be a song
some
in this book can’t be sung
Copyright © by Brian Teare. Printed by permission of the author from Transcendental Grammar Crown, a limited edition chapbook.
The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Marin Headlands Center, Brian Teare is the author of The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, and Pleasure (the latter just released this past fall from Ahsahta Press). On the graduate faculties of Mills College and University of San Francisco, he lives in San Francisco, where he also makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books. He maintains a web presence at www.brianteare.net.
Arts & Academe poetry editor Lisa Russ Spaar notes: Charles Ives (1874 – 1954) was a prolific modern American composer of striking originality who, like his poetic contemporary Wallace Stevens, made a successful living as an insurance executive. Influenced by and experimenting alike with popular and sentimental parlor songs, polyrhythms, brass bands, tone clusters, and dissonance, Ives worked largely below the radar during most of his life, though his pieces garnered the respect of Aaron Copeland, Arnold Schoenberg, and others, and made possible the later experiments of artists like John Cage. Reportedly as humble and humorous as he was artistically ardent and intrepid, Ives, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1947, gave away the award money, saying “prizes are for boys, and I’m all grown up.”
The poet Brian Teare, whose evocative, playfully serious lyric and textual experiments I have followed for some years, is an innovator of this order, and his attraction to Ives, who shared Teare’s interest in musical/textual sampling and quotation and his passion for the American, and particularly the “New Englandly,” context (both Teare and Ives, for instance, have written about Thoreau, Emerson, and other Transcendentalists), makes sense. Ives’s biographer, Jan Swafford, writes, “Filled with quotes of music from Beethoven to Stephen Foster and American hymnodists, Ives’s mature work is music about music, or rather music as a symbol of human life and striving and spirituality.” Teare’s poems, whose original spin on field poetics makes startling use of the hungering page, acoustically and visually, strike me as poetry about poetry, about the relationship of music to song, song to text, song to song, and as work which represents, as Ives said of his own compositions in a prose piece accompanying a privately printed song collection, 114 Songs, “marks of respect and expression.”
This poem’s title, “Hello,” invites us, genially, generously into the poem’s field, and as the reader registers its salutation and traverses the white space drop to the poem’s first “mark”—an em dash fused to the word “interval”—we already know that the poem will show us how to “read” it as we go, through its process, and that it will concern itself, among other things, with the gap between sound and meaning, music and “word language.” In a humorous meta-joke, “Hello” also samples from the well-known Tin Pan Alley tune, “Hello! Ma Baby,” a musical quotation Ives himself borrowed and worked into a composition “Central Park in the Dark.” What follows on the page is what Robert Duncan might call “composition by field,” with the very particular effect of what Donald Wellman and others have coined “scored speech.”
One thing I admire about Teare’s lyricism is his rare use of the first-person pronoun. The “speaker” here has a distinct, playful, idiomatic, vernacular, intimate voice that is interior and musing:
. . . —easy
now song has a few rights can break
a law if it likes if our ear veers hymnward
it won’t wear no ribbon to match its voice
But the sensibility, the tone, is plural rather than singular. Formally, in fact, the poem comes to us on the page in “tone clusters” (Ives used his fists at times when playing the piano to achieve this effect), and it samples amply from Ives’s own writings, weaving those perceptions in among his own, yoking music’s abstraction to the palpable veering of the ear. At play in the field of this poem are the ghosts not only of Ives, but of Dickinson, Susan Howe, Gertrude Stein (a song is a song is a song), Plath, Stevens, Yeats, Frank O’Hara, Thoreau, Pound (who was it that said that “Ezra is a crowd”?), and many others. And if this rich tapestry seems anachronistic, all the more true to Ives’s, and Teare’s, intentions (as Susan Howe puts it, “My precursor attracts me to my future”). “Intellect is never / a whole,” the poem tells us. “[S]oul / finds things there.”
Teare’s poem is replete with found and revelatory riches, among them a suggestion of what may ultimately be beyond translation: “the soul’s seat / set ringing.” As Ives writes of one of his “unperformable” songs, “Should it not have a chance to sing to itself, if it can sing?” The poem ends with a question that is at the heart of poetics (—must a song always / be a song”) followed by a statement ( “some / in this book can’t be sung”) that is not so much an answer as an acknowledgment that each century’s inherited artistic legacies and contributions, in and across genres and disciplines, don’t solve anything as much as they take up and extend questions we never tire of trying to answer.
