A review by laura_sackton
Poem Bitten by a Man by Brian Teare

This is an incredible collage poem made up of fragments from Teare’s notebooks, journals, published work, and the work of many of the artists he writes about, mostly Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin but also others. It is about the dissolution of his relationship, about illness, about being chronically ill and the relationship between illness and creativity, between illness and writing. It’s deeply about the work of Martin and Johns and how these artists have affected him, about queerness and invisibility and what is left out of Johns work, especially in relation to whiteness, about how these artists approached making art. 

There is so much in here about visual art and poetry and space and spatial relationships and the material world and language and if they are the same and how they function, about art-making and queerness and beauty and representation and process, about what it means to make art and be in relationship, with others and with art. It’s a book about mark-making, about the marks we leave, about how we are marked by other people, about how to make marks and how to erase them. It is so dense, the form is amazing, a blend of paragraphs and stanzas, lots of parenthesis and quotations marks that don’t close. 

I read it too fast, and plan to revisit it and really sit with it. It made me think so much about process and outcome and also about artistic lineage and what art and artists we are haunted by. And it made me think so much about the connections between poetry and visual art. I’m still not sure what they all are but this book wrestles so much with language and visual language and living inside language, language at its most basic as mark-making with meaning.

Also there is so much in here about being sick and the impossible systems in this country that make being sick so hard, about how we do and don’t talk about disability, and especially about illness in romantic relationships and how hard it can be to leave a relationship when you’re sick even when your partner is not able to meet your needs. 

This book is so dense with references and other people’s words and thinkings, made me think so much about collage as a form in poetry, something I’ve never really thought about before.