Pleasure

Brian Teare

 

 

An author’s statement

 

I received these questions from Lance Phillips when he was putting together his blog “Here Comes Everybody.” At the time, I wasn’t able to answer them.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

A: Hopkins’ “The Windhover,” which I first encountered in college. I’d read and liked a lot of poems before that, but it was the first experience of reading that was like my experience of love: so intense I was afraid to read the poem again. I remember the prosody and alliteration were so syncopated it was as if my head were the clapper inside of a churchbell; I held on to the desk; I was shaken with music. As with love at first sight, the poem seemed totally and strangely familiar and yet it took me a very long time to understand my experience of it—likely because of the swoon it induced. After a while the poem “untwisted” like a braid as I began to see how its syntax was linked logically to the alliterative prosody. It was my first experience of having to read initially with my ear as opposed to my inner eye or logical mind, both of which eventually caught up with the ear-sense the poem makes. It was also my first experience of reading “experimental” religious poetry—sensual and devotional, unorthodox and orthodox at once. I have been in love ever since.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

A: I’m not sure I read anything that would surprise my peers and colleagues, partly because I don’t read much that could be considered “non-literary.” Typically I read a lot of criticism and nonfiction about psychoanalysis, theology and religion, feminist and queer issues, natural history and environmental issues. I have a deep passion for the writings and life of Virginia Woolf and, to a lesser extent, the Bloomsbury circle, especially Dora Carrington and Vita Sackville-West, whose garden writings I quite treasure. I have a real love of photography and an interest in the history of photography. For a collaborative project on spiritualism and spirit photography, I’ve been reading a lot of ghost stories, occult philosophy, nineteenth-century philosophy and history and transcripts of séances. It’s reading that connects me back to childhood, when I fell in love with Kathryn Tucker Windham’s book, 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. I have loved ghost stories—and scary movies—ever since.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

A: Like a lot of poets, I’m not really a “systems person,” but the thought and writings of certain philosophers have influenced my own writing practice since the beginning. Thus perhaps it would be more accurate to say that philosophers have been more important to my writing than philosophy qua philosophy: Barthes, Irigaray, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Buber, Butler, Derrida, Bachelard, Gates, Foucault, Cixous, Cavell, and Kristeva, for example. Each of them has written at least one book—if not several—that I’ve underlined and dog-eared and argued with and stolen from; poems have begun in the margins of Camera Lucida and On Certainty and Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. In many cases—Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, Irigaray’s To Be Two, Buber’s I and Thou, Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, Butler’s Psychic Life of Power, Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy and Kristeva’s Black Sun—I have returned to the books again and again because they have been both burr and spur. Hooked deeply in the fabric of my thinking and writing, these books have acted almost as irritants that cause me to return to the site where they’ve attached themselves to my mind. Thus they inspire me, spur me on to revisitation, reconsideration, and rereading. It’s in this way that a lot of writing gets done.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

A: The non-Anglo American writers I admire would constitute a long list, so I’ll choose three elder poets whose writings have been and remain especially influential: Nathaniel Mackey, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Cecilia Vicuña. I admire that their bodies of work explicitly engage three very different spiritual traditions—African, Buddhist, and, in Vicuña’s case, something resembling pagan or animist beliefs—via aesthetic practices that have arisen from and been given shape by those very traditions. And yet their work re-figures their traditions, finding new forms and new figurations that both extend and revise the tradition. In Mackey’s case, his writing takes the form of an “endless” serial improvisation on the intertwined themes of creation, death and afterlife; Berssenbrugge’s poems investigate consciousness and relationship via meditative states, collage and intertextuality; Vicuña’s poems, chants and quipu-based precarios evoke ritual and prayer alike, reconnecting and tying the reader/viewer to breath, element and earth. I admire, too, how there’s an important politics to the spirituality of each of these poets: while Mackey explores diasporic religions, Berssenbrugge evokes the fragility of gendered subjectivity, and Vicuña foregrounds our indebtedness to earth.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

A: I do. Every day I read at least one poem of my own choosing—as opposed to the poems I have to read. It seems odd to me that poetry wouldn’t be important to my writing, but perhaps that’s because one of my assumptions concerning poetry is that—with apologies to Buber—All real writing is meeting. The poetry I love meets in conversation: with another person or poem, with itself, with its author, with the phenomenal world, with the poem’s cultural context, its generic history, its national and international histories, and/or its contemporary manifestations. Even language at its most private and subjective is bound in important ways to its larger contexts, and sometimes the thrill of poetry—as with Dickinson’s or Celan’s—is in the rub of a lyrical idiolect against context. One the one hand, Emily Dickinson’s personal vocabulary emerges from a heretical refutation of orthodox 19th-Century Protestantism; I learn a lot from watching her invent a language, shorn of religious dogma, in which consciousness comes to terms with mortality. On the other, the multi-lingual Paul Celan deliberately chose German as a stage for his writing and thinking through historical trauma—largely because German was fatally tainted for him by the atrocities of the Shoah. Celan’s habitual recourse to the vocative makes his choice all the more instructive given the poems’ desire for a conversation with “you”: despite the barbarities inherent for him the very language in which his poems are written. His work remains for me a model of ethics: the need for “real meeting” persists in spite of history, and sometimes poetry provides the only safe meeting place.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

A: Pleasure’s central myth is Eden, but I’ve never been able to read Paradise Lost past the third page. I can’t quite explain why other than a kind of aural discomfort that makes me tune out after a while—something about the syntax and prosody irks rather than excites me. There are a few important male canonical poets to whose major work I’m largely unsympathetic, a fact about which I used to feel a lot of shame, actually. Pound’s Cantos is one. Almost all of Stevens is two. And Milton’s Paradise Lost makes three. I keep revisiting their work in the hopes that I’ve changed with age; from time to time I’ll read relevant criticism in the hopes that the right critic will grant me new access. So far neither has happened.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A: It’s hard not to be precious in answering this, but I might say something like this: “It’s a recipe. Each line is a new ingredient. A poem helps you make new thoughts and feelings. And when you’re done listening to or reading a poem, the world looks and feels different. It’s a recipe for change.”

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

A: I’m not a “systems person,” remember? In fact, I probably believe that to systematize poetry would kill it—fast—the way systematic corporate greed is killing the Gulf of Mexico as I type this. But given that the possible number of roles the poet can fulfill in our culture is limited only by our conception of poetry itself, I’m always in favor of the poet acting in the role of the citizen, and vice versa. To do so radically changes poetry and citizenship in ways that expand and enlarge the possibilities of both art and society. I take Brenda Hillman as but one recent admirable example of this: her anti-war activism with Code Pink has allowed her a different relationship to poetry and thus to her audience. I honor the courage and resourcefulness that results in the willingness to combine our different roles, especially because the cultural capital of so much poetry today still depends upon the irrelevant distinction between “high” and “low” in their various guises. Practical Water emerges out of a refutation of the false binary of art and activism and I do think the world is better for it.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

A: Lemon **Jack / Chiseled **sculpture / I **-land / Of **-ten / Form **W-9