Lyric Encounters with Other Places: Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs and Robert Minhinnick’s ‘An Isotope Dreaming’

Abstract

Abstract:My chapter considers work of two contemporary poets, Juliana Spahr and Robert Minhinnick. Their poetry has been productively approached as performing an ecological writing or ecopoetics; critics have also focused upon their work as establishing dynamic relationships between local and global. This discussion considers network of relationships established between lyricism and encounters with other places in Spahr and Minhinnick's war poetry. For Spahr these encounters are with virtual places, heavily mediated through information systems and newsgathering networks. Minhinnick's travelogue poem about Iraq uses conceit of radioactive dispersal as a way of foregrounding multiple transitions in his work. His attempts a dissemination of self that can establish a sustainable reflection upon war. Ultimately, both poets' shared position of negotiating ideas of encounter in long poem creates a form that addresses war by focusing on processes of mobility, transition and inclusion.Key names and concepts: Lyn Hejinian, Robert Minhinnick, Charles Olson, Michael Palmer, Juliana Spahr; encounter, long poem, subjectivity, war poetry.In her poetics statement for American Poets in 21st Century: New Poetics, Juliana Spahr proposes:There are so many rules about how to write poetry that there might as well not be any at all. Poetry moves words around. It rearranges them from their conventions. It re-sorts them. It uses more than one language. It repeats. It pursues a conventional language and divergent typography. It often experiments. It can be ephemeral and occasional. It often uses pleasing patterns as it does all this. And all that helps me think. (Spahr 2007: 131)Later in her statement Spahr states that poetry is associated with movement, duration and transport: The feeling of being set in motion, a feeling that moves one to (132). These ideas of thought and movement recall Robert Pinsky's identification of a lyric that presents the poet talking, predicating, moving directly and as systematically and unaffectedly as he would walk from one place to another (Pinsky 1976: 133). Broadly speaking, Pinsky's model of a lyric, posits self as primary organizing principle of work. Central to this tendency is articulation of subject's feelings and desires, and a strongly marked division between subjectivity and its articulation as expression. What is most apparent in discursive model of is immanence of self and its centrality in composition as subject of writing. Unlike Pinsky's perception of poetic thinking as an inchoate interiority that retains its privacy and inclusion, Spahr's ambition is to create a discursiveness which moves outward, towards world. Spahr's this connection of everyone with lungs (2005b) was written as a response to 9/1 1 and Iraq war. sequences in volume create a space of duration and process, moving impetus of work beyond a drive towards a epiphany. Instead of an entry into a corralled personal realm, volume creates an important human ecosystem in its attempts to make relationships between poetic text, human body and world. This gesture to establish a discursiveness sited beyond interiority is mentioned by Spahr as an ambition to create dealing with complex questions of how to talk to one another. More poems that acknowledge how difficult that is. More poems that look outward (Spahr 2002: 8).The speaker in Robert Minhinnick's 'Return of Natives' from King Driftwood suggests wryly that be I'm / back could be supplementary information / exists could be I never / left (2008: 97). Minhinnick's poetry is frequently cited as incorporating elements of travel writing, his poems often seek linkages between his native Wales and a global community. This claim is supplemented by his collection of prose essays that include meditations on travel, ecology, war and politics: Watching Fire Eater (1992), Badlands (1996) and To Babel and Back (2005). …