Will There Be Singing

 excerpts from “Will There Be Singing”

By Juliana Spahr 

During these days,

I would wake up and my head would hurt 

and then I would realize that in my dream 

I had said to myself that I should write some poetry.

But my dreams never explained to me why. 

Or how.

How to sing in these dark times?

It is true that I have been with poetry for a long time. 

Since I was a teenager.

Those loves of many years and our bodies changing together.

And yet also the deepening of this love. Despite.

That day with the breeze in the bar

And we said together, there needs to be some pleasure in the world. 

And next, poetry is the what is left of life.

And we pledged, more singing.

And we referenced by saying,

In the dark times. Will there also be singing? 

Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.

 

Read the full poem on Poets.org

 

About the Poem

 

Juliana Spahr said, “I was trying to figure out what it was that I valued about poetry. I have had trouble the last few years remembering that I liked poetry because I had been for so long confusing the sociality around poetry for the poem. And I had spent the last few years writing a lot about poetry and its role in soft diplomacy and the genre seemed more and more suspect to me. So I decided to write an ars poetica, a meditation on poetry, to see if I still liked poetry or not.”

 

About the Poet

 

Juliana Spahr is the author of Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (Harvard University Press, 2018). She teaches literature and lives in Berkeley, California.