Brian Teare
Poem Bitten by a Man is a book-length collage. Its primary source materials are my journals and notebooks from 2007 to 2022. The book began in response to a paid commission from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which invited me to write a poem in conversation with the work of the queer American artist Jasper Johns in honor of his career retrospective Mind/Mirror. While researching him and his work, I discovered published excerpts from his sketchbooks, which I liked quite a lot. Almost from the start, I intuited two things: the basic measure of the poem would be the page, and on almost every page I would inset phrases from Johns’ sketchbooks as lines within a prose-based collage.
But writing a poem is largely letting it reveal to me its form; that’s true even when the poem is a book and the process of revelation is protracted. My poetics—my theory of making—is only articulated through making. I can’t be willful or hurry this; I have to be patient, alert to the emergent patterns of form-content relations that will guide later revision. For instance: the book’s first title was Association Copy, which I chose as a way to describe both Johns’ process and my own early instincts about the book I was writing. His iconic early paintings of flags are “copies” whose meaning is changed, distorted by their transfer to canvas, and I was initially interested in the way copying and pasting written material similarly distorts its meaning, leaving it more open to associative interpretation.
This page was, from early on in the process, the book’s first. It begins by borrowing quite a lot from a notebook entry about visiting San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with an art critic friend, though after the excerpts from Johns’ sketchbook its narrative focus drifts to medicalization. For a while it stayed in this first form, but I always knew it would have to change. As my research into Johns’ life and the Cold War period deepened, I discovered resonances between our lives embodied in his Painting Bitten by a Man, which he made in the wake of breaking up with Robert Rauschenberg: queer love and the frustrating failure of care. Looking at the book through the lens of Painting Bitten By a Man and its relation to Johns’ life, I began to see my writing process differently, and understand: 1) the cut that instigates collage is like a bite, and 2) the pasting that comes after is an attempt to repair it.
After I chose the book’s true title, I returned to this opening page. I was now dissatisfied with the dominance of the museum scene and decided to foreground the frustrating medicalization that had become one of the book’s central narratives. Re-writing this page meant taking the first cut-and-pasted version and cutting it up again. In doing so, I didn’t want to get closer to something intrinsic in that early draft; I wanted to turn it into raw material for a new poem closer in spirit to the book as a whole. I re-arranged its order, omitted and compressed material about the museum visit, and added more phrases relating to the collage process and the intent behind it. Now it begins by laying out through collage my own theory of collage: “to pursue meaning through its displacement. To understand change, remarkable or hidden. To go on—” Which is, in many ways, my theory of revision, too.
