Brian Teare, Doomstead Days

there & I went

on past graves

holding settlers

& Civil War vets

until the pines

seemed to charm

me out of myself

to stop & stand

& think touching

their live hard sides

of Plato’s vision

the human not

an earthly but

a heavenly plant

the soul housed

in the head (“Convince me you have a seed there”)

The sixth full-length poetry title from Philadelphia poet, editor and publisher Brian Teare is the expansive and ambitious Doomstead Days (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2019), following his earlier poetry titles The Room Where I Was Born (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), Sight Map (University of California Press, 2009), Pleasure (Ahsahta Press, 2010), Companion Grasses (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2013) [see my review of such here] and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015) [see my review of such here]. Doomstead Days is constructed in eight extended poem-sections—“Clear Water Renga,” “Headlands Quadrats,” “Toxics Release Inventory,” “Sitting River Meditation,” “Convince me you have a seed there,” “Olivine, Quartz, Granite, Carnelian,” “Sitting Isohydric Mediation” and “Doomstead Days”—the second of which appeared last year as a self-contained chapbook through Brooklyn publisher DoubleCross Press [see my review of such here]. As I wrote at the time, Headlands Quadrats is “a small chapbook of short lyrics furthering his own engagement with eco-poetics, and produced ‘In Memoriam’ for the late San Francisco poet Joanne Kyger (1934-2017).” The afterword to the chapbook, which doesn’t appear in this trade collection, writes:

The quadrat is a unit of measurement used in ecological studies of botanical species. It is a square (made of a durable material) placed over a site to aid in the controlled collection of data. Within the square, species are counted, rain is measured, temperatures are taken, and variations are often tracked over weeks, months, and years. Its inventor, the botanical ecologist Frederic Clements, first advocated for its usage in his 1905 textbook, Research Methods in Ecology, describing it as “merely a square area of varying accurate information.” But as the critic Joshua Schuster notes in his 2015 study The Ecology of Modernism, the quadrat eradicated the values with which Romanticism had laden nature. With the quadrat, “anything could be ecological, and ecological change was an open-ended process without a script that favored morally freighted outcomes.”

Doomstead Days is a book very much engaged in the large canvas, experimenting with short lines and short sections across expansive sequences, collected here as a sequence of poem-sections. Teare’s experiments in rhythm and meaning coincide with how the poems flow across the page, whether poems constructed using left-margined short, accumulating lines, a sequence of two or three line stanzas that flow back and forth across the page, or a sequence of three couplet stanza-squares, one to a page. “[S]ometime the image,” he writes, in the poem “Toxics Release Inventory,” a poem subtitled “(Essay on Man)”: “seems like the first frames of film / before the horror [.]”

One of the more active and engaged eco-poets in the United States that I’m aware of [he had an article on such recently posted via Harriet, the blog], Teare’s Doomstead Days is concerned with precisely what the author—and a number of his books—have been concerned with for some time: the ongoing planet-wide ecological disaster, entirely caused by human activity. Given his prior collection, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, explored both the onset of a chronic illness into the work of abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004), Doomstead Days would seem an extension of his explorations in the book prior to that, his Companion Grasses. As he writes near the opening of “Clear Water Renga”: “I watched white boats go // trailing bright yellow booms, saw / how the real absorbs a fact [.]” Doomstead Days records loss, articulates shifts in ecology and meditates on potential human responses, lack of response and what the shift means, both as loss itself and the encroaching possible termination of human life as we know it. His is a lyric propelled by research, experience and thinking, one line accumulating up against the next. There is something in Teare’s work, also, reminiscent of the work of Vancouver poet Stephen Collis—writing extended, meditative lyrics of accumulated short lines on and around the effects of the Anthropocene—blended with the poem-essay of poets such as Erín Moure, Elisa Gabbert or Phil Hall, utilizing the poem as their best “thinking form.”

each patterned aspect

of habitat lost

first to dams & mills

& industry runoff

& plots of flax

Germantown planted

for paper &cloth

made with water’s power

&; hauled out of

the precipitous gorge

up rough narrow roads

south to the city port

before adelgids

took the crucial dark

from under hemlocks (“Doomstead Days”)

Ongoing notes: early June, 2018

The spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair is coming up quickly! Might we see you there?

 

The summer has begun, and I’m in recovery from a week+ without laptop, a couple of days without air conditioning, nearly a week without the jogging stroller, and a few days Christine was in Houston, Texas for a conference, leaving me solo with the kids (yes, this was all concurrent). At least we had the car, which meant we ran off to Brewer Park for the splash pad.

 

And: I’m not really seeing chapbooks by Canadian publishers lately. I know they exist, and wish to review more. Please?

