Juliana Spahr's Ecopoetics: Ecologies and Politics of the Refrain

J l n p hr p t : l nd P l t fth R fr n

Dianne Chisholm

Contemporary Literature, Volume 55, Number 1, Spring 2014, pp. 118-147(Article)

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D I A N N E C H I S H O L M

Juliana Spahr’s Ecopoetics: Ecologies andPolitics of the Refrain

O ne of the compelling new developments in writingthat Juliana Spahr has been advancing “after Lan-guage poetry” is ecopoetics.1 Spahr’s poetry collectionWell Then There Now (2011) and poem series This Con-

nection of Everyone With Lungs (2005) deploy an innovative poeticsto frame into view varying and emerging crises of ecological illogic.The framework of Spahr’s poetry is a complicated device of ecolog-ical thinking, one that provokes acute reflection on the habits ofhabitat construction. It is complicated in that it figures the construc-tion of habitats by diverse cohabitants on local and global planes,and on multiple and unfathomable levels. Her lyrics foreground therhythmic buildup and breakdown of domestic and geopolitical pro-cesses by which everyone and everything become connected, withintensifying consequences. As micro and macro ecologies take fig-urative shape in her poems, they envelop and enter into each otheraffectingly on expanding cosmic horizons. The poems of Well ThenThere Now frame crises of habitation that range from the gradualpolluting of a childhood Eden by local industry to the accelerated

1. In “After Language Poetry,” Spahr heralds “emerging writers who are using theconcerns and intents of language writing to discuss race and/or sexuality more directly.”Her own “post-language lyric” probes questions of sexuality (see Keller), race, and mostrecently, ecology. Charles Altieri’s “What Theory Can Learn from New Directions inContemporary American Poetry” highlights Spahr’s poetry but not her ecopoetics. Con-versely, Charles Legere’s survey of ecopoetics singles out Spahr’s poem “Gentle Now,Don’t Add to Heartache” (Well Then 122–23) as an example of how ecopoets can bestrevisit the rhetoric of nature. Christopher Arigo has written an essay on Spahr’s eco-poetics that places it in the tradition of sublime aesthetics.

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melting of polar ice caps by global warming. Those of This Connec-tion house a serial reaction to the atmospheric fallout of 9/11 as itspreads across the planet to all species of earth-dwellers withuncontainable volatility. The art with which Spahr frames habitatsof evolving ecological and political involvement commands criticalattention.

Strange Habitats: Birds, Bowers, and Bulldozers

Spahr came to ecopoetics by way of Jonathan Skinner’s eponymousjournal, which Skinner launched in 2001. She claims to have foundin Ecopoetics “a poetics full of systemic analysis that questions thedivisions between nature and culture” (Well Then 71). That is, shefound a new, ecological direction for the subtle kind of “systemicanalysis” that Language poetry had long cultivated. She also founda welcome departure from “nature poetry,” of which she was “sus-picious . . . because . . . it tended to show the beautiful bird butnot so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying thebird’s habitat” (69). By proceeding to invent ways to frame theinvolvement of human machinery in the transformation anddestruction of human and nonhuman habitats, Spahr underscoresand develops the inclusive, ecological, and political focus withwhich ecopoetics characteristically conducts its investigations intonature.

In the inaugural issue of his journal, Skinner proclaims ecopoeticsto be in essence “a house making,” an avant-garde poesis (“making”)that determinedly “takes on the ‘eco’ frame” to interrogate the egre-gious impact of humans on the world and other species (7).2 Spahr“takes on the ‘eco’ frame” of ecopoetics by constructing poetic fram-ing devices that function as figurative houses, habitats, and terri-

2. The devastation of the global ecology, Skinner contends, “is without a doubt thehistorical watershed of our generation, a generation born in the second half of the twen-tieth century,” and yet “[t]he avant-gardes of the last decades of that century, noted forlinguistically sophisticated approaches to difficult issues, stand to be criticized for theiroverall silence on a comparable approach to environmental questions” (7). For Skinner,the “eco” of ecopoetics “signals—no more, no less—the house we share with severalmillion other species, our planet Earth. ‘Poetics’ is used as poesis or making, not neces-sarily to emphasize the critical over the creative act (nor vice versa).”

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tories. Her primary device is the refrain, which she constantly rein-vents from poem to poem or even within each poem. ThisConnection, for example, deploys a refrain—what we might call hersignature refrain—that repeats with variation the words “we spokeof birds and their bowers and their habits of nest” (66). Considerthe following variation of this refrain:

When we spoke of birds and their bowers and their habits of nestwe also spoke of the Israeli military bulldozer that ran over RachelCorrie, the mysterious flu that appeared in Hong Kong and hadspread by morning to other parts of Asia, Elizabeth Smart’s return,and Zoran Djindjic’s death.

(66)

The refrain frames the speakers (“we”) and that of which they speak(“birds,” “bowers,” “habits of nest”) in a figure of repetition thatopens out to include a “bulldozer.” More precisely, it opens out to“the Israeli military bulldozer that ran over Rachel Corrie” andhence on to a geopolitical plane of habitat creation and destruction.And it does not stop there. It opens repeatedly to further inclusionsthat expand and complicate the connection between ecologies andpolitics and that make the domestic ease with which “we” had beencomfortably at home in the world increasingly unconscionable,unsustainable, and unheimlich.

Spahr’s refrain frames figures of habitation in figures of repetitionso as to foreground for investigation the repetitious process of habit-uation that habitation involves. It is a construction that Spahr sub-mits to deconstruction and transfiguration to provoke thinkingabout ecological adaptation and degradation, or evolution anddevolution. Repetition adds varying degrees of chaos and complex-ity so that house- (habitat-, territory-) making also involves unmak-ing and deterritorialization. We can see this in the last sonnet of“Sonnets”:

But because we were bunkered, the place was never ours, couldnever really be ours, because we were bunkered from whatmattered, growing and flowing into, and because we could notbegin to understand that this place was not ours until wegrew and flowed into something other than what we were we

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continued to make things worse for this place of growingand flowing into

(Well Then 29)

The repetition of figures and clauses builds up a refrain that even-tually debunks the idea that “we” must be “bunkered” from thegerminal and material chaos of “this place” in order to “really” beat home. At the same time, it deforms the frame of the sonnet itself.The first nine sonnets of Spahr’s series take the standard form ofthree quatrains and concluding couplet. But the form begins tomorph with variations of the anaphoric clause “because we werebunkered” in the last two sonnets. In other words, intensified repe-tition of “because we were bunkered” frames an insistent problemof how to open a line of escape to “what mattered, growing andflowing into” and thus make “this place” more viably inhabitable.

