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Table of Contents:
ARS POETICA 1: CORAL
ARS POETICA 2: SCOTCH BROOM
ARS POETICA 3: BLUEBIRD-GHOST
ARS POETICA 4: BISON
ARS POETICA 5: GOBY
ARS POETICA 6: CORAL, AGAIN
ARS POETICA 7: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Biographical Note:
JULIANA SPAHR is a writer and scholar of literature. Her most recent book of poetry is That Winter the Wolf Came (2015).
Review Quotes:
"Juliana Spahr's Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan Univ., Feb.) ask how one might write in troubled times. (Spahr started by reading Brecht.)"--Library Journal
"Throughout Ars Poeticas, Spahr unpacks the steadily worsening threats of climate change and right-wing populism with humility and artistry. We can't help but wonder what poetry could ever add to the efforts to address them, if not just more lines of poetry. With Ars Poeticas, the answer, despite Spahr's reservations, is a tremendous amount."--Christopher Kondrich, The Washington Post
"Spahr's Ars Poeticas offer insight into a conversation on and through the paths lyric pushes us to highlight, both light and dark, and how one might best move through it, even across the failures art provides. Can or should art, specifically poetry, save us? Is that even possible? In the end, Spahr's lyric might just be about survival. If we are willing to work for it, of course."--rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog
"Juliana Spahr's Ars Poeticas sticks an -s onto the title of antiquity's best-known poem-about-poetry, Horace's Ars Poetica (Latin, 'the art of poetry'). There isn't one meditation on the art of poetry here: there are seven, by turns digressive and recursive, self-questioning and self-devouring."--Christopher Spaide, Literary Hub
"To be falsely comforted by poetry in our contemporary moment does a disservice to both poet and reader. One cannot write away the desecration, the wreckage. Silence, however, is its own form of desecration, and Spahr will not be silent--nor should the reader. The success of Ars Poeticas will lie in the reader's ability to take it into the world, whether through their own poetry or with their own body."--Jeff Alessandrelli, The Good Man Has No Shape
Review Quotes:
"Writing the common from the Emersonian tradition has been central to Juliana Spahr's practice of the past few decades. Her work's discipline is processual, labile, and mobile, like Emerson's, and politically lyrical, like Whitman's after him."--Lauren Berlant, author of On the Inconvenience of Other People
"Spahr's scenes of pastoral enchantment invoke enduring human fantasies of ecological coexistence grounded in mutual care and protection. Yet if these scenes lay the groundwork for the banishments to come, they also speak poignantly to the psychic need for these fantasies."--Margaret Ronda, author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End
Publisher Marketing:
Lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism
The 2026 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
During the time of an increasingly powerful alt-right which was also the time when species extinction was ever increasing, Juliana Spahr sat down to read Brecht. She was looking for an answer to Brecht's question about the dark times, about whether there will also be singing during the dark times. The answer that Brecht provides is that yes, that poets will sing of the dark times. In the six ars poeticas that Spahr writes, she sings of the dark times but also of coral, the pop song's possible liberation, and the love of comrades. She writes not only of the rich history of what politics and poetry have done with each other, but what they might yet do together.
[Sample Poem]
from ARS POETICA 1: CORAL
To write poetry after Castle Bravo.
Then to write poetry after 1500 feet.
After high-quality steel frame buildings
not completely collapsed, except
all panels and roofs blown in.
After 2,000 feet.
After reinforced concrete buildings collapsed
or standing but badly damaged.
After 3,500 feet.
After church buildings completely destroyed.
After brick walls severely cracked.
After 4,400 feet.
After 5,300 feet.
After roof tiles bubbled and melted.
After 6,500 feet.
After mass distortion of large steel buildings.
To write the Cold War and doves.
The Cold War and tapeworms.
The Cold War and sails of ships.
The Cold War and the steel of bridges.
To write poetry after that.
To write in a world with few nutrients,
one that rocks back and forth.
The same beginning in both the sea and the land.
To write poetry that knows a hard, cup-shaped skeleton.
And then poetry that knows
the long, stinging tentacles capturing.
Knows the water.
The Atlantic and the Pacific.
The connections between.
The one moving into the other.
To develop poetry in the stomach
that then exits through the mouth
which is the anus.
To write poetry in the blue
that is the absence of green.
Light penetration.
Whorls of tentacles.
The slime earth too.
Hunters and farmers.
Shallow water.
Few nutrients.
High fecundity.
Rapid growth.
Multiarmed morphology and tube feet.
To write tube feet.
To write the exact place.
Seaward slope place.
Sea terrace place.
Algal ridge place.
Coral algal zone place.
Seaward reef flat place.
Islet or interisland reef crest place.
Lagoon reef flat place.
Lagoon terrace place.
Lagoon floor or basin place.
Coral knolls, pinnacle and patch reefs place.
To write poetry after.
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