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Essays
Juliana Spahr has taken up Gertrude Stein's scepter, polished it, updated it, and made sense of it. A resident of Honolulu, she uses her colonial culture outsiderness to bounce off and around her sense of location, dislocation, and relationship through images made malleable by pop sensation. The title comes from a song heard at a hardcore punk show. One of the six long sequences that make up the book explores the indefinite/definite meaning of the pidgin word "da kine." Another describes an abstract dance performed by a woman, a younger man, and an older man. Each is brilliant in its timing and in its symbolic subtleties immersed often in abstractions about interaction. This is exciting work. It's troubling too, for in a way it seems a little like a 21st century Hugh Prather—easy psychology masked as theoretical action. It's the one danger Spahr must be wary of. Her work could deliquesce into psychobabble. I hope not, for seldom has anyone had such fun in poetry. Her sense of contradiction and mixed-message is superb. Her spare and quirky language dazzles. She even brings her scholarly self into the notes for the poems (Spahr recently published a critical study on social identity and literature entitled Everybody Autonomy.) Spahr writes with a foam baseball bat and hits hard, laughing all the way: "In the midst of this unsureness, / we are trying to tell a personal / story. // This story, the story of we, is of / our loss and our loving. // It is the story between deeply / sleeping, dreaming, and waking. // It is the story of what is crooked / and loving that crooked." (From "We") Beware L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets—Sphar makes sense and still knocks language's meaning off its chair.
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