Spahr builds figurative houses (bowers and bunkers) by repeat-edly building upon their foundational forms and ideas, and thenshe questions the habitability of what she has built by subjectingthese foundations to investigative deconstruction.3 Repetitionallows her to conduct and display a systemic analysis of how poli-tics and culture make up and complicate ecologies and nature, andvice versa. Her central framing device, to reiterate, is the poeticrefrain with which she radically experiments. The New PrincetonEncyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics states that a refrain repeats “[a] line,lines, or part of a line . . . usually at regular intervals, and most oftenat the end of a stanza—a . . . chorus” (Brogan 1018). “Though usuallyrecurring as a regular part of a metrical pattern, [the repeated lines]may appear irregularly throughout a poem, in regular form or not,or may even be used in free verse.” Repetition may be verbatim, orit may entail “a slight variation of wording . . . in such a way thatits meaning develops from one recurrence to the next.” Finally, arefrain “may emphasize or reinforce emotion or meaning by . . .echoing, and elaborating a crucial image or theme.”

As I read it, Spahr’s refrain stresses repetition at irregular inter-vals and with a variation of wording that deranges meaning with

3. Spahr practices a form of deconstruction that resonates with Derrida’s deconstruc-tion, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization. I focus on the latter resonance.


each recurrence. Moreover, with innovations that resemble (andreassemble) Gertrude Stein’s accentuated style of repetition, Spahrmakes thinkable hitherto unthought connections between figuresand ideas.4 Primary among her figures are figures of repetition,especially anaphora, as some of her reviewers have noted.5 ButSpahr does not just tinker with variations of repetition. She inventsa framework of repetition that houses a thinking that comes uncan-nily unhinged, and that escapes the bounds of common sense andlyrical expression. Her refrain occurs not merely at the end of stan-zas nor in stanzas more or less regularly repeated throughout thepoem. Instead, her entire poem is a refrain, or it is a block of smalland large refrains. This block tends not to take the shape of anystandard poetic form (with the exception of the sonnet form thatdeforms by the end of her series of “sonnets”). Rather, it assemblesfigures of repetition in lines that become increasingly asyntacticaland arhythmical, and that compound meaning with metrical andsemantic discord. In brief, Spahr’s refrain deforms its content ofexpression in a lyrical framework that comes undone.

A refrain that builds houses and habitats only to open them tochaos and complexity and onto larger, even global, territories,where they undergo deconstruction even as they continue to build,is not, or not just, a poetic refrain. Instead, I conjecture, it is some-thing akin to and aligned with the “territorial refrain” of GillesDeleuze and Felix Guattari. Spahr’s refrain is like Deleuze andGuattari’s refrain in that, as the philosophers explain, it “carries outa kind of deframing following lines of flight that pass through theterritory only in order to open it onto the universe, that go fromhouse-territory to town-cosmos, and that now dissolve the identityof the place through variation of the earth” (What Is Philosophy? 187).Spahr’s poems figure small refrains (“birds and their bowers andtheir habits of nest”) in the process of composing and decomposinginto large refrains, or onto what Deleuze and Guattari would call auniversal “plane of composition” (185). The form of her refrain is

4. Spahr’s critical monograph Everybody’s Autonomy includes a chapter on Stein, indi-cating her rigorous familiarity with Steinian linguistic and rhetorical strategies ofrepetition.

5. For example, see McLane for a brief discussion of Spahr’s “governing tropes” of“anaphora and accumulation.”

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not ready-made but ever in the making, at once territorializing anddeterritorializing. Like the philosophers’ refrain, Spahr’s refraininvolves both art and nature. It exhibits a poesis that poets sharewith birds and all territorial species that become involved inmaking an inhabitable world of rhythmic patterns and resonantconnections.

Spahr’s reinvention of the poetic refrain as an “‘eco’-frame” bearscritical consideration in light of the philosophers’ territorial refrain.Deleuze and Guattari conceive of the refrain as a more or less com-plex ontological framework that divides inside and outside,abstracts diverse materials from external flows, and sets these mate-rials vibrating within a resonant arrangement of symbiotic vitality.A refrain begins with the building of an abode and with the art ofhabitat-making that engages territorial animals (Thousand Plateaus312). “Perhaps,” they speculate, “art begins with the animal, at leastthe animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house (bothare correlative, or even one and the same, in what is called a habi-tat)” (What Is Philosophy? 183). Regarding “Nature as music,” theypoint to the exemplary refrains of the Australian bowerbird, whichassembles a habitat of such complex and material harmony as tocompose a veritable symphony or “opera” (Thousand Plateaus 314,331). They urge us to think of the bowerbird’s elaborate bower-building as conditional for mating and nesting, and not vice versa,as ethologists traditionally assume.6 If the bowerbird’s compositionis art brut, the fine art of poets and composers echoes with therefrains of animals: think of the deterritorialized bird songs thatcompose Olivier Messiaen’s modernist, musical landscapes.7

6. “Functions in a territory are not primary; they presuppose a territory-producingexpressiveness. In this sense, the territory, and the functions performed within it, areproducts of territorialization. Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has becomeexpressive, or of milieu components that have become qualitative. The marking of aterritory is dimensional, but it is not a meter, it is a rhythm” (Thousand Plateaus 315).Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly illustrate their idea of the refrain with reference tobowerbirds (see especially What Is Philosophy? 232n24).

7. In its most complex assemblage, the refrain becomes a musical ecology where“[m]embers of the same species enter into rhythmic characters at the same time as dif-ferent species enter into melodic landscapes” (Thousand Plateaus 320). Human composersdeterritorialize wild songbird song and reterritorialize it on a musical plane of compo-sition. “An example is Messiaen’s Chrono-chromie, with its eighteen bird songs forming


Accordingly, a territorial refrain is not merely a political territoryor an ecological zone; rather, it is an assemblage of heterogeneouscomponents that become expressive in composition. It involves animmanent, self-making capacity (autopoesis) to assemble qualita-tive—sonorous, rhythmic, chromatic—as well as semiotic andorganic differences, and to make these differences resonate withina boundary of intensive intra- and interconnectivity. Repeat move-ments of assemblage open the refrain to new energy flows, andwhile these movements tend to develop the refrain in the directionof greater complexity, they risk admitting forces of entropy. Thereis, in any case, a tendency of the refrain to begin small with the(infra-territorial) framing and (intra-territorial) building of a houseor bower, and to commence, often simultaneously, with processesof unbuilding (deframing, deterritorialization) and rebuilding(reframing, reterritorialization) on an infinitely large, cosmic scaleor (interterritorial) plane of composition. “[I]f,” they speculate,“nature is like art, this is because it combines these two living ele-ments in every way: House and Universe, Heimlich and Unheimlich,territory and deterritorialization, finite melodic compounds and thegreat infinite plane of composition, the small and large refrain”(What Is Philosophy? 186). Deleuze and Guattari draw on Lucretius,and chaos and complexity theory, to rethink nature as a process ofcomposition involving transversal connections and inclusive dis-junctions (birds and bowers and bulldozers). Their thinking differsfrom evolutionary theory, which regards nature as a process of selec-tion involving linear transmission and exclusive couplings.8 Stress-ing creative involution across species lines (as in symbiogenesis),Deleuze and Guattari emphasize ecological becoming more thandoes traditional biology, with implications for ecological art.9

autonomous rhythmic characters and simultaneously realizing an extraordinary land-scape in complex counterpoint, with invented or implicit chords.”

8. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze develops the ontological thinking that he willlater elaborate with Guattari as “the refrain.” It should also be noted that Deleuzeabstracts many of his ideas of difference and repetition, and the refrain, from Anglo-American modernist literature.

9. Guattari develops the refrain into “the three ecologies” and “existential Territories”of his political treatises, Chaosmosis and The Three Ecologies. For an excellent case studyon how “[r]efrains structure the affective into ‘existential Territories,’” see Bertelsen andMurphie 139.

C H I S H O L M ⋅ 125

To analyze how Spahr reinvents the poetic refrain to frame thecurrent state of nature for “systemic analysis,” I use the territorialrefrain. I do not impose an ontology on Spahr’s poetry so much astease out the thinking that went into its making, including that ofDeleuze and Guattari, whose work Spahr occasionally references.10

My method is to abstract a small refrain from a large refrain and toexamine the process by which a repetitious line of thinking becomesecologically and politically complicating. I focus on two poems—“Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” (2005) and This Connectionof Everyone with Lungs (2005)—poems that to my mind best exem-plify the capacities of Spahr’s refrain to frame into view the symp-tomatic habits with which “we” humans construct our world to thedetriment of other cohabitants, while at the same time opening theframe onto new territories of possibility.

We Let into Our Hearts

The anaphoric refrain “we let into our hearts . . .” is one of severalrefrains that resonate throughout “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heart-ache.”11 The rhythmic repetition of the phrase happens in conjunc-tion with the addition of various regional species from line to line,so that the affective territory, or heartland, ever deterritorializes ona larger plane of composition. The small refrain—“we let into ourhearts”—opens onto a large and expanding refrain where it figuresas the prosodic heartbeat of an intensive habitat-in-the-making. Theprocess of deterritorialization is as radically uncertain as it isintensely heartfelt. For instance, the evolving refrain of section 3takes a strange turn when “brackish parts” enter the composition:

We let leaves and algae into our hearts and then we let the mollusksand the insects and we let the midge larvae into our heart and thenthe stonefly nymph and then a minnow came into our heart and withit a bass and then we let the blue heron fly in, the raccoon amble by,the snapping turtle and the watersnake also. . . .

10. Spahr cites Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka in Everybody’s Autonomy (48) and TheTransformation (221).

11. “Gentle Now” was first published in Tarpaulin Sky in 2005. I refer to the unchangedand most recent publication of the poem in Well Then There Now (122–33).


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . we let into our hearts the brackish parts of it also.(Well Then 128, 130)

Many of the “things” that “we let into our hearts” are creaturesand landscapes that belong to the Midwestern heartland (Ohio)where Spahr grew up, though it is the affective qualities of thesethings, and not the things themselves, that resonantly shape thishabitat of the heart.12 Poetic poesis entails both a genesis, the makingof a world, and its unmaking, its degeneration. “We come into [a]world” that radiates “love” and “learning,” before the worlddevolves into heartbreak and “darkness.” Each refrain “lets in” adifference of feeling and thinking to generate new lines of question-ing. As the world becomes more chaotic and complex, skepticismbuilds over how “we” can inhabit a place that we come to love whileloving the things that destroy it.

The first section begins at the beginning, when and where:

We come into the world and there it is.The sun is there.The brown of the river leading to the blue and the brown of theocean is there.Salmon and eels are there moving between the brown and thebrown and the blue.The green of the land is there.

(124)

We might think of section 1 as an infraterritorial refrain that singsof “we” who “come into the world” and who begin to inhabit whatis already “there.”13 A rhythmic milieu evolves with repeat move-

12. “I wanted the poem to be local to Chillicothe, where I grew up” (Spahr, “Brief Q& A”).

13. The territorial refrain involves a nonsuccessive assemblage of three movements:the “infra-territorial” (consisting of only a periphery marking inside and outside); the“intra-territorial” (consisting of interior, “dimensional components” [Thousand Plateaus312]); and the “inter-territorial” or “cosmic refrain” (349) (consisting of “components ofpassage or even escape” [312]). Infra-territorial refrains assemble rhythmic “milieus”(313) and “characters” (349), while intra-territorial refrains assemble “territorial motifsand counterpoints” into “melodic landscapes” (318). Cosmic refrains interweave terri-tories on the universal “plane of composition” with an immanent capacity for complexity(311–23).

C H I S H O L M ⋅ 127

ments between tones of brown, blue, and green earth. “[W]e breatheit in” and “begin to move between the brown and / the blue andthe green of it,” as “we” become immersed in a fluidity of sensation.This beginning rewrites the Old Testament Genesis, which openswith God bringing forth the light and the waters and calling thetune for all subsequent creation. More earthly than heavenly, it sub-stitutes for God’s genotypes Adam and Eve different generations of“[e]lders and youngers,” who are also “there,” sui generis and simul-taneously (124). Everything that comes into this world-makingrefrain comes in inclusive disjunctions like “[e]lders and youngers,”and “[f]ighting and possibility and love,” and not in exclusive cate-gories or hierarchical binaries.

“We,” the subject of the refrain, evolves with every move that istaken to “come into the world.” Unlike “we” of the “Sonnets,” whowere first “bunkered from what / mattered, growing and flowinginto” (29), this lyrical subject welcomes the growing and flowing of“the world at the edge of a stream” (124). Refrain by refrain, “we”open our “hearts” and “heads” to the many wonders of riparianlife. “We” learn and love so that “[t]he stream was a part of us andwe were a part of the stream” (125). The “no name” stream flowsoutwards and away “down a hill into the Scioto that then flowedinto the Ohio that then / flowed into the Mississippi that thenflowed into the Gulf of Mexico” (124). It flows with abundant bio-diversity. The more stream world “we let into our hearts” andheads, the more worldly becomes “our” feeling and thinking.

Section 2 resonates with affects of love, composing a body ofheartfelt subjectivity:

We loved the stream.And we were of the stream.And we couldn’t help this love because we arrived at the bank of thestream and began breathing and the stream was various and full ofinformation and it changed our bodies with its rotten with its coldwith its clean with its mucky with fallen leaves with its things thatbite the edges of the skin with its leaves with its sand and dirt withits pungent at moments with its dry and prickly with its warmth withits mushy and moist with its hard flat stones on the bottom with itshorizon lines of gently rolling hills with its darkness with its dappledlight with its cicadas buzz with its trills of birds.

(125–26)


A stream runs through “us” in a flow of qualitative percepts: “rot-ten,” “clean,” “mucky,” “bit[ing],” “pungent at moments,” “dry,”“prickly,” “warm[ ],” “mushy,” “moist.” It is not that the streammakes “us” feel, so much as streamly feelings make “us” and make(“us”) love. The collective subject becomes a body of sensationsthat resonate with love. Biophilia resonates with polymorphouseroticism.14 “We” helplessly love the stream that couples with“our” senses and that implicates “our” desire in the quality of itsflow. Letting dappled light, buzzing cicadas, trilling birds into ourheart and head, “we” inhabit a delirium of sensation and, compul-sively, “we” let more into the territory of our heart. A belonging isbuilding.

