Contemporary Poetry

162 contemporary poetry

Poetry moves words around. It rearranges them from their

conventions. It re-sorts them. It uses more than one language.

It repeats. It pursues aconventional language and divergent

typography. It often experiments. It can be ephemeral and

occasional. It often uses pleasing patterns as it does all this.

And all that helps me think.^69

this connection of everyone with lungs consists of two extended
poems, one simply entitled ‘Poem Written after September 11 ,
2001 ’ and the second ‘Poem Written from November 30 , 2002 to
March 27 , 2003 ’. Set in long, prose-like lineation, the poems are
intimate and epistolary, addressing two ‘beloveds’. This hybrid
form of poetic prosody intersperses factual information with lyric
appeals and private meditation. Initially, one can frame Spahr’s
diaristic entries as responses to 9 / 11 , but as Nicky Marsh suggests,
the poems dramatise a desire ‘to fi nd the meaningful connections
that allow Spahr to understand her own place in the machinations
of international politics’.^70 Moreover, the poems are intent on
examining the relationship between the local and global, or what
the poet proposes as: ‘I speak of boundaries and connections, locals
and globals, butterfl y wings and hurricanes’ (p. 20 ). Increasingly,
Spahr’s desire to understand ‘the interconnections between seem-
ingly disparate world events, and her own role in them, is revealed
as suspect in its hopelessness’.^71 This prospect is expressed in
‘Poem Written from November 30 , 2002 to March 27 , 2003 ’:

I speak of how the world suddenly seems as if it is a game of

some sort, a game where troops are massed on a fl at map of

the world, and if one looks at the game board long enough one

can see the patterns, even as one is powerless to prevent them.

(pp. 20 – 1 )

Taking Skinner’s understanding of ecopoetics, one could add
that this connection of everyone with lungs performs topologically,
tropologically, entropologically and ethnologically. The fi rst ‘Poem
Written after September 11 , 2001 ’ uses the analogy of lungs and
air as a connective, uniting humanity across the globe. Moreover,
the analogy with lungs and breath creates an ecosystem within the