"To An Absence" by Brian Brodeur

Content Warning: Abortion, dead fetuses

Mea culpa: Ugh, I should've said "volta italiana." What a philistine I am. 

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-Lake View Cemetery and the Haserot Angel 

-Getting called out from beyond the grave

-Come see me read!  

-Brian Brodeur!  

-My Great-Uncle, Elton Glaser 

-Buy Brian's latest book: Some Problems With Autobiography 

-Wins and almost-wins in The Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Contest. 

-Yet more ways to make formal poems sound contemporary 

-The art of rhymes that don't rhyme 

-Another hybrid sonnet? 

-The triumphant return of the pyrrhic-spondee. 

-When Facebook stalking is part of podcast research

-Radford's Meat Market is real. 

-The dark truth by which we see

-The haunting of Brian Brodeur

-Is guilt itself a crime?

-Displacement Activity 

-Verbal dentistry

-How joy is deepened by suffering

-A dripping bag of redemption 

Text of poem:

To An Absence

The kid in latex gloves at Radford’s beef

brown-bags my five-pound brisket, saying, “Dude,

have a blessed day.” I do the math—you’d be

a teenager, his age. Across the counter,

the brisket drips (the kid grinning, “My bad”),

but all I feel for you is gratitude

for the life your death allowed—my wife and daughter

I’d like one day to see I might deserve. 

And would deserve, I think, if I could live

without the guilt I tongue like a decayed

incisor I’ve refused to have removed—

afraid what joy I’ve known might disappear 

without a counter-pain to root it here. 

The kid says, “Wait,” and stamps my brisket PAID. 

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 3-6: “To An Absence” by Brian Brodeur 

                Before I begin today’s show I’d like to issue a content warning: this episode covers what I believe is a very thoughtful, clear-eyed, worthwhile poem. In order to discuss it however, it will be necessary to include discussion of abortion and dead fetuses. If, understandably, that’s subject matter that you’re uncomfortable with, today’s episode may not be for you. Therefore, please feel free to stop listening at any time. 

                Speaking of dark subject matter, this week I received a needful correction on last week’s John Donne episode—the correction was not offered by any of my listeners however, but by a corpse. 

About a ten-minute walk from where I live is one of the most beautiful places in all of Cleveland—Lake View Cemetery, one of the finest examples of a 19th century garden-style cemetery in the US. Domestically, I’ve only seen its equal in New York City’s Woodlawn Cemetery. Outside of Cleveland, it’s perhaps best known as the home of the statue which appears to weep tears of blood, the Haserot Angel. The cemetery functions not only as a burial site, but a scenic park and sculpture garden. It’s a veritable pastoral necropolis, and a perfect place to reflect on the complex spiritual web of nature, mortality, love, grief, and human aspiration and dignity. Such places are favorite haunts of mine. 

                Anyway, Laura and I were taking a walk through the cemetery this week, and I happened upon a tombstone which made me realize that I had screwed up. The stone, which was quite large, depicted Dante accompanied by Beatrice, drinking from the River Lethe. It was only then that I remembered that, in the Divine Comedy, Lethe is not set in hell like the other Hadean rivers, but at the very top of Purgatory, in the garden of Eden. Therefore, my assumption that Lethe would have had a hellish connotation for Donne and his readers was probably mistaken. This doesn’t at all change my analysis of the poem, but I think it’s important to keep such things straight. 

                I’m very honored this week to present to you a poem by the accomplished contemporary poet and my new friend Brian Brodeur. Before I get into it, I’d like to remind you all that if you like this episode, please do consider leaving me a tip or getting a membership to Versecraft, which you can do at my link in the show notes. It takes many hours of labor to put this show together every week, and any support you might care to offer me would be incredibly appreciated. If you’re not in a position to give right now, please try and take a moment this week to recommend Versecraft to a friend whom you think might enjoy it. Let’s get more verse into the universe. 

                The last self-serving thing I’ll say today is that if you’re in the Cleveland area and you’re free this Thursday night at 7 pm, please consider coming on down to Heights Arts in Cleveland Heights, where I along with three other poets will be reading ekphrastic poems we were commissioned to write for artworks in the gallery. Please see my link in the show notes for more information.

