Pleasure

Brian Teare

 

An extended bio from the author

 

 

The last of six children, I was born and baptized Catholic in Athens, Georgia and grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The King James Bible was the first poetry whose prosody I knew by ear, an ear in which Southern speech gave the vowel pride of place—even now the South remains to me as much a way of hearing my way through language as the physical and cultural place where I grew up. “…Where,/ if the world is flesh, to place the limit// between your body/ and the world?” I ask in the final poem of Pleasure, a question I lift from Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible. I could as easily ask where, if my life is language, to place the limit between the poem and my life, if only because the limit between them is so protean, and my ideas about and feelings concerning that limit likewise changeable.

On the one hand, my work often takes autobiography as its ground. My early education as a writer at the University of Alabama and Indiana University was mentored by poets for whom the Confessionals were a nearly all-absorbing pantheon, thus the first tasks I was set were to master the verse and free verse lines and the canon handed down to me: Lowell, Bishop, Jarrell, Berryman, Roethke, Hugo, Plath and Sexton. On the other, my work has increasingly insisted on a dialectic between autobiography and the languaged page. My self-education as a writer has led me away from a post-Confesssional practice toward the alternative traditions that emerged from the San Francisco Bay Area, where, as luck would have it, I now live. Thus Pleasure’s permissions were given variously: by Robert Duncan’s The Opening of the Field, Kathleen Fraser’s il cuore : the heart, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Brenda Hillman’s Loose Sugar, Michael Palmer’s Notes for Echo Lake, Aaron Shurin’s A Door and John Weiners’ Ace of Pentacles.

Pleasure’s occasion, however, is autobiographical: in 1999, during my second year of graduate school at Indiana University, my lover Jared died of AIDS after eight months of ARCs. Despite all I had read about the AIDS crisis, despite having volunteered at an AIDS free clinic, I was unprepared to witness the suffering he endured as he died. Almost as unsettling to me, however, was the concurrent realization that, when as a young gay man I left the Catholic Church, I had also unwittingly left behind a way of understanding suffering and death. A deep disorientation followed the moment Jared’s casket lowered into the ground, as though I’d buried my only map and lost my compass.

One orientation point: Pleasure’s occasion, however autobiographical, was hardly singular. I was born in 1974, midway between Stonewall and the advent of AIDS; I came out in 1992, after AZT but before protease inhibitors, a time when there was little hope for survival. Hundreds of thousands before me had witnessed the onset of AIDS in their communities; they had mourned the extravagant numbers of the dead; they had prepared to die and/or to live without their loved ones and/or to live with a chronic illness; they had raged against pathologizing public rhetoric, inadequate public health care, education and policy as well as political apathy; they had also made a lot of art and documented what amounted to an irrevocable change in the queer body politic. Their writing and testimony showed me a way out of silence.

Two more orientation points: Hans Jonas’ The Gnostic Religion and James M. Robinson’s edition of The Nag Hammadi Library, texts I found by way of Brenda Hillman’s Death Tractates and Fanny Howe’s essays on theology and the writing life. A split between matter and spirit, a vicious male demiurge at war with female wisdom, humankind’s fundamental alienation from heaven: in light of aids, Gnosticism made sense. And if the bereft emerges suddenly from mourning like the estranged Gnostic answering the call to awaken, I came to in 2001. I found myself living in Palo Alto, California, during a drought so severe it necessitated rolling brown-outs to stave off an energy crisis. Northern California is a place subject to flooding and wildfire in addition to earthquakes and drought, and my own newly Gnostic consciousness seemed to rhyme with an alien place so prone to emergency.

A final orientation point: Pleasure is technically my second book, the first book I wrote during my self-education. Informed by the post-Confessional narratives of The Room Where I Was Born and looking forward to the lyric postmodernism of Sight Map, it was a transitional book, a fact that suited its subject matter, which did not seem to me to be aids so much as elegy and its relationship to epochal and cosmological change. If my sense of elegy’s formal and thematic possibilities altered between the book’s first and second halves, this aesthetic transformation depended on my turn from myth and trauma toward the phenomenological, God-haunted afterworld of grief—and reading. Deeply intertextual, the book composes itself in relation to the tradition of pastoral elegy even as it calls upon other frameworks: the literature of aids, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and theology. Without recourse to heaven, Pleasure tries to understand death via other means.