 

Brooklyn NY: I’m rather charmed by this small dos-a-dos chapbook by Anna Gurton-Wachter and MC Hyland (co-publishers of Brooklyn’s DoubleCross Press), produced “to celebrate Anna and MC’s reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church on May 7, 2018,” an edition produced as “an offering to the immaterial economies that flourish in poets’ communities, and may be exchanged for a range of non-monetary gestures, intentions, or objects.” For example, the sheet included in my copy, writing “I, ____________, hereby promise that, in exchange for this book, I will perform the following action(s):,” that include “Call a friend I haven’t spoken to in a while,” “Bring a non-poet to a poetry reading” and “”Steal someone away from their job for a mini-adventure [.]”

 

when I go to the laundromat

 

near my apartment

 

there are always

 

white women there

 

yelling at the

 

Arab-American teenagers

 

who run the place

 

for their dad

 

while the women yell

 

they look at me

 

as if to say

 

can you believe

 

I have to put up with this?

 

he locked the door

 

with my clothes inside!

 

they have a lot of anger

 

and don’t know where

 

to put it (Anna Gurton-Wachter)

 

The hand-sewn chapbook is made up of Gurton-Wachter’s “The Laundry Poem” and Hyland’s “5 Essays on the Lyric.” Gurton-Wachter’s poem exists as a continuous, single-stanza, accumulating thoughts, commentary and other information, almost distractedly so, potentially composed during a session at a public laundromat. I like the way it accumulates, picking up any stray thought or action, falling into the thread of the laundromat poem, managing to cohere despite the multiple directions. While I’ve been learning more of Gurton-Wachter’s work over the past year or so (she had a chapbook through above/ground press not that long ago, also), I’m far less familiar with the work of Brooklyn poet and publisher MC Hyland, the author of a small handful of poetry chapbooks, as well as the trade collection Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press, 2010). Hyland’s half of the collection is made up of five prose poems, effectively on “the lyric,” sitting somewhere between, say, the tight lyric prose of Anne Carson’s Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992), and the looser, almost meandering threads of Gurton-Wachter’s “The Laundry Poem.” I’m intrigued by her work, and might have to seek out some more, to get a better sense of what she’s doing. I also get the sense that these five prose poems exist somewhere at the beginning of a larger project, still feeling their way out and through an idea, albeit one that does have the potential to astound, as her “Essay on the Screen” opens:

 

I felt death’s pull through screens for many years. What magic allows each gone face to travel at astonishing speed through the air to reach our eyes? Yet it was not until writing these essays that I first perceived the lyric’s content is also death. That language is the wall that dead-stops each ghost fleeting through a light beam overhead. As the particulate matter of cigarette smoke traces each window’s diagonal illumination in old photographs, light travels forever until arrested by some object. Every movement of the story passes through the room. I want to know what travels toward language without reaching it. I want to live within the time of that movement. So this book’s long gestation: to, as Dickinson says, dwell in Possibility/ A fairer House than Prose.

 

Brooklyn NY: From DoubleCross Press comes Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s Headlands Quadrats (2018), a small chapbook of short lyrics furthering his own engagement with eco-poetics, and produced “In Memoriam” for the late San Francisco poet Joanne Kyger (1934-2017). As Teare [see my review of his latest book here] writes in his afterword:

 

The quadrat is a unit of measurement used in ecological studies of botanical species. It is a square (made of a durable material) placed over a site to aid in the controlled collection of data. Within the square, species are counted, rain is measured, temperatures are taken, and variations are often tracked over weeks, months, and years. Its inventor, the botanical ecologist Frederic Clements, first advocated for its usage in his 1905 textbook, Research Methods in Ecology, describing it as “merely a square area of varying accurate information.” But as the critic Joshua Schuster notes in his2015 study The Ecology of Modernism, the quadrat eradicated the values with which Romanticism had laden nature. With the quadrat, “anything could be ecological, and ecological change was an open-ended process without a script that favored morally freighted outcomes.”

 

I’m fascinated by the straightforwardness of the form, allowing for a fine subtlety in these twenty-one short poems. Is this a self-contained unit, or part of something larger?

