His Tongue Was a Pen
His Tongue Was a Pen
Jacob Walhout
In our church’s freezing back stairwell, where my dad and I drilled the Scripture passage I’d been assigned to read (a job I was only entrusted with once or twice, as I remember), my dad exclaimed, “you need to read like Brett Foster!” This was—and remains, to my regret—one of the few things I knew about Brett, that he was a good reader: of text, of people, aloud, in verse. At that age I rarely took in the meaning of what he had read, but not for the same reasons I rarely took in what others read. Unlike the often boring others, he fascinated me, maybe sometimes annoyed me: the slight tilt of his head; the chasmic silences he’d pull between sentences and verses, letting the congregation’s shuffling and coughing enter the Word; the laborious, searching eye contact during each of these caesuras; the softness of voice; these—which in anyone else would scream of the need to seem earnest or reverent—in him, were the real deal. I understand now that Brett Foster’s tactile, loving, yearning performances were the first poetry to reach me.
Extravagant Rescues is a posthumous collection of poetry by Brett Foster, who passed in 2015 from sudden colon cancer. As such, it is difficult to avoid reading a kind of foreboding that surely hadn’t been intended: the many poems about his family take on an inevitable somberness, as do innocuous moments like the time he describes his pessimism as “tumorlike.” To me at least, since I read The Garbage Eater (2011) only a year ago, Extravagant Rescues feels in some ways like Foster’s second posthumous collection. The first of Brett’s work that I heard, actually, was composed after this manuscript had been completed, after the diagnosis. I was initially surprised, then, that they weren’t in this collection; it was strange to read, expecting and then not reaching those poems, another distancing, perhaps. But while those poems are brilliantly and rebelliously alive, as are all of his poems, they are Brett “going out singing,” and wouldn’t quite have fit; those poems were posthumous in ways even Extravagant Rescues isn’t, written by a man who knew, in a realer way than most, that he was almost finished.
I have wanted to write about Dr. Foster for a while now, to say something about the presence I feel in his work, a presence I never experienced when he was alive; I have wanted to say something about the way Brett has touched my life, about how I feel something thicker than authorship when I read his Extravagant Rescues, something eucharistic; his poetry, of course, says it with better grace than I can muster: “Yet one glimpse / supplies an energy, fire inside the leaden pose, / while repose is made articulate by each / mid-deed, modestly everlasting.”
In memory of Brett Foster, then, father, husband, midwesterner, poet, scholar, Wheaton College professor, organizer of my dad’s basketball group, member of All Souls’ Anglican, who died of cancer at 42. Who might have known of me, but did not know me.
*
There is something more than imagination or mysticism or sentimentality, I take it, in my experience of the author’s presence as I read and reread Extravagant Rescues; I think it has to do with voice. And though it is not merely Brett’s literary voice that I hear—in the same way that it is not merely the baker’s bread I taste at communion—the written words are important and extraordinary. He writes about himself and his life, but his writing is not about that aboutness; his voice just comes through. I’m sure that wishful thinking and category equivocation play a part when I feel Brett sitting beside me when I read a poem of his, but they are not the sum. At least I hope not.
(Matters of persona vs text vs author vs voice, etc., have the tendency to bog themselves down in definitions and general squabbling, and I often find myself in a state of aporia regarding these topics. To put it crudely, the main problem is determining the extent that the “I” of a text correlates to the human being responsible for the text’s creation, the extent that the private is made public. On one extreme, the “I” correlates to nothing other than the text surrounding and creating it; on the other, the “I” is the author as if face to face. Voice, then, might be defined as that quality in a text—comprised of any number of literary factors—that at the very least seems to make the private public, and at the very most really does.)
I find Foster distinguished first in his choice and range of subjects: Persius, Da Vinci, YouTube, his wife and children, airports, George Clooney, Dante, Frank O’Hara, special teams-caliber Bears players, Horace, etc. These were not chosen by a poet with an eye to seem eclectic, but by a poet who wrote about what interested him, who treats a celebrity’s dancer girlfriend with the same pathos as he does The Empire Strikes Back as he does visions of apocalypse. It is this level gaze, in contrast with the modern/modernist name drop, that distinguishes Foster’s voice, the willingness to spend a poem on social media scraps as well as scraps of Roman verse. And it is a leveling gaze as well, in the best sense, a bringing down of mountains, a bringing up valleys.
The second poem of Extravagant Rescues, “Upon News of the Important Fossil,” is emblematic of this approach, in which he begins with some piece of news—likely a notification on his phone (“Those human features on the apelike creature / may be a watershed in the long debate”)—and gently gives it the dignity it deserves. Brief interjections—“but I like to imagine,” “It says something,” “And better”—indicate that Foster is thinking with us, leading, perhaps, but only just. Foster ends these kinds of poems—we could call them collector ekphrastics or meditations on the news—with an eye toward the future. In this case, the speaker imagines himself in the past, so that his future is our present, casting all our living as very grand and very poor at the same time. He starts the close of the poem with virtuosic lines: “dizzy festival / of ozones, phonemes, green zones, iPhones, / charred craters of conscience, newer loneliness.” Among the treetops with our ancestors, he imagines climate concerns and militarization, language and technology, drawing all together with rhyme and grace. It is sad and flashy (the chromatic rhymes between iPhone, conscience, and loneliness, for instance) and, ultimately, mysterious, as he sees all of humanity in that fossil, “still visible yet, at obliquest angle”; in doing so, there is also the intimation that our future is as inconceivable to us now as our present would have been to those proto-humans. It is this hint, this hint of future glory, glimpsed in the background here, that animates these poems, shades them sorrowful and joyful both.
Another thread I’d like to follow (along with Foster as reader, as collector, as person) is Foster’s teaching, which is evident both in the legacy of his students and admirers, and in his own verse, which I’ll call pedagogical writing.
The primary movers of this poetic pedagogy are Foster’s voice and gaze—the gaze to bring a thing before the reader, the voice to lead the reader in discovery. Or, perhaps the gaze itself gives its objects value, and the voice expounds. In any case, these are really one and the same, marked by or markers of Brett’s humility.
In my experience, teaching is about creating an environment in which the student can see a thing afresh, and then getting out of the way. Brett’s highbrow references are always accessible, his lowbrow always generous. In dislocating his subjects from their traditional surroundings, he presents the reader with the thing itself, or at least a record of his own attempt to reckon with the thing itself.
Foster’s teaching is also apparent in his poetic craft; to rhyme “bereft” and “benefit,” for example, is to teach the reader. Teaching, in this context, necessitates both extraordinary skill and humility; imbalanced, and teaching becomes showing off or else it passes without note. To do what Foster so often does, though, to astound without seeming astounding, is incredibly difficult, and I’m not sure how one might cultivate that skill outside of living the sort of life where such generosity is an honest overflow of character.
The following poem, “George Clooney,” demonstrates exactly this sort of character, is, in my opinion, remarkable in its generosity and humanity:
You gotta have a lot of cojones
to prank George Clooney, to phone him
late at night and say those outrageous things
about his young girlfriend, what’s her name.
Just because she’s from Las Vegas,
that doesn’t mean she’s a stripper, of course
it doesn’t, please! She’s just a cocktail waitress.
So what? His driver who’s a cop traced it,
the number, back to a pre-paid cell phone.
That was that. And imagine that--Clooney,
whom Vanity Fair last month called
The Last Actor in Hollywood, that guy
rudely awakened, middle of the night,
and those shocking words, the obscenities,
his anger like a punch in Leatherheads.
Earlier they had a motorcycle
accident, a miscommunication
at an intersection, common enough.
A lawsuit followed like a hungry child.
All year she wore an air cast, Red Carpet
here and there. They still smile, give an answer
numerous times, from head to talking head.
They hold hands as if they intend to last.
It isn’t fair, this cost of being
one of us, even beautiful among us,
sad and perishable, often injured
and injurious. How he got the number,
why he swore at the movie star,
why they too must suffer ignominy
sometimes, and paparazzi--who’s to say?
