a blog by Peter Leonard
Today the Danish students' association had a visit from the poet and critic Mette Moestrup, who gave a presentation on the contemporary American poet Juliana Spahr, formerly of U. Hawaii and now at Mills College in Oakland. Moestrup has been involved with Spahr in previous projects, including translating an article of hers into Danish for publication in Den Blå Port, as well as an event that brought American poets to Copenhagen. Spahr's latest poetic work, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, which is probably best placed in the "Hawaiian poetry about 9/11" genre, was what Moestrup read from and discussed with us today.
Reaction from the students focused on the issues of engagement versus passivity that seemed to emerge in Spahr's poetry -- the work makes constant reference to media overload and a stream of disturbing images on the TV in the run-up to the war in Iraq, while remaining strangely silent about political participation in the democratic process. One gets the sense the geographic isolation of Hawaii contributes to the sense of disconnectedness that Spahr's poetic narrator feels, though of course paradoxically the poems are all about being connected to events in the larger world. Hawaii's dual role as island escape and naval military base is also interesting to Spahr, though not really in any kind of complex or new way that I can divine.
The other striking thing about the poems is their creation of a kind of ersatz second-person-plural pronoun, normally morphologically undistinguished in English, in "yous". The group was about to ascribe this affectation to a cutesy way of referring to the poet's collection of multiple parrots, when somebody in the group pointed out that it was probably more a reflection her polyamorous lifestyle. Somehow I liked the poems more with the image of parrots in my head.
All in all Mette Moestrup made a stronger impression on me than the poems that she brought to share with us, as it's refreshing and inspiring to see authors from smaller European countries stay up-to-date and current with other authors in the world. There certainly isn't a counter-example of this kind of engagement that I can think of in the USA, with the possible exception of those authors whose mastery of Spanish allows them to engage with Latin American artists.