Middle Grounds: On Geoffrey Brock’s “After”

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“I still have conversations with my father.” In this line of pentameter, the first of Geoffrey Brock’s poem “Gray Communion,” the inflected “still” freezes a moment of continuity: the conditions for ongoingness preserve in time earlier conditions, earlier conversations. Does the father vocally participate in these conversations, or is “still” a reflection that adapts to the present? “Sometimes we’re at the bottom of the ocean / and he’s distracted by the lack of air.” Something in this son’s speech places his father in the occasion for distraction: the five-beat line almost misdirects from the inevitable question of agency. It sounds like father and son speak to each other; it also sounds like a son talking to himself, imagining what his father may or did say. “Sometimes he’s standing at a teller’s window / with me on his shoulders,” then later we transport again, “Sometimes we’re in his dirty living room / watching the Spurs, speaking chiefly in stats.” Wherever they are together, father and son speak and do not speak. 

After, in which “Gray Communion” appears, is Geoffrey Brock’s third volume of original poetry. In his postscript to the volume, cheekily labelled “Afterthoughts,” Brock describes the significance of the title: “A number of the poems were written after, and in response to, the death of my father, the poet Van K. Brock (Oct. 31- 1932-Mar. 1, 2017).” A temporal channel, a way to speak to the dead, the “conversations” that recur on the page happen through and within poetry, the younger Brock responding in verse to the poetry of his father. Brock is also a prolific translator of Italian literature, having rendered in English several books of poetry, prose, and comics—in addition to editing The FSG Book of 20^th– Century Italian Poetry (2015). Yet the difference between “original poetry” and work in translation structurally shapes the poems of After, as Brock continues in his postscript: “Some of those poems, and many of the others, are also in some way ‘after’—as in, in the manner of—other poems or works of art. Such texts are often called ‘imitations’ and have long been seen as, in Samuel Johnson’s words, ‘a kind of middle composition between translation and original design.’” These poems similarly converse with Horace and Robert Lowell, Rainer Maria Rilke and Natalia Ginzburg, Jennifer Grotz and John Keats. These “middle compositions” determine the formal conditions for each poem: what Brock will imitate outright, what the poem will return and resist. “Each stanza of ‘Gray Communion,’” Brock writes in the postscript, “borrows a line from a poem by [his] father or, in the case of the third stanza, from his communion certificate.” 

Another poem here borrows language from Van K. Brock. In “After my Father, a Cento,” the patchwork poem is comprised exclusively of lines from the elder Brock’s work. In antiquity, to use the cento form meant to borrow from poets greater than oneself, to work through poems greater than one’s own; lesser Greek and Roman poets would write centos after Homer and Virgil respectively. “I learned to translate / where snowmen tame wild country. / They’ll stand all night in snow,” begins “After my Father,” with lines from Van K. Brock’s “My South, My Russia,” “An Absurd Snowman,” and “Efficiency Award.” The formal parameters of a cento point to its artifice: formal coherence matters just as much as ruptures in the inherited structure; conversation between father and son recurs in these ruptures. What to make of the tense shift between learned to translate and they’ll stand all night? The poem elides the present—at first, at least until these tiny ruptures become a method for adaptation: “I can teach you how to translate: begin / bearing your son in your arms, our sons to us.” Parenthood, a form of sentimental translation: the middle ground between parent and child in which the terms for legibility transform. “Without a tongue, / I had no way to translate— / none of us had fathers who knew that trick.” The non-semantic communication that happens—and now must happen—without the ability to form new language: on the page, the past adapts to the present, father adopts a new image. “Instead / I listen, my whole body a tongue.” The palimpsest of “I”: both father and son listen to each other’s echo, animating the “whole body,” the living tongue. 

Luckily, it seems the observation “none of us had fathers who knew that trick” concerns an older generation. Translation here is a various and improvisatory act, only determined by mapping that middle ground: sometimes translation resembles rendering in English the structure of a poem composed in another language, sometimes a poem cribs language from Brock’s father and thus transposes its formal properties. Sometimes translation means the process of making legible across generations the idiosyncrasies of a single knowledge. Just as the figure of the poet converses with his father, he frequently addresses his own children, as in “Midwinter Letter”: 

Dear son of mine, dear daughter,
the forecast called
for a fine evening, and we
did laugh at first, but then we bawled;
our wine turned into water. 

