19 Jul CORAL by Juliana Spahr
Then to write poetry after 1500 feet.
After high-quality steel frame buildings
not completely collapsed, except
all panels and roofs blown in.
After 2,000 feet.
After reinforced concrete buildings collapsed
or standing but badly damaged.
After 3,500 feet.
After church buildings completely destroyed.
After brick walls severely cracked.
After 4,400 feet.
After 5,300 feet.
After roof tiles bubbled and melted.
After 6,500 feet.
After mass distortion of large steel buildings.
To write the Cold War and doves.
The Cold War and tapeworms.
The Cold War and sails of ships.
The Cold War and the steel of bridges.
To write poetry after that.
To write in a world with few nutrients,
one that rocks back and forth.
The same beginning in both the sea and the land.
To write poetry that knows a hard, cup-shaped skeleton.
And then poetry that knows
the long, stinging tentacles capturing.
Knows the water.
The Atlantic and the Pacific.
The connections between.
The one moving into the other.
To develop poetry in the stomach
that then exits through the mouth
which is the anus.
To write poetry in the blue
that is the absence of green.
Light penetration.
Whorls of tentacles.
The slime earth too.
Hunters and farmers.
Shallow water.
Few nutrients.
High fecundity.
Rapid growth.
Multiarmed morphology and tube feet.
To write tube feet.
To write the exact place.
Seaward slope place.
Sea terrace place.
Algal ridge place.
Coral algal zone place.
Seaward reef flat place.
Islet or interisland reef crest place.
Lagoon reef flat place.
Lagoon terrace place.
Lagoon floor or basin place.
Coral knolls, pinnacle and patch reefs place.
To write poetry after
About the Poet
photo credit Molly Matalon
Juliana Spahr is a writer, critic, editor and scholar of literature. She was the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring and the 2026 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Ars Poetica (Wesleyan University Press (2025). This poem “Coral” is the opening poem of Ars Poetica, which she has described as “lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism.”
Born and raised in Chillicothe, Ohio, she received her BA from Bard College and her PhD in English from the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo.
Spahr is the author of nine collection of poetry the most recent of which are This Connection of Everyone With Lungs (University of California Press, 2005), Well Then There Now (Black Sparrow Press, 2011), That Winter The Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015), and Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan University Press, 2025).
Her 2015 poetry collection, That Winter the Wolf Came, a chronicle of her participation in the 2011 Occupy Movement takes as its concern the global spread of political struggles located at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Her work examines social issues, including the repercussions of the BP oil spill, the global impact of September 11 attacks, capitalism, and climate change. She uses poetry as a mechanism to provide cultural recognition and representation to social movements and political actions. Following the Occupy Movement, the police shootings of Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown, and the 2009 California college tuition hike protests, Spahr founded the publishing project Commune Editions, along with Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover. The project was founded with the intention to publish poetry as a companion to political action.
She also publishes literary prose. A fictionalized memoir, Army of Lovers (City Lights Books, 2013) was cowritten with David Buuck and tells the story of two struggling, mediocre poets who are attempting to write poetry in a time when poetry’s importance is on the decline. The Transformation (Atelos Press, 2007) is a hybrid text of poetry and prose that blends lyrical poetry with theoretical prose to explore themes of identity, colonialism, collective responsibility, and global interconnectedness.
Her most recent book of scholarship, Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (Harvard University Press, 2018) , explores the ambiguous and disconcerting role that literature plays in upholding the modern nation-state. She was also the editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Women Poets in the 21st Century. Both Spahr’s critical and scholarly studies, i.e., Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001), and her poetry have shown Spahr’s commitment to fostering a “value of reading” as a communal, democratic, open process.
Spahr has taught at Siena College (1996–7), the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1997–2003), and Mills College (2003–). With Jena Osman, she edited the arts journal Chain from 1993 to 2003. In 2012, Spahr co-edited A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism with Mills colleague and fellow-poet Stephanie Young.