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    To Keep Love Blurry
    To Keep Love Blurry
    To Keep Love Blurry
    Ebook114 pages52 minutes

    To Keep Love Blurry

    By Craig Morgan Teicher

    2/5

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    About this ebook

    • New poetry collection by winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry.
    • As poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle, Craig Morgan Teicher is well-known and respected in the poetry community.
    • Poems from the collection have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, The Nation, Boston Review, and in other prestigious journals.
    • Craig's wife Brenda Shaughnessy's new book, Our Andromeda, will be published by Copper Canyon Press the same month as To Keep Love Blurry. The couple is planning joint readings and promotion in NYC and elsewhere. BOA and Copper Canyon are in talks about other joint promotions.
    • To Keep Love Blurry will carry blurbs from D.A. Powell, Dana Levin, and, possibly, Frank Bidart.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateAug 21, 2012
    ISBN9781934414941
    To Keep Love Blurry
    Author

    Craig Morgan Teicher

    Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books of poems: Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021); The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), which won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (CLP, 2007), winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry. He also wrote Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA, 2010) and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums (Omnidawn, 2014). His first collection of essays, We Begin in Gladness, was published by Graywolf in November, 2018. Teicher edited Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions, 2016) and serves as a poetry editor for The Literary Review. He writes about books for many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Times, and NPR. He worked for many years at Publishers Weekly and is now Digital Director of The Paris Review. He is a 2021 recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and children.

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    • 2/5
      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.

    Book preview

    To Keep Love Blurry - Craig Morgan Teicher

    PART ONE

    The Prince of Rivers

    In the land of rivers I was the prince of rivers.

    In the land of houses I lived in a thousand houses.

    In the land of scattered bones my bones were scattered

    by worshipful princes who carried each one like a scepter.

    I was there and a breeze eddied around me.

    In the land of questions I was the subject of questions.

    I’m sorry what was lost was found utterly changed.

    I could see through the sky and bring down the lonely stars.

    When I was happy, lambs were born. They stood up

    enacting their first dance of balance. In the land of frost

    I was never cold. A warm breeze eddied around me.

    When I thundered the sky tore like paper. Beyond the sky

    the sky tore and rain fell into the moon’s dark holes.

    In the land of eagles I received messages from eagles.

    I’m sorry the moon is a fake gray plate. I’m sorry the day

    is so dark. In the land of the future I saw men of stone.

    When I was sad all the seas swelled. The islands

    were swallowed and forgotten; books were drenched and forgotten.

    When I was old my hair was as long as my story.

    I’m sorry the branch bearing fruit is so high.

    When I was young trees arched toward me like I was the sun.

    I’m sorry the dead are quiet as ash. I’m sorry what’s left is so cold.

    I knew I could escape through a hole in the sky. Wherever

    I wept thick stalks grew. I knew I could weep for a long time to come.

    Father

    "You think too much—it’s what I’ve always said.

    There’s nothing new you’ll find by looking in your head,

    no encoded family secrets, no incestuous kiss

    from a molested aunt. It’s just exactly this,

    just memories less in focus when remembered again,

    modified, chipped into kindling for fear—

    I’ve spent most of my life afraid, being unclear

    about whether an honest mistake counts as a sin,

    and what the consequences were of hurtful things I did.

    There are no big answers, no revelations.

    Isn’t my life proof enough that anything I hid

    I lost? I’ll die, and so will you, without explanations.

    I’m no model, but do go for things you can touch—

    souvenir snow globes, girls. You think too much."

    Mother

    "‘I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead’—you’ve said

    so so many times. You wear my death like a birthmark.

    It’s not what I intended, but I do let it go to my head

    occasionally. God knows I was modest in life.

    But is my death enough to motor all your days, to spark

    enough imagination and verve to sustain your son and wife?

    Does it really excite you and keep you awake

    to the world at hand? Maybe. You’ve managed to make

    a little name for yourself, and you’re funny,

    which is a surprise. You were always a good writer,

    so nothing’s shocking there, and you even make some money!

    But obsessing over me—I’m afraid it keeps you slighter...

    But this is not the kind of stuff I would have said.

    It’s your call. This is you talking to you—I’m dead."

    Confession

    Lowell did it best because he understood

    that even when his art was saying I’ve been bad,

    he had to make himself look good.

    No one loves a truly self-loathing lad,

    though one and all are charmed

    by a man’s interest in his own evil,

    which he puts on show for those he’s harmed

    or those who haven’t been but hope they will

    be. Daredevil, rock star, martyr-circus-freak,

    he sets himself on fire every night,

    doused later as the audience cries, how unique.

    It’s a trick they like; he’s perfectly alright,

    because he’s in love with himself, playing hate.

    True self-haters perform to empty houses, late.

    It Came from the Primordial Ooze

    The mind is so big it’s easy to get lost in thought,

    big as a grapefruit, or like an astonishing

    house bigger on the inside than its frame

    could possibly contain. I remember something

    I’d forgot and wonder what it got lost behind,

    beneath, around, about. Books are divided

    into pages, stacked and bound, because no one

    can read one all at once, hence chapters

    and why a good song is just three minutes long,

    as if a kind of mind can only think

    so much, which explains why an octopus

    can learn to open a jar but not drive a car.

    A voice answers most questions the self asks

    the self, but where does he go when

    the self says I know? If I write down everything

    I think and

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