she does a really good job showing that there is a connection between everyone in the world, yet sometimes we do not acknowledge the connection and instead treat each other like there is no connection.

This connection of everyone who read Spahr. . .

Juliana Spahr wrote this collection of poetry after the events of 9/11 and leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Many pages are filled with facts or headlines she read in the news. Her subject goes back and forth between people coming together and people drifting apart. Periodically, she goes back to the connection she has with the rest of the world--the connection we all have with each other.

So, I guess I didn't get that this book was only two poems when we first started reading. I took it as two sections, and each date was the title of the next poem. Even though "Poem Written after September 11, 2001" and "Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003" are the only two listings in the table of contents, the way the book was set up gave me the impression of two parts with multiple poems in each. To realize that this whole book was only two poems really surprised me.

Spahr uses a lot of repetition. A LOT. Almost to the point where, in a couple places, it gets annoying:

"as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and
the space around the hands in and out

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and
the space around the hands and the space of the room in and out

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 in and out" (pg. 5)

And that went on for a few more pages until she got to "the space of the mesosphere in and out" (pg. 8). Yes, at the end of each repetitive stanza, she ends with "in and out" and even mentions breathing. So, each stanza could be seen as taking a bigger and bigger breath in and out; breathing is something of a repetitive action--but also a necessary one. I'm not so sure how necessary Spahr's repetition was in this case.
We had the opportunity in class to listen to Spahr read this poem. I don't mean to be critical, but hearing her read through the repetition only confirmed my thoughts on her choice to repeat so much. Now, she could have been having an off day, or something, but as she read, it sounded to me like her voice was getting tired of saying the same thing over and over and over. She started out reading the exact same way each stanza, in the same tone of voice, but I noticed her "change it up" a couple times--as if she was getting bored, herself--and her voice went up for a word (instead of staying level) in order to keep her, and her audience, focused. I don't really think her intention was to sound bored; I just couldn't help but notice little things like that. If she wanted to make it sound like breathing, I don't think she should have changed her voice at all. And if she wanted us to read her poetry as breathing, maybe she didn't have to take it so far.

I looked up the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere. The troposphere is the atmospheric layer closest to Earth, followed by the stratosphere (where aircraft fly and the ozone layer is) and the mesosphere. I guess I could understand why Spahr included the first two layers of atmosphere, but humans don't really make use of the mesosphere. There is space travel, but if that was important, why didn't she include the rest of the atmosphere, the other planets, the Milkyway, etc.? Why not go all out and add the universe?!
I did learn the the mesosphere is the last of the "uniform" layers of the atmosphere--which, as I understood it, has something to do with molecular masses of different chemicals. The mesosphere is the place where most meteors falling to Earth end up burning out. It is also the layer we know the least about. It's too high for aircraft flight and too low for orbital spacecraft. Does its air of mystery hold some sort of importance?

Louise Gluck and The Wild Irirs

Louise Gluck, in my opinion is the most interesting poet that we have read as a class so far. Her style and presentation are unmatched. The amount of personal material Gluck is able to incorporate amazed me. Each of Gluck’s poems had deep personal undertones, yet I was able to indentify with almost all of them. She personalized the poems and at the same time made them relate to every readers past experiences. I believe she is able to do just this by using religion and nature as her main themes. For example her poem “Early Darkness”, I believe has both spirituality and nature as themes throughout. Tone wise, “Early Darkness” has a confused speaker. The speaker first asks the reader a question, “How can you say/ earth should give me joy?” The poem hints constantly to the idea of a Mother Nature, who I gather is the speaker throughout, “Each thing/ born is my burden; I cannot succeed/ with all of you.” Constantly the notion of humans understanding Mother Nature flashes in my thoughts. What Gluck is trying to point out is that, everywhere people are saying, “I’m one with nature”, or “I’m synced with nature”. The entire first stanza dismisses these notions that people of being connected with nature. Mother Nature in “Early Darkness” is burdened with the over abundance of humans.

