Formally collaborative projects remain relatively uncommon in contemporary poetry, despite its many other radical delights. It has been said elsewhere that all poetry is collaboration, and of course many poems, even if begun in isolation, are shepherded into final forms through dialogic partnerships. There are also several well-known contemporary poetic relationships of reciprocal creation–to say nothing of the many historical ones–such as the longstanding collaborative project between poets Denice Duhamel and Maureen Seaton. One can also consider partnerships that exist across broader expanses of time, including the partnerships of craft potentiated by forms such as erasure, elegy, or ekphrasis. Still, the majority of poetry books published in the last five years are attributed to a single author, whatever their processes of becoming may have been.
Therapon, a collection of poems from Bruce Bond and Dan Beachy-Quick (Tupelo Press, 2023), participates in this lineage of poetic collaboration while also subtly pushing the boundaries of what has hitherto been understood as collaborative poetic dialogue. Framed in part as a response to Emmanuel Levinas’ construction of ethics as formed by one’s relationship to the Other–Levinas’ comment on the origins and meaning of language in entre nous serves as Therapon’s epigraph– these poems both explore and enact dialectic, asking and demonstrating what it means for the self to be dependently constructed in relation to the Other. In this sense, Therapon is not so much a conversation as a merging of voices–a process Bond has referred to elsewhere as an “incorporation.”Within an art form that is often believed to arise from solitude, this incorporative approach is quietly astounding.
Bond and Beachy-Quick’s text is an explicitly collaborative effort, with authorship of individual poems and the full collection attributed to both poets. Arranged in three numbered sections, the poems are untitled except for numerals preceded or followed by colons, alternately in ascending or descending order to and from 10. Because each numbered title appears twice in quick succession and because–in the tradition of the sonnet cycle on which the poems’ structures loosely hang–poems sometimes begin seemingly where the previous one leaves off, there is some space to assume that Bond and Beachy-Quick simply alternated writing poems. In a discussion about the process of writing Therapon with Superstition Review, however, Bond and Beachy-Quick shared that the text is meant to be read as a “continuous thread of poems that defy any attempt at knowing who wrote what.”
Rather than exploring the possibilities of shared or altered responsibility, then, Therapon does something fundamentally more radical. It complicates, in a fashion true to Levinas’ ethical project, the concept of single authorship. Moreover, the poems in Therapon subvert singularity beyond the crafting of poetry, attending as well to the self-fashioning that happens in childhood (often via identification with and separation from a parent), singular versus collective experiences of religious faith, the generation and appreciation of visual art as far back as paleolithic cave paintings, and the iterative process of self-understanding that can proceed from talk therapy. (“Therapon,” which is the noun form of the Greek verb therapeuo, is a root of ‘therapy,’ and has been alternately translated as ‘chamber,’ ‘attendant,’ or ‘servant’/‘slave’). There is an indebtedness and a hierarchy, then, to the ways in which we generate meaning and identity from others. The ‘chamber’ of ‘therapon’ tells us, too, that the dialogue in these poems is both a relationship and a physical space. This text thus becomes a space of possibility in which the multiple occludes the singular, allowing a voice truly attributable to both authors to emerge.
In true therapeutic form, the process evidenced in Therapon is more important than (or at least, equally important to) its component parts. No singular claim is made about “the nature of selfhood as best suggested and enlarged through gestures of exchange”; rather, that process is enacted in a mode that roughly adheres to the stages in which an individual might experience or discover it. The first of the text’s three sections performs the miraculous creation and confirmation of selfhood by the Other–frequently from the vantage point of childhood. The opening almost-sonnet (each poem is 13 lines in length) includes one of the text’s many quotable, idiomatic lines: “Two came first / The mother of one,” drawing a relational and linear thread between plurality and singularity that sets the collection’s tone and introduces the critical recurring concept of motherhood and mothering (1). The first poem’s invocation of cave art– “Far as the wall whose edifice mirrors no one here / though a torch might float a shadow across a herd”–asserts that the indelible linkage of one to the Other goes back (literally) as far as we have human records (1). Cave paintings are a compelling choice because their age and tendency to fall within expected categories of representation preclude identification of individual artists. Yet, as Bond and Beachy-Quick seem to assert, the paintings indicate creative impulses that can be conjured at any time, even by a child learning to draw: “the crayon the slaughtered beast of dawn you I say / and a million figured horses thunder through the room” (1). The cave paintings introduce us to the idea that authorship is both everywhere and nowhere.
