Pleasure
by Mackenzie Worrall
“Wasn’t language one long dying, / one long walling off meaning / from living, a boundary between / death and life, impermeable / not a repetition of belief, but / the annihilation inherent / in naming “positive” / and “negative”.”
(Pleasure, by Brian Teare, Ashahta Press, 75 pages, paperback, $17.50)
Pleasurable moments, given enough years, take on a tinge of pain when remembered.
In this stunning collection, poet Brian Teare confounds the barrier between pleasure and pain. The first part is the story of a man and his lover, who is dying of HIV/AIDS. Their history is eternal, archetypical. They live in a metaphorical Eden. After the inevitable death, the narrator experiences moments of pleasure in an unending stretch of mourning. Part two is an honest portrayal of ‘After The Fall’.
Out of a very underground queer poetry scene, comes this amazing little book. I am that odd sort of person who laughs out loud in a crowded room while reading. Only very rarely can someone’s writing move me to tears. Pleasure has done that. Yes, this is HIV/AIDS, but not in any way that you’ve seen before. After I have done this column for years, I will write a book in search of the Queer Canon. This will be at the top.
MACKENZIE WORRALL: The book is called Pleasure, but you don’t shy away from the painful. I have never left a book feeling so empty – and I mean that in a complimentary way. What empowered you to write this?
BRIAN TEARE: This wasn’t a book I chose to write – the poems simply began to come in the years after Jared’s death. At first they came slowly, and then as my experience of mourning became less intense, and I began to re-enter a less heightened sense of reality, they came more quickly. During the first year, I wanted to keep Jared near, and writing seemed to do that; later, I was aware of his presence growing distant, and writing seemed to help me to deal with that. And though I’d say the experience of his death and of grieving his loss triggered the poems, I know that I wouldn’t have been as empowered to write them without books like Paul Monette’s Love Alone, Mark Doty’s My Alexandria, Tory Dent’s HIV, Mon Amour and Brenda Hillman’s Death Tractates, all of which somehow served as models.
MW: ‘Dreamt Dead Eden’ asserts that this is not a memorial to Adam, but a way to “keep you near” – a kind of false idol of him. Are the poems here meant to be immortal, or a finite specter of the real?
BT: Those lines from “Dreamt Dead Eden” speak to my desire to use writing as a way to keep Jared near, and though I don’t think I cared one bit about the immortality of the writing itself, I know I wished – wanted to believe – the poems could continue the Eden in which we were together. This is a common desire in the time soon after a loved one dies: some people return to a photo or letter, listen to the deceased’s favorite piece of music or wear an item of their clothing. For a long time, the secret mantra of my writing and life were these lines from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a book I returned to often:
Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.
So many of those poems were written in the hopes of calling him closer, calling for comfort to calm my rage and frustration as well as my grief. Reading them now, I see so many of them say the same thing: Be near me.
MW: ‘Of Paradise and the Structure of Gardens’ is, I think, required reading for all queer people. It is a sorrowful acceptance of mortality, and an inking of the Adam-in-the-mind to this paper. If I ever meant the word ‘cathartic’, it would be here. Would you call this poem an exorcism of sorts?
BT: I’m really glad reading the poem was cathartic for you – it was a major turning point in the writing of the book, and I do believe it was “an exorcism.” On both conscious and unconscious levels I had been avoiding writing about AIDS directly – I think now because I believed I didn’t know how. I had come of age during the middle years of the epidemic, and some of the first poetry I read was written in response to AIDS – I think I thought those poets knew how to do it, but I didn’t. Ironically, the poem was triggered when I got an AIDS test for the first time after Jared died: going to the clinic, answering the questionnaire, and then getting my blood drawn brought back the last year of his life. In the day or so while I waited for the results, I was surprised to be gripped again by a fear and panic I hadn’t felt since we found out Jared was positive. First I became disappointed, and then I became furious with myself. I felt anger at my failure to write more directly about AIDS, anger at the medical system that had stigmatized Jared and had for so long failed to help so many with AIDS, and anger at the way the gay body politic had had to turn from the work of liberation toward mourning the loss of so many members. I happened to be reading a book called The History of Paradise at the time, and I remember trying to read it in order to distract myself from my fear and anger – and then the poem began to come, bits of the book mixed up with it.