The third Stanza is where Gluck makes her turn when she writes, “How can you understand me/ when you cannot understand yourselves?” Gluck turns the focus of the poem from humans not understanding nature, to humans not understanding themselves. Mother Nature in the poem has the reason why humans do not understand one another, “Your memory is not/ powerful enough, it will not/ reach back far enough-”

Gluck finishes the poem with a resolution. Mother Nature makes evident that all humans are her children, “Never forget you are my children.” Yet, the following lines after the first in the last stanza force the reader to realize there is nothing that can be done. Mother Nature tells the reader that humans suffer not because of what currently doing, but because they have simply lived and require sustenance separate of that from Mother Nature.

In general, Louise Gluck, is a master poet of which I fully enjoyed. Her masterful incorporation of the expansive themes of spirituality and nature amazed me throughout the book. Her form is simple and lends to the material n the poem. Finally the calmness of voice, even in her most serious of poems leads to a pleasing read.

The Wild Iris

I found The Wild Iris to be simple, refreshing, poignant. It was refreshing after what I considered the somewhat heavy-handed poems in Elegy and Armantrout's cryptic Versed. Gluck structures her book with pieces from the perspectives of flowers and also the prayers of humans. In this way, she explores the forces of nature and/or God.

The Wild Iris attempts to speak in the language of flowers, imagining their life circumstances and take on the world around them. They are often portrayed as voices of reason, in their connection to the earth and seasons. The flowers are shown as having both fragility and brevity, living and dying by the seasons. One such example is in "Snowdrop," where the snowdrops themselves speak: "I did not expect to survive,/ earth suppressing me. I didn't expect/ to waken again, to feel/ in damp earth my body/able to respond again." The flowers also speak of humans, often with contempt, as in "Lamium." The flowers describe humans as, "you...who think/ you live for truth and, by extension, love/ all that is cold." The flowers often seem to see humans as removed from natural forces and therefore, cold, inorganic.

The humans that appear in The Wild Iris are consistently the figure of the man and woman, or else the speaker and her husband. The man and woman are linked throughout to the garden, a biblical illusion that follows with Gluck's many reflections on God. In "The Garden," the couple is described planting a row of peas, being divided both from the earth ("they cannot see themselves/ in fresh dirt...") and one another, ("she wants to stop;/ he wants to get to the end...") and therefore also the truth of their situation ("they are free to overlook/ this sadness). The couple is often associated with desire, and emotion highly uncharacteristic of the flowers, which live not for one another or passions, but as a result of the inevitable turning of seasons. Also appearing throughout the book, are morning prayers, "Matins" and evening prayers, "Vespers." In these, the female voice in the book addresses God, or else the forces of nature (the line between which being blurred throughout the book). Often, her prayers are doubting such as in Matins (pg 25) when she speaks of her toils--"Or was the point always/to continue without a sign?" The speaker also finds herself answering her own questions, frustrated by her inevitable inability to guess at the workings of God, such as in Vespers (pg 37).

Gluck's The Wild Iris contrasts the simple logic of flowers with the complex emotions of humans, while comparing the flowers' views of the natural forces that move them with the relationship of humans and their God. Gluck seems to imply that the flowers "have it figured out" so to speak, in that they live purely by the forces that govern them, without questioning, and having a certain purity of existance. The humans, on the other hand, are ruled by love, desires, doubt, and frustration. Gluck's The Wild Iris manages to bring these concepts and the world of flowers and humans together in the premise of the garden.

Thoughts on The Wild Iris

It took me a little while to warm up to Gluck’s style of writing, but by the end of The Wild Iris I had grown to like her uses of imagery. Just like Armantrout, Gluck wrote poems that the average reader would classify as “normal poetry.” She wrote with a form that doesn’t seem daunting to most people, a familiar usage of line breaks and punctuation. I liked that her poems weren’t necessarily bogged down in allusions, but metaphorically deep at the same time. Something that I also found particularly interesting was her many uses of cycles.

