In This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems, by Juliana Spahr, I, along with the rest of our classmates have clearly recognized a Whitmanian influence in this work. Even the title itself adheres to Whitman’s belief that as a nation we are all somehow connected, whether biologically, spiritually, or sometimes both. I was really struck with how Spahr created two poems, one immediately after September 11, and one about a year after. This reminded me of Whitman’s Civil War poems and then the selection of poems he wrote during the period after the war. I feel like Spahr’s poems similarly reflect Whitman’s later works which deal with moments of recovery and crisis. For example, in the first poem, Spahr attempt to connect everyone through their use of breathing, creating a calming atmosphere throughout the poem: “Everyone with lungs breathes the space in and out as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands in and out.” However, by the end of the poem, Spahr seems to introduce a Whitmanian like moment of crisis by calling attention to the fact that this connection we all have has potential to simultaneously be dangerous in some way: “How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs.”
In the second poem, I see Whitman’s influence because Spahr appears to be speaking for everyone, much like what Whitman attempts to do in poems like “Song of Myself.” This becomes very obvious in the beginning of the poem when Spahr includes catalogue-type lines:
“I speak of long coastlines and Alexandre Dumas’s body covered in blue cloth with the words “all for one, one for all.”
I speak of grandsons of black Haitian slaves and what it means to be French.
I speak of global jihad, radical clerics, giant planets, Jupiter, stars’ gas and dust, gravitational accretion, fluid dynamics, protoplanetary evolution, the unstoppable global spread of AIDS.”
Here, Spahr is attempting to act as a voice for everyone and everything happening in and beyond the nation. Like Whitman, and even Lerner I would argue, Spahr takes on this overwhelming task of trying to embody a grand scale of people, places, and events.
No comments yet.