reviewed on November 4, 2025

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During the two years that I lived in Oakland, from 2012 to 2014, I came to understand the Bay Area poetry scene as occupying a spectrum between more or less leftist experimentalists on one hand, committed to poetry as a political intervention, and on the other hand the writers of what Charles Bernstein calls “official verse culture,” often affiliated with Stanford, Berkeley, or some other academic institution, and concerned less with politics than professionalization. 

 

That binary is admittedly too clean, as many poets in Oakland, San Francisco, and elsewhere fall somewhere between those poles, and many others fully embody both, marshaling academic employment and its privileges toward broader sociopolitical critique.

 

Juliana Spahr is one of those poets, Professor of English at Mills College, in the Oakland hills, and, as she documents across Ars Poeticas and the earlier That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015), a legit out-in-the-streets activist, no champagne radical of the kind one finds elsewhere in the Bay.  “[S]omeone chasing someone else ran / between us,” she writes in Ars Poeticas, “and they sprayed bear mace, so I looked away, eyes tearing.”  In this new book, in fact, Spahr thematizes precisely the spectrum I’ve proposed above, examining whether and how a political poetics might exist within establishment institutions—under what conditions, Spahr asks, is “committed” poetry possible?

 

In considering this question, Spahr turns in Ars Poeticas to the rhetorical mode suggested by its title.  As in Horace, these poems are abstract and expository meditations, “discursive” in both senses of the word: belonging to the realm of discourse, and deliberately digressing from one subject to another.  Spahr’s rhythms are prose-like, her sentences cracked over multiple lines while retaining a conversational limpidity.  Also like Horace, the poems are intensely  recursive in their self-scrutiny; in this way, they evoke the more politically inclined cabals of the Bay Area poetry scene, obsessed, like most leftist movements, with internal squabbles over doctrine and diction.  "What is the appropriate haircut?"  Bay Area poets seemed always to be asking.  "Are you going to happy hour after the protest?"

 

Irreducible to stereotype, however, Spahr asks what poetry can achieve when the genre has been co-opted and commodified not only by the credentialing agencies of higher education—of which both she and I are a part—but by a publishing industry enamored with marketable pabulum.  “I first protested to / them not about poetry,” she writes in the poem “scotch broom,” “but about the structural conditions of the poets, the / required courting of institutional authority, the lucky with their listings / of grants and prizes won, the resentments of those less lucky fighting for / attention on facebook or twitter.”  Ultimately, Spahr suggests, the emancipation of poetry would require not simply what Walter Benjamin calls the “functional transformation” of the means of production—independent, author-run presses, for instance, or a de-coupling of art and academia—but nothing less than the destruction of capitalism itself.  In Ars Poeticas, Spahr envisions a poetry “psychotic and large / in its demands, / by which I mean the end of capitalism […] the new feats of imagining we / have yet to embrace.”

 

For Spahr, part of this “imagining” involves extracting poetry from its Eurocentric and academic entanglements, similar to ways Charles Altieri envisions in rejecting “scenic poetry.”  As she puts it, Spahr wants an “opening in the tautness of tradition.”  Looking back on herself as a young writer, Spahr describes how she “embraced all that was epiphanic, used it // to write long poems where each line claimed to be / epiphany, rather than just the end, as // was the lyric convention.” 

 

A hallmark of leftist aesthetics, the rejection of "tradition" has become a familiar trope in contemporary poetry, where it usually serves to justify writers’ ignorance of any history at all. 

 

Spahr is up to something more complicated, since, as she well knows, the past has much to teach us, and poetic tradition itself remains a rich source of meaning and method. 

 

For all her hedging about “convention,” for instance, Spahr deploys a particularly Romantic convention in turning to the natural world as an image of utopian being.  “When the water is turbid, when the light is limited,” she writes in “coral, again,” “the corals then eat the algae. / This too is a form of happy.”  And here she is in “coral”:

 

Multiarmed morphology and tube feet.

To write tube feet.

To write the exact place.

Seaward slope place.

Sea terrace place.

Algal ridge place.

Coral algal zone place.

 

[…]

 

Coral knolls, pinnacle and patch reefs place.

To write poetry after.

 

One of our great poets of belatedness—from her post-9/11 This Connection of Everyone With Lungs (U of California P, 2005) to the post-Lehman That Winter the Wolf Came—Spahr takes up here and throughout Ars Poeticas the issue that Theodor Adorno addresses in his 1965 “Commitment,” in which he levels his famous warning that “to write lyric poetry Auschwitz is barbaric.”  Spahr updates this maxim in the very first line of Ars Poeticas, a fragment: “To write poetry after Castle Bravo.”

 

That fragment names an ambition, not a reality. 

 

For as Spahr suggests in “coral,” excerpted above, the most responsible political poetics would involve nothing more than the naming of the natural world, a reverence—deictic in its pointing—that wrests attention from those contemporary forces which seek to vitiate it. 

 

It would be, Spahr suggests, a righteous and “exact” poetics, a “place” which dissolves its own ground. 

 

It would be no poetry at all.