Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr, Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, April 13. Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr get something that's still hard to get; the fix is over; our shared opus of desire and wellbeing has been martyred. In both their poetries psychic v. civic dichotomies are shot to hell, a nearby resting, writing, and reading place, weirdly familiar, with ready access to jihadic media, the better to toggle multiple registers for probing yet-unspoken consequences of 9/11. Both readers concentrated on pieces from their UC Press books, Joshua's just-released The Totality of Kids and Juliana's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005). Juliana's is less an admixture, less filtered as psychosis. "Still a huge sadness overtakes us daily because of our inability to / control what goes on in the world in our name." The sad, almost comatose state Juliana references is a diagnosable communal despair, unfeigned depression and chronic pathology as comity within which the beloved's presence can be easily perfused by irrepressible forces from afar, resulting in a weaponized imminence, "when I stroke the down on your cheeks, I stroke also the / carrier battle group ships." Juliana's reading explored such imminence by way of apposing data in a nonfictional rude awakening. In "November 30, 2002" speaking of parrots = "speaking to all we wake to this morning, the Dow slipping...homelessness and failed coups"; "the flapping of parrots' wings" = "the helpless flapping of our wings in our minds." Apposition is more than diagnosis, it is way of distinguishing forces, both visible and cloaked, imposing their vulgarity. Juliana writes in her "Note" to "Poem Written from November 30/2002 to March 27/2003" that previous ways of feeling separate, staying disconnected are no longer useful, "I felt I had to think about what I was connected with, and what I was complicit with." Of all her pieces, "Poem Written after September 11/2001" is the one that sees the farthest, and the one with the most visual style. The poem zooms counterclockwise from cell division, to hands and feet and lungs, out to the global everyone with lungs, further outward to the tropo-, strato-, and meso-spheres, "everything turning and small being breathed in and out by everyone with lungs during all the moments." The piece apposes known elements to reach what is at-once obvious and roundly difficult, "How connected we are with everyone." This is a brief, reassuring poem, telescoping (in reverse) and then collapsing elements and time into a litany of physics that seems a starting point.

Joshua read newer pieces as well as ten poems from Totality… a body of work that spans pre- to post-9/11. Many of what I take as pre-9/11 signal through their titles cultural topic matter; his love and researches of music are pervasive, as are his preoccupations with a) troubadour arcana ("In Jaufre Rudel's Song," "Aeon Flux: June"), b) art practice ("Whiteread Walk," "Auteur Theory," "Aporia"), c) French language ("Ca ira," "Ceriserie," "Valiant en Abyme"), and, of course, poetry ("Late Style,""What's American about American Poetry?"). In these and other poems from Totality… Joshua promenades through cities, frequently an otherly digitized Paris, as a slowed down darkness fills the "pale window box poppies of the laughing class, / Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight." These poems are smart, play with being smart, so they don't take themselves too seriously, and in being so smart they cover a lot of ground, high and low. More recent material is less processional, more volatile in their often discursive attacks against flimflam, aurally more heated vis a vis the new and omnipresent problem posed by the ones who can't face what's happening to all of us, those of us who impose deceit, "those who would inspire terror ... [we say] be new like us ... [only our] old is the new." Joshua gets to the root of another collective deceit in "Their Ambiguity," pointing to a "composite view called the flower of individualism...an electronic texture [where thrives] absence of an intensely desired presence." A remarkable re-lease and dis-appearance, a flicker of postlanguage vaporware nuanced cosmetically, socially astute, looking forward, and enamored of its own critical unresponsiveness as it concocts further difficulty -- my verbose paraphrase for these last lines of Joshua's "Poem": "Meanwhile I am happy / To see you! It's enough but not of anything."