Imagination is not simply a bulwark in Cradle Book; it is a means through which Teicher actively transcends the blight suffered throughout the work.
The past year saw several American poets breaking the boundaries of contemporary form to establish new aesthetic frontiers. There was C.D. Wright’s investigative poetry-journalism in One With Others, Thomas Sayers Ellis’s Skin, Inc., a collection of sprawling “identity repair poems,” and Anne Carson (honorary American) with Nox, an elegiac book-in-a-box whose form is indivisible from the emotion it generates. Add to that list Craig Morgan Teicher and Cradle Book, a work that inhabits such a broad swath of forms that no one name can be affixed to it. The book is at once a collection of fables, of philosophy, of prose and prose poems, of aphorisms, creation myths, mystery, and parable.
What places Cradle Book among the year’s most innovative works is Teicher’s unsettling and manifold treatment of the fable’s traditional speaker. Though he is drawing from a fabular tradition that itself draws upon the rich heritage of folklore, Teicher breaks from both forms by placing his speaker in a position where the stories he tells both distort and bring him into sharper focus. Fittingly, the book’s most declarative story is also its first, its shortest, and its most sinuous, calling into question the voice behind the stories to come. Here it is in its entirety:
THIS STORY
This story is older than the words with which it was written,
though this is the first time it has ever been told.
Teicher’s is a speaker who, like a god, likes to dictate the terms of his universe, of his story, by speaking them into existence. In fact, Teicher’s speaker is not a speaker at all—he is a storyteller. With deictic authority, he tells us to whom the story belongs (this story) and to whom the telling of the story belongs (this is the first time).
One of Cradle Book’s many triumphs is the way in which Teicher is able to enhance our understanding and pathos toward this storyteller by remaining true to the incalculability of his character. In “The Groaning Cows,” we encounter a tenderness in the storyteller that resurfaces throughout the book, whether it be amidst fires, death, or even the origin of unhappiness. Look how Teicher’s use of repetition and question in this passage creates a kind of somber pastoral, calling forth the tone a mother uses when reading her child to sleep:
One night, as if responding to some invisible signal, all the cows began groaning. They groaned and groaned all the next day and did not stop at nightfall. This went on for days and days. No one could sleep. The children were becoming more and more afraid. Nearly driven mad, everyone meeting hall.
should they do? No one could agree.
The question is a favorite tactic of Teicher’s storyteller, who, like any good god, refuses to answer the questions he puts forth. “Who will rise up,” he asks in “The Voices,” “for mustn’t someone? Who can tell the voices that call for help from those that only call to hear other voices in return? Perhaps it is you. And perhaps it is not.” Here we are witness to the spasmodic changes in tone Teicher is able to induce in his storyteller. By first asking his question in the negative—“mustn’t someone”—the storyteller leverages the responsibility of providing an answer onto the audience. But the clause that precedes this negation is a call to arms, as is the longer second question that follows it. And then: “perhaps it is you,” our storyteller says with a coquettish thread of hope, “and perhaps not,” turning his back on us just as quickly with a snarl. Still, we sense that this bitterness is a dramatic front, a stance that belies a greater panic, a greater foreboding and fear.
This looming dread is everywhere in Cradle Book. Even after the book’s second section, which we are told comes “from The Book of Fear,” we come to a story called “The First Fire,” an account of human beings confronting a succession of fires that burn for longer and longer durations every time they set themselves ablaze:
Men threw their food into the fire, and still the fire burned. They threw their cattle into the fire, and still the fire burned. They threw their wives and daughters and sons into the fire, but still the fire burned.
The fire burned the land and the sea, swallowing houses, forests, islands, even the water, which burned burned.
Now read this against W.S. Merwin’s 1967 poem “The Lice,” in which deforestation brought on by human beings causes an ever-growing shadow to emerge upon the landscape:
They took stones to the water they poured them into the shadow.
They poured them in they poured them in the stones vanished.
The shadow was not filled it went on growing.
The word that I think comes closest to the experience of each poem is blight. In Merwin’s poem, this blight is literal and there is blame to be assigned: we are destroying our own forests and creating our own decay. In Teicher, however, the blight comes out of nowhere, inexplicably, and assaults us in such a way that the motive cannot be fathomed, thus striking at the root of our fear. The poet with whom Teicher ultimately shares the greatest chunk of his sensibility is Vasko Popa, the great Serbian poet, whose “Little Box” series broke from surrealism in order to generate an imaginative response to his experience of World War II that drew from Serbian folk traditions. Here is an excerpt from “The Little Box:
The little box grows and grows
And now inside her is the cupboard
She was in beforeAnd she grows and grows and grows
And now inside her is the room
And the house and town and land
And the world she was in before
What poet Ted Hughes said of Popa also holds true of Teicher and the work he’s assembled in Cradle Book: Teicher “is always urgently connected with the business of trying to manage practical difficulties so great that they have forced the sufferer temporarily out of the dimension of coherent reality into that depth of imagination where understanding has its roots.”
As with Popa and Merwin, the fear in Teicher, the suffering that forces us back to the imagination, is the fear that blight will consume us without ever elucidating its purpose, “until,” as Teicher writes earlier, “there is no next thing.” Here is the final paragraph of “The First Fire”:
There are many stories of fire, but all of them end in the same way: as inexplicably as it had burned, the fire cooled and smoldered and finally went out, as if anything else could happen.
Imagination is not simply a bulwark in Cradle Book; it is a means through which Teicher actively transcends the blight suffered throughout the work. How do the villagers stop the endless groaning (yet another blight) of the cows mentioned earlier? A weaver’s daughter places her hand on the “soft muzzle of the nearest cow,” an imaginative effort that likewise tells us we must demand compassion of ourselves. But just as soon in Teicher, the pigs begin to groan, and the weaver’s daughter realizes her life will “belong to the pigs and the cows, to the goats and the ducks, to the hens and the rabbits. Most of all, it would belong to the men, whom she knew would never let her be.” With this last flourish of dread, Teicher tells us that we can never truly be free from the threat of blight, but by writing it down, by telling the story, we can resist enacting the blight upon each other.
