Sight Map by Brian Teare

Abstract

colorado review 162 When Mr. Vincent persists that “a well-known figure in our common cultural life, is to some extent public property,” Sophie appropriately gives Coetzee the final word on the matter: “He believed that our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world.” In an age that is obsessed with tell-all memoirs, maybe we should remember Flaubert’s famous line, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” and look no further than fiction to satiate our curiosity about the condition of a writer’s soul. Sight Map, by Brian Teare University of California Press, 2009 reviewed by Charles Malone Sculptor Robert Smithson, from whom Brian Teare draws the title of his latest collection, Sight Map, argues that two-dimensional drawings or diagrams of place fail to resemble an actual landscape. From this problem stems his Site/Non-Site dichotomy . Where Cartesian coordinates suggest a world of two dimensions —a globe that can be laid flat like paper—Smithson is interested in three-dimensional metaphors for actual places and has described some of his sculptures as “abstract containers” built to hold the raw materials of actual places he then transports into galleries. I see Teare’s book this way. Teare starts with coordinates, a numerical representation, and begins adding dimension, filling the container. Smithson was interested in geology, in the story of human exploitation of natural resources; Teare’s eyes survey differently. Like most significant contemporary writing, Sight Map is more than one thing. It offers us multiple points of entry, and each thread informs how we think about others, none offering a key for easily resolving the work. Sight Map is indispensable perhaps because Teare takes up the aesthetic process Smithson suggests: to map the world in multiple dimensions and arrange it in a container relying as much on discord and conflict as on craft and beauty to carry meaning. A multidimensional view of place for Teare contains not sediment, clay, and stone, but a very human landscape. We get Teare’s toying with the Transcendentalists, we get love poems, 163 Book Notes we get rural life thrust up against crowded city scenes. Our most refined elements, our most sublime questions are shadowed by our most base and erotic muddling of this false, lingering hierarchy. This conception of place stems first from an exploration of how language creates and fails to create landscape. Teare conceives of page as place, of form as creating landscapes for the reader’s eye. Sight Map works to create charts and to question them as Teare suggests in “As If from Letters of Surveyor Samuel Maclay”: pluvial the maple a map of the river’s tributaries rinsed glistening province of inquiry “Maple” contains “map,” words flow from one another, from the raw material present on the page. Pluvial calls attention to itself not just as the source of rivers, of glistening and rinsing, but as an object on the page. Etymology, phonemes and morphemes , and letters themselves are all accounted for in Teare’s survey. I start with this fragment to show how rewarding, how varied the activity of reading can be in this book. I start here because it is from the material of language that all the other activities of Sight Map proceed. From the beginning, linguistic questions take precedence. In general I am growing skeptical about how contemporary poets turn easily to language itself as subject matter, but Teare’s work hinges rightly on this question. In “Emerson, Susquehanna” Teare writes: Not thaw brought to the river— thought, long winter a surface that holds no current or image. And there’s language laid down like that, . . . Language is at once the two-dimensional representation Smithson tries to escape and the only material poets have to build fuller descriptions. Here, language becomes landscape, a very questionable one: a landscape in flux, in flow. We might follow colorado review 164 language as it once moved across the map; Teare describes it as “a river or tree decides to branch.” At the same time the poems , as above, are sonically rich, playful, and surprising from the outset. Teare bends sound and meaning...