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Juliana Spahr
Response
Sun and Moon Press, 1996
97 pgs, $10.95 It seems inevitable that the
generation of authors born in the 1960s will have to deal
with the role that media and popular culture plays in
their lives. The passivity and shallowness of most of
that culture, as well as the seriousness of its power,
makes it hard to challenge, especially by someone raised
with its glittering imagery. But Juliana Spahr's first
full-length collection of poems, Response, has
managed to harness the power of popular culture and turn
it against itself. In so doing, she's written one of the
best books of American poetry to appear in the last year.
Response presents a montage of poem
narratives that strike at the corrupt heart of popular
culture--its manipulation of images in ways that capture
the human imagination with capitalist fantasies. Taken
together, the poems in Response constitute a
thorough critique of attempts to control life with
imagery. Understood throughout Response as an
attempt to fix, record, and control experience, the image
becomes the basis for the pathological culture that has
always been hidden underneath modern media's flash and
crash.
The book's opening piece, "introduction,"
introduces a question to which the rest of Response
only apparently seeks an answer: "how to tell
without violating?" I say apparently because the
answer in much of Response is that telling
itself is violation. The desire to represent
one's experience, to tell it, becomes the means of
extending a socially enforced confusion. The desire to
hold onto oneself, through image, through language,
through response, leads inevitably in Response
to the splitting of one's personality into various image
fragments.
 [ Click to Order Spahr's Response (soft $) ] Throughout the second poem, "responding,"
various fixed identities are labelled not with specifics
but with generic markings indicated by brackets: "or
[name of major historical figure] hails a cab."
These markings suggest specific images, but more
significantly suggest that those specifics are more
generic than specific. Paradoxically, the desire to
control experience through a narrative that can give all
thing specific names leads to a circumstance in which the
capacity to control through naming makes all specifics
irrelevant.
Although one cannot isolate Spahr's poems without
damage, nonetheless "thrasing seems crazy" and
"testimony" are two absolutely remarkable
poems, unforgettably shocking, revealing, comic, and
terrifying. They both come directly from pop cultural
sources, from pathologies that can be recognized by even
the most unsubtle readers: self-reported victims of
multiple personalities and of alien abductions. To Spahr,
of course, the aspect of self-reporting is key.
"testimony" does not explore whether
individuals have been abducted by aliens; rather, it
concerns the social pathologies involved in reporting
oneself as an alien abductee.
That "thrasing seems crazy" is based on a
story told on the Oprah Winfrey Show only adds to the
lurid spectacle of its tale of multiple personalities.
The reported story is as follows; a woman repeatedly was
terrorized, and eventually stabbed, by a male stalker to
whom she gave the name "the poet." Police were
unable to find this man. Eventually, though, the facts
were discovered; the woman was a victim of what is called
"dissociative personality disorder," more
commonly known as multiple personalities. The
"man" who had stalked--and literally stabbed
her with a knife!--had been herself, in a
dissociative state.
In the poem, this story, while undeniably extreme,
becomes a prime example of the pathological desire to fix
one's identity in a singular image. Having multiple
personalities is not the problem; rather, the problem is
the inability to recognize that one has multiple
personalities. "thrasing seems crazy" is
remarkable not simply because the tale itself is
astonishing. Spahr shows what the tale says not only
about that particular woman, but about the larger
pathology of the social itself. It is a world in which a
woman thinks of stalkers and poets as similar freaks, in
which she denies the parts of herself that act like a
man, in which she makes frequent panicked calls to the
police. But what's astonishing about these details is
their double significance; taken outside of the specifics
of this woman's story, they actually describe common
social occurences.
"testimony" is divided into five sections.
The opening section both seriously and ironically
introduces the problem of the poem: that information,
especially personal "testimony," cannot be
trusted. Seriously, because it's true. Ironically because
that lack of trustworthiness is one of the baits of
popular misinformation; when people are interested in
alien abductions, it's often because they want to believe
in something, but feel like they can't.
The second section of "testimony" includes a
long list of "reports" that describe images of
abduction and define a world of violence, violation, and
confusion. This world is intimately linked by those who
report it to other, more clearly identifiable horrors,
such as sexual abuse. But Spahr doesn't make this link to
suggest that self-reported alien abductees are simply
repressing human sexual abuse. The "facts of the
case" are not the point; it is the desire to fix the
facts of the case that is at issue. What Spahr wants to
show is the similarity of language in all descriptions of
abuse. She wants us to see the links between violence and
the language of violence. She wants us to understand that
the ways in which people talk about abuse are themselves
often abusive because of their tendency to control and
deny differences. Thus, descriptions of abuse often end
up supporting abuse, becoming part of the
problem rather than the cure.
The third section of "testimony" features
language in quotes meant to imply that it considers
itself direct testimony. Further self-reported links
between alien abductees and other social horrors are
suggested by the abductees themselves, in lines such as
"It is just like Auschwitz, just like
Auschwitz," and "I have recurring nuclear war
dreams." A brief fourth section points out that
"unreliability of information" is a social
fact, but that belief in "reliable information"
itself often reveals the pathological desire to fix
reality.
In the poem's final section, the narrator speaks
directly to the reader:
my point here is not the laugh
not the truth
not to merely explore truth's turns, information's conspiracies
it is:
what do we do?
Despite her unwillingness to impose her own
conclusions on the text, Spahr does provide some possible
answers to this question:
as we rethink ourselves, the political enters
and the issue twists to become about our
ability to touch
information
to make our own decisions
which has been required of us all along,
we've just slacked off
letting the advertisements speak a larger truth
letting others do our thinking and condense it
back to us as a
series of dialectical issues
Of course, given the social dynamics of contemporary
capitalism, one may not have the power to stop
advertisements (and, by extension, all image-based
ideology) from "speaking." But Spahr wants us
to understand the ways in which people participate in
their own debasement to languages of violence. One may
not be able to stop such "advertisements," but
one can openly and consistenly contest their power.
In the final poem, "witness," Spahr returns
to the heart of Response--the way in which
people try to fix responses to experience in images,
especially when that experience is horrifying. Section
one has only one brief line: "when terrible things
happen they must be witnessed." The irony here is
unavoidable; the urge to "witness," to tell and
repeat scenes of violence so that they are not forgotten,
also increases the power of that violence to control
human life by turning it into a tale.
The rest of "witness" follows through on
that insight with pitiless clarity. Whatever the terrible
event in question, "witnessing" it is not a
solution but an extension of various problems. The urge
to witness, even when born out of the legitimate desire
to have violence exposed, can turn quickly into an
attempt to contain violence through representational
images. Such false containment leaves the uncontainable
aspects of violence to fester, with the result,
undoubtedly, that they will emerge elsewhere again. In
the last lines of this poem, and of Response,
Spahr writes: "turn on the lights/one person urges
another/turn on the lights." The paradox implied is
exactly as harsh, and as revealing, as the rest of the
insights in the book. The person (indeed the culture) in
darkness, seeking to bring clarity and hope into the
darkness, finds only the pitiless, naked bulb, which
offers no solution to the pain that it momentarily makes
visible and extends.
Guest Reviewer: Mark Wallace
This review previously appeared in The Washington Review.
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