In Ryan Teitman’s recent poetry collection Paperweight, winner of the 2024 Akron Poetry Prize, words are strange creatures. Their sounds enchant, and their meaning hangs by the frailest thread of the social contract. In a modern corporate office, fruit flies, roaches, and cats colonize cubicles, as a worker spins in her chair and “said ‘portfolio’ over and / over again as if I were working a block of clay. The folks in research / preferred ‘recompense.’” In “My Airship,” the poem’s speaker—an actor in a 1970’s Russian sci-fi film—hears the moss whisper “the names of ships that have / vanished on this same course: Hotspur, Red Star, Windhover, Kintsugi.” In another poem—“I was a Dog”—the narrator remembers his past life as a canine and hears his neighbors “call me ‘weird’ or / ‘difficult’.” And when he’s caught digging up the front yard, he remembers “the right answer: ‘gardening’.”
Paperweight attends to the strange in full-throated song, and as I read the collection, I often looked up in wonder or laughed aloud at the stunts of language these poems perform. The poems revel in craft and in performance, balancing them on the fulcrum of compassion, grief, and humor. Here, the familiar and the bizarre dance, tell jokes with no punchline, and skirt the edges of history in the image-landscape of film, art, and literature.
In addition to the narrators described above, there is a person who finds his missing hand bone on the floor; fathers and sons who avoid naming the realities of their relationships; a tech bro intent on convincing a baby she could make billions through “artisanal crying;” clouds and ghosts, dreamers and dream, and boys who watch cartoons and stand audience to singing fish.
There is the collection’s eponymous poem, too, in which the speaker slowly transforms into a rock that his wife uses as a paperweight. Sitting atop her desk, he reflects, “It’s nice to have a / singular purpose. I’m glad I don’t become a brick or, God forbid, a stone.” What is the difference between a rock and a stone, a paperweight and a brick? “Paperweight” directs the mind’s eye to a compact and sturdy object, capable of holding in place things easily dispersed and weightless. Yet what a strange and paradoxical word, holding these contradictory ideas of paper and weight together.
If you could wedge yourself into that space between words, where their basic bizarreness of sound and meaning create a compressed but dense world, then you would be in the weird, sly, ominous, and accommodating line work of Teitman’s poetry.
Teitman and I have known one another since 2008, when we started graduate school together in the Midwest. We initially bonded over our Eastern European backgrounds (we couldn’t find a decent pierogi anywhere!) and a friendly rivalry over the better Pennsylvania city, with Ryan repping Philadelphia, while I took the crown for Pittsburgh. I’ve read his poems over the years, so his formal inventiveness and affinity with the off kilter are easy companions. His previous collection of poems, Litany for the City (BOA Editions, 2013), was selected by Jane Hirschfield for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and his poems have appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review.
I talked with Teitman in a formal interview over Zoom in March, and I began by asking him about the circumstances that conspired to give him the ambition to see his vision through in this book. Once he transitioned to a working life outside of academia, he realized that a manuscript he had been working on was more shaped by the desires of others, especially potential academic employers, than his own conception for the collection. As he began to attend to his own practice and desires for his work, he noticed that “I could take as long as I wanted to do what I wanted to do.”
One formal mode he experimented with and on vivid display in Paperweight is the prose poem. As he admits, “There’s lots of different ways to do prose poems.” Inspired especially by Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End and Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life, Teitman takes from these collections a sense that “they use prose poems to be these kind of boxes to contain something that feels off kilter or absurd or pushing or tweaking almost a law of nature, some weirdness. You get to see how it ripples out but because you’ve confined it to this little box it feels very safe, you know, it feels very contained. But that containment also really lets you explore that weirdness and really delve into it, which I really enjoy.”
The compression creates the geologic force necessary to meld words like “paper” and weight” and to transform everyday words into strange emissaries. Teitman acknowledges, “When you give [the line break] up, you have to do that to get something else in return. I find what you get is that kind of compression that goes with it. [Prose poems] don’t necessarily have to come out like this but the way I’ve been doing it is these sort of bricks of text, and I find that the language gets put under a little bit of extra pressure, which, I think, is an environment that’s particularly suited to the kind of strangeness I’m interested in exploring.”
