Chain 11: Public Forms

by Juliana Spahr (Editor), Jena Osman (editors)

letters to the editor, a mechanical beet collector in Loveland Colorado, web sites, a surfer dude sculpture in Santa Cruz, eulogies, the “empty” buildings of Detroit, nodding hello, the movement of elk in Rocky Mountain National Park, speechmaking, occasional poems, anti-war signs, line marking on public streets, market research surveys, the “It’s a Small World” ride in Walt Disney World, murals, signs on overpasses that cross I-495 in New England, text on truckbeds, protest marches, car alarms, surveillance cameras, aerial views, classified ads, an Argentinean small press that makes books out of cardboard collected by the unemployed, t-shirts, a bench in Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, graffiti and raffiti-proofing, internet spam, the “Dance Steps on Broadway” in Seattle, stickers in phone booths, the Garden of Eden, prophecies, the gutters of Valparaiso, billboards, the Prostitution Toleration Zone in Rotterdam, eye-witness reports, the toppling of the Saddam Hussein sculpture in Firdos Square, architecture, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, internet discussion groups, the debate over the World Trace Center memorial, call boxes, the politics behind the Capital of Culture competition in Europe, banisters, a citywide play that enacts the dreams of the people of Lille, France, shadows, a private office for a public telephone, cemeteries, creating a giant footprint on a beach, train station flip signs, planting subversive signs in corporate sign groves, planting papaya seeds on public land in Hawai‘i.

362 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2004

About the author

Juliana Spahr (born 1969) is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is 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.

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. Her work therefore "distinguishes itself because she writes poems for which her critical work calls." In addition to teaching and writing poetry, Spahr is also an active editor. Spahr received the National Poetry Series Award for her first collection of poetry, Response (1996).

(from Wikipedia)