One of the more obvious cycles in the book is the progression through the seasons. The book starts out in early spring, with the “end of suffering” at the end of winter, and poems with titles such as “April” and “End of Winter” itself. The poems then move into warmer months, where in Midsummer, “everything is possible.” Autumn hits with a poem titled “End of Summer,” where the “void” of colder weather is soon approaching. The last poem in the book, “The White Lilies,” heralds in winter. This poem recognizes the end of the cycle, the “one summer [they] have entered eternity;” the narrator also knows that he or she will return again come spring.

Even many of the flowers in the titles of Gluck’s poems follow this cycle. Scilla normally bloom in early spring; white lilies bloom throughout the winter.

Looking at the titles of the poems, it’s also evident that Gluck is writing about the cycle of an average day. Before the poems start to get into summer, there are seven poems titled “Matins,” or a morning prayer that should properly begin at midnight, but can also start at daybreak. These prayers are usually said at the true start to the day, the beginning of the cycle. As the warmer weather starts to wane in her poems, the day does as well; ten poems are titled “Vespers,” an evening service. This is where her religiousness first comes into significance: if one did not know the terms for these prayers, or wasn’t in a place where they could look them up, the meaning would be lost.

Sometimes the cycles intertwine. In her poem “Ipomoea,” Gluck writes of how she believes God is leaving her; she is “not to be permitted to ascend ever again,” to gain understanding of God’s word. The Ipomoea is the more scientific term for a morning glory; these flowers are in full bloom only in the morning, closing up during warmer parts of the day. Each day, this cycle continues: bloom, curl, bloom, curl. It seems like her religious beliefs wax and wane with the seasons as well; it’s clear towards the end of the book that she is doubting her beliefs: God has “drawn a line” through her name.” This part actually made me think of something else that has to do with the cycle of the seasons. In Judaism, a week after the New Year there is the holiday of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On this day, we fast and spend most of the day in synagogue, repenting for our sins in the hopes that God will write our names into the Book of Life, so that upon death we will be allowed into heaven.

The Wild Iris: Flowers, Gluck, and God

The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck was a text filled with imagery of wild flowers. I.E. most of the poems in the text not only had the title of a flower most also had flowers as having voices The text also contained two other speakers apart from when the text has flowers speaking (such as the lamium poem) those are God and Gluck herself. I honestly must confess that the poems with direct god references (such as god speaking directly) made me a little uncomfortable, not being a religious person. A good example of god speaking is found on pg 20 in the poem “April” the poem opens by saying “No one’s despair is like my despair-“ the poem goes on to say how god is more unhappy than unhappy people because he created us and humans do not love him or each other. Another good example of god being disappointed with us is found on page 58 in the poem Lullaby where he is again disappointed with man for not loving or caring for each other or god.
Another central theme in the text is that of Louise Glucks’ personal battle with cancer; while the text isn’t directly referencing Gluck laying in a hospital bed sick with cancer, the text does have poems that represent her struggle with the illness. An example of this is found on page 56 in the poem vespers. This poem talks about how it is fruitless to plant a tomatoe plant in the early fall when winter will only kill it before it matures, and how if her life is almost over (presumably because of the illness) than why is it worth living out because she can already see the end. Pg 62 Gold Lily is about glucks’ dying moments calling out to god and when he doesn’t answer she questions if you do not answer than are you not the father that has been there all my life? A question that is symbolic of Gluck questioning her faith when her battle was the worst with cancer.
I found while reading this text that even though the poems do not create a dense poem like some of the Larry Levis we read, having a dictionary or the internet handy to look up the meanings of the wild flowers discussed in the text, helped a lot in ascertaining meaning from this text. A good example of this would be the poem Lamium, if you don’t look up the meaning of Lamium and learn it’s a plant that likes cold dark places then the cold dark imagery in the poem lamium is confusing. With the direct god references or not this is a good book to pick up and read as it contains a different viewpoint of the world, one that is from a gardener (naturalistic) with a perspective that is at times cynical and other times hopeful of the world.

Gluck: A Breath Of Fresh Air

Gluck has many voices within this book, The Wild Iris. There is the voice of the narrator, which is the most obvious, and there are presumably flowers talking, and also the voice of “God”. This leaves room for a lot of different perspectives on belief and spirituality. In “Snowdrops” on page 6, it reads, “I did not expect to survive, / earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect / to waken again.” This makes it obvious it is the grass or a flower talking, blooming again after a long winter. This is one voice, and the second I want to talk about is “God’s” voice. On page 15, the poem, “Retreating Wind” opens with, “When I made you, I loved you. / Now I pity you. / I gave you all you needed: bed of earth, blanket of blue air.” God made people, and now instead of loving, he pities our “small talking” souls. Gluck is giving a voice to God, which is a voice no one has ever heard before. Same with the voices of flowers—I know it’s something I’ve never seen in poetry before. These different kind of perspectives gives a surreal kind of feeling to the book, knowing that these voices are unique. Then, even with this voice of God, Gluck’s narration shows that she is having trouble believing in Him. “Once I believed in you,” she says on page 36, “I planted a fig tree… / It was a test: if the tree lived, / it would mean you existed. / By this logic, you do not exist.” I think this is an interesting quote in itself, because she is trying to use nature to prove God’s existence.

There is such a strong connection to nature in this collection, the biggest reason, obviously, is the title of the book. I decided to look up what the connotations of “Iris” are, and I found that Iris is a messenger of the Gods in Greek Mythology. This was a huge discovery for me, and suddenly, I understand the title much more. I take this to mean that nature is trying to speak to the higher powers, which is Gluck’s intention throughout this collection of poems. In “The Jacob’s Ladder”, a flower speaks, saying, “Trapped in the earth, / wouldn’t you too want to go to heaven?” It seems to me this flower can’t speak to God, just humans, because this flower “desire[s] / knowledge of paradise.”(24). Because we have a perspective of a flower and nature, it’s like we’re seeing three different levels in this collection: nature being the bottom level, or the base, humans are the middle, and God is the top level, presumably in heaven. Since nature is two levels away from God, it is trying its hardest to speak to the humans to get its message across.

I can’t figure out if Gluck wanted readers to think she was atheist, or a “believer”, let’s just call it. Because throughout the collection, Gluck is very much debating the existence of God, but then she has poems written in God’s voice. I’m not sure if she just wants the reader to come to his or her own conclusions, or maybe there really is some kind of method to her madness. The readers are left to their own opinion. But one thing is for sure, there is no mistaking the meaning behind Gluck’s poems. One thing that sets her apart from all the other poets we’ve read, is that the meaning is pretty much laid out for you. This is very much unlike Armantrout, which was the last poet we read. Gluck was a breath of fresh air.

Emily M's Response to Gluck

Reading The Wild Iris was an interesting experience because of the choices Gluck made in her writing. From the title it was clear that nature would be a predominate theme throughout, however after reading the first section it became even more evident that nature was in everything she wrote. The garden setting becomes a home for her readers as they are introduced to the unspoken thoughts of the inhabitants, each plant becomes personified and gives us a glimpse at their lives. “Snowdrops” on page 6 shows the desperate state in which these flowers find themselves in during the winter, “I did not expect to survive,/earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect/ to waken again, to feel/ in damp earth my body/ able to respond again, remembering.” These very real human feelings and thoughts are also used in all of Gluck’s poems and are what make the impossible conversations understandable and relatable. Superficially, the garden poems are a discussion between the plants and the gardener but going below the surface, they are about relationships of all kinds.

