When Temple University opened the doors on its fall semester last month, it did so with a new faculty member, one who is also an award-winning gay poet.
Brian Teare, the winner of the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry, joined the faculty of Temple’s English Department this fall.
Teare is teaching poetry workshops and literature courses in the undergrad and Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing programs.
Teare himself went to college for music but his career goals shifted after a serendipitous writing course.
“I studied music and one summer I needed more credits so I just took this writing class. I was the kind of student that teachers hate to have because I didn’t take the class because I wanted to, I just had to,” he said. “The second half of the class was poetry, and I just fell in love with it. It helped me to find language for my own experience and my place in society.”
Writing became an integral outlet for Teare to deal with his coming-out experience of several years previously.
Teare grew up in Georgia and, when he came out to his parents in high school, he said the fallout was “disastrous.”
“That time was really difficult. I had dropped out of high school and was having a lot of trouble with my family, so later on writing was immensely crucial in looking back and figuring out what happened, why my family behaved the way they did and why I reacted the way I did,” he said. “At the time I didn’t have those tools to deal with it and I also wasn’t as reflective about language and language’s impact on me, so I understood the whole experience a lot less.”
Teare’s passion blossomed into a successful career, as he was awarded numerous poetry fellowships, had his work featured in several publications and anthologies and went on to publish three full-length books of his poems.
Throughout that time, Teare said he began to notice his own poetry style transform.
“At first I was, like a lot of young writers, trying to tell my story in language that conveyed my experience and trying to talk about the different cultures — in the United States, in the South, religious cultures — that shaped my experiences. But in my first book, I avoided writing much about spirituality or queerness because I think confronting those questions directly was really hard for me and really risky,” he said.
Those issues came to the forefront of his third book, “Pleasure,” which won him the Lambda Literary Award.
“Pleasure” grew out of Teare’s experience with his partner’s 1999 death of AIDS-related complications and explores his own coming-to-terms with that event as well as the overarching topics of sex, sexuality and spirituality.
“I was raised religious but later rejected Christianity so I didn’t really have the framework to understand death, so the book was a way of coming back to it and interrogating a lot of the beliefs I’d been given as a youth and trying to see what was there to help me grieve,” he said. “But then there are also the ideas about how HIV/AIDS changed the way we think about the gay male body politic and the body politic in general. To me it was very personal and grew out of my pure and simple grief, but also became about some of the larger cultural ideas.”
Teare said he was surprised when he learned he won the Lambda Literary award in light of the other contenders, including a posthumous nomination for James White and James Skylar, both of whom Teare said he looked up to as a budding poet.
The awards ceremony, with such a gathering of his contemporary LGBT writers, was just as surreal, he said.
“It was such an unbelievable honor that I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it,” he said. “And since I wrote the book in memory of my partner, for it to be honored like that was a wonderful way to also remember him and keep his memory alive.”
While writing is his chief passion, Teare is also devoted to the teaching of his craft, although it can be a challenge.
“When you’ve spent so many years figuring out how to do something yourself, trying to explain that to other people can be pretty difficult, especially when a lot of people have the thought that writing poetry is easy,” he said. “So sometimes it’s difficult to communicate that poetry is fun, exciting, strange and revolutionary, but it’s really hard work.”
In addition to his teaching post, Teare will continue operating his own micro-press, putting out four to six chapbooks a year.
Teare comes to Philadelphia from San Francisco and said that, while the cities are vastly different, he’s been impressed by his new locale — especially with its status as home to the oldest LGBT bookstore in the nation, Giovanni’s Room.
“San Francisco doesn’t have a gay bookstore anymore so to come to this community that’s in some ways smaller than the San Francisco community and to see how amazing this resource is and that so many people are still interested in queer literature is really amazing,” he said. “I’m very excited to be in a place like this.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected]..