The Loraine Williams Poetry Prize is open from March 1 to May 15. Each year one winner gets $1,500 and publication. We also publish three finalists, each of whom receives $200. All submitted poems will be considered for publication. Read full contest details here.
In April, GR poetry editor Noah Baldino spoke with judge Brian Teare about context, form, the “kinesis at work in poiesis,” and how to prioritize a poetics that can—across a poem, a body of work, and a life—“contain more of ‘everything that is the case’.”
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Noah Baldino (NB): The Room Where I Was Born, your first book, warns, “We suffer forever // how our stories begin—”; in Doomstead Days, “the world is awake / be careful my dears / it is the gender / that remembers / everything.” What one is subjected to, what one subjects the world to: both moments caution against complacency and neglect towards context. Is Poem Bitten by a Man’s bite—in offering both consequence and encounter—in conversation with those previous gestures?
Brian Teare (BT): I love that you’ve connected that fairy-tale-esque warning in TRWIWB with the bite in PBBAM. They’re the only two books (so far) in which I have written about my family of origin; they both reckon in very different ways with the violence of my queer childhood in the rural South. In TRWIWB I set out to write about the sexual violence in my family in an attempt to “master” that trauma: I was young enough to think I could actually do it! And I was also foolish enough to think that I could do it by writing one single book. What’s interesting about reading the line you quote now is that it proves I already knew something about suffering our origins that I pretty quickly disavowed. After I finished TRWIWB, I chose to stop writing about my family of origin. Twenty years and many hours in analysis later, I came back to my queer childhood through the dynamic I saw between the visual artists Agnes Martin and Jasper Johns and their mothers.
I wrote PBBAM in part inspired by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, who suggested that adults turn to making things in order to repair our relationship to the world. Neither Martin nor Johns had a happy or stable childhood: Agnes reported being actively hated while Johns was largely abandoned to his grandparents. Both artists made serial work, returning to similar forms and themes for decades, practices that resonated differently with me as I approached fifty. And neither navigated romantic relationships with particular aplomb, another fact that resonated with me after the breakup of an important LTR. Now I can see that for thirty years I’ve been trying to make sense of harm and understand suffering—personal, political, metaphysical, economic, and ecological—and, more recently, to posit and explore reparative positions that are ethical and do not disavow fault, complicity, or failure.
NB: Your work often incorporates an abundance of material (theory, autobiography, ekphrasis, etymology, history, received and conceived forms, et cetera). That widening lexicon is remarkable, but I’m even more moved by how, across a poem (or, even, within a phrase or image) you catch multiple and varied frequencies of meaning. One single moment can carry personal, historical, philosophical, ecological, literary, and sociopolitical implications simultaneously—a common confluence in one’s life but rarer to find rendered in a poem. Is multivalence a discovery, an ethic, an orientation, a methodology? How do you experience it?
BT: That’s such a generous reading! When I was in grad school I got obsessed with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein after watching the magical, campy, rigorous film Derek Jarman made about his life and his thinking. Co-written with the critic Terry Eagleton, it’s a biopic and a primer about Wittgenstein’s philosophy, but it’s also the record of a living queer artist’s conversation with a dead queer philosopher. That film led me to Wittgenstein’s first book, 1921’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which opens with the famous proposition “The world is everything that is the case.” That claim made me realize how limited my own poems were then, and made me wonder why I was being taught to make poems that exclude so much.
Watching Jarman’s films and reading Wittgenstein instigated a desire to make work that contains more of “everything that is the case,” a desire that I suspect gave shape to my later ambitions and restlessness as a maker. When I look back on my seven books so far I see a dilation outward from the post-confessional “I” of my earliest work toward an “I” that is more overtly situated in context, an “I” caught in the confluence of, as you write, the “personal, historical, philosophical, ecological, literary, and [the] sociopolitical.” It’s worth noting that, later in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein also states that “Ethics and aesthetics are one.” That’s a claim that continues to inspire and challenge me as an unapologetic art fag who’s also a critical citizen of a violent empire.
NB: Long poems—which you, notably, steward—are often contest contenders. I would need both our hands to count the poets I know currently wrestling with a sonnet crown or lyric sequence! Do you notice any distinct essential capacities in the long poem that could help buoy its early makers across its expanse?
BT: I’m a big fan of sequences and serial poems, and have written my fair share of both, though more than sequences or series I love truly long poems. As both writer and reader, I’m most invested when a sense of aesthetic adventure animates the poem’s unfolding, articulated by and preserved in the leaps or turns in its form. The best work runs on some kind of formal engine that fuels forward motion and perpetuates the kinesis at work in poiesis, yet doesn’t dictate telos or drive progress in expected ways. In fact, following the late, great Fanny Howe, I’d argue that any sequence, series, or long poem should be animated by some form of “bewilderment,” which Howe describes in her seminal essay as “the heave, thrill, and murmur of the nomadic heart.” I wouldn’t write knowing where a sequence, series, or long poem is going to end up, and I don’t want to read feeling the poet already knows where their sequence, series, or long poem is heading. In fact, Howe argues for bewilderment as “a method of searching for something that can’t be found,” and I’m happiest as a reader when I feel like I’m discovering the poem alongside the poet as they risk inclusion and digression! I’m thinking of Tommy Pico’s IRL, Robin Coste Lewis’s “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk, Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas,” Phoebe Giannisi’s Chimera (translated by Brian Sneeden), or any of Arthur Sze’s remarkable sequences, among many other recent excitements.
