Robyn Ross discusses Gregory Brooker’s poem Texan

Gregory Brooker’s reading of Texan and other poems Sunday night has been the best Fusebox experience so far. Texan is part of Brooker’s project to interweave geographical expanses with poetry, a quest that began as a response to a (possibly) misinterpreted line from Walt Whitman. How could the entire United States be fit into a poem? Brooker wondered. How could the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, where Brooker lived for a time? How could Texas?

The answer involves literally fitting the poem into the geography (Brooker read from a poem about another, now demolished, Las Vegas hotel: “I wedged into the window frame/the last two lines of this poem.”) He has published lines in newspapers, all of which eventually return to the earth through recycling or decomposition. He has hidden lines in commercial planes flying international routes, thereby spreading his writing across the world. He has placed excerpts in the top of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. For Texan, he published lines from the poem in four Texas newspapers, printed them on the side of a crop duster to fly thousands of miles in Texan air space and (as you’ll see) imbedded them in the bodies of twin brothers.

This endeavor to contain vast geography in a poem is not Brooker’s only peculiar pursuit. He also endows his poetry with its own agency—and not the stubbornness or antagonism we think of when we have writer’s block. Instead Brooker the writer acts as a docent for his writing, pointing out the poem’s choices and intentions. Each poem is a living entity, one that he as writer and narrator guides the reader through.

This is one of the “Fusebox moments” of Brooker’s work – rather than being content to describe a subject, Brooker’s poems narrate their own actions. They announce that one stanza is standing in for another. They point out the properties of individual lines. They state that “at this point… the writing has had too much to drink.” Like much of the art in Fusebox, the poetry is aware of its own conventions and shrugs at them.

Texan and Brooker’s other selections are in clear contrast to another well-known poem that itself personifies poetry. Donald Justice’s “Poem” (1973) begins:

“This poem is not addressed to you.

You may come into it briefly,

But no one will find you here, no one.

You will have changed before the poem will.”

Rather than adopting the impenetrable, indifferent countenance of Justice’s “Poem,” Brooker’s personified poems welcome us in. They explain their intentions (“The writing wants to be about flowers”). They approve our double-take: “Impossible yes? That the writing could become sentient?”  But always they interact with us. One concludes, “Reader… into it you are writ.”

Texan is described as a site-specific poem. But as much as space, Brooker’s work is concerned with time. Each poem he read treated time as a collapsible entity, the descriptions of past, present and future interwoven and aware of one another. The future is buried in the present; the seed of what we will become is tucked into the bud of now. Texan is a poem that planned ahead, down to the very minute when it would be read before an audience at Fusebox, at 7 pm on April 25 in Austin.

The manipulation of time in Brooker’s poems reminded me of the best moment of LA Party, wherein the three performers (merged into a single narrator) took a break from the describing the titular party and talked about coming to Austin for the show. Wait, we listeners thought. This seems off the cuff, but clearly it’s rehearsed since all three of them know the lines. This must also be part of the show, even though it feels unscripted. Similarly, Brooker’s poem has written the moment of its public presentation into its closing lines, jarring the audience with this nonlinear approach to time.

One explanation of the description in the Fusebox booklet is in order: “The poem’s ending will reside in the twin brothers’ bodies for 7 years and then disappear.” It’s true, sort of. The last two lines of the poem were written on paper that twin brothers who assisted in the reading folded and ate. On the presumptions that some part of that poetry-laden paper will be assimilated into the brothers… and that every cell in the body is replaced after seven years… the poem’s ending is the most site-specific piece of art one can imagine.

Justice’s “Poem” ends: “And it does not matter what you think/ This poem is not addressed to you.”

In contrast, those of us at Brooker’s reading were invited, welcomed, and personally addressed by a poem that knew – long before we did – that it would meet us in Austin last night.