Section 3 adds intra- and interterritorial dimensions of “depth,”“layers,” and “connections / between layers” “where we learnedlove” (126). Much of the poem comprises an assemblage of speciesthat “we” learn to name as cohabitants of “the world at the edge ofthe stream” (124). This assemblage names species common to Mid-west watersheds but accents specifically those names that resonatewith expressive qualities (colors, markings, morphological features,territorial signatures): “the black sandshell,” “the yellow bullhead,”“the predaceous diving beetle,” “the harelip sucker,” “the orange-foot pimpleback,” “the speckled chub,” “the gray-cheeked thrush,”“the ohio pigtoe” (126–27).15 Included are a few anthropomorphicexotics like “the burning bush,” “the rabbitsfoot,” and “the spectaclecase” that name actual biological species while showcasing thisecology’s cultural character (126). Above all, the refrain assemblesan expressive list of what “we learned and we loved.”16 Anaphoric

14. Ecologist Edward O. Wilson defines “biophilia” as “the innate tendency to focuson life and lifelike processes” (1). He refers to the “heart of wonder” and the “humanspirit” (10) that compel “humanity” to know “other living creatures” and to thus “ele-vate[ ] the very concept of life” (22).

15. Spahr draws from “a list that [she] found online in A Guide to Ohio Streams” (“BriefQ & A”).

16. Sophie Mayer argues that the extensive “listing” in Spahr’s poetry is a “radicallysubversive” version of new media forms of “aggregation and syndication” (43). Shequotes Spahr from an interview: “I like lists because they are inclusive. You can keepsticking things into them. And they don’t require categorization. So each item in the listcan be as important as the others. I especially like the list as lament. . . . I like poetrybecause it helps me think. It helps me re-sort data. It lets me list things and then thinkabout the shape of the list” (qtd. in Mayer 44; Spahr, “Brief Q & A”).

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repetition orchestrates a rhythm of developing affection. Lyrical reit-erations of “Our hearts took on new shapes . . .” reshape theunformed block of lines into the refrains of a heart-throbbing song,culminating in sonorous “rapture”:

We sang gentle now.Gentle now clubshelldon’t add to heartache.Gentle now warmouth, mayfly nymph,don’t add to heartache . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Gentle now, we sang,Circle our heart in rapture, in love-ache. Circle our heart.

(128, 130)

The first three sections compose a refrain that begins much likeDeleuze and Guattari conceive the territorial refrain to begin, witha circle of song:

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing underhis breath. . . . The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing,calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. . . .

Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary todraw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a lim-ited space.

(Thousand Plateaus 311)

“A child in the dark” could be replaced with “we . . . at the edgeof” a growing, flowing stream of inchoate life, who, likewise, inhabitchaos in a circle of song. “We” do not come into the world alreadyat home. Home does not preexist this singing, though the world isvirtually already there in all its generative and sensational calamity.“We” sing the world and draw a circle around our heartland, asharmony shapes this calamity into an expression of belonging. Rap-ture resounds. But chaos returns in section 4 when the “brackishparts” of the stream are “let into” the circle (Well Then 130). This isnot what Deleuze and Guattari project to be the usual next move-ment of the refrain, which occurs when “one opens the circle a crack.. . . to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces” (ThousandPlateaus 311). Instead, Spahr’s refrain opens the circle a crack to“where the old forces of chaos press against it” or to where a deter-


ritorializing vector swerves onto ecological entropy (311). “Heart-ache” intensifies to a point of heartbreak.17

Chaos enters the refrains of section 4 in the figure of varying andaccumulating pollutants. The “brackish parts” become as much apart of “us” as the parts “we” loved. As the “brackish parts” buildup, the loved parts are “lost,” which “we” are slow to realize. Some“brackish parts”—“soda cans,” “cigarette butts,” “pink / tamponapplicators,” “six pack of beer connectors”—we let in “knowingly”(130), but others—“run off from agriculture, surface mines, forestry,home / wastewater treatment systems”—we let in “unknowingly,”along with imperceptible quantities of “chloride, magnesium, sul-fate, manganese, iron, nitrite / nitrate, aluminum” (131). Love’sbody starts to decompose, and love’s song turns into “lament” as“we” commence to sing “whoever lost her elephant ear her / moun-tain madtom / and whoever lost her butterfly lost her harelip sucker/ and whoever lost her white catspaw lost her rabbitsfoot” (131).The inclusion of brackish parts generates a loss of loved parts withinthe circle/circulation of ecological affects.

Chaos runs amuck in section five, where “we” split up and “Iturned to each other” to voice a songless dirge (132). The refrain“we let into our hearts . . .” breaks into two alternating refrains—“Ididn’t even say goodbye . . .” and “I replaced . . .”—which proceedto list the circle of lost beloveds. “Lifestream Total” replaces streamlife in a movement of absolute deterritorialization:

I replaced what I knew of the stream with Lifestream TotalCholesterol Test Packets, with Snuggle Emerald Stream FabricSoftener Dryer Sheets, with Tisserand Aromatherapy Aroma-Stream Cartridges, with Filter Stream Dust Tamer, and Streamzap PCRemote Control, Acid Stream Launcher, and Viral Data Stream.

(132–33)

What begins as a rhythmic movement between the brown, blue, andgreen of a luminous, life-filled earth devolves into a sunless, inertsoup: “dark, all merged together” (133). Yet even this degraded hab-

17. The movements of the refrain are not successive. “The refrain . . . makes themsimultaneous or mixes them.” It moves sometimes toward chaos and dissolution, some-times toward the cosmos and hypercomplex refrains, and sometimes in both directions(Thousand Plateaus 312).

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itat generates expression. The final anaphoric refrain “I did notsing” closes the poem with a disconsolate wail that does not quiteresonate with insightful woe: “I did not sing o wo, wo, wo! / I didnot sing I see, I see. / I did not sing wo, wo!” (133).18

Echoes of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) and RachelCarson’s Silent Spring (1962) can be heard respectively in the open-ing rapture and closing lament of “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heart-ache,” though Spahr’s poem ultimately stresses Carson-like alarmover Dillard-like epiphanies. This intensifying accent marks theentry of politics into Spahr’s lyrics with deleterious aesthetic effect:the song discomposingly decomposes. By accenting politics at theexpense of form, Spahr writes against a belle-lettristic trend in con-temporary American environmental literature that can be tracedback to Dillard.19 Like Carson, Spahr evokes the loss of a belovedAmerican heartland after its watershed is liberally, if unwittingly,poisoned. And like Carson, she deploys a down-to-earth lan-guage—“pink / tampon applicators,” “six pack of beer connectors,”and all—to relate to the common reader. (Dillard’s language, bycontrast, is bookishly Puritan; it carries Thoreauvian pastoralism tothe highest levels of metaphysical conceit, while banishing the loco-motive from the entangled bank.) But if Carson maintains herpopulism by penning rhetorical prose, Spahr machinates compli-cated, antilyrical refrains as a jarring wake-up call to readers ofnature writing’s inspirational meditations. With her refrain, Spahrcomposes a minor territory within American pastoralism where thelyrics of visionary democracy continue to beat, from Walt Whitmanto Gary Snyder.20 To use Jed Rasula’s term, Leaves of Grass serves as

18. Spahr draws this wail of woe from Euripides, which she says “came to [her] fromGail Holst-Warhaft’s Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature” (“Brief Q &A”).

