Juliana Spahr Quote: "I remember reading Paul Fussell my first year ..."

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I remember reading Paul Fussell my first year teaching at U of Hawai'i and being like, oh, it has a turn! Why didn't anyone tell me?

Juliana Spahr / Poet
Reading
Teaching
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I remember reading Paul Fussell my first year teaching at U of Hawai'i and being like, oh, it has a turn! Why didn't anyone tell me?

⇛ Juliana Spahr (Poet)

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I was told over and over the poetry in forms was "conservative" but there was no analysis of why this was so.

Juliana Spahr Poet

Genre/forms are institutional questions mainly. Like matter to MFA programs in terms of which workshop you can teach.

Juliana Spahr Poet

I'm sort of annoyed that some very basic things about poetic forms were not conveyed to me in the various poetry courses I took over the years.

Juliana Spahr Poet

What does it mean to be a used white wife, a mother, a tragic girl writing poems? Sandra Simonds gets into these messy words and then tears them apart. Sometimes with the words of others. And sometimes with poems made from scratch. They aren't all bad, these words. But they aren't all good either. And that is where Mother was a Tragic Girl gets its power. You will at moments be laughing but then you will also at moments just as much be crying. If Antigone was alive and decided to write some poems about the nuclear family, she would write them like Sandra Simonds. These are tough.

Juliana Spahr Poet

A love of reading is an acquired taste, not an instinctive preference. The habit of reading is formed in childhood; and a child's taste in reading is formed in the right direction or in the wrong one while he is under the influence of his parents; and they are directly responsible for the shaping and cultivating of that taste.

Henry Clay Trumbull Author

Traveling across the United States, it's easy to see why Americans are often thought of as stupid. At the San Diego Zoo, right near the primate habitats, there's a display featuring half a dozen life-size gorillas made out of bronze. Posted nearby is a sign reading CAUTION: GORILLA STATUES MAY BE HOT. Everywhere you turn, the obvious is being stated. CANNON MAY BE LOUD. MOVING SIDEWALK IS ABOUT TO END. To people who don't run around suing one another, such signs suggest a crippling lack of intelligence.