                Now back to our poet. Mr. Brian Brodeur was born in 1978 and studied at Salem State and George Mason before receiving his PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati. He is currently a professor of English at Indiana University East, and is the author of four books: Other Latitudes, which won the 2007 University of Akron Press’s Poetry Prize—incidentally, the founding director of Akron Press is my great-uncle, the poet Elton Glaser; Brodeur’s second collection, Natural Causes, won the 2011 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, his third, Every Hour is Late, was published in 2019 by Measure Press, and his latest, Some Problems With Autobiography, which was just released, won the highly coveted 2023 New Criterion Poetry Prize. I’ll provide a link in the show notes where, if you like what you hear today, you can purchase this book, which is the source for today’s poem, “To An Absence.” In the past week, Brian also won the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Contest, the sister contest of which, for Sonnet Crowns, I did not win but was shortlisted for. 

                As the title Some Problems With Autobiography would seem to attest, Brodeur has an ambivalent relationship with confessional poetry—that is, poetry that takes for its subject the more personal elements of the poet’s own life. On one hand, he recognizes the sentimental self-indulgence one is liable to fall into when writing in a confessional mode, and often avoids it through the adoption of a semi-detached narrative tone, even when he is writing, as he often does, in what appears to be his own voice, in the first person. On the other hand, his muse is strongly drawn to reflecting on events and impressions from his own life, especially traumatic ones, and he often gleans his most powerful and universal themes from such reflection. In today’s poem, a seemingly mundane occurrence, and the very personal self-interrogation which the occurrence inspires, serves as a vehicle for broader issues: the nature of sacrifice, conscience, and responsibility. The poem goes like this: 

To An Absence

The kid in latex gloves at Radford’s beef

brown-bags my five-pound brisket, saying, “Dude,

have a blessed day.” I do the math—you’d be

a teenager, his age. Across the counter,

the brisket drips (the kid grinning, “My bad”),

but all I feel for you is gratitude

for the life your death allowed—my wife and daughter

I’d like one day to see I might deserve. 

And would deserve, I think, if I could live

without the guilt I tongue like a decayed

incisor I’ve refused to have removed—

afraid what joy I’ve known might disappear 

without a counter-pain to root it here. 

The kid says, “Wait,” and stamps my brisket PAID. 

                If we count the lines, we see that we have a sonnet, but this is not your grandmother’s sonnet— even more than other contemporary poets we’ve examined, Brodeur makes his form as quiet as possible. Interestingly though, he does so through an opposite strategy to the one we’re used to seeing. In previous contemporary poems we’ve looked at, we’ve observed that even when the poet uses slant rhymes, the rhyme schemes are still obvious. Instead, those poets have roughened up their form by writing in a loose version of iambic pentameter. Here, by contrast, if we look at the versification, we see that, other than a couple of minor variations, the meter is as smooth as silk, smoother in fact than many Renaissance sonnets. And yet, Brodeur’s poem still sounds conversational and contemporary. This is mostly due to the fact that Brodeur writes with contemporary, conversational diction. In doing so, he gives the lie to the argument that poets, if they want to sound modern and relatable, must write in free verse. 

In addition to his diction though, he also achieves a contemporary feel through the radical looseness, not of his meter, but of his rhymes, which are, for the most part, less rhymes than verbal echoes. Brodeur could have chosen to abandon rhymes altogether, and written a blank verse sonnet—instead however, he shows his subtle devotion to the traditional constraints of the sonnet by creating patterns that are so faint that, while they do add to the musicality of the poem, they might not consciously register at first. To get a sense of what Brodeur is doing, it’s helpful to go through and read the last word of every line: beef, dude, be, counter, bad, gratitude, daughter, deserve, live, decayed, removed, disappear, here, paid. The only obvious rhyme here is “disappear” and “here,” a conspicuous heroic couplet which Brodeur almost permits to end the poem in traditional English fashion, but not quite. He wants that decisive sense of finality the couplet produces, but does not want his ending to appear too pat. The other true rhymes we have are “decayed” and “paid,” and “dude” and “gratitude,” but because Brodeur places these rhymes four lines apart, they don’t automatically register. As for the other pairings, they can be identified only by the fact that they share a sound on the final syllable: “beef” and “be;” “dude” and “bad;” “counter” and “daughter;” “deserve,” “live,” and “removed.” 

