Craig Morgan TeicherRezensionen

I am really enjoying this, even more since having a baby myself. He has some really grounded imagery and yet also the sublime of the banal.

Ultimately, it was too much. Teicher gives us a life, in all its messy, glorious insecurity, in the guise of formal verse. I needed two months to get from poem one to poem two. Getting to Death, the concluding piece, might take more time than I have, as each cuts away a slice of protective myth about contemporary society (or self) that must then scab over and heal before moving along to the next. Much like life itself.

In this very personal and moving collection, Craig Morgan Teicher explores his own biography. We feel his worry and pain as a father of a health young girl and a very sick boy. We listen to his love for his wife, his children, for the mother he lost when he was young, for the housekeeper who raised him, for the father who loved only through his emotional distance.

Some of the lines are very fine, such as:

...She lived and she grows
like joy spreading from the syllables
of songs.

Or

I could hold that rock
and rewind time and find myself
standing between verb tenses.

Or

I can divide all life
into breath and waiting
for the next breath, and
the calm in the troughs
between.

Some of the poems are complete, and touching, and real. You read the collection and imagine you are listening to a friend, pretending you know them, as much as any human can know another. A worthwhile read.

The first and last poem in Craig Morgan Teicher's "To Keep Love Blurry" redeem the book and earn it two stars instead of one. The rest of the poems largely consist of what I'd call trite thoughts put to paper seemingly unedited. The majority of the book deals with the death of a mother, a rocky marriage, and a loss of self-definition following a job loss. These could be weighty topics for a poem, if they were deftly handled, but here the poems are very personalized, not at all universal, and come across more as whining than thoughtful reflections. I kept wanting to scream at the author, "Everyone's life is full of struggle and pain, you're not the only one, but what do you do with the pain?" The answer in poem after poem was that the author wallows in self-pity. The first and last poems were the only ones that addressed a larger universe outside the author's ego and made no direct mention of personal struggles, and for that they were a breath of fresh air.

Utterly without passion, emotion, insight, or even uniquely functioning eyeballs. Under what compulsion, for what purpose, do people like this write at all? One is forced to wonder for how long Teicher laboured in search of the precise words to express such deep, poetic observations as:

"All words are lies. There is
no such thing as a lie." (p27)

or:

"Because my white dog sleeps
in corners, we let her sleep." (p28)

How freshman Comp, how bland. This guy has nothing to say.

UPDATE and a warning, I'm about to start swearing: This is the fucking worst fucking writing I've ever fucking seen in my entire fucking life (depressed 14-yr olds on myspace included: though they pedal around in endless cliché, at least they're trying to say something). After 14 pages of the poem, "Poem to Read at My Wedding", in which we find these romantic thoughts,

"Sitting in front
of my computer again" (p95)

and this tacky confession:

"I began masturbating
when I was very young

and never had normal fantasies" (p98)

Teicher attempts to get meta-diegetic with this profound reflection,

"Soon this poem will hit
10 pages, making it my longest
ever." (p104)

[... insert 19 lines of jibber-jabber about long poems and other random thoughts, made poetry because the lines are short and have 9 breaks in-between (oh, yes, we've even heard about how he took inspiration to narrow his margins in Word from another poet who wrote on adding machine tape), and we get to read this amazing discovery...]

"Ooh! I've

just crossed page 10! And used
up both my allotted
exclamation marks." (p105)

But no! He will use more!

"Look at what I just said:
I'm marring Brenda. Whoa!" (p106)

Duude!

So then skip a few pages distracted by the strong wish that this guy would get a grip on his similies (he's like a mirror and that's why he's like a window, or, like he's looking through a window at himself, being mirror-like in the window-like mirror which is, like, reflecting other mirrors, which, still, are like windows), and I have an IF THIS GUY CAN'T BE ARSED TO WORDSMITH HIS OWN POETRY, AT LEAST GET HIM A COPY EDITOR-moment. Context: Our poet can't understand death because he's never died before:

"but unless falling asleep is
like dying, I've had no practice." (p107)

JFC! Does he know what he just said?! He just said he has had no practice falling asleep! If Teicher wants to say he's had no practice dying and can only liken it perhaps to falling asleep, IT'S THE OTHER WAY AROUND BUDDY! "unless dying (which I've never done) is like falling asleep (which I have done), I've had no practice (dying)".

I can't figure out if I'm supposed to be stoned while reading this, or if I've just been introduced to some bizarro world where striped-shirts/khaki pants guys repetitively say "door" or any other word to themselves too many times and think they're the first person to think words are weird, dude, resulting in their friends thinking they're a philosophical genius. Oh but if from the trees the Tractatus would fall on his head, and the wind, the wind, tear the page which says whereof one cannot speak, one should remain silent and stuff it in Teicher's mouth...

Deals with impending marriage, father/son relations, the nature and meaning of thoughts and words, and making connections with oneself and others. Some profanity.

smart, inventive, and profoundly moving, this is one of the best books of poetry i've read in recent years.