The Transitive Property of Love: On Toby Altman’s “Discipline Park”

Toby Altman | Discipline Park | Wendy’s Subway | September 2023 | 112 Pages

As a writer, I get a lot out of my parasocial relationships. Especially with other writers, because they are often not many degrees of separation from me. Maybe you could call them transitive relationships. The writing world is small and the clout sucks, and it is soul-crushing to watch some people shill on the internet for creative writing, of all things. Still, there are some writers whose work I like and whose public personas I deem fascinating. Like the magazine editor who my boyfriend had a big crush on in high school. Or the famous novelist who slept with one of my friends. I feel close to these strangers in my realm, as though our mutual acquaintance could spark into something meaningful. Though of course it doesn’t. None of these people know who I am, but Toby Altman does. 

Toby Altman is obsessed with the hospital he was born in, which has since been torn down. I am obsessed with the hospital I was born in, which has since been torn down. His, in Chicago, mine, in Manhattan. 

I am obsessed with Toby Altman, but just a little. We have some of the same friends, some of the same anxieties. I left Iowa City in 2016, a year before he arrived. A few years later I moved to Colorado. A year later, he moved to Colorado. His wife has the same first name as me, and I have always felt a kinship with other Emilys. The commonness of our address filling the space of both our houses.

I once had a dream about him before we had ever met. In the dream we were roommates, but newly. My bed was soft and white. He was reading to me, Bernadette Mayer. I was lying on my back, head pillowed, and he leaned over me and stuck a finger in my mouth. I bit it as hard as I could. Then I woke up.

“Very lesbian,” a friend told me, after I’d told them. Very.

Altman writes, “there is something inexplicable about this book, even to its author.” He writes, “This book is about love.” He asks, “What does it mean to love a building?”  

Does it hurt to love a building, I wonder, in the same way it hurts to love a person who doesn’t love you back?

Bertrand Goldberg designed concrete buildings with unusual shapes. You’ve probably seen one, or an image of one. 

Altman writes that Goldberg was, “convinced that design could, through cheap, ubiquitous materials, make human life more bearable.” Goldberg built using these materials “because it seemed utopian to do so.” I like the idea that the materials we surround ourselves with shape our experience. It’s simple but still strikes me as profound. You are what you feel, you are what you breathe, you are what you see. 

Toby Altman is interested in seeing, is interested in Utopia and its failures. He traveled the US visiting Bertrand Goldberg’s buildings. 

Goldberg designed thirteen hospitals, including Prentice Women’s Hospital, where Toby Altman was born. 

Northwestern University, which owned Prentice, decided to demolish the hospital about a decade ago. Toby Altman was employed by Northwestern at the time of its destruction.

The hospital in which you were born being demolished is a perfect metaphor for your mother dying. I know this because both have happened to me.

When my mother was dying of cancer, one of the hospitals she received treatment in was Mobile, Alabama’s Providence Hospital.

It was, of course, designed by Goldberg.

The book

Discipline Park is divided into four sections: “Mandatory Fields (a memoir),” “Bruise Smut,” “The Institution and Its Moods,” and “Afterwards.”

In “Mandatory Fields (a memoir)” we learn to read the book.

On the left side, an image that is a still from a video recording of the destruction of the hospital in which Toby Altman was born.

Below the image, black text that engages with the photo, at least theoretically.

A small word or phrase, often an elliptical poetic fragment, splits across the central binding, broken across the spine. These breaks open a meaning, force a turn.

On the opposite side of the spread, in the upper right corner, white text that engages with Goldberg’s ideas in some way.

Though sometimes these elements move playfully across their pages, this is the form we come to expect.

These different sections function as separate rooms, where different ideas could occur.

“Bruise Smut” begins with a quotation from the snack company Sun Chips, “Being different/is our thing” and here we get the attribution to the left of the quote, broken across two pages. 

Now images appear on the right side of the spread, though the small elliptical text is still broken across the middle.

Altman plays with our expectations as readers. Here I feel the full brunt of his power as a poet, as he mixes high and low.

“Clap your hands if you feel/like a room without a roof” quoting the mind-numbing “Happy” by Pharrell Williams.

And later, Alice Notley: “Every moment must destroy suffering anew.”

Altman is a tour guide of our shared culture, his references akin to the architecture of this time: the ugly mixed-use real estate development, with soulless retail on the ground floor and condos for the wealthy and tasteless above. What would a room without a roof feel like? Why do we not feel the suffering in that phrase when listening to Top 40? How would one even destroy suffering anew?

In the third section, “The Institution and Its Moods,” we are brought along to a tour Altman took of Goldberg’s designs. 

