47:1 Spring 2001

JULIANA SPAHR

Some of We and the Land that was Never Ours

Juliana Spahr, longtime co-editor (with Jena Osman) of the arts journal Chain and author of Fuck You – Aloha – I Love You (Wesleyan, 2001), first published “Some of We and the Land that was Never Ours” in the Spring 2001 issue of Chicago Review. Selected for inclusion in Robert Creeley’s Best American Poetry 2002, Spahr’s poem saw decisive victory in the 66th round (over “In a Rut” by Ronald Wallace) of the infamous head-to-head poetic combat between Creeley’s BAP 2002 and Yusef Kumunyakaa’s BAP 2003 conducted on Jonathan Mayhew’s blog, Bemsha Swing (reprinted in Issue 2 of Octopus Magazine).

In “Some of We and the Land that was Never Ours,” Spahr’s characteristic pairing of conversation and repetition illuminates a complex relationship with Robert Frost’s poem for Kennedy's inauguration. Here's her note to the poem from BAP 2002:

We were tourists. There were long lines. My mother waited in them. I sat outside and took notes. In the park someone was singing we are all in this world together. There were some grapes. Someone was feeding sparrows, making them perch on the thumb and eat out of the hand if they wanted any food. The sparrows preferred to eat on the ground. I was thinking about a story I had heard about a French grandfather who left early in my father's life, moved to Canada, and died falling off a horse. I thought about the vines that grew in France, then came as cuttings to California, then went back to France after a blight. I thought about who owned what. And divisions. And songs sung in bars. And inaugural poems. I was just trying to figure out this day how things came together. I came home and used a translation machine (http://babel.altavista.com) to push my notes back and forth between French and English until a new sort of English came out, this poem.

Previously an instructor at the University of Hawai’i, Spahr is currently the W. M. Keck Professor in Creative Writing and an associate professor of English at Mills College.

[KM, 2006]

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