19. Dana Phillips criticizes ecocriticism for canonizing Dillard and those environmen-tal writers (Diane Ackerman, David Abram, Richard Nelson, Jack Turner, Barry Lopez)who, like Dillard, put more stress on literary style than on the science and politics ofecology.

20. Deleuze and Guattari use “minor” to refer to asignifying, deterritorializing affectsthat take shape in majority literature. They point to modernists, like Kafka, who contortsyntax and tone to create a “minor literature” within mainstream literature and to giveexpression to a “minor people” who do not yet exist, having yet to emerge from anoppressive majority (Kafka).


“compost” to Spahr’s ecopoetics. The discordant singing of “GentleNow, Don’t Add to Heartache” recycles “I Sing the Body Electric,”and other “songs of myself,” with a poesis of (de)generative vision.By ending her poem with the refrain “I did not sing I see, I see. / Idid not sing wo, wo!” Spahr turns Whitman’s invocation of dem-ocratic union into a middle-American narcissistic disorder.

Spahr’s refrain parodies “[t]he Whitman phrase,” which AngusFletcher proclaims to be “the centrally natural linguistic expressionof democracy” (112). Contrarily, Spahr’s refrain composes a centralstrategy of minor literature, which is to reiterate and interrogate avernacular form of self-deception that plagues ecological under-standing. Fletcher asserts that “the Whitman phrase is itself mod-eled on the virtually infinite translation of the wave—in nature, art. . . and human experience”:

[B]y aggregating his own identity into an ensemble of parceled phrases,Whitman is able to insert his own personality into the drifting climate heinvents, for ensemble is context in motion. Through the phrase and itsclausal surrogates, the poetry gains particular control over the drift, theensemble, the en masse, the average. . . .

[W]e have prepositional phrases (west through the night), or participial,infinitive or gerundive phrases. The key idea here is that without predi-cation the phrase expresses a thought, with the effect of the thought alwaysbeing a fragment or part of a larger union.

(105)

Spahr’s refrain may scan, at times, with a wavelike rhythm, not asa virtual translation of nature, but as a repetition of a repetition witha critical difference. Spahr paraphrases Whitman’s phrase to accentthe diversity that the latter calls into assembly. Her ensemble ofparceled (anaphoric) clauses builds up a tsunami of rapture, but italso sings of adversities that “we let into our heart.” Rhythm buildsand collapses in a chaotic disassembly of “stream-life / Life-Stream.” Instead of aggregating identity and gaining control overthe drift, her subject circles brackish things with a song of love thatspirals out of control. Rapturous singing decomposes into listlesslistings of nonbiodegradable refuse as heartland transforms intowasteland. The key idea here is that without predication, the refrainexpresses a thought, with the effect of the thought always being a

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part of a larger thinking that asks how one’s country can disassem-ble with such loving consensus.

Spahr’s collective pronoun and consensual subject “we” isanother key departure from Whitman’s phrase. With it, she evokesa union more desirous of including nonhumans than republicans.“We” declare “[t]he stream was a part of us and we were a part ofthe stream” (125). But Spahr’s subject is not so self-aggrandizing asto integrate all the many and variant leaves of grass into a singularidentity. It is the refrain that assembles “we” into its territorial body,or into what Deleuze and Guattari would call a “body withoutorgans,” a body that resists forming a unified (organized, organic)organism (Thousand Plateaus).21 Parodying Whitman’s “multitudes,”Spahr’s refrain assembles such commoners as “the common / mer-ganser,” “the / american bittern,” “the american eel,” “the american/ robin,” “the crabapple,” “the sumac,” and “the sparrow,” alongwith such freaks and outcasts as “the elephant ear,” “the monkey-face,” and “the mountain madtom” (126). Yet the further inclusionof “the burning bush,” “the / rabbitsfoot” (126) and “the / tree-of-heaven” shapes the idea of a democratic commons into an ecologicalfantasy (127). Finally, Spahr does not use the singular first-personpronoun to call diversity into assembly. Rather, her symptomatic“I” who does not sing displaces “we” with an express loss of col-lective sensibility.22 A critical difference between Spahr’s refrain andWhitman’s phrase is that the latter does not admit to the chaosinvolved in making new worlds, and how implicated “we” becomein our own undoing. If Spahr returns to Whitman, it is not to“honor,” like Gary Snyder, his “old ‘new world’” as “a vibrant andinspiring hope for a world people yet to come, a society that wouldbecome the best on earth” (Place 214). Rather, she returns to Whit-man to mobilize something along the lines of Deleuze and Guat-

21. Vidar Thorsteinsson argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs” isa more promising conceptual foundation than that of “the people” for advancing an ideaof the common.

22. “I started with ‘we,’ because,” Spahr explains, “I wanted to start with together. Itis the idyll part of the poem. ‘We’ is humans and animals and plants. It is also knowledgewhen you are a child. You learn with and through others. And I wanted everyone to bethere in the poem. I wanted ‘we’ to include those who read it. And then I wanted whenI turn to ‘I’ to talk about how that moment of becoming individuals, becoming distinctand disconnected, is part of the problem” (“Brief Q & A”).


tari’s “resistance to the present,” where the present is an exhaustedrepetition of the past and creation is lacking (What Is Philosophy?108).23 Parodying the canonical chorus of American pastoralists,Spahr sheds light on a people and an earth still missing at this lateage of political (r)evolution. Her poetry may not invoke democracyat all, since the minor territory that it carves out of the majorityechoes the phrases of mounting dissolution/disillusion.

This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

Spahr’s poem-series This Connection of Everyone with Lungs buildsrefrains of evolving and devolving chaos and complexity. The firstpoem, “Poem Written after September 11, 2001,” frames a world ofembedded spaces, starting with the small and intimate and buildingoutwards to the large and stratospheric, before repeating the processin reverse. The collective, third-person “everyone” evokes a quotid-ian, ecological subject who is everywhere connected to “everything”by the elemental circulation of air and the fundamental impulse tobreathe. The remaining (fifteen) poems of the series—collectivelytitled “Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003”—proceed to complicate this connection with each refrain. “Lungs”repeatedly appears as a synecdoche of ecological and political sub-jectivity. Like the collective heart of “Gentle Now, Don’t Add toHeartache,” it lets in more than a body or territory can assemblewithin its borders. At the same time, it opens out to a cosmic planeof composition and an emergent bodies politic.24

“Poem Written after September 11, 2001” sets in motion a rhyth-mic expansion and contraction, a nebulous breathing in and out.Like the first refrains of “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache,” itpulsates with bodies in motion: “cells, the movement of cells andthe division of cells / and then the general beating of circulation /

23. “We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. . . . Art and philosophy convergeat this point: the constitution of a new earth and a people that are lacking as the correlateof creation. It is not populist writers but the most aristocratic who lay claim to this future.This people and earth will not be found in our democracies. Democracies are majorities,but a becoming is by its nature that which always eludes the majority” (What Is Philos-ophy? 108).