The images in this section are pictures he took on his iPhone of the buildings. He writes what he sees outside the buildings:

“Trash bags full of diapers and dog treats”

“A white man laughing in the closed precincts of his Nissan” 

He imagines what is inside, and here we have the shapes of poems made of images, a place where projection meets the object.

I am consistently struck by Altman’s turns of language:

“Howdy/to the speechless/dead” 

“I would say a kind/of pregnancy. Like many men, I fantasized about/being encumbered: beneath me or inside, weaving/of a new body.”

“Now you are a thick suburb”

You have to think about the hospital as having died

When I was four my grandmother died. I remember going to a hospital in Mobile, I don’t know which one, with my mother. I asked where my grandmother, Gibbon, was now. My mother pointed up. I imagine now that she was pointing to the sky, to say heaven. But I saw her finger point to a little orange flag on the roof of the hospital. Ah, I thought. That’s where souls go. Into that little cone of an orange flag.

I don’t know what hospital it was and my mother died about a decade later, so I can’t ask her. I don’t even know if the hospital had anything to do with my grandmother’s death or if it was incidental that we were there. I spent much of my childhood in hospitals, never as a patient. I visited both my parents in hospitals, my grandparents. I knew them all. But I always thought the Beehive was the best looking one. The Beehive is what we in Mobile called Bertrand Goldberg’s Providence Hospital.

Why am I writing all this?

I try to attend a reading at one of my least favorite venues in Manhattan with my friend Juliet. Outside I run into a poet I know from Iowa, there with her beautiful architect boyfriend and his beautiful architect friend. I chat with the friend-of-my-friend’s-boyfriend, trying to make him laugh. We follow each other on Instagram. Months later, he posts about Goldberg. I send him a link to Toby Altman’s chapbook, Every Hospital by Bertrand Goldberg (Except One).

I am trying to get over my twenty-five-year-old lover who recently left New York. They were born in a hospital designed by Goldberg.

I feel jealous of Toby Altman for being so obsessed with this topic, which makes his poetry a “serious project.” I worry I am only serious about my love for people.

I try to sublimate all my bad feelings into desire. Could you do that with a building?

I sit writing this in a coffee shop in New York and out the window I see a man who looks like a mix between Toby Altman and Ben Lerner, then later think to myself that it was probably just Ben Lerner. 

On Sunday, April 30, 2017, Altman visits St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tacoma, Washington, where my ex-lover was born. It occurs to me that they were both in Tacoma that day, almost certainly, while I was not far away, 40 miles north, in Seattle. I had not met Altman or my ex yet, did not know that either of them existed. 

I check my photo app on my phone, my best calendar for where I was at any given moment. On April 30, 2017, I was not in Seattle, I was in Iowa City, back to visit friends and attend “Workshop Prom.” I remember that day. At midnight on the 29th I wore a sparkly silver dress festooned with sequins and metallic makeup in a band across my eyes. I went home with a translator I had casually dated the previous year. I woke up in her small apartment and prepared to walk across town to my friends’ house, where all my belongings were. In the translator’s bathroom I attempted to remove the makeup with coconut oil she kept in a large glass jar in her bathroom. My face was rubbed red. Altman would arrive in Iowa City in the fall of 2017.

Altman writes of Goldberg’s hospitals, “Pictures do not show how sensuous they are, how the folds fold on each other as you walk around them: a body in the presence of a body.”

Of course, I love this hospital because it was the first place that my ex-lover existed in. The insanity of love: to cherish a secret kinship for a building. To see it mentioned and think, “That’s for me, that brings me to delight, and is special.” 

I feel these moments of coincidence with Toby Altman. In reading Discipline Park, I feel his obsession grow, and it grows in me too. I learn, through the book, of other buildings of Goldberg’s. There is joy in the discovery of coincidence, in seeing the world grow smaller. As if someone placed these little delights against the uncaring backdrop of life. 

I cannot get over having a hospital. 

When I visit the LGBTQ center on 13th Street in Manhattan, I often like to take some time at the AIDS memorial nearby. 

When I was born, in 1990, St. Vincent’s had one of the largest AIDS wards in the country. It was the first one in New York.

St. Vincent’s was where they took survivors of the Titanic. It was a “major site of triage” on September 11th.[1]

For the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire too.[2]

The musical artist St. Vincent[3] and the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay[4] were both named after the hospital.

If I were a better poet, I would write a whole book about St. Vincent’s, but it wouldn’t be as good as Discipline Park.

What is the transitive property of love?

Altman travels to the area of my childhood in July of 2017:

He says he “asked Nick what to do in Mobile and [Nick] said, ‘Stay for the sunset, all the offshore rigs light up like crystal cities.’” 

