Local Effects: Devin King Reviews Brian Teare's Doomstead Days

Except for those poems in Brian Teare’s first book—where he’s working out his upbringing with grad-student-y precision—and those poems in his fifth—where he’s writing through chronic illness and Agnes Martin—you can bet a Teare poem is gonna be about one of three things: reading, walking, or fucking. A poetry of encounters: page, world, partner.

WALKING

In a section of the prose-y Tall Flatsedge Notebook (Cyperus Eragrostis), from his fourth book, his best book, Companion Grasses:

Later that day at Chimney Rock we saw below the path

a cat sunning—“Is that a cat?” I asked—pricking its ears

it flew to clustered firs. Earlier we’d heard its who who

over the ridge, weird to hear owl and ocean both.

We were sitting. I was making nouns simpler  :

dirt      wind    cliff      stone   blue     blue     blue

blue     (each depth dependent);

The argument of this stanza will be familiar to a determined reader of Teare. Like an objectivist, he’s constantly trying to get his language, his poems, to follow his perception of the real. But even though he makes “nouns simpler,” his language is never as chiseled as Zukofsky’s and Bunting’s. Teare’s voice is closer to two of his many masters, Duncan and Blaser; the world is always read through eros rather than architecture; the sensual body rather than the geometric eye. Those simple nouns aren’t meant to stand still, but to be flexible: “I was making language / a stem to aspire to : // durable flexible able / to register shift quickly—// when shaken / to keep shape.” 

READING

Teare quotes and references constantly. You could spend a summer digging into his bibliographies, and you’d be the better for it. For some poets, quotes give the work a choral quality, but Teare—strangely, since they couldn’t be more different in disposition—reminds me of Pound. Quotation as pedagogy. Teare reads to learn and quotes to teach. In his book Pleasure, Teare is obsessed with the Gnostics. Obsessed! “Apocalypsis—L. to uncover, disclose” is the subtitle to his poem Eden Tiresias, for which each section is, well, I’ll just quote Teare’s note:

The titles of each section are phrases borrowed from the Gnostic hymn, “Thunder: Perfect Mind,” from James Robinson’s The Nag Hammadi Library (Harper & Row, 1988). The snake as a vehicle of transformation is where the Gnostics’ Eden and Ovid’s Tiresias overlap—here, I take a cue from the certain Gnostic cults who read the snake in the garden as a manifestation of Sophia, or Wisdom, the feminine divine.

I don’t know about you, but the kind of poetry I want is the kind where I have to think about the overlap between Eden and Tiresias. It’s a good poem too.

FUCKING

Here’s the beginning of the first section of Eden Tiresias:

No seed. Flat beneath my hand : 

bone. Pelvis a field, but no seed.

Because there was no punishment

like fucking, its whip burned

Adam and nothing after. Because

shine took flight like two parrots

so deep green they seemed black.

And though the field tilted and split

forth meant two ways, though

far into the garden meant I lost

love, even a god could honor that.

A little overwrought to get me going but then…Parrots! Hotsy-totsy. Early on, Teare hides a lot of his erotics within myth-y language like this. He’s become less mystical as he’s gone on. I have two theories as to why. Theory one: he’s had more sex. Theory two: an engagement with ecopoetics has forced on him a commitment to clarity and the real as a mode of witnessing. The first is laudable, the second is a bit of a shame. Doomstead Days, his sixth book, reads like a more staid Sebald updating Thoreau, with oil spills rather than the Holocaust and Industrialization. It is too long by half, and though the book is filled with fine poems, they’re endless. 

Here’s the beginning of Toxic Release Inventory (Essay on Man):

the quick hard quake slaps

the building as I unpack   ::

5.8, handfuls

 

of plaster scattered

like salt on the dark wood floors

I buy a new broom

 

to sweep    ::    my first day

in Philadelphia feels

like San Francisco

 

the tectonic earth

alert here too    ::    it’s my self-

same self feels newly

 

estranged the way books

I put in the same order

back on the shelves look

 

different    ::     I open

the new notebook on a walk

later that same day

Teare continues, describes the difference between his interactions with nature in Philadelphia to memories of the Bay. There’s a deer in a cemetery that turns into a plastic bag. Thistles along the sidewalk next to oil runoff. Pedestrians cursing a lady hurting her dog whom she’s forced to walk barefoot on a snowstorm’s rock salt. It’s a good poem, Teare knows how to write good poems. But: “I walk out // into late empire / as if walking could conjure / a calming charm, charm // from carmen, Latin / for song” is just an imitation of earlier obsessions. Walking never got Teare (or Sebald or Thoreau) anywhere anyways.

Teare’s form belies this problem too. Renga! The haiku stanzas (count ’em!) force the fifty page (!) poem, unfortunately, into the renga’s continuous stasis without the form’s normal pleasure: the slow revelation of overlaid material. This may be intentional—to make us really sit in the horror of our moment, of our incapacity to think with and about the world. But it’s imagination that got us into this problem, and it’s imagination that’ll get us out.

And so, the best parts of Doomstead Days hark back to the imagination and vision of Teare’s earlier work. Here’s the end of Clear Water Renga: 

            I look   ::   an elk steps

forward from the sedge   ::   it steps

into the image

 

of an elk who steps forward

from the sedge & bends its head

 

 

to drink from my mouth   ::

& bends & from my mouth drinks

clear water   ::

After twenty pages of an edited journal, this revelation shocks. There’s not enough of it. In an interview with Lynn Keller, Teare spells out why:

….every kind of being—trees, birds, mammals—requires its own form of looking with its own form of language. I think of that as relational and also empirical and scientific. I am aware, even though my looking is not based on killing, that my doing this work is based on a long history of slaughter and specimen collection. So, looking and naming is a species of attention, and it can be a respectful nonviolent one, but it’s always enmeshed in a long history of violence.

Teare knows that any capable reading of the world—turning an elk into an image of an elk—will always force the writer into a kind of violence. It’s foolish and ridiculous and presumptuous when Thoreau reads The Iliad into a battle of red and black ants. It’s unfashionable, but given the choice between The Iliad and a scientist or theorist writing about ants, I’ll choose The Iliad every single time. When Teare interleaves Thoreau, the ecological philosopher Michael Marder, and language from a website about genetically modified trees, he’s asking us to make a choice between different types of violence done to the natural world. I’ll say this: I’ve already picked up his book of poems. Later, in the title poem, Teare describes my essential frustration with the book:

I stand on the bank

& I know I’m not

supposed to posit

an analogy

between the river

& my body but

courtesy of this dam

the city siphons

its water into me

another human

intervention

diverting its path

each of my cells

a little prison

the river sits in

so we’re related

on a molecular

level so intimate

I think I can say

it wants speed

& movement free

enough to jump

the strained relation

to human needs

It’s that “I know I’m not supposed to” that drives me bonkers. Writing driven by seminars. Brian Teare’s poetry is kind. His poetry is rightly worried about doing harm, and in its lulling somatic attention it does nothing but witness with even keel. Doomstead Days writes more deeply into climate change than any of Teare’s other books. But, like too many authors, he refuses his own vision, and just notices the local effects.