On survivalist sites, “doomstead” is the term for a home that can safely ride out a disaster. It’s buried or bermed on three sides, insulated concrete usually, sealed and defended from the outside world in every way. Teare’s lyric dwelling place is a poem — just as “stanza” is derived from the Italian word for room. He imagines an enlightened alternative that operates as the opposite of the doomstead: opening up to everything around us to begin again, anew.
Teare’s epigraphs set up his theme: “To praise this, blame that, / Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where / We must stay, in motion,” writes John Ashberry. Here’s Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: “We don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin.” So Teare asks throughout these poems: how do we look for life? how to stay in motion? can any poem really teach us how to live — or guide us — through an apocalypse? Teare walks us into the answers. Literally.
The first step is attentive: look around, look carefully. Look again. In these poems, Teare tells us that Doomstead Days was drafted on foot across rivers, cities and forests taking the measure of himself, our world, and our days, even through (and especially with) chronic illness.
Teare walks us to the Cosco Busan oil spill in San Francisco Bay — caused by a tanker striking the bridge in November 2007 — in his opening poem “Clear Water Renga”:
fog, error, radar
failed :: the container ship hit
the bridge tower hard :: . . . .
the next day it hurt
the eyes to walk dockside, wind
bringing the sting of petrol ::
each of its pilings
ringed with rainbow, from the pier
I watched white boats go
trailing bright yellow booms, saw
how the real absorbs a fact
the way a seabird
preens its greased wings helplessly,
the ordinary
gesture gently carrying
toxins from feather to beak,
from outside to in ::
it was the first disaster
I could walk to
There is no traditional sentence, here: no capital letter at the beginning, no period at the end. In fact there is no beginning or end, per se: Teare commences the book with a lower-case letter — “f” in “fog” — as if continuing something. And, in fact, how does fog originate? It doesn’t arise out of nothing; it comes from the ongoing intertwining of natural forces. For a book about our collective lack of insight, starting with the word “fog” could not be a slyer touch. Details are so rigorously consistent with theme in this book that they become teaching points, down to the smallest mark: the punctuation.
Teare employs a double colon — in logic indicating equivalencies — to yoke independent clauses, de-center the subject, reveal complex relations that are apparent as a kind of network, reorienting the reader to reality. The web or weave you discover is fastened by the use of the ampersand — originally a ligature or binding of the letters “et” — to replace “and”: an ancient symbol, it “reads” like Teare’s imaginative re-use of the double colon, almost like an emoji, a modern re-casting.
These details accrue to model an embodied response to our global situation. Reading twenty pages of “Clear Water Renga” — without a single period or sentence — begins to unhinge a way of thinking about the world that is soft-wired into us from kindergarten. You realize in a felt sense how everything is connected and equal. The prominence — and respect — given to some letters, and not others, is gone. The authority of making a single statement, and assuming it speaks for everyone, is gone. The regularity of line and measurement draw you through associations rather than landing on the things themselves. Sensorial ways of knowing — smell, sound, touch — push you further into a bodily understanding of surroundings. Reading Teare is like dropping into a meditation sitting. In fact, two of his poems have “Meditation” in the title. I leave both his book and a zazen as one paying closer attention to what’s around me, to what I was missing before, appreciating what is in front of me.
But that’s not all. Teare subtly argues for action. Notice the form of “Clear Water Renga”: it is a type of linked poem — a series of tanka — invented over 700 years ago in Japan to encourage the collaborative composition of poems. One writer pens the first stanza (three lines, total of 17 syllables), the next poet adds the second stanza (couplet with seven syllables per line), alternating again and again. A new stanza grows only out of the stanza preceding it. The renga moves ahead by restarting without losing the thread that joins it all together, without erasing the past: embracing each present and moving forward. When you reach the end of “Clear Water Renga,” you find a double colon. This is the second step: it is your turn to continue if you’ve noticed how the elements add up. How will you contribute? Who will you collaborate with?
