Brian Teare

Neither objects nor time nor space nor anything – no forms.

Listen to Audio Version.

reading Agnes Martin
on the bus I think
about her “perfection”
for about four blocks
until I begin to hate it



in the drawings I love
she leaves evidence
of process fraying
the grid’s edge
like leftover math



her forms suggest
a counter-rhetoric
dots of color or
the hand-drawn
incidental
serves as a frame
a word changes as it enters a new discourse
freed from received ideas and responsibilities
stripped to its core it’s made “perfect”
but a word might choose to change itself



outside the realm of perspective
a line that constructs a system
continually escapes perfection
a kind of found quality persisting



a word might choose its medium
graphite over a light acrylic wash
emptiness as an outer limit or
graffiti scratched into the bus window
existence makes a thing useful
nonexistence makes it work
the impossible patterns a life

* * *

This developing awareness I will also call "the work" It is a most important part of the work.

Listen to Audio Version.

           I look at paintings

                                                                       I work on another poem

            the teacher Agnes made

                                                                        with a ruler

            and I wonder about

                                                                        compulsory repetition

            the grid as endgame

                                                                        helpless entrapment

            not a spritiual practice

                                                                        or meditative lyric

            but the mind's limit

                                                                        iterated constantly

            I know she believed

                                                                        satisaction is impossible

            art is better hungry

                                                                        but now I remember

            before I became ill

                                                                        I could open my mouth

            I could eat without fear

                                                                        I could be nourished

teare.html my lover could enter me

            until illness entered me

                                                                        and I desired nothing else

                                                                        more deeply than health

 

A 2015 Pew Fellow in the Arts, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of four critically acclaimed books — The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map the Lambda Award-winning Pleasure (also from Ahsahta Press), and Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. An Assistant Professor at Temple University, he lives in South Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.