One of the most common relationships Gluck writes about is that between a higher power (presumably God), and humans. A number of her poems are titled “Matins” and “Vespers” which are times of prayer in Catholicism. In these poems, Gluck again has impossible conversations, this time between God and humans. “I am not to speak to you/ in the personal way. Much/ has passed between us. Or/ was it always only/ on the one side?” This poem “Matins” (13) is the perfect example of the uneasy relationship between humans and God that is shown throughout the book. Gluck’s readers come to expect the back and forth that she has created by titling the piece as a time of prayer but posing a question that would nullify the need for prayer. Her uncertainty about religion and God can be interpreted in most of her poems. She shares her doubts and frustrations about God, but gives the impression that she believed in him at one point, and is now trying to wrap her head around it all. “Vespers” on page 36 says it quite bluntly “Once I believed in you/…It was a test: if the tree lived/ I would mean you existed.” Her frustrations are not the only ones voiced however, poems sometimes take the voice of God, sharing what she believes he must be thinking such as in the poem “September Twilight.” In the lines “I’m tired of you, chaos/ of the living world-/ I can only extend myself/ for so long to a living thing.” here God’s irritation with the limits of humans, along with their flaws becomes the center idea, and it is used several other times in her work.

The voices Gluck creates are what make the book, because they are relatable to her readers. These voices say the things we have thought, and describe the emotions that we have felt. The idea of having impossible conversations combined with relatable subjects makes the book more interesting because it adds dimension, allowing a reader to take it for face value or go deeper if they desire. Gluck has a presence in each of the poems just as Merwin did, by giving us direct access to thoughts and inner conflicts. However, her life was not an open book like Merwin, she gave us access to her emotions and thoughts in a specific moment without any back-story, and this too made a difference in the book as a whole.

Not So Wild

Coming in succession behind Armantrout, Levis, and Notley, Gluck’s poetry was almost painfully easy for me. Unlike the other poets (Merwin excepted, sort of), Gluck hands her readers the meaning and tell them to do something with it. Notley invited readers to experience meaning alongside Alette, Levis dares readers to unpack his collages and make something of them, Armantrout hands the reader a puzzle to play with and create meaning and even Merwin (who is more straightforward) gives readers a sense of meaning and an idea and lets them decide what it means to them individually. Gluck tells us what she means.

In “Matins” (25), the speaker is again in the garden, an obvious Edenic motif that runs throughout the book, but this time is not planting but “pretending/ to be weeding.” The speaker then proceeds to describe everything she does in her garden in the morning (matins), all of which has a clear metaphor, which she even tells us: “I’m looking for courage, for some evidence/ my life will change.” The “symbolic leaf” she is thinking of pulling cannot be anything other than a sign, which has the convenient synonyms: evidence, symbol, assurance, mark, proof, etc. Well, if we weren’t sure before that one of her main themes is understanding of self and life, we know now that it is. It is also completely clear that the “you” the speaker is talking to is both us, the readers, and God, who appears in nearly every other poem as a definitive otherworldly all-powerful being. If there is another all-powerful creator of earth and life and humanity other than the Christian God, I apologize, but it is abundantly clear that this is the “you” she means. Her reversal of meaning at the end comes in the form of a question: “Or was the point always/ to continue without a sign?” This last sentence tells us two things. First, that the previous interpretation of assurance that her life can change (presumably for the better) in the garden (Eden) where she talks to god is correct and second, that her questioning and our questioning that such a thing can or does exist is valid, and that this is what the poem wants us to think about.

Ultimately Gluck’s poetry functions as an intimate view into the speaker’s (ahem, her) spiritual journey and mindset while exploring God and faith in the rural Vermontian landscape she paints for us. We are simply watching instead of experiencing or sharing. I think this still gives meaning to the reader, but in a me: teacher, you: student sort of way that wasn’t present in any other poet we’ve read so far.

