An Interview With Juliana Spahr About That Winter the Wolf Came

It's just a Juliana Spahr type of day. At Entropy, an interview with the poet about her newest book, That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015), "written for this era of global struggle." Jos Charles sheds some light. An excerpt:

[Jos Charles]: The tone of That Winter the Wolf Came has moments of honest sloganeering—all art either with the crowd or with the police. All art coming down to that simple divide—as well as more opaque imagery. “If You Were a Bluebird,” for instance, is comfortable situating the reader in half-page long strophes about hingemouth and anal fins. Why choose to foreground legibility when you do? Is there political or social urgency to being clear about certain things? Is there a necessity to obscure others?

[Juliana Spahr]: I like legibility. I think what has happened is this: I got trained in an avant-garde, in a modernist tradition. I got trained in this tradition in the various schools that I attended: Bard and SUNY Buffalo. And I left these schools with this idea that I was an experimental poet. And I was, thus, against lyric and confessionalism. The lines felt clear to me when I left SUNY Buffalo. And then I moved to Hawai‘i and I realized that divide was a story that described certain poetries on the continent, and not even all those poetries. And these were more just forms with histories rather than identity positions. One of the big debates in Hawai‘i was about clarity. I had sort of gotten this idea somehow in this training I received that clarity was a tool of official verse culture or something and thus wasn’t for me. And I got rid of that idea. There was at the time a really big debate about Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s work. It was similar, although more intense in many ways, to the debates that have come with Tony Hoagland’s work. They were debates about clarity somewhat. About what was being made clear. I am always trying to be clear. Sometimes it might come out as unclear, or obscure, because of that early training in the modernist tradition.

JC: In “It’s All Good, It’s All Fucked,” Non-Revolution is a romanticized or sexualized character for the speaker while also being a kind of stand-in for politics that have revolution as a possibility but only as a modified and negated possibility. Is Non-Revolution any non-revolutionary politics? A kind of post-left neo-liberal politics? A non-violent declaration or occupation? The it of it’s all good, it’s all fucked?

JS: Non-Revolution is in the most literal sense the various moments of disruption that have defined the bay area in the last ten years...

Read it all at Entropy.