MW: Is part two of Pleasure about acceptance or moving on? It fluctuates between sadness and waiting.
BT: For me, the second half of the book is about leaving the most heightened time of grieving and re-entering “ordinary” time, which had itself been changed by the experience of grief. This re-entry was complicated by the fact that I moved to California a year after Jared died, and so I came back to the “ordinary” after leaving a high green Midwestern summer and arriving in the Bay Area during a long drought that sparked brown-outs and fires. That period was already a re-orientation to a world I thought I knew – but there I was in California, where the scale was off, the sound was turned up and everything felt a little too close, a little too bright. So the intensity of multiple dislocations and simultaneous emergencies underwrites the poems in the second section of the book, which also includes a lot of waiting. It took a long time for the ordinary to begin to feel ordinary again – which of course came at the cost of my attachment to Jared and the belief that continuing to mourn me from losing him altogether.
MW: I am a devotee of a genre I call ‘sexy poetry’. And while ‘IX: Elegiac Action: To Fuck’ is mechanical, it is still erotic. It’s simple, and something we’ve all experienced. What do you see as the symbolic difference between including this erotic image, or a romantic one instead?
BT: I’ve said this elsewhere, but I think it’s worth repeating: one of the hardest and most unexpected aspects of mourning Jared was the fact that my desire for him did not die when he did. While I was writing the early poems in the book, I was friendly with a poet who had recently lost her husband, and we often spoke about the startling fact of wanting to have sex with someone dead – I remember that we both wondered why no elegist ever seemed to write about this aspect of mourning. And yet it was strange to desire his body as much as his living presence, a fact that seems to me much more about the persistence of eros than about romance. To write about Jared through a more romantic image might have been more comforting – but I wanted to be honest about the disturbing sensuality of our attachments to the dead, which to the mourner function like a form of hope.
MW: What’s the State of Queer Poetry? Is it in its adolescence? Or is there not even enough of an organized core to call it a ‘thing’? I find very little visible modern queer poetry in the literary world.
BT: Queer Poetry in all its riotous richness has never been represented in either the mainstream literary media or on the shelves of most independent bookstores, which is why even the savviest of queer readers might never find the small press titles that show the State of Queer Poetry to be undergoing immense transformation. On the one hand, I’d argue that the gay/lesbian binary is definitely getting queered by increased trans visibility; on the other, the aesthetic and cultural range of Queer Poetry seems to be growing increasingly more diversified as small press publishing itself diversifies. Following in the footsteps of the late Kari Edwards, amazing trans poets like Julian T. Brolaski, Ely Shipley, Nathanaël and Jai Arun Ravine have published books in the last three years, while queer poets of color like Rigoberto Gonzalez, Dawn Lundy Martin and Ronaldo Wilson have been winning awards and publishing stunning books that are changing the ways we talk about race, representation and queer desire. I mean, Carl Phillips – an African-American gay man – is the new judge of the Yale Younger Poets Award, and his first pick is Slow Lightning by Eduardo Corral, a gay Latino poet. Frankly, it’s an exciting time to be a reader of queer poetry: there’s a slew of fabulous “emerging” poets among us, including CA Conrad, Stacy Szymaszek, Stephen Motika, Renee Gladman, Paul Legault, Sina Queyras, George Albon and Juliet Patterson, to name only a few. What this cascade of names indicates is that, while the State of Queer Poetry might understandably be hard to ascertain, readers can have faith that there are plenty of queer poetries being written and published.
MW: Plugs, book recommendations, fashion advice?
BT: A plug: Kevin Simmonds’ fabulous anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality. Book recommendations: Thomas Meyer’s Kintsugi and Paul Legault’s The Other Poems. Fashion advice: I could probably use some!
A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts. After a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s now an Assistant Professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
[...] Mackenzie Worrall of Outlook talks with Brian. [...]