Rachel Zucker speaks with poet, scholar and activist Juliana Spahr about teaching, language poetry, studying at SUNY Buffalo, post-colonialism and anti-colonialism, personal rules she established when living, writing and teaching in Hawaii, finding a more nuanced way of avoiding appropriation (without just avoiding it completely), who she is willing to upset, what it means to not uphold a nation, funding, the influence of the state on literature, why literature and higher education (especially MFA programs) remain so segregated and influenced by whiteness, the problems with declamatory political poems, Commune—both the book press and the magazine—occasional poems, how the genre of poetry is changing, the role of the internet on political poetry projects, the impact of Black Lives Matter on literature, and how literature is becoming more and more like opera.
EXTRA RESOURCES FOR EPISODE 63Books by Juliana SpahrDu Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (Harvard University Press, 2018)
That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015)
An Army of Lovers (with David Buuck) (City Lights, 2013)
Well Then There Now (Black Sparrow, 2011)
The Transformation (Atelos, 2007)
This Connection of Everyone With Lungs (University of California Press, 2005)
Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001)
Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (University of Alabama Press, 2001)
Other Books and Writers Mentioned in the EpisodeAmerican Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, edited by Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine (Wesleyan University Press, 2002)
Myung Mi Kim’s Commons (University of California Press, 2002)
Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 2012)
Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf, 2004)
Gertrude Stein
Leslie Scalapino
Robert Creeley
Charles Bernstein
Lyn Hejinian
James Thomas Stevens
Germaine Greer
Gwendolyn Brooks
Joshua Clover
Jasper Bernes
Ron Silliman
Sappho
Homer
Shakespeare
Arielle Greenberg
Allen Ginsberg
Other Relevant LinksJuliana’s essay “My White Feminism” in The Boston Review
Commune Editions
Theory, Pop, and Riot
SUNY Buffalo poetics program
Lana Turner (Issue 10 here)
Claire Grossman / Cantil
Jacobin
Democratic Socialists
Language Poetry
Poets Against the War
Episode 121: Fred Moten and Ronaldo Wilson - Part 2
Episode 120: Fred Moten and Ronaldo V. Wilson
Episode 119: Eugenia Leigh's Bianca (KTCO feed drop)
Episode 118: Laurel Snyder
Episode 117: Charif Shanahan & Safia Elhillo with Isaac Ginsberg Miller
Episode 116: The Gathered Congregation
Episode 115: Moheb Soliman
Episode 114: Live & Embodied
113: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Episode 112: Gabrielle Octavia Rucker with V Conaty
Episode 111: The Confessional Episode
Episode 110: The Poetics of Wrongness
Episode 109: Joy Harjo
Episode 108: Saeed Jones
Episode 107: Eileen Myles
Episode 106: S. Yarberry with V Conaty
Episode 105: Carl Phillips
Episode 104: The Critical Response Process with Liz Lerman & John Borstel
Episode 103: Cody-Rose Clevidence with Valentine Conaty
Episode 102: Rebekah Wolkstein
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