24. I borrow the term “bodies politic” from Protevi.

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and hands, and body, and feet / and skin that surrounds hands,body, feet” (This Connection 3). From moving and dividing cells, tosurrounding skin, to expanding atmospheric layers, there evolves awidening frame of circulation:

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the handsand the space around the hands and the space of the room andthe space of the building that surrounds the room and the spaceof the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and thespace of the regions and the space of the nations and the spaceof the continents and islands and the space of the oceans andthe space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphereand the space of the mesosphere in and out.

In this everything turning and small being breathed in and outby everyone with lungs during all the moments.

(8)

Minute bodies thrum across the breadth of a cosmic breath. Micro-cosms spin within macrocosms, and macrocosms spin aroundmicrocosms. “[E]verything turning and small” becomes breathablein a space that encompasses all frames of atmospheric combustion,from the cell to the mesosphere. After a world-widening expansion,there follows a breathtaking contraction, as the refrain is repeatedin reverse: “The entering in and out of the space of the mesosphere. . . in the entering in and out / of the space between the hands”(9).

Strangely, these opening refrains compose a figurative “sphere”of breadth and breath that is as much a thanatosphere as a biosphere,and as uninhabitable as inhabitable by “everyone with lungs.” Thelast refrain of “Poem Written after September 11, 2001” opens thebiosphere’s lungs to the toxins released into the air by the terroristattack on the World Trade Center. No degree of bunkering couldhave saved anyone in the vicinity of “September 11, 2001” frominspiring the “nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and / argonand carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria / . . .with sulfuric acid and / titanium and nickel and minute siliconparticles from pulverized / glass and concrete” (9–10). Spahr’sopening refrains compose a figure of intense, intimate, and localconnection becoming infinitely interconnected across a planetary


system of circulation. Manhattan’s poisoned air enters this systemand spreads imperceptibly across the planet’s enveloping and pen-etrating spaces. The local habitat deterritorializes onto a cosmicplane where the political and chemical toxicity of 9/11 has thepower to affect every living, breathing, and cohabiting earthling.The double (deterritorializing) movement of Spahr’s cosmic refrainrepeats emphatically the ecological logic of embedded habitats:“The space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing/ inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vaporand / argon” (9). “Mixing,” moreover, includes feeling—mixed feel-ing—or so the refrain concludes: “How lovely and how doomedthis connection of everyone with / lungs” (10).

That everything is connected to everything else is the oft-citedfirst law of ecology.25 This Connection recites this law with a hyper-bole that connects all the earth’s territories. It deframes the view ofour unitary blue planet as famously seen from space by telescopingthe multiple and diverse levels of interconnectedness. Moreover, tothis ecological interconnectedness it adds a sense of political con-sequence, as the final line implies. “This connection” is “doomed”because everyone with lungs breathes the lethal fallout of war; andit is “lovely” because everyone is connected on a scale neverattained before. Local and global, and molecular and molar, com-pose a geopoetic body-without-organs.26 Between being lovely anddoomed, “everyone” must ask how she and her fellow-breathersare to survive and thrive. It is the question that Spahr’s lyrical sub-ject poses insistently to her beloveds in subsequent refrains: “Belov-eds, what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this / minuteatmosphere?” (26).27

25. Barry Commoner, a founder of modern ecology, formulated four rules of ecology:(1) everything is connected to everything else; (2) everything must go somewhere;(3) Nature knows best; and (4) there is no such thing as a free lunch (Lewis n. pag.).

26. Deleuze and Guattari use “molar” to refer to organisms and organizations (orsystems and structures) and “molecular” to signify detachable (anorganic) particles thatcirculate in and across molarities with the potential to materialize the virtual forces ofbecoming and to map the deterritorializing trajectories of becoming-other (ThousandPlateaus).

27. There is a queer valence to the “beloveds” to whom the poem is addressed. AsLynn Keller notes, “[r]eaders . . . will be aware of the biographical basis for this pluralin Spahr’s involvement in a romantic threesome during her years in Hawai’i. But in her

C H I S H O L M ⋅ 137

Subsequent refrains of This Connection frame a domestic habitatthat opens, extensively and intensively, to exterior and mountingforces. “Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003”encompasses fifteen refrains, each titled with a date and repeatingthe news of the day. The first refrain, “November 30, 2002,” deploysthe anaphoric clause “I speak of . . .” or “When I speak of . . . I speakof . . . ,” together with the apostrophe “Beloveds.” It begins with aspeech act which frames a scene of ecological embedding whichparrots inhabit together with the speaker’s beloveds:

Beloveds, the trees branch over our roof, over our bed, and sorealize that when I speak about the parrots I speak about loveand their green colors, love and their squawks, love and thediscord they bring to the calmness of the morning, which is thediscord of waking.

(15)

Moreover, when “I” speaks to her beloveds of parrots and theirdiscordant squawks, she also speaks of

the Dow slipping yet still ending in a positive moodyesterday, Mission Control, the stalled railcar in space, GeorgeHarrison’s extra-large will, Hare Krishnas, the city of Man, thecity of Danane and the Movement for Justice and Peace and theIvorian Popular Movement for the Great West, homelessnessand failed coups, few leads in the bombing in Kenya.

(15)

The frame of habitation includes not only such strange affectiveconjunctions as “love and their green colors” but also such disjunc-tions as parrot “squawks” and news sound bites that awaken thebeloveds from their cozy slumbers with arousing ambivalence. Alove nest shared with feathered friends opens onto a rat’s nest ofpopular culture and world affairs. Much of the news that invadesthis domestic space is news that the Americans are gearing up forwar on Iraq.

poem the plural beloved functions with an expansive ambiguity that is thematicallysignificant: the beloved addressed is also a collective, apparently one that includes the[poem’s] readership” (76).


“November 30, 2002” marks the date when the beloveds begin tosense how immanently they are connected to the larger territory ofreaction taking shape in the wake of September 11, 2001. Day bymomentous day, “Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March27, 2003” builds increasingly complex territorial refrains of wake-fulness within the cosmic frame of “Poem Written after September11, 2001.” The later poem addresses the problem that Spahr outlinesin her prefatory note, namely, how one can cohabit a space ofunwanted intimacy with the military-industrial complex.28 It alsoframes “[t]he unanswerable questions of political responsibility”(58) as questions of complicity made inscrutable by an ecology ofembedded connectivity. Above all, it frames such questions inunheimlich sensations that express the transformation of a bower ofbliss into a launchpad for war.