 

faster than predators

on the trail I encounter

 

for the first time a coyote

exactly the color of July

in these hills unhurried

it turns to me full of bones

 

Brian Teare, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven

Not to know, but to go on.

white underpainting

floats up through               milky as wringing

darker colors it carries       just-washed glue

                                          brushes over the sink

            as water floats paper

            before saturation    waiting is the color

            reveals its inks       of what draws nearer

                                          without touching

The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015) is Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s fifth trade poetry collection, after The Room Where I Was Born (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), Sight Map (University of California Press, 2009), Pleasure (Ahsahta Press, 2010) and Companion Grasses (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2013) [see my review of such here]. As Teare describes in the preface to the collection, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven is a poetry book constructed from the onset of his own illness, which prompted his discovery of the infamously reclusive American (born and raised in Canada) abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004). He writes: “When in 2009 I began writing the poems in this book, I knew nothing about Agnes Martin. Early during the onset of a chronic illness, I opened her Writings and found ‘The Untroubled Mind’ to be a comfort. But as the illness deepened I began to ‘seek her out’ when I could through research in museums, libraries, and archives. These poems set my life in relation to my long encounter with her painting, drawing, writing, and the metaphysics she argued was implicit in them.” Known for her use of lines, grids and fields of subtle colour, Teare’s poems employ an intriguing structural influence from Martin’s artwork, stretching her colour field into a series of texts stretched across the field of the page (and the book is 8 inches by 9.5 inches, in case you are wondering the size and scope of his physical field). Certainly, Teare’s use of empty space and the length and breadth of the page isn’t new, as evidenced from his Companion Grasses, but the influence of the grid structure from Agnes Martin allow for a curious exploration of how words are shaped, and even read, playing off each other in nearly-overlapping lines. In a recent interview with Christy Davids on the new collection, posted at The Conversant, he writes:

In both Sight Map (University of California 2009) and Companion Grasses (Omnidawn 2013), I was working off of my own kind of personal reading of Olson’s “Projective Verse”—I think that’s not surprising for anyone who knows my work—and in Companion Grasses that was particularly true in terms of thinking about prosody, and also thinking about poems on the page as being a scoring of an encounter with a place or a species. Because so many of those poems—all of them, really—were written on foot, were written in the field, I was really trying to use prosody and typography as a musical registration of an encounter, and combining Olson’s belief in the page as a kind of musical score with the ways in which breath and ear change in relation to whatever you’re in relation to. I was interested in the phenomenology of prosody—that it could, theoretically, capture or register relation differently between each encounter with place, with species, with a particular day or meteorology or whatever.

As well, unlike Martin’s reluctance, if not refusal, to release biographical detail, Teare’s The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven directly engages his illness, as he writes to open the poem “We are not the instruments of fate nor are we the pawns of fate we are the materials of fate.”: “I leave each doctor’s appointment ashamed to be ill // the philosopher argues the verbal expression of pain // undiagnosed my body so illegible no one can read it // replaces pain without offering a description of it [.]” As part of his author biography at the Ahsahta Press website, Teare offers:

I hate that a biography like this largely leaves out the formative details: a difficult family life, the disaster of coming out in the rural South, my first love dead of AIDS, falling in love again in California, years of chronic illness, my discovery of meditation. True to my early schooling in Confessional writing, these narratives are in my books. But more importantly, my books understand autobiography to be as much intellectual as physical, as aesthetic as it is emotional. I’ve striven to fashion a poetics that can inscribe experience on all the registers on which it occurs: high to low, abstract to literal, philosophy to pornography. Similarly, I’ve striven to render the poem’s form flexible and sensitive enough to register the myriad shifts native to experience. Inspired in equal parts by Charles Olson’s essay on projective verse and my training as a letterpress and digital typesetter, I’ve recently come to believe that design is both proprioceptive and plastic, capable of carrying embodied knowledge and visual information that exceeds the semantic. The poems of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven are the direct expression of this belief.

The poems in The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven are structured in three untitled sections, with poems floating through direct and indirect reference and response to, and influence from, Martin’s artwork and writing, as well as his own ongoing illness. As the poem “Defeated you will stand at the door of your house and welcome the unknown.” begins: “chronic nausea / chronic non // narrative even / the public health /                                  eventually the surface gets interesting [.]” The introduction of a further abstraction into his work is quite compelling, compared to the more direct lines and lineages of Companion Grasses, and allow for a far more visual and meditative flow, expanding his repertoire to extend into a deeper use of the fragment, collision and critical intelligence. His utterly fascinating author statement on the Ahsahta Press website (I find myself quite taken with the clarity and ease of his prose) ends with:

I worked on the poems for six years. Keenly aware that Martin herself avoided autobiographical narrative in her writing and representation in her visual work, I couldn’t help but think that chronic illness seemed the perfect fusion of autobiography and formal abstraction. Pain was largely wordless, but it was also my life—a somatic texture in which illness became a chronic duration and duration (time) became texture (form). And things anyways happened. Over those six years, I got access to public health care and exhausted my treatment options without getting a diagnosis, I started seeing a Chinese medical practitioner for herbs and acupuncture (which helped), and I also started a meditation practice (which helped). But I remained ill. And I kept returning to Martin and her work, even going to museums, libraries, and archives to get “closer” to her, the way young curators and artists had once sought her out in the desert of New Mexico.

