Poem Bitten by a Man

Reading Brian Teare’s Poem Bitten by a Man, one can almost hear the text thinking aloud: the questions that occupy Teare about language and image—for instance, is one more adequate than the other for the purpose of abstraction?—are asked in plain view. The problems—“how to make language more, a dimension that holds & meets multiple demands: love, work, death, art. & gut trouble, joint pain, headaches that last for days,” or “How to say what can’t be seen?”—become the poems. The lines appear bitten clean, arranged to perfection, and one has the sense of something simmering underneath—material that is prone to excess and emergencies:

define object define event
move the “inside” of the picture

 between invisible & visible
the ineffable & the clinic
 what’s considered to be the “material”

flower fruit phallus book & vase

For Teare, language’s facility is its flaw: a headache can be named in language; it is much harder to paint a headache than to write about it. “Painting knows it’s not the event that matters most but the structure of feeling it leaves behind.”

The practice of abstraction in painting is meaningful to Teare for two reasons: it takes an event and turns it into an idea (headache into an abstract image), but it also intimates some kind of removal (headache leaves the body to become an idea). But how can this be achieved in poetry?

“Like any sign, a symptom becomes abstract through repetition until illness too seems double-voiced,” writes Teare. Elsewhere, laid out on a healer’s table with his “headache gripped in her hands,” he thinks of a grid, and “how to stand at its edge & look out is to turn toward emptiness without form.”

The “structure of feeling” that Teare’s book “leaves behind” is of something poignant (partly due to its difficult subject matter—abuse, illness, hardship), but what remains is also an impression of clearness, and beauty. If this sounds like a description of a painting, that is to Teare’s credit.

Odd that any thing is arrived
at, if it is