In the second poem, specific features from parietal art further the concept of Otherness as sameness, or as being essential to constructing the self. Listing found elements in a real or imagined paleolithic image, Bond and Beachy-Quick write, “bison, bird-headed staff, horse, headdress, / you have no mother, child, only memory / that fever in the cave you thought to cure / by swallowing strange ink and spitting it out” (2). Among other archetypal images, the list in this first line evokes the famously enigmatic “bird man of Lascaux,” a relatively rare Magdalenian example of paleolithic art that features both humanoid figures and an implied narrative. The self in this image–both in the original artwork and in the poem–is a hybrid, neither fully human– “you have no mother...only memory”– nor fully settled in its sense of identity– “that fever...you thought to cure / by swallowing.” The poem’s ‘child’–for the child is the best starting point, literal or metaphorical, for the self-in-progress–is both ancient and modern, bird and man, motherless and mothered, pre-creative and a maker.
Part II of Therapon introduces a more literally therapeutic relationship, and explores grief, anger, and sadness as mediating exchanges that form a Self. The child of Part I is older now, but still a “child of the deep”–the recurring concept used for the state of multiplicity that creates the experiences of grief, anger, and sadness. The mother and therapist in this section are joined, at times, by an angel–a third guiding steward of the One. Death, too, is a recurring theme in the text’s second section, introduced alternatively via allusions to lived experiences and allusions to myth. When, in “: 7,” the Child learns that one Uncle Bob has gone “to a better place,” the poets write, “I always loved that trick / how he pulled a quarter from my ear,” splicing grief in the memory of a joyful encounter with the paying of Charon to ferry souls into paradise (29). Paradises, in fact, also abound in this section. “Paradise? I keep forgetting if it’s true” and “My mother taught me about our faith / seldom practiced. We believe in no hell, / She said. But there is a heaven” follow “: 10”’s encounter with grief and precede “: 7”’s reflection on Uncle Bob’s passage into death. At times playful, personal, and meditative, the general assertion here seems to be that, in keeping with the text’s overall investigation of exchange and relationality, we are responsible for shepherding each other through this life, even and especially through states of alterity.
The third and final section of Therapon is more personal than the preceding two and focuses on the relationship between past and present in a manner that allows for more personalization or evidence of individual authorship than exists elsewhere in the text. Here, especially in the section’s latter half, the poems more frequently flow directly into each other, with ellipses indicating direct continuity from preceding lines and evoking, if not performing, some of the conventions of the sonnet corona. To the cave, mother, underworld, and paradise, as well as to the angelic and therapeutic dialogues of Part II, Bond and Beachy-Quick add a motif of the family graveyard which, like Woolf’s lighthouse, is witness and transfer point for interpersonal connectivity over time. “The same woods edged / The cemetery my ancestors are buried in, / Graveyard we own and that owns us” the section opens (46). A brief flash of personal authorship here– “the Quick cemetery, it’s true”–allows a moment of intergenerational connectivity: “I pick up the pine-cones / From trees my great-grandfather planted” (46). The third section is interested in relationships of exchange and, much like the first two sections, those exchanges span generations.
This final section also crucially provides an answer to a question I had considered while reading the first two about the relationship between Levinas’ ethics of relationality to the conditions under which the book was written and published. Steeped as it is in archetype, myth (Homeric and otherwise), and memory, Therapon is appealingly gnomic, which also means it possibly misses an opportunity to link the ethics of connectivity to ongoing realities in the world of its creation. In “5 :,” the poets do approach this linkage:
...you whose waters never breathe whose
names of coastal cities float across the harbor
save me says a tiny island in the South Pacific
that is no longer there every map one face
across another save me says a ring my father
left behind and so I slip it on so large it falls
like an angel... (53).
In a dense collapse of personal and global loss, “5 :” connects lost spaces (due, presumably, to climate change) to lost relationships and artifacts. The poets’ elision of punctuation here–a common stylistic move throughout the third section–helps facilitate this collage-link connection. In “6 :,” Bond and Beachy-Quick similarly address global conflict vis-a-vis the personal: “I burst into an aureole / of peonies and bees I was just that scared I / placed a cube inside a song and called in barn / or justice or the American conflict in Southeast Asia...” (55). The move here is similar to that in “5 :”: the poem notes the ultimate exchangeability and connectivity of all things, concrete or diffuse, extended even to global conflict.
If there is an ethic in this third section (with apologies to Levinas, of whom I am no scholar), it might be this: there is a violence to the process by which oneness happens, and interdependency rather than singularity is the more ethical position of selfhood. After all, Bond and Beachy-Quick reveal earlier in the text that they are not naive about the process by which individuation, even in childhood, sometimes violently happens: “a child strikes matches in the dust, dips crickets / In kerosene, sets them on fire. What is beautiful / Isn’t true or false” (14). In fact, the interconnectedness or separation between people and animals is a frequent transfer point for this book’s connection of interdependence to a broader ethic. At times violent, at times comical– a father grows a tail and gorges in the garden; Homer’s Elpenor, back from the dead, reflects on the oneness of humans and pigs following Circe’s conversion– humans become, reflect, harm, and remember animals throughout the book’s three sections. These moments are delightful and strange and yet, while the poems don’t owe readers a clear ethical stance, one wonders whether there is more potential here for the poems’ already ethically-informed driving narrative to comment more pointedly on the disappearing of Pacific islands or “the American conflict in Southeast Asia,” whichever one it may here be.
In its complexities and mysteries, in its powerful erasure of personal authorship, and in its balance of invitation and refusal, Therapon is an astounding project. It is also a delight. In addition to its consideration of Levinas, or its remarkably authorless near-sonnet structure, it also triumphs in achieving the strangeness and profundity that many of us most desire from the best works of contemporary poetry. Among many moments of profundity, I was most moved by a section from one of the final poems, “9 :”:
the love I
lost became at last what it was what does
water know of where a river starts
where it ends
it is busy being water which is to say another... (61)
I was reminded here of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s meditations on the Ojibwe “grammar of animacy” in Braiding Sweetgrass, particularly where she explains that the words for natural spaces and objects are often verbs, rendered as states of being rather than inanimate or lifeless entities. The state of being in Therapon–being water, being a child, being a person in grief, being an angel–is ongoing, and the process of discovering and describing our present states and our relationships to the Other ultimately supplant the need for a definitive end. Returning, in the final poem, to grief, the authors write of letting a friend “cry by the boat in the barn / for as long as he needs to cry. Which might be forever. / Or longer yet. There is no end to such therapy...” (64). Bruce Bond and Dan Beachy-Quick have here opened a dialogue that exceeds a singular one, and that exceeds forever. That is no small thing.
KB Kinkel is a writer based in Massachusetts. Hispoems, interviews, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Prelude, The Rumpus, Poetry Online, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is the author of the chapbook blood machine, a finalist for the 2020 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize and a semifinalist for the Poetry.ONL Chapbook Series Fellowship (2023). He was a semifinalist for the Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize (Gasher Press, 2023) and was longlisted for the 2023 Frontier Award for New Poets (2023). He teaches English and creative writing at the Cambridge School of Weston (MA).