Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You
Juliana Spahr
Wesleyan University Press
$12.95, ISBN 0-8195-6525-3
The tension contained within Juliana Spahr's latest book is immediately
apparent in the provocative ambiguity of its title: its six poems
are a study of things cyclically coming together and falling apart.
In these poems, the individual struggles to be productive within communities
of varying sizes. This, then, is a book of circles within circles,
about trying to determine one's place within a larger whole. "Everyone
is connected in the thrash," Spahr writes, yet even when describing
mosh pits, acrobatics, and complex sexual acts, it seems that situations
are always in danger of becoming uncomfortably tangled in knots.
Spahr establishes the perspective of the book early on in "things":
Like the claim made by astronauts
that when they see the world from
space perspective shifts.
There are these things and they are
da kine, they are the world seen from
space as whole yet complex.
The astronauts claim realizing da
kine, overwhelmed by emotion,
an epiphany that things are fragile
from far away and thus all the more
sweet.
The speaker in these poems is something of an astronaut, orbiting
an array of human interactions, even while simultaneously participating
in some of them as part of a "we." (As in her "Spiderwasp
or Literary Criticism," Spahr's use of pronouns here is slippery,
and their referents are often elusive.) Like an astronaut, too, the
poet here turns a highly trained eye on subjects, viewing even emotional
facts and events from a deliberate distance that allows them to be
carefully documented and studied.
The poems build through repetition and incremental progress, and
these elliptical patterns of turning and returning come to suggest
struggles that are simultaneously specific and universal. In "gathering:
palolo stream," a fenced-in parking lot—which has no road
leading to it—blocks the way to a community local gathering place,
and the community's struggle against this supposed progress is at
once absurd and yet all too familiar.
Interactions between much smaller communities are analyzed as well.
A meeting between two lovers is dissected:
A bed is soft and we, the two
people in the hotel room, run our
hands over each other's bodies
while reclined upon it.
We like the feel of each other's
bodies.
This is pleasure.
This is also speaking.
There is no language here normally associated with sensuality, nothing
traditionally erotic within the poem, no hint that the participants
are actually lost in passion. Instead, the scene is intellectualized,
presenting a vision of humanity that's more mechanical than animal.
Coming together with clothes on proves to be no easier. Describing
a group gathered around a conference room table, Spahr writes that,
"We are similar to each other. We/ look like each other. We understand/
each other even in argument." Despite the positive aspects of
this interaction, the group is "unable to get comfortable/ around
the table." And while attaining some level of collective understanding
may be a positive, the image of clonelike thinkers cloistered in a
sterile, airtight environment certainly represents something other
than a model community.
At many points in this book, the voice is aware that "I am part
of a we and then not/ part of a we." Ultimately, then, "The
problem is how to we all/ together now." Make no mistake about
it: there is an urgency to this concern, even as the voice speaks
with a certain reserve. Spahr writes:
There are these things.
Words that flip switches.
I am trying to say how they work
in a world that I am close with.
I am in a place called there and I
am trying to make it into a place
called here.
Striving to move from "there" to "here," writing
becomes a tool for reaching toward a sort of closure. There is an
uneasy tension as the poems pull the reader into their insistent rhythms
yet push back at the same time with their clinical distance, replicating
the aggressive hello-goodbye contained within the book's title.
In "a younger man, an older man, and a woman," Spahr describes
a gymnastic sequence in which the three performers explore a variety
of complex positions. Instead of coming together in the name of intellectual
theories or sexual gratification, the emphasis here is on individuals
literally constructing a society with their bodies: "In culture
we reach out to build / ourselves. // In culture we interact."
While this poem presents what may be a more positive take on human
possibility, the piece is still tempered by a sense of temporary accomplishment:
In balance a single position is
obtained and maintained for a
number of seconds before it is
discontinued.
Most heartening, perhaps, is the fact that if progress is temporary,
so is failure; when balance is lost, "we tuck / the head and
go into a forward / roll."
These poems are unrelenting in their depiction of struggle, and the
consistency with which Spahr sees her project through is impressive.
For all the clarity of its straightforward diction, this is a difficult
work that renders familiar landscapes as simultaneously bleak and
yet offering previously undetected possibilities.
