Juliana Spahr's The Transformation is a fascinating convergence of autobiography and poetics. She writes about her experience of living in a relationship of three rather than two, of teaching in Hawaii, of living in New York around 9/11, and how her experiences have affected her political outlook, her intellectual thought, her writing, her conception of self. Spahr has such a strong unique style, it's mesmerizing and lovely. Like Anne Carson, Spahr can reference Stein in her style without writing like Stein. I think that's part of what draws me to her work. But I also enjoy how she works through complex questions using repetition and incremental syntactic shifts. Like in this passage, where she talks about the significance of poetry in the aftermath of 9/11:

The fragmentation felt reassuring to them. Felt like a trance-inducing chant. Like a philosophy of connection. Like a model of intimacy that was full of acquaintances and publics that recognized not only points of contact and mixing, but also relational difficulties, cultural and linguistic difference. And so they often wondered in this time if perhaps all those who claimed that poetry was a comfort were right. Even if those who claimed this were usually talking about lyric poetry and not poetry that used fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on. They had noticed before that they felt writing in their body. That they felt those certain sensations, those sensations of interested calmness that happened when their mind and their breath were working together, that pleasant boredom. And they began at this time to think of the poetry that used fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on not as a radical avant-garde break but as the warm hand of someone they loved stroking their head, helping them to relax the muscles in their hand and inviting them to just close their eyes and relax for a second with the words of someone else. This feeling somewhat answered that constant question of about the use of the avant-garde in a time like this.

- Juliana Spahr, The Transformation, p. 188

This passage is wonderful, and her conclusion strikes me as quite liberating. I too often wonder about the use of avant-garde poetry, particularly with regards to what I sense as a pervasive imperative to purge the personal from innovative poetry, to move away from individual voice in the service of isolating language, examining language, being radical with language. I don't want to write lyric poetry, and yet I don't want to write poetry that lacks emotion or that can't connect with readers on more than a theoretical/intellectual level. Avant-garde (or experimental, innovative, post-avant, I don't really have a word for what I think of when I think of the poetry that I think matters) poetry can be comforting, not in Barthes' readerly sense of confirming what the reader already knows, but in the sense of acknowledging the disjunctive, confusing, impossible nature of the world. I find that comforting. The problem with writing poetry, I find, is how to confront without disengaging, how to be radical but not alienated.