Brian Teare's "Separation is the necessary condition for light": New Light on Old Fathers

 
http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Poem-A-Day--Separation-is-the-necessary-condition-for-light--by-Brian-Teare.html?soid=1110705357409&aid=y7VLnilgUpU

In Brian Teare’s “Separation is the necessary condition for light,” the central idea and almost all the imagery and phrasing strike me as precise, original, and strong. I like them a lot. The dead father’s empty mattress and hat, the "generic" fathers fathers grouped like unnamed, undifferentiated trees (what an exceptional word “generic” is in this context), the sunset lighting them up and making them "blonde"  (why have I never thought of autumn trees as blonde? Shame on me), and the fatherless adult child as a drifting sail . . .  all of that seems precisely right. (As a temporary survivor, I don’t see myself as a sailboat-survivor gliding over treetops, but it’s a flattering image that makes a lyrical kind of sense).

I’m not sure what I think and feel about Teare's allergy to commas and other punctuation. Also, I wonder what he’s seeing that I’m missing in the alternating left and right stanzas. However, I’m open to the argument that the lack of punctuation and the staggered placement of stanzas suggest the motions of leaves in wind as well as sails gliding dreamily along, where any pause looks and feels nothing like a punctuation mark. Maybe that’s a stretch, but I can live with it.

I struggle harder with "roots / that rise to stem that rise.”  At first I heard it as the trees having flipped, their tops becoming their roots, which I was hearing as an image of death. But that doesn't help me understand the fact that the roots rise in order to "stem"—as in, prevent—another rise, maybe adult children rising toward death.

Or maybe upright trees have risen above the ground—a kind of levitation. Is that an image of immortality? When those roots "stem [squelch] that rise," are they holding the survivors in the ground as they try to rise into the air, as immortal spirits traditionally do?

In "stem," I appreciate the word play on aspects of trees and other plants. Again, we can have “stem” as squelch, as “stem the tide,” or we might hear a newer, fresher sense of “stem” as a verb—the leaves or trees are not only leaving, but also growing new stems, or “stemming.” That makes a better fit for what follows, where the autumn trees are apparently dropping leaves: “rise // to leaf his door and cornices.” To “leaf” is an exquisite image of fallen autumn foliage piling up, but I’d like to know how it develops from the two lines that precede it.

In all, however, the new and lovely features in Brian Teare’s poem more than compensate for the single speed bump caused by “rise” and “rise” and “stem.” Of the several things that draw me to the poem, the foremost might be the notion of fathers' being “generic” in the way trees in a field are generic. I've certainly seen my friends' fathers as a blurry cluster of vaguely appealing yet ordinary, un-special beings. They might be the fathers of students as they gather awkwardly but importantly in school lobbies and hallways on parents' visiting days.

Until Brian Teare's elegy, however, I failed to notice just how generic and autumnly blonde they were, even those who were important, or tried to fake importance, and how their future absence, in death, might be visualized as the empty mattress where they had lain or their now empty felt hats. 

I suspect that from here on, I’ll never see or imagine fathers in the same way, at least not as a group. And maybe the yellow-leaved woods in the fall will always be fathers as well as trees, whether I want them to or not. There’s a lot more gift than burden in that, which is what good poems give us. So in spite of one line that’s bumpy for me, I am grateful for Brian Teare’s “Separation is the necessary condition for light,” and I won’t soon forget it.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23729

See also Bob Hicok’s masterful father poem, “O my pa-pa.”  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/179572

I discussed it here January 2, 2010:   http://banjo52.blogspot.com/search?q=o+my+pa-pa

 

Thomas Lux, "It's the Little Towns I Like"

It's the Little Towns I Like by Thomas Lux : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

In pursuit of more poems that raise the question of conversation compared to poetry, I came across Thomas Lux's "It's the Little Towns I Like." I was looking for a different Lux poem, but the small town theme in the title here caught my eye, and I like what he does with it.

With Lux, I usually do like it. Among contemporary poets, his work creates an unusual balance between accessibility and density. He tells good stories; his frequent anger seems justified, seems to be our anger, or the anger we should have if we weren't lazy and complacent; yet he makes us laugh; and he gives us imagery that's approachable and memorable.

On the side of density, he's almost always in the service of the universal themes, like social injustice, and most of his lines of, say, four words or more offer small gifts of their own as they move toward the larger gift of the whole poem. Surely it's a given that memorable imagery serves both accessibility and density. In short, Lux is no lightweight, but neither is he a tangle of techniques that are all brain, no heart. (Remember Yeats's great line in "Easter 1916": "Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart").

Still, in the end--or should I say, "At the end of the day?"--ugh, gag me with a spoon--who started that? More to the point, who were the first few to regurgitate it? They were probably too busy "going forward" and "begging the question" to notice they had jumped on the instant-oats-of-cliche wagon and steered it into the mainstream of TV anchor-speak)--

Speaking of streams, one of Lux's greatest lines is, "If a river could look over its shoulder . . . ."

--Where was I?

In the end, it was Lux's reference to fathers and the similarity to Bob Hicok's "O my pa-pa" (January 2 here at Banjo) that told me I had to post Lux's "It's the Little Towns . . . ." I predict there will be more of Thomas Lux at Banjo52.

It's the Little Towns I Like by Thomas Lux : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.