“Forecast” may also characterize the weather of that midwinter evening; it certainly refers to poll trends and election forecasting. This is a letter of embarrassment, father “blinded by rare optimism” before the moment “our country had gone mad / in a red flurry.” Having expressed that optimism to his children, they’ve mirrored their father’s temperament. The line expands if only to contract, two beats in the second and sixth lines of each stanza; we feel that accumulation and release as an ongoing tension: 

even the moon was torn
that night by schism,
half dark, half bright, but I—
blinded by rare optimism
and drunk on common scorn
believed a lie,
or more than one, and had 
the two of you
believing too. I’m sorry.

Note the enjambments that immediately precede the rhythmic shift. As the line contracts, the sentence accelerates by inflecting the social occasion for rhyme: torn, optimism, scorn. It would be a mistake to prescribe the formal capacities of the poem through its subject; what matters instead is how these shifts make us feel as if a word like “optimism” belongs in a poem of emotional and political nuance. As tension builds and crests, the knowledge becomes our own. Into this tension steps grandfather. Father smothered by embarrassment, overwhelmed by what previously seemed impossible, the task of translating this failed optimism reverts “to my dying father / to say something true.” Only after watching his father’s “cool but not cold” response—“This is the way / America works”—does the son learn how to communicate this particular knowledge to his own children. This is the way America works. This is the way parenting works: you learn first what to do (and more frequently what not to do) by making observations of your own childhood, the behavior of your parents (if you’re willing to pay attention). The knowledge is not new, but what feels familiarly new in After is the way we move to these realizations: 

I’m trying to glimpse a future
where fathers are better,
and countries. All I see
tonight are spacemen. But if this letter
should find you there, then picture
a joyous me,
not this large child, grieving
at three a.m.
for his earthbound father,
his failing country. No, not him;
he is a ghost. You’re living— and must live further.

If this letter should find you there: deeper into life, deeper into this failing country, where a dying father guides his son towards a series of discoveries, where that same son writes to his own children in the future. 

If I am making this process seem too neat—parenting and translation as similar types of dialogue—it’s because, reading After, I feel entranced by its sense for formal invention. In his postscript, Brock briefly meditates on the Romantic sense of originality and genius: “All poets, Goethe suggests, are inescapably indebted to other poets, much as each of us is indebted to the people who raised us.” When Brock pens a poem after “Fiaba e morale” by the Italian poet Paolo Febbrano, a father and son happen to appear: “he fell and died, the skier,” then later, “his son sets out from his home.” When Brock dedicates a poem “for my daughter, at four,” translation becomes its subject, the inimitable silence of a staring contest between parent and child: “I see, as if projected on a wall / by the light of a match, the shadow / of the creature she will be…” Always, though, the books return to the elegiac mode: acute recognition of how Van K. Brock has shaped the poet’s life, hopeful anticipation of the ways he will continue to do so from the afterlife. As expressed in “The Makers”—“The children are the makers of the parents, / by cut and paste, by drag and drop, by trial / and terror”—the middle ground is exactly where the poet finds himself at the moment of articulation. 

Father and son commit to quitting cigarettes together. Neither will smoke again if the other promises to do the same. Father fails: “There was betrayal, father, when you broke / the pact we’d sealed one evening with two snuffed / cigarettes.” “Betrayal” happens to be the title of this poem. Now, son is untethered from his promise: what keeps him away from cigarettes? “The reek / of you a proof, I thought, of weakness / of love.” Thirty years have passed since this moment, “death / has stretchered” father, and yet son cannot shake this betrayal: “I’d wanted you to save me, father, / by saving yourself—for us to save each other.” The retroactive wish for self-correction would recast the future, the present moment of articulation, or at least make the lesson burn less severely: “That you couldn’t, or wouldn’t, / was something I didn’t / want ever to have learned.” What’s left? The lesson and its small wrinkles of grief, anger, understanding, the lesson that works “down the throat of my lives, / back, toward my birth, / and forth, toward future children, future wives…” It’s been thirty years; it’s been no time at all. The rift transforms, an unspeakable distance between father and son, but what’s left is not merely lessons of grief. Later in After, in “So Tell Me…,” we learn how the enduring act of translation reinforces, across time, exactly what’s needed at that moment: “My will, these days, is soothed by the caress / of Love’s voice, which allows me to desire / exactly what I have—no more, no less.”