Literature / “We were tourists in France,” writes Juliana Spahr in her new book, Well Then There Now, “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 thought about who owned what. And divisions. And songs sung in bars…”

It’s unclear, from the contents of Spahr’s book exactly how much time she spent in Hawaii, or France, or Appalachia, but one can immediately gather that she pays attention to more than most temporary “settlers.” Her concerns, during these epic odysseys are ecological complications in places where language is as touchy as pin-pricking or coral stabs. In Hawaii, the shrinking of public beachfront and the inevitable extinction of indigenous species are all among the physical and theoretical concerns of a poet, who has disdain for ordinary language, but respect for the alphabet.

“Some of we and the land that was never ours” is a response to this witnessing. In this poem, Spahr illustrates monotony and repetitiveness better than a 1920s French photograph, and yet, somehow, she finds the ability to sustain our attention. “But the ground was never sure with us. Is never some of ours. Be never certain with us. Never will be rightly some of ours. Be correctly never certain with us. Never to be owned. Never to be had. And the land’s green is the land’s owning of us. And the green of the ground is the possession of the ground of us.”

In the chapter entitled, “Dole Street,” Spahr reaches beyond the street’s physical coordinates. She explores bumper stickers–“Giant girls bathing in suits with provocative poses”–stickers about desire and ownership and identity and place. She historicizes the streets she walks and speaking of what was once an industry town, Spahr writes, “Then it was sugar, now it is tourism… Yet history continues.”

It’s obvious that, during her time here, Spahr grappled with being an outsider on an island where being an insider is more precious than gold. Yet, there is a “place” where most foreign poets/writers/journalists go, but Spahr resists the temptation. She holds back during the very moments when you think she might just say the words many of us ask without hesitation–do I belong here?

“What we know is like and unlike/ as it is kept in different shaped containers/ it is as the problems of analogy/ it as the view from the sea/ …it as the opinion of the sea/ it as the occidental concepts of government, commerce, money and imposing/ what we know is alike and unalike…”

Spahr makes no apologies for being a guest in other people’s houses. Her guidance into a city, onto an island where the illusion is thick with delusion, is worthy of a hefty fee.

“Shortly after I moved to Hawaii,” she writes later in the book, “I began to loudly and hubristically proclaim whenever I could that nature poetry was immoral. There is a lot of nature poetry about Hawaii. Much of it is written by those who vacation here and it is often full of errors… I was more suspicious of nature poetry because even when it got the birds and the plants and the animals right it tended to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat.”

What is remembered from a journey through Well Then There Now is the book’s collection of words about objects, its political and social clarity and its impressive ability to endure.

---