Poetry has always been something that confused me and interested me. A good poem can make you laugh, cry or make you snap your fingers until they’re raw. The power of poetry and all its forms are showcased in many important events such as the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics or in the aftermath of tragedies such as World War II or 9/11.

While reading Juliana Spahr’s collection of poems in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, I was drawn in by the rhythmic trance of the first poem, but after reading the second series of poems I began to think this connection was more about her and her small circle of people and not the connection with everyone. Then I began to question why she speaks so knowledgably about events in North Korea, Gaza, and France, yet she doesn’t detail the events of 9/11. In a book that frames itself around the events of 9/11 and what happens after, I thought there would be a bit more of an emphasis on the main event.

Then I remembered the story of my friend.

A prolific spoken word poet, she is making a name for herself in the Vancouver scene and was asked to write a poem for an organization that helps the families and victims of eating disorders. She was tasked with writing a poem that would be presented at the annual celebration dinner/ fundraiser that would impact the survivors and their families while making the sponsors see the positives of the organization. She spent a couple months perfecting the poem until it had a perfect ratio between emotional and funny. She submitted it to the head organizer and only a few hours later was told that the poem just wouldn’t do and she would have to write another one. Apparently the poem contained a few things that could trigger the recoverees and their families. The poem they wanted needed to be only about the positives and looking up. So she went back at it and wrote a poem that didn’t divulge into the details of the suffering of the victims and ended up with a poem that was all sunshine and daisies.

Now, I’m not saying that the poem shouldn’t have been positive, I’m saying sometimes you need the details in order to understand properly. While my friend’s original poem brought the listeners through the suffering and then emerged into the positive, the new poem just left the listeners with a falsified image of what eating disorders can be like with no details which shed light on the harmful effects of eating disorders. The organization was too cautious of the details which could have triggered people, which is similar to what I think may have happened in Spahr’s poem.

In ASTU while reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close we talked about the limited knowledge that was released following 9/11 and the sensory that occurred. People don’t want to talk about something so horrible because they don’t know how others will react and they don’t want to do something that may lead to negative consequences. In the case of Spahr’s poems we can see that if she wrote only of 9/11, she would lose a certain demographic, she would have complaints written since she wasn’t that and she couldn’t understand and she would lose sales. By using it as a basis, she gains attention because it is seen as controversial but since it isn’t once read, it gains the market. Maybe I am being too cynical by seeing it more as a marketing scheme to sell her book and raise the profile of her poetry and its style.

This ‘connection of everyone with lungs’ is proven in her poems; there are bad events happening everywhere, we all have beds, we all have skin, we all breathe the same air, etc. The only thing that mystifies me is her use of 9/11 as the frame. It may be the misleading which has dampened my liking for these poems but when there isn’t much being said about 9/11, I believe this book of poems had the ability to really connect with people emotionally about the events. Poems are powerful and we wouldn’t have poems like In Flanders Fields if people don’t just write what needs to be expressed. Maybe by expressing and having something like a poem based on the events, the emotional connection could help in the healing of the victims of 9/11.

How are we supposed to remember what happened in our history if no one cares to write about the details in fear of offending someone?

 

Cited:

Safran Foer, Jonathan. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. New York: First Mariner, 2005. Print.

Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Los Angeles: U of California, 2005. Print.