Eventually I realized I’d been looking for someone or something to help me change my life. I’d been seeking healers and teachers, some of whom did in fact help, some of whom didn’t. Eventually I ended up in the hospital (again) and realized help might not be coming, at least not in the form I’d wanted. Lying on the gurney, I asked: What’s the right attitude toward suffering? An answer came: It neither lies to you nor makes you suffer more. And more than my own suffering I heard the man in the room next to me weeping as a doctor drained his wound. When I stopped wanting a teacher, when I stopped waiting for an end to suffering, my life did change. I did in fact suffer less. When I gave up the illusion of salvation, I found a modicum of rest and some room for the experience of joy. When I stopped needing Martin to help me, I could finally look at her work in companionable awe.

Julie Joosten, Light Light

Quanta of light move in waves over the sea, move the sea to the horizon.

Purple is a horizon extending the sky.

It seems not an earth-sky.

To think of attention as moving without trying to be moved to shadow, hepatica, sea, to purple or sky.

Rain falls on the sea and forms a night field of circles glittering idly in moonlight then dissolves into sea surface.

To give attention to what does not exist.

Here, there. (“Wind”)

Toronto poet and American expatriate Julie Joosten’s first trade poetry collection is Light Light (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), a collection of dense lyrics blended with the attention of essays. Joosten writes on spaces lost, forgotten and otherwise misplaced, or even deliberately obscured. “[S]ecrecy another form / of resistance,” she writes, in the poem “If light stabilizing / If to receive a bee.” The sixteen extended lyrics that make up Light Light sketch out a series of meditative studies on and around small moments, as she writes to open the poem “Ghost Species”: “Henry David Thoreau would describe the seasons, listing // the flowering times of wildflowers around Concord Massachusetts / (1851-1858). // It continues today: the data, the occasional field, the wildflowers, / declining.” The poems in Light Light are small studies in horticulture, sketches of ecologies and exploration of botany, and how any gaze changes both watcher and precisely what is being seen and studied. To describe her poems as “eco-poetry” would do the book a disservice, through reducing a more complex set of structures, ideas and perspectives to something far less. And yet, quite simply, her poems speak to a perspective that becomes irrevocably lost, once we lose sight of what is just outside our window, and the relationships we have with nature. By describing and discussing the world and natural histories, she becomes one of the natural world’s strongest advocates.

It began a field, grew valley. Light tipped grass scatters from pollen. Tree atoms gather in splints, divide to aster and cress.

Become a room of weather.

The sun coppers the ground. Its angles bring several seasons at once.

The accident of petals quarrying a winter field.

In a valley of wild hive, orange blossom, and honey the sun is silent. Is carried on the backs of horses.

Ferried against the wind.

By sympathy or suggestion I remember what I am. Walking beside a river humming with the dark. (“Once Sun”)

She certainly isn’t the first to work through ecological concerns and/or natural histories in poetry, and some recent examples of works that share Joosten’s ecological attentiveness, striking language and the book-length unit of composition include Robin Clarke’s Lines the Quarry (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2013), Brian Teare’s Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013), Ken Belford’s Internodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) and Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s collaborative re-issue Sybil Unrest (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2013). There have been poetic conversations going back decades about the pastoral, with more recent strains of eco-poetry and other ecological concerns added to the mix, which can’t help but fall deeper into the writing with every passing day. Light Light is a striking, subtle collection of sharp lyric movements that ebb and flow like water, alternately rushing, punching and as soothing as same. Not just light, but lighter, light or lighter than.

The green of the field felt so unforgettable winter could never again exist.

I’d have said in the absence of colour there thought was. The hills bringing the mind not to itself but to the idea of green. To the feeling of sunlight as expectation. The future opened from a circle of snow.

Stone, maple, daffodil, tadpole, skein.

When the valley came to be a valley I was watching winter grasses brown against the sky then green then suddenly in a startling smallness bud to pink. But it wasn’t as peaceful as that. Mud thickened the ground, made it grabby.

It gripped a finch, spit up feathers to write with, took an oak, four kittens, a thunderstorm, and a pair of woolen gloves. Grabbed a man and a woman whole, left imprints like swollen snow angels.

In a place of winter a field emerged, carving beauty’s furrows, entrenching muck-spattered beauty into the valley.

I was to guard the valley, name it, speak to it by name. (“Once Sun”)