Having built their abode on a small island in the Pacific, thebeloveds become unsettled by American forces mobilizing acrossthe island’s air and naval bases. They feel inclined to bury theirheads in “the sand” and limit their awareness to the “distinctive”qualities of earth, water, and wind that make “a habitat for endan-gered waterbird species” (66). But they cannot escape the obviousfact that “the beach on which we reclined is occupied by the USmilitary” (67). They discover the extent to which the military habitatoccupies and alters their wetlands habitat, becoming increasinglypreoccupied with the species of unnatural destruction. By “March16, 2003,” the refrain “birds and their bowers” is adapted to includethe war planes “from the nearby airbase.” The names of militaryaircraft populate the beloveds’ speech so acutely as to eclipse theirconcern for “endangered waterbird species”:

And because the planes flew overhead when we spoke of the criesof birds our every word was an awkward squawk that meant alsoAH-64 Apache attack helicopter, UH-60 Black Hawk troophelicopter, M2A3 Bradley fighting vehicle, M1A1 Abrams main

28. “September 11 shifted my thinking in this way. . . . I felt I had to think about whatI was connected with, and what I was complicit with, as I lived off the fat of the military-industrial complex on a small island. I had to think about my intimacy with things Iwould rather not be intimate with even as (because?) I was very far away from all thosethings geographically” (Spahr, This Connection 13).

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battle tank, F/A-16 Hornet fighter/bomber, AV-8B Harrier fighterjet, AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter and that soon wouldmean other things also, the names of things still arriving, the B-2stealth bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base, the B-52 bombersthat are now in Britain.

(67)

The territory of awakening is changing. Where once “we” awoke tothe “chattering” of parrots (15), now we “wake up and all we hearin the birds’ songs is war” (68).

The lightness and hope with which the poem “November 30,2002” composes a post–9/11 habitat do not entirely fade, despitemounting refrains of war. “March 16, 2003” underscores “[s]uchoptimism, beloveds, such optimism,” which “I” feels while watch-ing birds build a nest with urban debris (“I have watched mynasgathering materials for / their nests. // . . . I saw one pick up andcarry off a big clump of dried / grass. // And then I saw anotherstruggling with a big piece of napkin at / the side of the road” [65]).But “such optimism” is compounded by much pessimism, when“we” watch the military make its move:

We watched the planes fly overhead from the nearby airbase aswe spoke of birds and their bowers and their habits of nest andwe were also speaking of rolling start and shock and awe and twohundred and twenty-five thousand American forces and anotherninety thousand on the way and twenty-five thousand Britishforces and one thousand Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corpscombat and support aircraft in the area.

(67)

Trembling with the “rolling start and shock and awe” of concertedforces, the refrain moves the beloveds along a cutting edge of pre-carity, where the deployment of incendiary forces invades home lifewith prospects of mass death. Yet as the beloveds watch destructivepowers mobilize on the domestic front, they learn over the Internetof people gathering en masse in protest around the globe. Refrainsof escalation alternate with refrains of protestation, until the oscil-lating rhythm reaches a pitch of resistance. “February 15, 2003”assembles a block (blockade) of names of the one-hundred-and-thir-teen cities where “millions” (53) “of people gathered” (55). Thenames monumentalize a cosmic event that is primarily, but not only,


cosmopolitan, for “[e]ven those on Antarctica gathered together”(54) and “[e]ven we on this small island” (55).

“February 15, 2003” returns to the cosmic refrain that began ThisConnection. But what has (r)evolved in the interim is an evocationof a new earth and people. If then there was a world of embeddedspaces where everyone breathed the incendiary fallout of 9/11,there now emerges a planetary commons aflame with a potentialfor geopolitical resistance. The air that everyone breathes is nowsmouldering with the “isolated, / burning fires” of terrorist andantiterrorist warfare (56). But “that burning . . . dirty air” is theconnective affliction that generates a volatile, global bodies politic.“March 5, 2003” expresses the absolute degree to which the burningpenetrates and pervades every space, including the most intimateretreat:

there we are taking the burning of theworld into our lungs every day where it rests inside us, hauntingus, making us twitch and turn in our bed at night despite thecomfort we take from each other’s bodies.

(57)

The burning of the world intensively deterritorializes home terri-tory, and the private, domestic interior becomes haunted with globalinsecurity. But even here and now, lightness and hope dawn again,in the next refrain, with a cosmological memory of the eternalreturn:

Beloveds, before all my hope is burnt up, I should also rememberthat eleven million people across the globe took to the streets onerecent weekend to protest the war and this gave us all a glimmer.

(58)

The final refrains of This Connection express the affective com-plexity with which military and domestic habitats become ecolog-ically and politically embedded. The beloveds address each otherin an uncanny idiolect that mixes war talk and talk of armed retal-iation with love talk and erotic caresses:

We get up in the morning and the words “Patriot missile systems,”“the Avengers,” and “the US infantry weapons” tumble out of ourmouths before breakfast.

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .And it goes on and on all day long and then we go to bed.

In bed, when I stroke the down on yours cheeks, I stroke also thecarrier battle group ships, the guided missile cruisers, and theguided missile destroyers.

(74)

These lines confess how unwittingly one succumbs to sleeping withthe enemy, or how cohabiting with invasive species includes bomb-ers as well as parrots. But they also express a symptomatic andchaotic entanglement of opposing assemblages of interterritorialoccupation. Above all, they block the retreat of thinking and feelingto a sanctuary of apolitical perception. “I” reaches for her belovedswith a pleasure that has become habituated to military proceduresand machines with sadomasochistic and fetishistic familiarity.Spahr’s final refrains raise the problem of living with the military-industrial complex to an insuperable climax of displacement andcrisis of engagement.

To Make the Vertiginous Cosmos InhabitableWhat, then, does Spahr’s ecopoetics do? It builds refrains. It buildssmall refrains that frame a house (a habitat, a territory) into largeand complex refrains that let in chaos and/or open out to the cos-mos. The final sonnet of “Sonnets” builds the refrain “we were bun-kered from what / mattered” with a deterritorializing line of escapethat leads to a “growing and flowing into” and a germinal “love”for “this place” (Well Then 29). The refrains of “Gentle Now, Don’tAdd to Heartache” frame an open-hearted homeland that becomesan unreclaimable wasteland by letting in industrial debris with inar-ticulate grief. Finally, the refrains of This Connection open an islandhabitat of beloveds, birds, and bowers to a transoceanic stage ofincendiary precarity.

Spahr’s ecopoetics frame a local/global vision that never losessight of home even as a sense of displacement accrues.29 The refrain

29. Spahr’s refrain builds existential territories from both local and global constitu-encies, evoking, at once, a sense of place and a sense of planet. For a discussion of eco-cosmopolitanism and deterritorialization, see Heise 50–67.


subjects become other than insular homebodies in a process ofawakening to what matters beyond their bedroom. As the belovedsof This Connection come to realize, “Perhaps it isn’t lovers in ourbeds that matter, perhaps it is the / earth” (34). But if the “beloveds”are the primary subject of Spahr’s refrain, they are not the primemovers of the refrain’s movements. The subject of a poetic auto-poeisis, the beloveds change with every refrain that compoundstheir connection to the circuitry of feeling and thinking that delin-eates the poem’s plane of composition. Even at home in their bed,they are embedded in an ecology that makes them feel the wideningsphere of political reaction and responsiveness that becomes “the /earth.”