The poems in Paperweight and Teitman’s description of them put me in mind of Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie—typically translated as defamiliarization—in art. In “Art and Technique” (“Iskusstvo kak priyom” 1917), Shklovsky lauds art’s purpose as that which gives “back the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things.” This is the difference between becoming a rock, and not—God forbid—a stone. The strangeness in Teitman’s poetry is a process of defamiliarization with the common things of the world, a delight in examining objects as language and language as object.
Teitman acknowledges his own belief in poetry’s closer kinship with the physical arts, like pottery, filmmaking, sculpture, and painting, the sister arts as they were named in the Renaissance. In “Creation Myth” a boy sits “off to the side. Creation-adjacent.” as more magnificent deities create the force of oceans and the light of stars. “He sculpts figures out of clay that reman figures of clay. / . . . / Perhaps he’s a creator who can’t create, he thinks– / . . . / The idea delights him; he’ll be / worshipped for sure. Finally, a god everyone can relate to.”
The creator who can’t form his creations reflects the ekphrastic genre that shades many poems in Paperweight. “[In writing an ekphrastic poem] it feels like you are creating another object to respond to an object,” Teitman observes. In the compact prose poem “The Studio Boat,” Monet’s self-portrait in his nautical studio becomes one of the few canvases the artist doesn’t drop into the water, locking it in his trunk which is sold to a butcher upon the artist’s death. At the poem’s end, the painting remains in doubt (though we know in the “real” world it hangs in Philadelphia’s Barnes Gallery): “Then, one day, his daughter breaks / the lock and reveals the masterpieces inside. Or she ignores it, and the trunk stays closed forever.”
Like the counterfactual that Le Bateau-atelier has never been found, Paperweight explores the other side of history and experience where books are never read and the world is never formed. There are worlds and books, of course, but they become objects defamiliarized by not serving their accepted purpose of having readers or inhabitants.
And this weirdness is often funny.
“I’ve also noticed that a lot of the tools that comedians and poets use are very similar. I think comedians love metaphor and simile,” Teitman observes. Pushing scenarios to the extreme, and allowing a tightly imagined world to burn itself in the space of the poem are backdoors to absurdist humor. In the poem “A Cloud and a Ghost Walk Into a Bar,” we’re set up for a punchline that never quite arrives. It’s tough being a couple when one of you is marginally more corporeal than the other and comes from human dirt and not water. The ghost muses, “She thought they would have so much in common: an incorporeal / ontology, expertise in both floating and hovering, an appreciation for the / films of Jean Renoir.”
You know this couple. You might be one of these lovelorn loners looking for the someone who really gets you. When the ghost decides to leave the cloud before he can leave her, she “flies west, for dozens of miles, before / stopping under a clear, dark sky. The starlight moves in and out of her like / a needle through fabric. She doesn’t feel a thing.”
For a moment, the absurdity of permeability is a spectral light on the depth of our feeling and longing, another way of being porous.
Grief partners humor in many of the poems. The prose poem’s strengths come forward to contain pain and trauma and use the long lines to take seriously the non sequitur. “My wife and I experienced a really traumatic pregnancy loss,” Teitman shares. “The poem ‘Promenade’ I think probably has the joke I like the best in it, and it is probably my saddest poem. I think it needs that joke to sort of start moving toward where it needs to go. I probably needed that joke to even start myself going in that direction.”
In that poem, a walk through the neighborhood tends toward musing:
Once, you read a book
on why the world exists, rather than nothing at all. No one knows, it
turns out. You consider how a walk accretes with every step, like a pearl
gaining another coat of lacquer. For months, your wife carried the baby
until a test showed something was wrong.
It is the frailest ties that bind us to reality and to life in this world.
Defamiliarization returns us to the everyday, the ordinary, with a sense that two states of mind can exist together at the same time: our experiences are unique to us and they are of a piece with a common human experience of the world. Speaking of how he returned to poetry in the midst of his personal grief, Teitman reflects, “I was trying to sort of process that grief and also feeling like ‘Oh, well, something like writing can’t help me with that grief. It’s too big, it’s too difficult, poems don’t really matter right now.’ Learning to live with that grief and also realizing that that grief is also a subject that deserves to be written about. I guess sometimes it can be a balm, but also it’s something people experience all the time.”
Paperweight manages to be both, the heavy thing that holds us to our place in the world, and the feather-light language that drifts us toward—as another poem puts it—some farther shore.