Callie's take on Gluck

Louise Glück, in her book The Wild Iris, works with the changing seasons as well as the changing time through the placement of the individual poems. For example the very first poem, “The Wild Iris,” is a poem with the voice of a wild iris. This iris, which is a perennial plant that grows from a bulb at the beginning of summer, tells its gardener that it knows what death is like since it dies away during the winter months and then grows again when it begins to rain: “that which you call death/I remember.” (1) The following poem, “Matins,” is a poem related to morning prayers or services. This poem also deals with spring as the poet uses the “hollow stems of the white daffodils,” (2) which are flowers that grow in the spring time and are symbolic of spring. Further into the book Gluck’s poems turn to summer themes: “Midsummer--/everything is possible,” (32) from the poem “Heaven and Earth,” as well as daytime: “as the fire of the summer sun/truly does stall/being entirely contained/by the burning/maples/at the garden’s border.” (32) Next, the poems turn to evening as in “Vespers” where the poet is talking to God in an evening prayer, which is what Vespers are: “the stoic lambs turning/silver in twilight,” (38) and the end of summer: “the field itself, in August dotted/with wild chicory and aster.” (38) And finally the last poem of the book, “The White Lilies,” is set in the evening: “here/they linger in the summer evening/and the evening turns/cold with their terror.” (63) The book also closes with the poet putting her garden to sleep as the summer is overtaken by the cold autumnal weather: “It doesn’t matter to me/how many summers I live to return:/this one summer we have entered eternity.” (63) The Lily is telling her gardener that even though she will die off for the winter she will one day return.

Glück’s poetry is also filled with the lyrical “I” but who is speaking changes from poem to poem and even changes within a poem at times. There are three main beings who speak in Gluck’s poems: God, human, and plant. The first, God, is apparent in the poem “Clear Morning” in which God is speaking to human kind: “I’ve watched you long enough.” (7) It is clear that God is speaking because He would have to speak “through vehicles only, in/details of earth, as you prefer,” (7) in order for mankind to understand His meanings. Other poems are written in first person from the point of view of a human such as in “Matins” which is a prayer from a human to God: “I asked you to be human—I am no needier/than other people” (13). And the poem can be from a plant’s point of view as in “Lamium” where a plant, a Lamium, speaks to a human: “The sun hardly touches me./Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.” (5) Lastly, the point of view can change within a poem as in the poem “The White Lilies” where the beginning is spoken in the point of view of a narrator with no specific “I” but most likely human: “As a man and woman make/ a garden between them like/ a bed of stars,” (63) and then there is a shift to the plant, the white lilies, speaking to their gardener, the human from the beginning: “I felt your two hands/bury me to release its splendor.” (63)

Louise Glück’s poetry is unique in that it usually has a surface meaning which is great because it doesn’t take much time or knowledge to get something out of it, but it also has a deeper meaning when you look closer at it and pick it apart. I enjoyed her poetry for this because even the poems I didn’t look at closely I still got something out of them.

John's Response to Levis

The dark, intelligent, moving images of Larry Levis’ poetry is oh so alluring for many reasons I do not understand. Many of Levis’ poetry is about death and the understanding of death, yet he also gracefully puts what I would consider hope in his poems. Levis may have a very aggressive nature towards poetry but he also adds many intellectual references to his works. I believe combining these three features of hope, aggression, and intellectuality produce very well rounded thought provoking poetry. Levis’ “Elegy with a Bridle in its Hand” even though a much easier read then most, certainly has moments of confusion. In the fifth and sixth stanzas Levis writes, “Deity is in the details & we are among other details & we long to be teased out of ourselves. And become all of them” I took these several lines as an explanation of why Levis writes. This I believe is the hopefulness in which Levis writes. If a deity is among the details, and according to Levis, we are among the details then someone among us must be a deity. When Levis says, “we long to be teased out of ourselves” he means we long to stand out from the rest of the masses.

“Boy in Video Arcade” another poem of Levis, is simple in form yet ambiguous in meaning. The poem’s line structure is quite irregular. The irregularity, however I believe adds a certain flow to the reading of the poem. Every stanza seems to be a different image Levis is trying to depict. The first lines, “Some see a lake of fire at the end of it, or heaven’s guesswork, something always to be sketched” immediately made the impression the poem was going to be dreamlike or deal with surreal images. Because Levis toys with the theme of death and absence, I perceived this poem as dark because of the ambiguity of the images. The images themselves may not be dark in nature, but the poem considered as a whole, thematically is dark.

Overall I very much enjoyed Levis. Of the poets we have read so far I believe Larry Levis made us think the most.