Book Review: The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Brian Teare)

Reviewed by Jennifer Bartlett

The principles of Buddhism and meditation are often helpful and soothing with everyday problems. People anger us. The world saddens us. Getting through this life can be nearly impossible. Silence and reflection helps. For many, visual art does too. A trip to a museum or quiet moment with a painting can be life saving. But, what happens when the stakes are higher? All suffering feels the same, perhaps, but some problems are more difficult to accept and navigate. How do meditation, silence, and art speak to a more complex suffering?

As Brian Teare writes in his new book, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven:

I am speaking
of illness and the critical situation it reveals.

And it is such issues that Teare means to face and dig through. Not necessarily answer, but explore. I do not mean poetry as therapy, but rather poetry as a way of moving through the world, of speaking and living.

These poems are a reflection of many systems: thematically and structurally. There are themes of the body as a container, chronic illness, and how the American medical system makes these issues that much more dire when a person is of the "artist class." Of a caliber medical care that is simply unavailable to some, Teare writes:

Uninsured
No other place

to go    I had
to bring my body

He struggles:

a patient of clinics and a writer of lyrics
at the last doctor’s appointment I can afford

The structure of the poems, as Teare writes in his introduction, is based on the paintings of minimalist painter, Agnes Martin. Each poem is titled after one of Martin’s paintings or drawings. Many of the titles are poems within themselves and reflective of Buddhist meditations:

We seem to be winning and losing, but there is no losing.

or

I give up facts entirely.

In the introduction, Teare gives a good sense of what Martin’s work means to him and how it fits together with the poems. He writes “these poems set my life in relation to my long encounter with her painting, drawing, and writing.” Something that feels important to mention here is that, despite the feeling of calm that Martin’s work conjures, she was no stranger to strife and disability. Teare writes,

the teacher repeats             restraint
of the body is beneficial               I can see the touch
of Agnes’s brush        paper’s grain opened up to color
the was I imagine pain enters my body

I want to also note that Ahsahta did a wonderful job in the book’s production. The book’s slightly large size gives the poems room to expand and live on the page. Through the beauty of Teare’s work, like him, I am able to "turn toward this little apostrophe in the dark of me" and find a light.

Title: The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven
Author: Brian Teare
Publisher: Ashanta Press
Publication Date: 2015

 

Jennifer Bartlett was a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. Her collections include Derivative of the Moving Image, Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography, (a) lullaby without any music , and the chapbook anything important enough has to get done. She is also an editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability.