this connection of everyone with lungs – Juliana Spahr

A beautiful long poem spawned when the author realized that America would again invade Iraq which, as the title suggests, attempts to show a connectivity among human kind. It can be taken a step further to include a connectivity within the world, in the things of the world and in the individual who desires to arrive at an understanding of it. About her process, Juliana Spahr is particularly revealing in her note preceding the section entitled November 30, 2002:

I thought that by watching the news more seriously I could be a little less naive. But I gained no sophisticated understanding as I wrote these poems.

She admits that she couldn't find answers to her questions or that her answers, if they were that, would only be as satisfying as her observances.

The poem, a wonderful list of the senses, kicks off with a passage about cells dividing. As in any good poem, the rules for its interpretation are provided within the poem, and the opening lines show us clearly where we begin. The smallest structural unit of living matter capable of functioning independently:

There are these things:

cells, the movement of cells and the division of cells

and then the general beating of circulation

and hands, and body, and feet

and skin that surrounds hands, body, feet.

This is shape,

a shape of blood beating and cells dividing.

A fine beginning. Ending with a colon, the first line is a cold, matter-of-fact and, by itself, plain statement about what will follow, a list. The poem then advances to introduce its first image in the second line, cells. They are not simply biological components of living things, they are also containers, jails, spaces. They form the living world, the places and people and things to which we respond and react. This is the shape of the poem, its form, which reflects its things and inhabitants and the whole huge list of the world.

But outside of this shape is space.

There is space between the hands.

There is space between the hands and space around the hands.

There is space in the room that surrounds the shapes of everyone's hands and body and feet and cells and the beating contained within.

There is space, an uneven space, made by this pattern of bodies.

This space goes in and out of everyone's bodies.

Everyone with lungs breathes the space in and out as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands in and out

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands in and out

This shape which occupies this space is a living, breathing thing. Every stanza or trope which follows is repeated in its entirety, adding a new image to the end of each, pulling further away until we are actually in space, observing the entire world while we breathe in the poem and the world.

The poem shows a controlled use of repetition and list techniques to expose the contradictions of the microcosm of the narrator's life on a tropical island with the macrocosm of the world beyond. It also demonstrates a fantastic use of language and image to emphasize form and build the poem dynamically from the seed of its beginnings. The poem asks us to consider this place, this space we share, and also that those things which often seem so far removed from us must really be considered as parts of us. Parts of our shape and breath.