by Megan Friedman

Writing ‘the art of poetry’ into a multiplicity, Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poeticas interrogates the existence of the poem, realizing poetry as a resilient and ever-expansive art form that consistently rewrites itself within its own tradition. As art becomes representation and representation is distorted through capitalism, Spahr takes on the evolvement of humankind, exploring our darknesses, our singing, and explodes into a place beyond understanding through which “still, we together swim on, into some world / not yet imagined, not yet understood” (48). As she determines ‘not understanding’ as crucial to poetry, Spahr is able to make the impossible possible, able to “write a poem that was too broken for the lyric / poets and too lyric for everyone else” (11-12). Through intensive movements of lyric mediation, Spahr’s Ars Poeticas is ambitious in its expanse and successful in its ambition to hold the multitudes of what poetry can be and do. 

The first poem in Ars Poeticas, “Ars Poetica 1: Coral,” immediately disrupts linearity by putting pressure on what comes after. In questioning what it means to write poetry ekphrastically and/or through spatial-historical undercurrents, Spahr leaps elliptically through time and space, filling gaps between “The Atlantic and the Pacific,” often landing on thought and body, developing “poetry in the stomach / that then exits through the mouth / which is the anus” (3-4). Spahr, then, expertly expands time dilation into “Ars Poetica 2: Scotch Broom” through which she interrogates her own understanding of the poem, naming understanding as a concept that shifts over time through circumstantial fracture and language limitations. This section flows from fragmented couplets into fast-paced prose poems, through which Spahr brilliantly blends the mundane with the cosmic so that beer is “vibrant, bubbly” and leaking into light “almost carbonated” (19, 22).

Spahr’s movement into the next three sections—“Ars Poetica 3: Bluebird-Ghost,” “Ars Poetica 4: Bison,” and “Ars Poetica 5: Goby”—places direct focus on the ecologic world and its human-caused destruction, naming the beginning of art as the bison, the bison as lost, and this being “the reasons why there are thousands of representations” (40). Throughout these poems, Spahr ties natural beauty with beauty expected from the lyric, not shying from questions regarding the intersection of the personal and political: 

that someone  

will understand a poem to be an  

intricate sonnet of interconnected streams, 

that someone will claim there 

 is a political beauty in a few important-  

sounding words arranged in rough  

syllable counts

Here, Spahr’s attention to music, representation, and capital collectively spark epiphanies within and beyond poetry’s capacity to bridge the lost with the found. By manifesting the question of poetic capacity within the lyric itself, Spahr acknowledges a real distance between the lyric and the socio-political sphere, thus negating her own limitations and reaching something larger than her language anticipates. As she writes “I understood I could / not ever write a poem that in any // way had such complexity, variation / as this throat and this galaxy,” Spahr both does and does not write a poem that bridges lyric with universal complexities (12). 

To further complicate her poetic impulses, Spahr expresses concern over her own use of lyric to address global crises. Spahr questions what a poet should be concerned about, and if and how a poet’s concerns manifest within a poem. “I’m concerned about these other things,” writes Spahr. “Or that is what I thought when they said they were worried I no longer understood the poem, the poetry” (Spahr 19). Throughout Ars Poeticas, Spahr names her concerns through a constant disruption of her own poetic understanding, spinning each poem in on itself, spinning her own logic in on itself—so much so that understanding ceases to be possible, and within this impossibility lies a new form of knowledge. This knowledge, paradoxically, is only accessible through an exploration and destruction of Spahr’s prior sense of knowing. Therefore, understanding, for Spahr, is constantly dismantled and necessarily disregarded while remaining central to a poem’s existence.

It is through this dismantling that Spahr attunes a continuous resignification of concern and attention. Throughout this collection, Spahr defies expectation and turns the ars poetica into something seemingly impossible, yet entirely true—grounded in art, tradition, and the lyric. In that regard, it would only make sense for Ars Poeticas to end at the beginning, at the ‘after.’ In “Ars Poetica 6: Coral, Again,” Spahr brings attention to interconnectedness, projection, and mirroring—“Is it not all here, in a story retold so many times?” (54). By writing and rewriting an ars poetica, Spahr allows for both the end and the beginning of times to exist simultaneously, for representation to layer upon itself, maintaining each poem as both real and unreal, cultivating new realities within the shadows. “Ars Poetica 7: Acknowledgements,” the book’s closing piece, showcases this simultaneity by turning acknowledgment into a poem itself, bringing poetry out of its expected container by allowing outside influences into the poem without flattening their existence: “That’s a poem, no? Tradition held in suspended animation only to be reactivated in the lab, reproducing, consuming, reproducing again, changing a little each time but holding fast to the measured form” (63). 

Throughout Ars Poeticas, Spahr maintains her measured forms while allowing each poem to shatter and refigure through an interrogation of its own existence. Through this shattering, Spahr makes clear that the lyric tradition is founded in a consistent rearrangement of what ‘tradition’ is, does, and means. For Spahr, the poem becomes more than itself, the poem becomes “something psychotic and large in its demands” (43). Despite her continuous rearrangements, Spahr creates consistency through dynamism and disillusionment. In its fragments and its entirety, Ars Poeticas provides the reader with an understanding of poetry through our relation with ‘not-understanding’—and it is through this endeavor that Spahr sings, keeping poetry alive.