Once we identify these correspondences, we can identify the rhyme scheme as: ABACBBC DDEDFFE. This is interesting because it appears to divide the poem into two equal seven-line stanzas, two septets. However, if we then go back to the poem and see if we can identify the location of a volta, we find it not in the eighth line, but in the ninth line, with the thought beginning “And would deserve, I think,” which is where we would traditionally expect to find it in an Italian sonnet. Between this volta italiano and the almost-ending Anglo-couplet, this poem exhibits features of a hybrid sonnet, but the tension between the alternate visions of the poem’s division exhibited by sound and sense, as well as the highly unorthodox rhyme scheme turns it into something of its own beast. 

One interesting thing to note is the way that the arrangement of the rhymes, such as they are, moves from a very enclosed arrangement in the first half to a more haphazard one in the second: ABA, CBBC, followed by DDEDFFE. This somewhat mirrors the sense of the poem, where the speaker moves from elliptical, somewhat cagey description to an emotional revelation of guilt that functions as a confession. 

            I mentioned that the meter in this poem is incredibly regular. There is however one particularly intriguing instance of variation in line 3, in the phrase “have a blessed day.” Here, Brodeur actually has sacrificed metrical regularity for the sake of including real-life dialogue, but in a way that still complements the iambic line. “Have a blessed day,” two unaccented syllables followed by two accented ones, creates a classic but rare combination we haven’t seen in a very long time: a pyrrhic followed by a spondee. 

            The plot thickens, however. In a Facebook post last month, Brian wrote the following: “Friends, am I alone in pronouncing “beloved” as three syllables, “be-love-ed,” even in my head? Am I beyond any possibility of redemption?” It is reasonable to assume that if Brian pronounces it “belov-ed” he would also pronounce “blessed” as “bless-ed.” If we then go back and read this phrase as “have a bless-ed day,” we are faced with far less unusual line: a first foot anapestic substitution followed by four iambs. Nevertheless, I think it’s more appropriate to keep “blessed day,” because I think it’s highly unlikely that a modern teenager would use the pronunciation “bless-ed” in everyday conversation. 

            Let’s now begin the poem again, starting with the octet: 

The kid in latex gloves at Radford’s beef

brown-bags my five-pound brisket, saying, “Dude,

have a blessed day.” I do the math—you’d be

a teenager, his age. Across the counter,

the brisket drips (the kid grinning, “My bad”),

but all I feel for you is gratitude

for the life your death allowed—my wife and daughter

I’d like one day to see I might deserve. 

                Because this is a poem in which each line seems to acquire new significance from the lines which follow, let’s take a look at the octet as a whole, and toggle back and forth between lines in order to tease out the rich play of meanings at work here. The speaker begins by setting a scene: he’s at Radford’s Beef, purchasing a brisket from a mellowed-out teenager. For the record, Radford’s Beef is a real place, technically called Radford’s Meat Market, located in Richmond, Indiana where Brodeur lives. This seemingly arbitrary detail is actually quite telling: it gives us reason not only to believe that Brodeur is speaking in his own voice, but that he’s recounting an experience which actually happened to him. This not only lends the poem a sense of immediacy, but, given the subject matter, allows us to appreciate the poem not only as a work of art but an exercise in vulnerability. Brodeur is offering us here his own refined and emotionally restrained vision of what a confessional poem can be. 

                We soon learn that the boy’s youth causes Brodeur to remember someone who died young— “you’d be a teenager, his age.” The identity of this person is then suddenly revealed by a frank admission a couple lines later: “all I feel for you is gratitude/for the life your death allowed— my wife and daughter/I’d like one day to see I might deserve.” Someone young died, and this death allowed Brodeur to later start a family. We are chilled to realize that Brodeur is addressing this poem to his aborted child, whom he refers to only as “an absence.” Brodeur is simultaneously unmistakable yet indirect— his unwillingness to be explicit evinces both a sense of social decorum as well as a sense of shame. 