In this way, Teare walks us further toward new ground: he suggests change takes place when we get involved, even in small-scale local community efforts focused on what works for all of us. He doesn’t dwell in dichotomies, advocating alternative energy over gas, for instance; nothing “moves forward as long / as green energy & oil / are antagonists.” Teare is consistently focused on intercorporeality, a term feminist philosophers use to speak to bodies existing always in relation to other bodies. He says in an interview on the Nightboat Books blog: “Many of my poems re-orient the reader towards the real rather radically, and my hope is that to begin this work on the micro-level of punctuation makes that macro-level work more accessible ::”
At the heart of Doomstead Days is a fifty-page series of haiku called “Toxics Release Inventory (Essay on Man).” Here Teare speaks most fervently of the dangers of the “late empire” state: it “hopes to hide / from public view the human / cost.” In line after line, he draws the visible from hiding: rock salt thrown on sidewalks cuts and burns the paws of dogs who limp without us noticing; we are distracted instead by the beauty of fresh-cut flowers — “lilies / early daffodils // irises, & long branches of pussy willow” — grown with pesticides polluting our water systems and poisoning day laborers. Truck-and-plane transportation releases carbon into the atmosphere, speeding up climate change. It is a time, he writes:
when industry goes
so wide, so deep, & touches
us so totally
we find our final
privacies violated ::
benzene & styrene,
toluene & n-
hexane, carbon disulfide
& acetone :: six
toxics present in
ninety four to one hundred
percent of people
tested, both urban
& rural people whose blood
& urine carries
the cost of merely
breathing as they go to work ::
& are not broken
This is a time when even wars are invisible to us. There are no bombs falling so close to us the pen jumps. Teare quotes current activist Teresa Hill as well as twentieth-century conservationist Rachel Carson, and philosopher Merleau-Ponty whose words he underlines:
where are we to put
the limit between
the body & the world, since
all the world is flesh? ::
Teare accepts that change is not a linear movement; it is an organic process of coming and going like the “to-&-fro” of migration. In the spirit of openness, Teare keeps moving, ending the poem like this:
:: & now
to write, with a new
nib, & to go on wanting
to catch the rhythm
of being open,
critical, & also glad,
married to the world
alive with the feel
of mortal knowledge :: no high,
no low, no great, no
small :: no future full
of forces that bind, connect,
& equal all ::
In Doomstead Days, the celebratory and the harrowing, the healing and the violent, the fertile and the impotent are “equal all.” To say that Teare’s poems reside inside — and embody — bewildering equations is to pinpoint one of the ways he allows you to re-experience the world — to see everything anew, even his beloved Marin Headlands: “clarity lupine & thistle // oystercatchers & black sand tide” but also “a tourist pisses a relief // to be in a landscape/where purity isn’t possible.” Teare critiques the capitalist and white imagination as he “challenges the white mind // to look at this coast / & think this is a ruin ::”
To live as an ethical human, Teare says, means “taking down the boundaries between the human political and the real, in acknowledging embodiment as relational and in relation to everything’s body, not just the bodies included within the human political.”
The last word in Doomstead Days is “everything,” all by itself on one line, without any punctuation after it, not even a double colon. The page opens into the future: our future; yours and mine, also the birch and pine, and the red-tailed hawk on the telephone line.
[Published by Nightboat Books on April 2, 2019, 176 pages, $17.95. Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry]
In Doomstead Days, the celebratory and the harrowing, the healing and the violent, the fertile and the impotent are “equal all.” To say that Teare’s poems reside inside — and embody — bewildering equations is to pinpoint one of the ways he allows you to re-experience the world — to see everything anew, even his beloved Marin Headlands: “clarity lupine & thistle // oystercatchers & black sand tide” but also “a tourist pisses a relief // to be in a landscape/where purity isn’t possible.” Teare critiques the capitalist and white imagination as he “challenges the white mind // to look at this coast / & think this is a ruin ::”