Abstract
Juliana Spahr promotes a trans-corporeal posthumanist ethics by composing poetry that adopts the complex patterns of nature, a poetry that models the shared, connective spaces we inhabit with others. In doing so, Spahr’s poetry provides an excellent illustration of how health and illness are not properties of the individual body, but are features of relationships between bodies and other materialities, including the myriad of plant and animal species we relate and share space with—the species we become with. Spahr’s emphasis on entanglement has important implications for medical posthumanism. One cannot speak of human health as independent from ecosystem health. Recognition of our bodily entanglement reduces the weight placed on individual choice and merit as outcome predictors, while also encouraging us to acknowledge our kinship with all others. This recognition is vital for achieving true health equity.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For a description and historical timeline of One Health, see the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) One Health website: https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/index.html.
- 3.
Other criticisms include a view of “public” health solely in terms of the human, a tendency to universalize western views of health, insufficient recognition of sociocultural and economic factors, and a continued conceptual separation of animal, human, and environment. Alicia Davis and Jo Sharp (2020) provide a great overview of various criticisms, while offering a way to rethink One Health in posthumanist terms of assemblages; also see Deborah Lupton (2022).
- 4.
In an interview with Joel Bettridge, when asked what she believes her poetry is trying to accomplish, Spahr replied, “I’m just trying to think. That is how I see writing. It is thinking…And the reason one publishes is that one needs to think with others” (Spahr 2005a: 5).
- 5.
See Lewis Williams (2017) and Caroline Wellbery et al. (2018). This assessment is also based on my own research, as well as my personal experience as an educator and scholar in academic medicine. Climate change is not part of the primary discussion and is not a curricular concern in most medical schools. An August 2019 article in The New England Journal of Medicine discusses possible links between climate change and the kidney disease CKDu, concluding with a call to integrate climate change into medical education curriculum (Sorensen and Garcia-Trabanino 2019). The “call” is here, and has been for some time, but consistent nation-wide changes to the curriculum have not been made.
- 6.
“Language poetry” is an avant-garde movement that emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Language poets compose and arrange words in non-traditional ways, allowing the reader to determine meaning on an individual basis.
- 7.
The concept of “enaction” describes cognitive thought as resulting from an organism’s physical interaction with the environment. See N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman (1999: 154–158).
- 8.
Earlier, Spahr explains that she enrolled in an ethnobotany course in order to “think more” about the problem of nature poetry and learn more about the history of Hawai’i. I see Spahr’s enrollment in the course as both fulfilling Haraway’s “obligation of curiosity” and participating in Retallack’s experimental interrogation.
- 9.
For a better understanding of European and American colonization of the Hawaiian Islands, see Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawai’i to Iraq (2006), Sally Merry’s Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (2000), and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s Hawaiian Blood (2008).
- 10.
See Patrick Kirch’s “The Impact of the Prehistoric Polynesians on the Hawaiian Ecosystem” for a discussion of the prehistoric Hawaiian ecosystem (1982).
- 11.
Spahr’s use of the term “anti-global” isn’t a denial of the global interconnections and relations we cannot possibly ignore. Rather, she is against the neoliberal globalization of business and multinational corporations and the ways they act with impunity.
- 12.
See The Department of Hawaiian Homelands website at https://dhhl.hawaii.gov/applications/applying-for-hawaiian-home-lands/.
- 13.
I’ve typeset the lines to reflect how Spahr has read the poem in oral performances. In Well Then There Now, the CBC data is printed on the verso page, but right justified so that the lines run into the lines on the recto page. Spahr reads the lines as though they were 14 long lines running straight across both pages. Reading the sonnets this way re-enforces the entanglements of biology (or nature) and culture. See Spahr’s PENNSOUND page to hear a recording of Spahr reading “Sonnets”: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spahr.php.
- 14.
For an interesting discussion of ecopoetics and the practice of recycling text, see Harriet Tarlo’s “Recycles: the Eco-Ethical Poetics of Found Text in Contemporary Poetry” (2009).
- 15.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to address the ethics of animal research, although lamenting species loss as the loss of experimental test subjects is quite problematic and may be confusing to see in a text arguing for a posthuman ethics. See chapter three of Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, entitled “Sharing Suffering,” for a start to this conversation. Here, Haraway posits the beginnings of a posthuman relational ethics for animal instrumentalization. As Haraway contends, “Instrumental intra-action itself is not the enemy … work, use, and instrumentality are intrinsic to bodily webbed mortal earthly being and becoming. Unidirectional relations of use, ruled by practices of calculation and self-sure of hierarchy, are quite another matter” (2008: 71).
- 16.
Andrew Jameton and Jessica Pierce outline the ethical tensions at stake, including matters of inequity, when to comes to develo** sustainable health care (2001). Health Care Without Harm is a global organization dedicated to reducing health care’s environmental footprint. See https://noharm.org/ for more information.
- 17.
These examples are extremely simplistic and elide the vast relations at work. For a more extensive look at sustainable becoming, posthuman ethics, and the intensity of assemblages, see Nick Fox and Pam Alldred’s Sociology and the New Materialism (2017).
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Welch, T.J. (2024). Entangled Species/Entangled Health: The Inclusive Poetics of Juliana Spahr. In: Advancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry . Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49888-6_2
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