                Once equipped with this knowledge, we are able to view the seemingly innocuous details of this poem in a new tragic and deeply disturbing light. The latex gloves of the first line, worn to handle dead meat, remind us of the latex gloves of an abortion doctor. The brisket itself, specifically described as five pounds, is the weight of a small newborn. Like an illicit bottle of alcohol, it is tucked into a brown bag, out of sight. It gets even grislier when we remember that the brisket is dripping in front of Brodeur’s eyes, like some kind of bloody phantom. Along with the brisket, the teenager behind the counter becomes a stand-in for Brodeur’s own lost child: when the kid grins and says “my bad,” it is almost like he is taunting Brodeur, ironically apologizing for existing, and thereby causing the father guilt. Both the brisket and the teen are literally behind the counter, but they also present both the embodiment and the figurative counters to Brodeur’s counter-factual child, the child who never was—they are the reality, his lost child is not. We recall that the kid says, “have a blessed day,” and it’s unclear at this point whether this is meant, within the imaginative projection of the phantom child, to be an actual benediction or a haunting reminder of a spiritual crime. This religious undertone is heightened by the phrase in line seven, “the life your death allowed,” which adds a Christological dimension to the fetus’s death: like Jesus, the fetus was sacrificed for the wrongdoings of others, given up so that others might gain new life. 

Brodeur, who characterizes himself as someone who “does the math,” implying that he is someone capable of making utilitarian calculations, claims that all he feels in the face of this pair of ghoulish apparitions is gratitude for the life he now has, which includes a wife and daughter he loves. Nevertheless, already there is a hint that his actual view is not as sunny as he claims. He says that one day he would like to feel as if he deserves his family, implying that, as of now, he doesn’t. To see what he actually thinks, let’s read the poem again, this time all the way through: 

The kid in latex gloves at Radford’s beef

brown-bags my five-pound brisket, saying, “Dude,

have a blessed day.” I do the math—you’d be

a teenager, his age. Across the counter,

the brisket drips (the kid grinning, “My bad”),

but all I feel for you is gratitude

for the life your death allowed—my wife and daughter

I’d like one day to see I might deserve. 

And would deserve, I think, if I could live

without the guilt I tongue like a decayed

incisor I’ve refused to have removed—

afraid what joy I’ve known might disappear 

without a counter-pain to root it here. 

The kid says, “Wait,” and stamps my brisket PAID. 

                In the beginning of the sestet, Brodeur makes an interesting claim: he says that he thinks he would deserve his family if he could live without his guilt, presumably the guilt surrounding the abortion. In other words, he would deserve his family if he could forgive himself or be otherwise absolved from this action which haunts him. This initially appears to be very strange way of judging worthiness. It would make sense if Brodeur was saying that he would feel more deserving if he could find forgiveness, but that’s not what he’s claiming—he’s saying he would actually deserve his family more if he could live without guilt. It is almost as if he is saying that because he currently thinks that what he did was somehow wrong, he is by that very act of regret committing a wrong against his family. By questioning whether what he did was right or wrong, he is showing a lack of faith in the overriding goodness of the family he has, the love of which should justify all sacrifice. What he needs, in order to be at peace, in order to deserve his family, according to him, is some way to be convinced in his heart that the sacrifice he made was not merely acceptable, but entirely justified. 

                He compares the compulsive guilt that he feels to the compulsion to run one’s tongue over a decaying incisor—one of the front teeth. This sort of compulsion, which is similar to the compulsion to pick at a scab, bite your nails, twiddle your thumbs, or, in my own case, chew on my tongue and run my fingers through my hair, is what is known in psychology as a displacement activity, an activity which provides a mild pleasure or pain in order to distract from the stress we feel when we don’t know how to proceed in a given situation, or else are prevented from proceeding how we would like by some obstacle. This simile is therefore particularly apt in Brodeur’s case—not only is he agitating his painful guilt the way someone mindlessly agitates a painful tooth, but the physical behavior described speaks to Brodeur’s deep sense of uncertainty about how he ought to approach the issue of his past actions and his lingering guilt.

