Juliana Spahr
I had a poem about the town formerly known as Chesire, Ohio, a town that barely exists anymore as American Electric Power bought most of the houses after residents complained about health issues from the coal burning. I was interested in the idea of ownership: why can an electrical company own the land and pollute it? I had built this poem because I was asked by Angie Sijun Lou to write something for Dark Soil, a collection of works inspired by Karen Tei Yamashita. I called that poem “38.9448013°N, -82.111255°W.” Eventually the title was changed to “The Blue Plume.”
To write this poem, I had driven to the crossroads that was once the town with a friend. We had a picnic by the river and drove around the Gavin Power plant. I took a series of notes on the plants and birds that I saw near the river that day. When I got home, I watched some video. I read some scholarly articles on coal and electricity. I googled, in short.
But the poem that I wrote was lopsided. It was more a celebration of the river than a poem about Chesire. So then I decided to rewrite the entire poem. I took out the line and section breaks. I began moving things around. Around this time the poem became about attempting to write a poem about the river. I had printed out John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” and taped it by my desk. I began asking ChatGPT again and again to rewrite my poem as if it was by Ashbery. I took very little from the ChatGPT version but I am sure that the poem would look very different without pushing against the nonsense it generated. Then I put the poem into second person. And then had that person also use the second person. And then at some point, I just called it quits. I renamed it “Bluebird-Ghost.”
*
bio note: “38.9448013°N, -82.111255°W” was first published as “The Blue Plume” in Dark Soil: Fictions and Mythographies. Ed. Angie Sijun Lou, Coffee House Press, 2024. “Bluebird-Ghost” was recently published in Ars Poetica, Wesleyan U P, 2025.
< DRAFT 1 >
first section of “38.9448013°N, -82.111255°W”
These are these ways to hold
the river in one’s heart.
Drive south is one way to it.
Drive south and leave the flatlands behind. d
Briefly follow the Scioto
with its unusually large flood plain
spread like a skirt, along its sides.
Drive through valley bottoms smooth,
through flood deposits rich,
through a valley so wide, so deep.
Drive through farm lands
with fields full of grasses and wheats.
A place so full of a richness
that it is beyond description.
Then turn to the east,
leave the Scioto behind
and drive into the hills covered
with sugar maples, beech,
northern red oak
grown to a largeness
with the help of ferns and fungi,
a largeness that shelters
both the bobcat and the woodrat.
Slide past the churches and cemeteries
of prior generations carved into hills,
perched on the sides of the road.
Drive around and over
to arrive at this grassy lot,
at this unmarked grave of a town,
that rests beside this serpentine
turn of the river.
A path that resembles
the one taken each fall
by the warblers,
those golden-winged,
those chestnut-sided,
and those yellow-rumped.
That resembles the path of the north winds too,
the ones that the saw-whet owls
use in late November,
the main southward passage of the bobolinks too.
< final version >
excerpt from “Bluebird-Ghost”
You
add a siren off in the distance, pause
dramatically to list the names of
everyone you once kissed beneath
its bridges in the darkness that
harmonizes with fecundity. And
then you, never one to hold
back, insist on putting just one
more bird on it if only because
you want to dwell with the
words golden-winged, chestnut-
sided, and yellow-rumped. That
feeling of possibility, that you can
hold both of the river’s climates, the
subtropical one and the continental
one, in a few lines. That conviction that
all it takes is to find a few words in
the dictionary, inventory a dangerous
lexicon of allure, and allow a fleeting
encore to come out the other side.
That belief that a poem can meaningfully
insist that someone take a moment and
just bother with beauty, that someone
will understand a poem to be an
intricate sonnet of interconnected streams,
that someone will claim there
is a political beauty in a few important-
sounding words arranged in rough
syllable counts. By someone you
mean a clown, curly red hair, exaggerated
red and white lips, something funny
going on with the eyebrows, the
sort that suddenly shows up in this
locale, celebrating the intrinsic beauty
of this space with yet another poem
about lost opportunity and bad timing
in relationships. By clown you mean
yourself just moments ago. All of
that gone. You can’t say it that way
anymore. No one can. A dog is
barking as you turn your head to
see the coal barge floating down the
river’s curves, heading to the power
plant off in the near distance,
ominous beneath the blue plume of
smoke produced by its smokestacks.
Horace makes fun of those who
write of babbling brooks. And he did not
even know about coal barges and
capitalism, much less the
late capitalism that blossomed while
you sat around thinking about
the cuteness of a bobcat and a
woodrat, two enemies, sheltering
under a very large sugar maple in
an image of an impossible pax
Americana. If only for the sake
of self-analysis you think something
ought to be written about the cooling
towers, the 765-kilovolt transmission
lines, the smokestacks, the blue
plume that regularly dusts the tubal
inflorescences of the bee balm, the
stubby blue flowers of the wild
indigo, the polished, vibrant red,
deeply five-lobed racemes of the
pinnately cut and lobed wood poppy,
and the dark green and the black of
the white wood aster.