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Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You
by
Juliana Spahr uses details to explore Hawai'i's politics of location and her own place in it as an outsider: a hard-core show where the singer shouts out "fuck you-aloha-I love you" over and over; the pidgin word 'da kine;' native Hawaiian rights to gathering; Palolo stream; the similarities and differences between hotel rooms and conference rooms; and acrobats at a Las Ve
...more
Paperback, 96 pages
Published
November 27th 2001
by Wesleyan University Press
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A noble project, but a little repetitive. By the time I reached the lengthy poem that excerpts a tumbling manual, I was all, I GET IT.
The book is worth reading, if only for the third poem "Switching":
"This impossible position.
This position that does not even give the most pleasure.
And yet we place all our hope in this touching.
As touching, gathering, happens
in the most difficult places at
the most difficult times."
The book is worth reading, if only for the third poem "Switching":
"This impossible position.
This position that does not even give the most pleasure.
And yet we place all our hope in this touching.
As touching, gathering, happens
in the most difficult places at
the most difficult times."
These five poems are experimental but surprisingly accessible (while not at all simple), and I love how she subtly enters the ordinary, everyday messes of space in Hawai’i. She seems to translate the deeply ingrained colonialism of things like barriers to public access of Palolo Stream into beautifully radical, precocious children’s stories. She pulls cliched local catch phrases like da kine close to the chest again. From her poem things:
There are these things and they
are da kine to me. They a ...more
There are these things and they
are da kine to me. They a ...more
Juliana Spahr is good and she sort of knows that. There's this quality in there, something going on in the knowing-everything of it. The poems should be a little more brittle than they are, they could be as paul says leaky or something so as to put to use all of her talent and intellegence and make the whole thing a little more brave and do it a little like we are humans and we are sort of talking.
Ok. The poems aren't really that impersonal, but she got on my very bad side when she said that nat ...more
Ok. The poems aren't really that impersonal, but she got on my very bad side when she said that nat ...more
This only gets 1 1/2 stars from me. Not my style at all.
4.5
Spahr’s “Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You” is both an exploration of Hawaii’s politics as well as a personal poem about finding the poet’s identity as a foreigner. Even the provocative title is a demonstration of repetition: she pairs the American expletive “Fuck You” with the peaceful and affectionate Hawaiian term “Aloha” with the powerful, simple American term of endearment, “I Love You.” In each of her five poems, repetition easily moves us from line to line, page to page, and poem to poem. She rep
...more
This is a short book of poetry that I think demonstrates well the idea that a poet and her poems should teach the reader how to read her poetry. The use of repetition and allegory, simple language, and returning to similar themes quickly trained me how to read the book. In the process, I did find it occasionally too repetitive. In these spots, I tried to enjoy the sound of the repetition, the same words again and again, sometimes with building variations, leading eventually to insight. Also help
...more
Spahr's poems read like philiosophical arguments--series of premises leading up to conclusions. The effect is at turns pretentiously distant or urgently inviting. The back of the book (which you should definitely read, since it describes the subject matter of the several long poems more explicitly than the poems themselves) calls this "documentary Poetics."
In Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You, she explores ideas of connection and place using the example of her home, Hawai'i, and its complex environment ...more
In Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You, she explores ideas of connection and place using the example of her home, Hawai'i, and its complex environment ...more
Seven long poem-thoughts. Echoes and repetitions of hellos and goodbyes...
I especially love her description of the pidgin "da kine" or the word you use when you don't use the word...
"There are these things and they
are da kine to me. They are the tear.
The torn circle.
There are these things and they are
the circle malformed, pulled tight
in one place. These things are the
symbol of all not being right. They
are da kine for me.
Da kine for me is the moment when
things extend beyond you and me
and into the ...more
I especially love her description of the pidgin "da kine" or the word you use when you don't use the word...
"There are these things and they
are da kine to me. They are the tear.
The torn circle.
There are these things and they are
the circle malformed, pulled tight
in one place. These things are the
symbol of all not being right. They
are da kine for me.
Da kine for me is the moment when
things extend beyond you and me
and into the ...more
Oct 20, 2008
Lightsey
added it
This isn't my usual (ah, the public library)--and it's not poetry of a type that I strive to write--and, you know, sometimes this book drove me up the wall with its repetitions and its rather nun-like finger-wagging chaste little sentences. But one poem in here did poke a few holes in my tent. "Culture is when. . ." she begins each section (or "In culture,"), and then she goes on to describe a gymnastic formation, very line by line, prosaically. I'm still not sure what it amounts to, but I like
...more
Juliana Spahr writes the kind of poetry that I normally have a hard time liking. I love her poetry. Which is fitting, because the poetry is about the paradoxes. All the paradoxes. It's political and sort of theoretical and it asks you to grapple with language. It does it very well. And to make sure of that fifth star from me, she has titled this book with a pretty much perfect title. Thanks, Juliana!
Poetry should be allowed to play the same game as orchestral music. When there's a good part, and you know it's a good part, you should get to repeat it in ways that are meaningful to the poem and the listener. That's what Fuck You, Aloha does. And in ways that nudge more meaning onto the page. A true pleasure.
I hear here the same music (a lullaby?) that I hear in Gertrude Stein. I did enjoy very much the poem that circles "da kine" and the sticky mixed up mosh pit. But the other poems felt like notes written after an intimate writers yoga retreat that I didn't go to.
The emperor isn't wearing any clothes. I can't find any merit in this book. The structure, the form, and the sound aren't interesting. The subjects of the poems, whether sex or environmentalism, come across as cliche rather than compelling because they are completely vague and inhuman.
switching is my favorite contemporary poem of all time.
Poetry: An intriguing look at the interactions of writer reader, individual vs. community.
9.11 and Iraq War news obsession, pitted against lovely morning skin-against-skin and the sound of Hawaiian birds. Spare, simple, repetitive, important.
I love you, Juliana Spahr!
A mind-bending exploration of the possibilities and impossibilities inherent in language. The book builds, in a symphonic structure, from the concept of "da kine" to seek out the unspeakable.
Frank, direct, and thoughtful exploration of what it means to belong to a "we" and who has access to politically fraught spaces. This is docupoetry that's not meddled or unnecessarily opaque.
I was reading Juliana Spahr on the beach. It worked pretty well. A year prior, what was I reading on the beach? Seneca and Ryuichi Tamura. Gee, life is cool.
Instructional. Sensual. Flowing, gentle, direct sort of language and rhythm that mostly only Spahr achieves so easily these days.
I feel a lot a lot of warmth for this book. Wow! Way to use some language. I will read "Da kine" a hundred times.
Personal and all-encompassing at once. Broke my heart -- in a cleansing way.
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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 S ...more
Both Spahr's critical and scholarly studies, i.e., Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001), and her poetry have shown S ...more
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