![]() ![]() In like manner it abolishes time and space.” The more time I spent classifying grasses, the more their materiality refuted and complicated my understanding of what it means to know the world-I was constantly misidentifying what I saw, and yet my focused attention on them abolished time and space. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. I was moved by the contrast between deep attention to the material world and Emerson’s claims that “The soul circumscribes all things. The book began in response to two concurrent experiences: my first attempt to identify grasses and wildflowers with the aid of field guides, and a deep immersion in the central texts of 19th century Transcendentalism. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Teare is now an Assistant Professor at Temple University, and lives in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.Ī brief interview with Brian Teare (conducted by Rusty Morrison) Anthologized as a critic as well as a poet, his work has appeared in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006), At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (2009), Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (2011), and Jean Valentine: This-World Company (2012). From 2000-2002, Teare was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University and has gone on to receive fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is also the author of numerous chapbooks, most recently Paradise Was Typeset, Helplessness, and Black Sun Crown. His highly acclaimed collections of poetry include The Room Where I Was Born (2003), winner of the Brittingham Prize and the 2004 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Sight Map (2009), and Pleasure (2010), winner of the Lambda Literary Award. After first pursuing studies in flute performance and composition, he received a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Alabama and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University in 2000. Peter O’Leary, author of The Phosphorescence of Thoughtīorn in 1974 in Athens, Georgia, Brian Teare grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Brian Teare’s “Companion Grasses” is a glorious, daring continuance: “I was making language/a stem to aspire to.” From Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson on, the rigors of observation have laid claim to the spirit’s desire to find transcendence in the saturated repository of language. In pursuing an aesthetics situated in place, they compose an ethics of what it means to be a human companion to the natural world: “What we love, how we care for it,/is where we live.”įinalist, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist, Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry Recommended on Harriet‘s November 2013 Reading List by Tiffany Higgins One of Slate‘s Best Poetry Books of 2013 One of The Volta‘s Best Books of 2013 One of Verse‘s 2013 Recommended BooksĪmerican poetics has never strayed far from a vigilant entwined apprehension, where a meticulous naming or reading of the world’s phenomena becomes an intelligence of the world’s immanent possibilities. Both ecologically rich landscapes and highly rhythmic inscapes, these poems set seasonal and human dramas side-by-side, wresting an original, signature music from the meeting of site and sight. Inspired by Transcendentalism, Companion Grasses sees the sacred in the workings of the material world, but its indebtedness to the ecological tradition of California poets like Gary Snyder and Brenda Hillman means that it also unearths such evidence in the sensual materiality of words themselves. ![]() Walking the cities, coasts, forests and mountains of Northern California and New England, they immerse themselves in the specifics of bioregion and microclimate, and take special note of the cycle of death and rebirth that plays out dramatically in California’s chaparral and grasslands. What does it mean to dwell in a place? These adventurous poems go on foot in search of answers. ![]()
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