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.
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