By scouring the acknowledgements of this book, I determine that this Nick is Nick Sturm, so I find and follow him on Instagram and send him a message, asking if he is from Mobile. He’s not, he was teaching there. Impossible to imagine that the academic poets are taking short-term teaching positions in Mobile, but there we go. In college, when I would fly home to Mobile for winter or summer breaks, after my connecting flight in Atlanta or Charlotte, I would look at everyone on the plane and think, “Why are you going to Mobile?” But I was, and they were too, maybe even for a good reason.

I love that Altman includes his photos of the buildings. I beg you to look at them too, to understand how we who grew up in the places with these hospitals loved them, felt proud of their insistence on our landscapes.

Altman writes: “Say that you want this world and it is yours. It hides inside of money.”

I want this book, Discipline Park, to be mine. I have a personal interest in the architecture of Chicago. My boyfriend’s grandfather was an architect in Chicago, so I decide to search for him online. I never met him; he died eleven years before I met my boyfriend in 2013. I learn he worked at the firm Perkins & Will and designed the Chase Tower (known at the time as the First National Bank Building), the fourteenth tallest building in Chicago, and popularly known for the fact that it is where the NPR show “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” was recorded until 2022. 

Here is his sketch:     

I find his collection is at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

“The portion presented here illustrates aspects of the built environment of Chicago and the surrounding metropolitan area over a thirty-year time span from the early 1960s through the mid-1990s.”

There are 2,313 pictures he took of the buildings of Chicago.

In this collection of photographs of buildings in Chicago, twenty-six are of Goldberg’s. 

I particularly like his shot of Prentice Women’s Hospital, which he took in 1975 or 1976. The angle is reminiscent of the cover of Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” which famously features Goldberg’s Marina City as seen from below.

I like to imagine my boyfriend’s grandfather long before my boyfriend existed, when my boyfriend’s dad was still in high school, walking the streets of Chicago and noticing.

I tell my boyfriend that I found the archive of his grandfather’s photographs and was thinking of using them in this piece. He didn’t know the archive existed. So here I am, bringing the surprise back around to him. 

The beginning and ends of things

Altman writes, “A hospital, if it is well-made, acts as a sealant or a border. It refuses to explain the nature of pain: to say the extent to which pain is not an exception to, but a condition of, the city around it. This is part of what makes Bertrand’s hospitals so strange. Their viscosity. Their intimacy with pleasure. They are unconcealed and they are not ashamed.” 

Here, I notice that Toby calls Bertrand Goldberg Bertrand. I decide I will call Toby Altman Toby.

Toby visits Providence Hospital, in Mobile, on Sunday, July 17, 2017. I was in Wallingford, Connecticut, teaching at a summer program. 

He writes, “Careful to exclude the faces of patients and ambulance staff, I try to photograph it and mostly fail. No one here likes me. In turn, I am not easy: anxious, as always, to say a lot. As if these poems could be complete; a record of a world that has nothing but needs.”

Hospitals contain the human lifecycle, they are where people are often born and where people often die, but for the most part they exist outside of society. They are receptacles for humans at our most needful, but when we do not need them most of us would rather stay away. 

Why would anyone love a hospital?

“What he built is just a screen or veil beyond which a bright underwater city waits, where the patients are lifted from their beds and taken into the blue mystery, breathing easy in the deep, their cancers cured and their bodies unbroken, their bodies undressed or stretched, long flagellates that pierce the pores within the BUDGET. Where they travel, no one can say. Perhaps into Mobile Bay. And how long until the bay marches up the hill and kisses us, fed by glacial runoff, so that nothing here remains? Nothing personal anyway.” 

I laugh when I read this, for me the most personal of these entries. The place where my mother was not cured of cancer. 

I hated hospitals as a kid, when I was in them so often, where my parents would let me steal the Jell-O from their plastic trays. As an adult, I live, for the most part, outside of them. 

“Oh great, another hospital. Why did he build so many?”

•

[1] Emily Zheng and William H Frishman, “The Closing of St Vincent’s Hospital in New York City,” The American Journal of Medicine, Vol 125, No 5, May 2012, May 2012, https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(11)00653-X/pdf

[2] Ibid.

[3] “Five Interesting Facts about Music Artist St. Vincent: GIAF.” Galway International Arts Festival, June 9, 2015. https://www.giaf.ie/media/post/st.-vincent-in-five.

[4] “Edna St. Vincent Millay: Biography, Jazz Age Poet, Playwright.” Biography.com, August 16, 2023. https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/edna-st-vincent-millay.