This book of twenty-six poems was awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize for 2018. An award well-deserved, indeed, in my opinion. Teicher’s poems here are principally about poetry itself, a literary art based on the line (a perspective with which I wholly agree), a fragment, and—in series even—incomplete. Here’s his way of putting it
“ …
how the line breaks before
the thought is done, how the line,
a partial thing,
is the measure,
and it’s never enough. My …”
in the third version of “Why Poetry: A Partial Autobiography.” Clever title, don’t you think, given what he wants to express? Even repeating the title for three different poems is clever, given “it’s never enough.” What is true of each of the constituent lines—never enough—is true for the poem as a whole. Yes, a poet sometimes will mount a kind of denial: think of Keats’s peroration ending “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” But a poem, too, always ends before the thought is done (because enigma lies within its heart). A poem is a fragment within the body of poetry and poetry itself is forever incomplete. An aspect of Teicher’s genius is to show the correspondence between poems, poetry, and life itself—the latter ends in any individual case. Life ends; it concludes yet it’s incomplete. All along, it was a series of fragments, line breaks. And Teicher’s own writing of line breaks is masterful, one of several causes for my joy in his achievement. He seldom misses triggering a moment of suspense, which on occasion he amplifies by delaying the appearance of the words in the line to follow. A poet’s poet, speaking for myself and, I’ll guess, a lot more, too.
Have a look (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2017)!
