A Mesh of Strange Strangers in Juliana Spahr’s Well Then There Now (2011): An Exploration of Timothy Morton’s Ecological Thought

Abstract

Summary In this article, I utilise theoretical concepts from Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought (2010) to examine selected poems by Juliana Spahr from her poetry collection Well Then There Now (2011). Many of the poems in this collection, especially “Things of each possible relation hashing against one another” (WT 53-67) and “Gentle now, don’t add to heartache” (WT 122-133), deal with the inter-connectivity of all human and non-human beings. Spahr’s idea of inter-connectedness relates philosophically to Morton’s definition of “the ecological thought” as a “practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings – animal, vegetable, or mineral” (2010: 107/2088). It would thus be illuminating to use Morton’s concepts as set out in his ontology about the interconnectivity of all things, in particular, “the mesh” and “the strange stranger”, to read Spahr’s poems in Well Then There Now. “The mesh” imagines inter-connectedness and asks, “who or what is interconnected with what or with whom” as an attempt to illustrate that “nothing exist all by itself” (2010: 108/2088), whereas “the strange stranger” relates to the interconnectivity of all things because it comes forth from the interconnectedness that characterises everything. Morton (2010: 246/1088) writes: “The strange stranger isn’t just a blank at the end of a long list of life forms we know (aardvarks, beetles, chameleons … the strange stranger). The strange stranger lives within (and without) each and every being.” The interconnectedness of all things is an interesting characteristic of Spahr’s poems, and Morton’s theoretical concepts provide the necessary tools to emphasise these different relationships extensively.