In Rankine’s “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” there is an amazing mix of prose, poetry, images, and dialogue that feels similar to Lerner’s 10:04 in many ways. Unlike Lerner, there is no direct reference to Whitman yet there are still many instances of Whitman’s energies. The mention of New York City always seems to be […]
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Rankine’s Paradoxes of Connection
Like Lerner’s 10:04, Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric integrates poetry, prose, and images as it also slips across the boundaries of perspective and personality. However, where Lerner’s work moved from singularity to collectivity by way of stitching together seemingly disparate experience across first-, second-, and third-person perspectives, Rankine seems to remain in […]
“Multitudes” – A History of Convenience
Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric is one of the more interesting reads of my college career, and it fittingly serves as an extension of (and in my opinion, an improvement from) Ben Lerner’s 10:04. Rankine demonstrates many stylistic similarities to Lerner, including the flexible form which weaves between prose, verse, […]
Appearance Versus Reality
In Rankine “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” she examines modern culture in light of modernization and its flaws, including consumerism, the desire to categorize, isolation due to technological advancement, a loss of individualism, appearance versus reality, etc. Within one particular section she examines 9/11 and how “the language of description competes with the dead in […]
Gentle Now, Explore The Heart
This poem explores the deepest forms of human experience: birth, knowledge, love, loss, and death. For my blog post, I would like to flush out the portion about the heart and its unique experiences. In part three after Spahr discusses the lengthy list of all the things we “learned” and “loved”, she says “and this […]
Hands
The first few lines of Juliana Spahr’s poem “Tradition” focuses mainly on hands. This immediately made me think of the “Poem Written After September 11/2001” which obsesses over the spaces surrounding our hands. However, there is a difference in that “Tradition” seems more focused on our physical hand as well as the action of handing […]
Contamination
Reading Spahr’s poem “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”, I thought that it cautions against allowing too much of the public world in. Hence, we remain “gentle”, to which she is referring accepting the benefits of a stream. She relates the stream to a life force; the clean water provided by a stream is a […]
Spahr’s Ecopoetry: Nature and Human Connection
Juliana Spahr is not a student of Romanticism. She does not wax poetic on the restorative power of nature. Instead Spahr’s poems manifest themselves in ecopoetry, in which she utilizes her freeform style to explore the interdependent and often injurious relationship between humanity and the natural world. Spahr begins “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” […]
“Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”
In Spahr’s “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” she converges with Whitman in his expansive energies, though her mellifluous, chant-like lines, and in her emphasis on nature, touch, etc. However, as one “welcomes” the world and “[breathes]” it in, the “red tailed hawk” becomes juxtaposed alongside “cigarette butts” to highlight how her vision of connectedness includes pollution, […]
Skin
There is a quote about skin I remember reading once that describes it as an “artificial boundary,” and goes on to offer the ways in which the world and its contents enter into it while the self wanders out of it. Spahr’s poetry undoubtedly aligns with this notion that skin simultaneously separates us from, and […]
