Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You
Juliana Spahr
publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2001
isbn: 0-8195-6525-3
price: $12.95
Spahr's follow-up to her 1995 National Book Series Award winning debut Response is an understated, careful examination of the individual in the troubled nexus of the law, community, culture and, centrally, language.
The sequence "a younger man, an older man, and a woman" fixes the reader in the center of a minimal narrative that is both fascinating in a cinematic (even voyeuristic) way -- the poem is a plain description of the movements of the three named in its title as they perform some gymnastic routine -- and yet is also a playful schematic for an ethics of relationships among individuals:
In culture an older man and a younger man stand facing each other with their feet spread for balance.
They place their hands on each other's shoulders and together they flex their knees and keep their backs straight.
A woman steps onto their thighs, one foot on a younger man's thigh, one foot on an older man's thigh.
A younger man and an older man are support. A woman is a tower.
[62]
The poem is very effective by what it leaves out; the phrase "in culture" is, for most of it, contrasted with the emphatically pedestrian (though erotically suggestive) descriptions of constructions from human bodies, giving the reader a strong sense of the ethics of interaction, as if we were puppeteers navigating our dolls in and out of threatening or beneficial situations.
Some of the punch of this poem is lost with the intrusion of a moral-of-the-story ending -- that we all must "get along" if we are to build anything like a future -- a letdown after the sophistication of the literary technique.
But Spahr -- who teaches literature at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa, and has recently published a study of social identity and literature called Everybody's Autonomy -- may have the last word, as this seemingly simplified approach to over-complex politicized issues makes a disruptive, yet redescriptive, contribution that is (unlike "theory") hard to ignore.
The sequence "gathering / palolo stream" concerns the conflict of native Hawai'ian property traditions and the imposition of rights to private property; at the center of the poem is the resonant void of a parking lot to which no road leads, and yet which stands in the way of a contested gathering place by a stream.
This symbolic void, like the scream of the punk-rocker in another poem that is the title of the book, lends a strong air of nihilism to what is obviously Spahr's project of hope, and this tension between the black heart of anger and the faith in community makes this a distinct, ambitious, if not entirely fleshed out, book of poems.
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