WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.770 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.770 --> 00:00:03.760 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:00:03.760 --> 00:00:06.200 align:middle line:90% Thank you. 00:00:06.200 --> 00:00:09.100 align:middle line:84% In Brian Teare's book, The Empty Form Goes All the Way 00:00:09.100 --> 00:00:11.840 align:middle line:84% to Heaven, the first lines of the poems 00:00:11.840 --> 00:00:15.200 align:middle line:84% are taken from the artist Agnes Martin's writings. 00:00:15.200 --> 00:00:19.700 align:middle line:84% One of these is titled I Give Up Facts Entirely. 00:00:19.700 --> 00:00:22.180 align:middle line:84% I've been thinking about facts a lot 00:00:22.180 --> 00:00:26.040 align:middle line:84% this week, as I imagine that many of you have, 00:00:26.040 --> 00:00:28.850 align:middle line:84% and thinking about the role of poetry and art 00:00:28.850 --> 00:00:32.020 align:middle line:84% in the face of alternative facts. 00:00:32.020 --> 00:00:36.250 align:middle line:84% In Teare's poem that follows the title from Martin, 00:00:36.250 --> 00:00:39.350 align:middle line:84% the facts are not alternative facts 00:00:39.350 --> 00:00:42.620 align:middle line:84% but the opposite, phenomenological facts 00:00:42.620 --> 00:00:44.700 align:middle line:90% felt in the body. 00:00:44.700 --> 00:00:49.770 align:middle line:84% But not before each needle the healer sets in my flesh 00:00:49.770 --> 00:00:53.560 align:middle line:90% is a fact I feel, he writes. 00:00:53.560 --> 00:00:56.640 align:middle line:84% The book, written in the face of a chronic illness, 00:00:56.640 --> 00:00:59.740 align:middle line:84% is one in which Teare writes through both illness 00:00:59.740 --> 00:01:03.130 align:middle line:84% and through the voices of many other poets and thinkers who 00:01:03.130 --> 00:01:06.550 align:middle line:84% make their way into the work, from Robin Blaser, 00:01:06.550 --> 00:01:10.220 align:middle line:84% to Basho, to Emerson, to Heidegger, to Olson, 00:01:10.220 --> 00:01:14.800 align:middle line:84% to Hillman, to Whitman, to Duncan, to name just a few. 00:01:14.800 --> 00:01:19.160 align:middle line:84% I find in Teare's poems a vigorous pushing 00:01:19.160 --> 00:01:22.910 align:middle line:84% of the formal and aesthetic potential of poetry and art, 00:01:22.910 --> 00:01:26.030 align:middle line:90% in the field and on the page. 00:01:26.030 --> 00:01:28.360 align:middle line:84% You can see this also in his work 00:01:28.360 --> 00:01:31.260 align:middle line:84% with Albion Books, a micropress that he founded, 00:01:31.260 --> 00:01:35.250 align:middle line:84% whose chapbooks are in the rare book room across the way. 00:01:35.250 --> 00:01:37.080 align:middle line:90% So here are a few facts. 00:01:37.080 --> 00:01:40.720 align:middle line:84% A former Stegner fellow at Stanford, Brian Teare 00:01:40.720 --> 00:01:43.250 align:middle line:84% is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National 00:01:43.250 --> 00:01:46.630 align:middle line:84% Endowment for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, The Fund 00:01:46.630 --> 00:01:49.800 align:middle line:84% for Poetry, the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, 00:01:49.800 --> 00:01:52.560 align:middle line:84% and the American Antiquarian Society. 00:01:52.560 --> 00:01:57.090 align:middle line:84% He is a 2015 Pew fellow in the arts. 00:01:57.090 --> 00:01:59.710 align:middle line:84% He's the author of five full-length books-- 00:01:59.710 --> 00:02:03.760 align:middle line:84% The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda Award-winning 00:02:03.760 --> 00:02:07.700 align:middle line:84% Pleasure, Kingsley Tufts finalist Companion Grasses, 00:02:07.700 --> 00:02:10.400 align:middle line:84% and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. 00:02:10.400 --> 00:02:13.160 align:middle line:84% He's also published seven chapbooks. 00:02:13.160 --> 00:02:15.350 align:middle line:84% After over a decade of teaching and writing 00:02:15.350 --> 00:02:17.450 align:middle line:84% in the San Francisco Bay Area, he's 00:02:17.450 --> 00:02:20.160 align:middle line:84% now an assistant professor at Temple University 00:02:20.160 --> 00:02:26.170 align:middle line:84% in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for Albion Books. 00:02:26.170 --> 00:02:29.300 align:middle line:84% I find a certain tenderness in much of Teare's work 00:02:29.300 --> 00:02:32.010 align:middle line:84% and think of his poems as a kind of community 00:02:32.010 --> 00:02:36.600 align:middle line:84% or as meeting places, to borrow a phrase from Muriel Rukeyser. 00:02:36.600 --> 00:02:39.890 align:middle line:84% He has written about his work and the use of poetry, 00:02:39.890 --> 00:02:42.900 align:middle line:84% particularly in relation to Lorine Niedecker, 00:02:42.900 --> 00:02:46.460 align:middle line:84% another poet who I've seen him write through this way. 00:02:46.460 --> 00:02:50.810 align:middle line:84% I lose myself to process, even as consciousness of the process 00:02:50.810 --> 00:02:54.210 align:middle line:84% is heightened throughout my body. 00:02:54.210 --> 00:02:56.550 align:middle line:84% So what does this have to do with climate? 00:02:56.550 --> 00:03:01.280 align:middle line:84% At a conference on ecopoetics in Berkeley a few years ago, 00:03:01.280 --> 00:03:04.130 align:middle line:84% Teare said that the immense pressure 00:03:04.130 --> 00:03:06.620 align:middle line:84% we put upon our rhetoric and activism 00:03:06.620 --> 00:03:10.280 align:middle line:84% is both noble and insane because I'm not 00:03:10.280 --> 00:03:13.180 align:middle line:84% sure what local good can be done against widespread 00:03:13.180 --> 00:03:16.100 align:middle line:84% environmental destruction sanctioned by our most 00:03:16.100 --> 00:03:18.590 align:middle line:90% basic symbolic systems. 00:03:18.590 --> 00:03:21.580 align:middle line:84% That sounds kind of disheartening at first, 00:03:21.580 --> 00:03:23.650 align:middle line:84% but I believe it also speaks to some 00:03:23.650 --> 00:03:26.160 align:middle line:90% of the power of poetry and art. 00:03:26.160 --> 00:03:30.630 align:middle line:84% Poetry and poetics pushes against our most basic symbolic 00:03:30.630 --> 00:03:33.220 align:middle line:84% systems and pushes us through loss 00:03:33.220 --> 00:03:35.260 align:middle line:90% into new forms of relation. 00:03:35.260 --> 00:03:39.690 align:middle line:84% I would say that Brian Teare is a poet of the relational, 00:03:39.690 --> 00:03:43.360 align:middle line:84% and we're all lucky to have him here relating with us tonight 00:03:43.360 --> 00:03:45.930 align:middle line:84% and giving us some of the embodied facts 00:03:45.930 --> 00:03:47.570 align:middle line:90% that we can find in poetry. 00:03:47.570 --> 00:03:50.770 align:middle line:84% Please help me welcome Brian Teare. 00:03:50.770 --> 00:03:52.620 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE]