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 61: Rosa Alcalá (Translation Series, Ep. 1)
Episode 60: Robin Coste Lewis
Episode 59: Alison S. M. Kobayashi
Episode 58: Cate Marvin
Episode 57: Dorothea Lasky
Episode 56: Jennifer Kronovet
Episode 55: Anne Waldman
Episode 54: Gerald Stern
Episode 53: Tommy Pico
Episode 52: Richard Siken
Episode 51: TC Tolbert
Episode 50: Inside Commonplace
Episode 49: CAConrad
Episode 48: Poets at MacDowell: Destiny Birdsong, Juleen Johnson, Jenny George, Eloisa Amezcua, & Amanda Galvan Huynh
Episode 47: Erin Riley
Episode 46: Allison Parrish
Episode 45: Tyehimba Jess
Episode 44: Matthew Zapruder
Episode 43: Airea D. Matthews
Episode 42: Gabrielle Calvocoressi
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