 Lines 10 and 11, in which this simile is contained, are incredibly rich with wordplay, so let’s continue to unpack them. We can start by noting that the word guilt, g-u-i-l-t, has a homophone, the word gilt, g-i-l-t, which refers to a thin layer of gold that covers something. In the phrase, “the guilt I tongue like a decayed incisor,” we are encouraged to fuse these two meanings, imagining Brodeur’s feelings of guilt but also the layer of gold, called a crown, which is often placed over a decaying tooth. We are moreover encouraged to think of this gilded, rotten tooth as a metaphor within the simile— Like a rotten tooth, the memory of the abortion festers in Brodeur’s mind. Ironically, he refuses to have it removed, unlike the fetus which haunts him. Instead, he has merely covered it with a superficial layer of gold, claiming he has nothing but wholesome gratitude for what happened. As Brodeur is well aware however, this lie that he tells himself is no permanent solution, and eventually, he must come to a true reckoning with the guilt that rots in his soul. One of the ways he is doing so is to express his thoughts in his poetry. In yet another sense then, this is the “guilt he tongues,” the guilt he gives voice to. 

Finally, we should note that the word incisor means “something that cuts.” It is unclear to me why Brodeur chose an incisor rather than a canine or a molar, but I suspect that it has something to do with this etymology. His guilt is something that not only rots but cuts away at him. The suggestion of incision also serves as a medical image, much like the latex gloves of line one. 

In the next two lines we encounter the heroic couplet. Brodeur says that he is afraid to set aside his guilt because “what joy I’ve known might disappear/without a counter-pain to root it here.” “Counter-pain” recalls the imagery of counters in the octet. In the octet, the word “counter” was used in the sense of counteraction— reality opposed to fantasy. Here however, it is used in the sense of counterbalance—something which brings harmony to a larger whole. Already then, the language of reconciliation is beginning to break through. Similarly, the word “root” calls back to the dental imagery of the previous lines, but now with the positive connotation of stability. 

What the couplet is actually getting at is an important psychological truth, one that I often attempt to grapple with in my own poetry. Namely, that one’s capacity for joy may be deepened by one’s experience of suffering. Not only do bad times provide a dramatic contrast to good times, but a knowledge of how fragile and ephemeral things are, how full of horror and disappointment the world is, allows one to be all the more grateful for the beauty that is in the world, all the more aware of the preciousness of things, all the more aware of how crucial love is. It may be that the guilt Brodeur feels over his lost child is what causes him to never take his living wife and daughter for granted— to dismiss his guilt would be to dim his awareness of just how singular and special his actual family is, and how dearly bought his happiness. It is the knowledge of pain that makes joy seem ever fresh. 

Nevertheless, Brodeur desires some sort of redemption—desires an affirmation that he is a good man. Having projected the spirit of his absent child onto the teenage meat-monger, it is to him that he turns. In the last line, the monger offers him advice, and absolution. “Wait,” he says, as if to say that time will eventually heal this wound. He takes the dripping brisket, the grotesque stand in for the fetus, and marks it paid. Because Brian has suffered for years, because he has been a good husband and a good father, the boy assures him not only that he now legally owns this brisket, but that he has more than paid his dues for the potential life that he denied. He need have no nightmarish fantasies that he is nourishing his family with the flesh of his rejected offspring. The brisket is, after all, merely a brisket, and Brian Brodeur is merely a man doing his best to be good. 

With all that we have learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend:

To An Absence

The kid in latex gloves at Radford’s beef

brown-bags my five-pound brisket, saying, “Dude,

have a blessed day.” I do the math—you’d be

a teenager, his age. Across the counter,

the brisket drips (the kid grinning, “My bad”),

but all I feel for you is gratitude

for the life your death allowed—my wife and daughter

I’d like one day to see I might deserve. 

And would deserve, I think, if I could live

without the guilt I tongue like a decayed

incisor I’ve refused to have removed—

afraid what joy I’ve known might disappear 

without a counter-pain to root it here. 

The kid says, “Wait,” and stamps my brisket PAID.