Bad enough to be hounded, ordinary
fury, but he shouldn’t have to hear lies
about his girlfriend, who is young and strong
and will not have him around forever.
As I read this, Brett feels present for whatever reason, this poem connecting me to him, or to my projection of him. But it feels true in the way religious experience feels true: the certainty dissolves immediately upon reflection, but the feeling, or the memory of the feeling, grounds a kind of faith or hope. It is not the presence of Sexton’s or Plath’s imitators, overt in merging speaker and author, but rather the presence of someone leaning close and pointing to something in the distance.
There are devices, of course, that help create this feeling: the faintly embarrassed diction (“cojones,” “outrageous,” “obscenities”), the asides (“what’s her name,” “So what?”, “who’s to say?”), the talkiness. Most important, I think, is that in subsequent readings the fun he pokes at both parties transforms into a strange respect, the insight he offers at the end acting as catalyst. Lines like “She’s just a cocktail waitress. / So what?” and “They hold hands as if they intend to last” sound first like feigned sincerity, like the speaker knows the couple’s true motives but plays the part. This side-eyed sarcasm melts away, however, in the third to last sentence: “It isn’t fair, this cost of being / one of us, even beautiful among us, / sad and perishable”. It is a true protest, pathos-charged because humanity’s cost is evident even in these petty, lurid stories.
The final lines (“he shouldn’t have to hear lies / about his girlfriend, who is young and strong / and will not have him around forever”) turn us around again, and we see Clooney and his girlfriend not just as victims of harassment, but as two people, by all accounts in love, who will not last. To suggest that the true harm is in the lies, and not the obscenities or disruption; that Clooney might feel bad about not being around for his girlfriend; that neither is deceiving the other, but simply living their occasionally hazardous life: this is Foster’s voice: humor and its ebbing away, tabloids and their humanity, melancholy and the faint relief that that melancholy is recognized.
*
I hadn’t yet made my silent, melodramatic exit from an organic chemistry lab and become a philosophy major when Brett passed away. I have thus grown into that grief, the deepening love I’ve found for poetry always accompanied by a deepening sadness, however undeserved, for a connection I couldn’t have had. It isn’t regret, really. There’s nothing I wish I had done differently. Instead, I keep unearthing things I wish I could have said or done, things that never could have happened.
Maybe, in entering into someone’s small, constructed world, looking at the things the poet writes about looking at, feeling the things the poet writes about feeling, maybe something mysterious happens there, a kind of eucharist in which the small morsel, infused somehow with its author, is taken in. Does poetry open opportunities for such presence between any reader and poet? I think about Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons of understanding; I think about perichoresis, “mutual in-dwelling”; I think about how I feel like I missed Brett, and now how I miss him, having not known him.
Extravagant Rescues features several very short poems. The great deal of stress put on each word in a poem is multiplied as the poem lasts fewer and fewer words; there is a daring, then, to have so many short poems—and to not string them together into a series to cover over the risks. Incredibly, these poems still embody Foster’s best traits.
“Happiness, Carolina Highway,” quoted in full in the book’s introduction, goes like this:
I tried to sing falsetto
amid the pine and palmetto.
I had a golden god’s bravado,
made bold by my Eldorado.
Jeff Galbraith writes: “This song, about trying to sing, packs an outsized performance into a brief lyric. The ‘bravado’ of the poem lies in the freedom and ease of its style, in the poised assurance that such efforts are, indeed, enough”—to which I’d add that its further success comes from the way its form (free, easy, poised, assured) merges with its content, the way Foster’s “bravado” is steeped in humility. The way these mergings themselves are a happiness.
But my favorite of the short poems is “About Your Delivery-Room Video On YouTube”:
The baby’s head has barely crowned the canal
when today’s parents perpetrate this scandal.
Maybe omphalos is overrated anyhow.
Instead, go with mom’s face, red like a Roman candle.
