Sina Queyras

Because I begin essays but rarely complete them, and so poetry.

Because to “fall into the singing” is the dream. 

Because stroke by stroke, syllable by syllable, word by word, to not only feel the rhythm & movement, but to get somewhere, is what poetry can do. 

Because collectively. Individually. In the poem. Is to survive. To report back from the abyss.

Because poets release poetry releases poets.

Because poets have familiars whether they like it or not, we don’t get to choose who aligns with us, or doesn’t, who gets the work, and who doesn’t, who lifts the poem, who cites it, who takes a sword to it, a chainsaw, or hammer.

Because to me Spahr’s influence is contiguous with Woolf & Stein, a river of thinking, a poem like slide, a point of entry, a self reflection, a desire for authentic engagement, transparency rather than confession: “And so because at first I thought I wanted an opening in the tautness of tradition, I glitched this whoosh.“

Because for years Sphar’s voice has been part of the chorus asking “for what was poetry”? Because her verse has resisted & wrestled with “songs that tend toward institutional” to enter and undo the institutional. Because a tendency to corral, to list, to witness all that is being disappeared.

Because poems make space for more poems, and Sphar’s poems create spaces I want to inhabit.

Because yes, poetry needs to wrestle with the institutional, and because I too have dedicated my life to poetry, made my values align with poetry, moved toward, tended an idea of poetry that is public, that is not only smooth, that can be provocative and uncomfortable as much as song.

Because the poet is aware of poetry’s relation to the “nation” to “the political” to “value” & “use” & hope & soothing,

Because what can poetry do? Do more.

Because more than many of us, Spahr’s verse shows us what poetry can do, because it is rooted in an ongoing placement of her body in the line & on the line as in the antifa with the stick, with the Oath Keeper on her back, with the threats from militia groups, because the poems are beautiful lists, but they are not safe, not only composed from a position of safety…not from a safe place calling everyone else out…

Because again and again poetry’s aim at the surface of moments breaks my heart. 

Because when it’s real—like an organ ripped out of my chest, pulsing and in need of transplanting now, into the next body—I am so grateful to have poetry in my world. 

Because of the rustling, the accounting: “I thought that poetry/ could be apart from the nation still. I thought/ that two sorts of poets existed: poets/ who write the terrible nation into an/ Existence and poets fucking around to/ Do something else…”

Because of something else. 

Because I am loving wrestling with this book, swooshing through this broken (break through) moment, into possible futures. 

Because there is also joy: “I/ joked that I had found a sweet spot. I could/ write a poem that was too broken for the lyric/ poets and too lyric for everyone else.//A poem, I understood.”