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 81: Commonplace goes to Taiwan, Part 2
Episode 80: Commonplace goes to Taiwan, Part 1
Episode 79: Christine Larusso
Episode 78: Anne Boyer
Episode 77: Tina Chang
Episode 76: Ada Limón
Episode 75: Victoria Chang
Episode 74: Rachel Zucker's SoundMachine
Episode 73: Jennifer Croft (Translation Series Ep. 3)
Episode 72: Ilya Kaminsky
Episode 71: Mira Jacob
Episode 70: Alicia Jo Rabins
Episode 69: Live Reading with Brown, Joseph, Meitner Parker, Pico, Tolbert, and Yanyi
Episode 68: Live Reading w/ Calvocoressi, Falkner, Gay and Mark
Episode 67: John Biewen
Episode 66: Sarah Gambito
Episode 65: Hillary Frank
Episode 64: John Keene (Translation Series, Ep. 2)
Episode 62: Khadijah Queen
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