Like “Happiness, Carolina Highway,” we have four roughly iambic lines each broken on the end of a phrase or sentence, each with one perfect or near-perfect rhyme and two off-pitch rhymes, so that the two poems make something of a pair: the first, a gentle take on happiness, the second, a gentle rebuke for the overzealous Instagram husband. It is the gentleness, I think, which elevates these and much of Foster’s poetry, his tendency toward deference, humor beveled but very much present.
The key to “About Your Delivery-Room Video On YouTube” is omphalos, which necessitated a Google search (as is frequently the case in Extravagant Rescues, for this reader at least, and which never feels like a chore, surprisingly); without omphalos, or rather without its definition, we have this outline: the baby’s head crowns—to be filming this is a scandal—Greek word near-rhymes with scandal and canal, alliterates with “overrated”—mom’s face is red. I expected omphalos to be a concept of some kind, like logos or pathos (again, this reader’s particular experience). Instead, omphalos is a rounded stone of great religious significance, especially the one at Delphi, believed to be the navel of the world. And thus the poem is unlocked, the humor and importance blending together: with omphalos we have a physical description of a baby’s head in a vaginal canal, a metaphorical link to its deep spiritual importance and to its centrality in this couple’s world, and the speaker’s academic queasiness. In the same way “Happiness, Carolina Highway” merged content and form to both enact and speak, “About Your Delivery-Room Video On YouTube”—maybe this is a stretch—imitates the Socratic “knowledge as birth” metaphor, the appearance of omphalos bursting into the poem and changing it after a brief gestation period, the hazy concept of a child becoming physical. And so we have pedagogy, a kind of ekphrastic process, humor, sincerity, in just four lines; we had those things too, by all accounts, for the whole of Brett’s life.
*
One of the poems in this collection mentions my sister-in-law’s godparents, one of whom works with my aunt. Another lists several Chicago Bears players from an era when I still followed them—slightly jarring to remember someone I likely would have never thought of again. Several poems speak about two children from my church at ages younger than I ever knew them, though they were younger than me by enough that I never got to know them all that well anyway. Another mentions Wheaton’s Theosophical Society, which I’ve always half-suspected to be Dan Brownianly nefarious. Something different happens when one knows an artist or their inspiration, but is it just an illusion of proximity? Though I’ve spoken elsewhere about presence during the artistic experience, right now I doubt its verity. I waver, and then despair for wavering. I think it was Kierkegaard who railed against the bourgeoisie who wept at the opera and stepped over the beggar at the theater’s entrance. I worry that the times I’ve been shut in my closet-office weepy over Brett’s poetry were exactly that sort of selfish aestheticism.
But then I think about Anise, and Gus, and Avery, about my dad, even, who started at Wheaton College just a few years before Brett, I think about the myriad unprompted stories I’ve been told about Brett, I think about artistic legacy—I think about how everything I write becomes about myself, while Brett could so nimbly illuminate the most quotidian things. I wish he could have illuminated me like he reportedly did for so many; maybe he could’ve been a poet-mentor to me; maybe, had he lived longer, I could have ignored poetry. To have read a brand new poem about the messiness of The Rise of Skywalker and watching Gus’s jaded reaction to it, meditating on childhood’s twilight; to have forgotten and remembered Brett with a jolt; to have gone to a lecture on Renaissance literature in Blanchard Hall for extra credit and dozed off; to have introduced myself in one of those strange interactions that call painful attention to themselves, but are funny as well, the sort of thing you’re glad to have done, afterwards; to have never read so deeply from his work; that surely would’ve been better. I hate that to think about someone absent is to think about their absence; I suppose everything is posthumous eventually.
Read the poem that inspired the title of this essay at Image Journal
Jacob Walhout
Writer & MFA Candidate
Jacob worked as an ophthalmic technician for three years after graduating from Wheaton College; he and his wife now live in Columbia, SC, where he's an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of South Carolina. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Great Lakes Review, Headway Quarterly, The Esthetic Apostle, and The Cresset.
Photography by Josh Hild