(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Juliana Spahr. That Winter the Wolf Came. Commune Editions, 2015
"The municipality," writes the Invisible Committee To our friendsor To our friends, as Tankekraft Förlag's Swedish edition has become called, «it is thus the covenant to confront the world together […] it is a social connection and a way of being in the world"There is no advance people to create the rebellion, they claim. It is the rebellion that creates a people because it gives rise to "a shared intelligence and experience, the human tissue and the language of real life that has been lost." The actual event takes place in the meetings that the rebellion leads to, "[the] meeting is less spectacular than 'movement' or 'revolution', but significantly more crucial. No one knows what a meeting can lead to. ”
Poetic resistance. From January to April 2014, on the American poetry site Jacket2, a series of posts were all read collectively signed Commune Editions. The editors, Joshua Clover, Jasper Bernes and Juliana Spahr, referred to themselves as a friendship formed in combat, including during Occupy Oakland, where “those who devoted themselves to poetry and those who devoted themselves to militant political resistance became increasingly entangled and in the end turned out to be the same ”. The publisher was to publish this poetry, linking it with poetry from other times and places where "the politicization of poetry and the poets' participation in small and large revolts was and is the convention".
After more than a hundred years of subversive and antipoetic experiments, these now belong to poetry's toolbox of conventional techniques; "There are apps for this".
The three editors went hard. In the first post, they claimed that because the poet role as we know it springs from writing class communities with a clear division of labor, and where the poet belongs to the same class as the warrior and the priest, then the poet and poem's call is to abolish itself: "In this way the poetry goes in alliance with the class whose historical task is to abolish all classes, themselves included. " The claims were moderated, or rather rooted in the subsequent posts. The editors admitted having few answers to what a revolutionary strategy entails for poetry here and now. Neither the avant-garde gesture nor conceptual techniques suffice. After more than a hundred years of subversive and antipoetic experiments, these now belong to poetry's toolbox of conventional techniques; "There are apps for this". Throughout the winter, the project appeared rather pragmatic on behalf of poetry (and art). It was about standing on the side of the rebellion, about participating, and perhaps “playing a role reminiscent of Athens riot dogs, a companion to battles and manifestations whose contribution is ultimately inferior, which stands for inspiration and may be able to distract the enemy now and then, but which cannot do much to change the relationship of strength. "
Game Fonts. In April this year, the publisher then released the first book, Red Epic by Joshua Clover (one of the poems from the book could be read here in the newspaper April 1), and in June came We Are Nothing And So Can You by Jasper Bernes (the title is taken from a graffiti outside a plundered goldsmith's shop in Santa Cruz and plays on a line in "International," "Nous ne sumes rien, soyons tout!", which means something like "We are nothing, and must become everything! ”). The most striking similarity between the books is how the confrontations with the police and the camaraderie during the demonstrations and occupations in recent years have entered into the author's view of the world. The books are written in combat and to be included in the next fight.
[Spahr's solution] has often been passages that reflect on the author's own privileged statement position – a strategy that can quickly emerge as a compulsory penance exercise that reinforces distance.
So also with Juliana Spahr's book That Winter the Wolf Came, which launched on August 30. The book describes, among other things, bird migration, oil recovery, oil prices, pollution and parents' care for children, but with the meetings in the camps under Occupy and during the confrontations with the police as a recurring refrain. The unmistakable method of the previous books is the same: a wealth of referential phrases, linked to various constellations in long, insistent, phrase-based poems, a style somewhere between Gertrude Stein and Inger Christensen, perhaps. Spahr has always considered the mutual influence and dependence of different life forms, and of course the sometimes life-threatening antagonism between these life forms. Be it the circus man's human pyramid, or the relationship between native and colonial gentlemen in Hawaii in Fuck You Aloha Love You (2001); September 11 and the escalation to the Iraq war in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005), where a cacophony of statements is linked in an inquiry to unnamed "promised", or the American and global class community, which is one of the threads of Well Then There Now (2011). In addition, she has been involved in a wide range of editorial and writing collaborative projects, where the magazine and publisher Chain, which she edited with Jena Osman, are probably the most important. The journal, which was published annually from 1994 to 2005, had as a general rule that the contributions should always be printed in alphabetical order. The editors first and foremost wanted to create a place where different writing practices met, and as little as possible control the reading of the texts. Spahr is one relations poet and editor in the broadest sense.
Inner contradictions. In the latest issue of Monsieur Antipyrine, Mikkel Bolt asks about the turning of art away from institutional criticism and toward relational and activist actions in recent years, in fact, an inversion of the historical avant-garde's intention to change society: “The avant-garde's attempt to abolish art and give art a new function in everyday life as part of a comprehensive transformation of society has thus been paradoxically reversed, so that it is now apparently the art that has occupied more and more areas of life without life being transformed for that reason. » The statement is not immediately applicable to poetry, but in Spahr's case it has a certain transfer value. In spite of all good intentions and obvious qualities (I myself have helped to publish her texts in Norway and hold the authorship very high), there is something problematic in letting heterogeneous life forms enrolled in a homogenizing syntax, at least when the immanent claim in the texts is that all life forms are in principle equal. IN Alphabet Inger Christensen solved a similar problem by inserting self-mutating nonconformities into the system she wrote within, so that the system as much as the author came to control how the text evolved. In Spahr's absorbing flow, the solution has often been passages that reflect on the author's own privileged statement position – a strategy that can quickly emerge as a compulsory bout to reinforce distance. I have never been entirely sure whether this inner contradiction has been intentional on Spahr's part, or whether the syntax should overcome it. It is not a given that these books are a bad property.
During the reading of That Winter the Wolf Came I have, however, thought that the book shows a clearer relation to the inner contradiction in her writing. There are two main reasons for this. One is almost lyrical: With the experiences of the battles before, during and after Occupy, the self in these books is now in the midst of the events it describes. The self confronts the world in a community that includes far more than those who usually write and read poetry, it doesn't just speak as poet. The second reason lies with the founding of the publishing house and the publisher's pragmatic attitude towards working politically with poetry, which places the poetry in line with any other activity that stands on the side of the social revolution. I seem to see that it has transformed Juliana Spahr as poet and editor from first and foremost to be a viewer to participate in a particular historical context.
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