Spahr’s ecopoetics perform something like the political work thatGuattari mandated for “‘eco’-art” three decades ago, which was “todare to confront the vertiginous Cosmos so as to make it inhabit-able” (Three Ecologies 53, 67).30 Guattari foresaw a praxis-poeisis ofeveryday life that would involve everyone in the making of new“existential Territories” or “hyper-complex refrains” (Chaosmosis16).31 Only a cosmic refrain, he reasoned, could weave together “thetangled paths of the tri-ecological vision” to overcome the mentalpassivity, social homogeneity, and environmental degradation of“Integrated World Capitalism” (Three Ecologies 67). Spahr’s refraininterweaves multiple ecologies, including social, mental, and envi-ronmental ecologies. It figures ordinary people in their daily, finiteroutines and transforms them into ecocosmopolitan dissidents onan emerging planetary front.32 To use Guattari’s term, it assembles

30. Guattari charged poetry, especially, with the mandate to make a more inhabitableworld: “We cannot conceive of solutions to the poisoning of the atmosphere and to globalwarming due to the greenhouse effect, or to the problem of population control, withouta mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society” (Chaosmosis20); “poetry today might have more to teach us than economic science, the human sci-ences and psychoanalysis combined” (21).

31. “What we are aiming at with this concept of refrain aren’t just massive affects, buthyper-complex refrains, catalysing the emergence of incorporeal Universes such as thoseof music and mathematics, and crystallizing the most deterritorialized existential Terri-tories” (Guattari, Chaosmosis 16).

32. For Guattari, ecology entails, among other things, praxes that deterritorialize sub-jectivity. “Eco-praxes are on the watch for dissident vectors, ruptures and mutations ofsubjectification in all walks of life and thus in all the ecologies and in any existentialterritory” (Genosko 108).

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a global “dissensus” against the present military-industrial complex(50). As the “beloveds” of This Connection enter, refrain by refrain,into composition with “the millions” who gather to protest theAmerican invasion of Iraq, they form something along the lines ofthe “group [e]ros” and “crowd aggregates” of Guattari’s “socialecology” (Three Ecologies 60). They assemble with a potential to“rebuild[ ] human relations at every level of the socius,” from themost intimate to the most public (49). Moreover, each repetitionof “this dirty, burning air” adds volatility to an atmosphere ofburning adversity and combustive agitation that, like Guattari’s“environmental ecology,” explodes environmentalism’s ideal as anature-loving retreat.33 Spahr’s refrain also resounds the discor-dance with which the global mass media communicate the news.By re-reciting syndicated sound bites with overtones of intensify-ing, all-inclusive disaster, it overcomes the mental disconnect withhyperconnective, an-anaesthetizing effect. Such aggregated newsitems as “a dismembered mother, the shoe bomber’s letters, ScottPeterson’s / wife and girlfriend, Brian Patrick Regan’s letters toHussein and / Gadhafi, nineteen thousand gallons of crude oil inthe frozen / Nemadji River” are linked in refrain by an emergentsensation of erotic, domestic, international, and environmentalbetrayal (This Connection 52).

Spahr’s refrain compares, furthermore, with the “worldingrefrains” of Kathleen Stewart, an American cultural critic who haslong been developing Deleuze and Guattari’s refrain for the twenty-first century. For Stewart, “[w]hat is, is a refrain,” or as sheelaborates,

A scoring over a world’s repetitions.. . . a worlding. Nascent forms quicken, rinding up like the skin of an

orange. Pre-personal intensities lodge in bodies. Events, relations, andimpacts accumulate as the capacities to affect and to be affected. Publicfeelings world up as lived circuits of action and reaction.

(339)

33. “Ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-lovingminority or with qualified specialists” (Guattari, The Three Ecologies 52).


As Stewart sees it, her task as critic is to track the process of repe-tition by which the refrain generates new existential territories, orbecoming worlds. She tunes her critique to the refrain’s intensifyingrepetition: “Critique attuned to the worlding of the refrain is a bur-rowing into the generativity of what takes form.” Like Deleuze andGuattari, Stewart conceives of “the refrain” as a formal assemblageof virtual potential and “becoming” as the germinal capacity of abody or a territory to affect and be affected by other bodies or ter-ritories brought into composition by the refrain. She investigates thegermination of worlding “bloom spaces” as varied as a homelessbody, an aging body, a school body, and an economically andsocially depressed landscape. Spahr’s refrain likewise generatesbecoming worlds and bloom spaces. “Gentle Now, Don’t Add toHeartache” begins with the refrain “the world is there . . .” and arhythmic milieu that sways with “[t]he brown of the river . . . theblue and the brown of the / ocean” and “[t]he green of the land,”and each subsequent refrain becomes more complexly worldly, aswell as affectingly “brackish” and blue (Well Then 124). “Poem Writ-ten from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003” begins with a ter-ritorial refrain that resounds with “parrots,” “love / and their greencolors,” and “love and their squawks,” which, in subsequent poems,evolves into a cosmic refrain that reverberates with “burning,” plan-etary affliction (This Connection 15).

Another generative effect of the refrain is its lyrical—speaking,thinking, feeling—subject of repetition. The refrain does not origi-nate with human consciousness, nor even with the human. Rather,“[w]e come into the world and there it is” (Well Then 124). The sub-ject comes into the world, where it undergoes transformation inrelation to the world’s eternal self-making. Transformation is a pro-cess of repetition, and Spahr’s lyrical subject is a compulsiverepeater of repetitions already in circulation, including the contin-uous on-the-hour newscasts that riddle the communicative space ofquotidian temporality. But as I have shown, what gets repeated inSpahr’s refrain gets repeated differently in evocative assemblagesthat reactivate local-global connections and, potentially, a cosmicbodies politic. In short, Spahr’s refrain “scor[es] over a world’s repe-titions” to call into existence a coming earth and people (Stewart

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339).34 It does so not ex nihilo but by reiterating the oft-repeatedphrases of address, fragments of speech, and media blips withwhich we earth-dwellers customize and naturalize a comfortablehabitat for ourselves. It repeats not verbatim but with a differencethat contorts quotidian speech in asyntactical, arhythmical, and par-adoxical musings so as to denaturalize our sense of place and toopen a way out of habituated existence. My own critical strategyhas been to investigate the (de)generative possibilities that Spahr’sform of repetition “underscores, overscores, rescores” (Stewart 339)and to show how her (de)territorializing refrain prompts readers toprofoundly rethink the problem of how “we” come to inhabit theearth.

University of Alberta

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Juliana Spahr's Ecopoetics: Ecologies and Politics of the Refrain

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