Letters from Brett: A Poet and Professor Remembered Ten Years Later
Aaron Brown
There in my small, windowless office, I sat in some space between denial and bargaining, whispering “no” to myself again and again as I saw the tributes to Brett Foster come across my screen. I just wanted more time with him. I needed to know he’d still be there at the other end of an email chain, ready to respond with insight. A digital-age Virgil, a tireless Merlin, who managed to shepherd poet-souls toward tenuous callings.
This was ten years ago, during my first teaching post in Sterling, Kansas. The town with only a single streetlight, a Subway stationed in the last building before the town fades into fields.
"Brett Foster" (Poetry Foundation, 2015) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/brett-foster
In my office, I saw first one Facebook post, then the next and the next. Suddenly my feed was filled with the smile, the cancer-starved face, the stories again and again of how Brett Foster had graced us all—with his poetry, with his friendship, with his humor, with his guidance.
I didn’t know he had been on hospice, or that his cancer was imminent. I knew that it was serious, that our emails had gotten few and far between, and were shorter, briefer. I should have seen, in his last email to me a few months before his passing, that he was telling me in the only self-effacing way he knew how. What I had taken to be a note explaining why he had to cancel a road trip through Kansas was in fact a kind of sign-off, a letter revealing something quite profound in the face of death: “I have tried to face these changes of plan and circumstances with something better than mere resignation,” Brett wrote, “but more like equanimity, with a peace and trust.” He added, “It has certainly been an unpredictable fifteen months or so for all of us here.” I should have known that he was at the threshold.
Within days I read his poem, “Tongue is the Pen,” in the Fall 2015 issue of Image, arriving as the poet himself was leaving this world. This poem, that went about as viral as a poem can after his passing, contains Brett’s characteristic wit and singsong defiance: “And speaking of things overheard, you heard right: / if I have to go out, I am going to go out singing.” Like Donne, who I grew to love under Brett’s teaching, Brett was telling Death that he would have the last word, and the word would be beautiful and defiant and alive.
Only a few weeks before had I seen images on social media of a gathering in Wheaton, Illinois, at a rented-out café, wall to wall with people, and there was Brett, now wearing an ascot cap to go with his typical tweed. His body was gaunt, his facial lines clearly defined. But his eyes still bright, the light in them preserved by the camera. He was giving out books from his own library, writing personalized notes for each friend.
That should have been the clearest sign. But when was Brett Foster not giving out books? I have my own mini-library from him after all, first when I was his Teaching Assistant my senior year. When I’d run rented books back and forth from the library to his office. I remember the copy of Rose he gave me by the poet Li-Young Lee. I remember the small packet he sent me and my wife shortly after our graduation, wedding, and move to grad school—Silk by Alessandro Baricco.
In my office that day in Kansas, between classes, I felt his loss in some deep, intestinal way, grief clawing out of my gut to seize a hold of my lungs. I cried at my desk.
His guidance was gone. The number of emails we had sent each other was now fixed.
A knock at my door, a colleague. “Going away potluck down the hall! You should come.” By then, my face was stoic, numb. The lines of my eyes raw. But she stepped away before she could see. I walked down the hall. Fixed my plate of crackers, cheddar slices, summer sausage. Took a few bites but could hardly swallow for the grief that harbored inside in me.
After a mix of small talk with several others, I found myself telling the same colleague, Terry, that I had just lost a mentor. “Aaron, I am so sorry,” she said. A shadow passed behind her eyes, too. “I am so, so sorry.”
I left shortly after, retreated back to my office, placing the plate I had hardly nibbled at in the trash. I had fifteen minutes before I needed to teach my next class. And what did I do? I gathered my things, manilla folder of handouts and my textbook, and I taught. It was one of the hardest classes I have ever taught. The grief there, behind every word. But Brett was there, too. In my enthusiasm, my jokes, my pacing around the room, my calling on a student, staying for the answer. The teaching theatrics were hard, but I had to do it. I had learned it from him, after all.
*
In the four years I got to know Brett Foster, we must have exchanged more than a hundred emails. First, as I took classes with him my sophomore year—John Donne, Poetry Writing—the emails were a steady stream of class-related updates, publishing opportunities, answers to my inane questions about which class to take, or whether he might look at a draft of a poem. This last request I asked with the mixture of hesitation and trepidation that hangs like an anxious cloud over all undergrad writers. But always, Brett was disarming, often with the help of an emoticon, all caps, or endless exclamation marks. He read whatever I sent him and shared his thoughts with a gentle honesty I see now to be a professorial masterclass.
Then, in my senior year, I was his teaching assistant—and this was when the emails grew into a steady, relied-upon correspondence. His notes were a stream of research-related tasks, which often involved me scanning or copying large passages he would then take with him and read on his frequent trips—“... let's keep tackling any books awaiting copying on my office chair. Little by little... ;-)” In another email, Brett asked me to trek over to the library once more and scan part of The New Yorker that had just come in. Though I could tell from his words the excitement he had to read a review for a new Christian Wiman book, Brett asked me to do this task almost apologizing as he wrote, hinting that it would be totally fine if I declined. “Feel free to take a noble ‘Finito, il professore!’” he said. Another professor, Roger Lundin, remarked to me one day while I was standing at the Xerox machine that Brett must be planning that I photocopy the whole library.
So much was going on—I was applying to MFA programs in poetry, I was getting married, I was trying to figure out how much of a writer I was going to be, and whether I had it in me for the long haul. All the while, Brett was urging me on. I didn’t always see the destination, but he did.
Brett offered counsel, releasing me from the worry or hesitation about publishing my early poetry: “First, yes, it is probably good of you to think and be hopeful about new work that you have upcoming ‘setting in amber’ (so to speak) your earlier, collegiate work. That's not to say that these poems collected here are not strong, they are, but I must be hopeful for you that the time in the program there gives your writing a leap forward.” There he was, wishing me onward, urging me toward growth. I needed to learn that the poems I was writing were often just stepping stones to better poems in the future. A hard lesson when you’re young and think that everything you write deserves to be shared, maybe even celebrated.
Just as it is for many young writers, the two years I spent completing my MFA in poetry were full of frustration and anxiety, plagued by the opinions of my peers and my professors. When I received some harsh feedback from a fellow student, I wrote Brett, as much as to air my grievances as it was to seek some kind of comfort. His response was beautiful, full of words that consoled me as much as they asked me, gently, to endure:
“Less gratifying to hear, obviously, is news of this weirdness with your classmate regarding your chapbook and, from the sounds of it, your poetry overall—its voice, subject, concerns, point of view, all of it. I did fully suspect that you would encounter a number of transitions, both in terms of grad study and in terms of your writing more personally. Some of the encounters will be exhilarating and some alas will be disappointing, mystifying, even painful. You must press on— being as easygoing and forgiving and as much of a exhibitor of charity as you can, but I would also urge you to take on the challenges to your current work as full-on and as squarely as you can. I think it's wise of you to notice just some fundamentally different approaches and values among your classmates. It is good of you to be aware of these differences, but it is also a season in your writing training where you also stand to learn from that more ‘mainstream’ mindset—not be appropriated by it, mind you, but to let it affect your work in whatever fruitful, useful ways you can discover and devise. I hope this does not sound too prescriptive, but mainly I wish the best for you from this experience there.”
The wisdom Brett shares here, especially in the final sentences, in which he challenges me to listen in the ways I was complaining that others weren’t—this was Brett’s balanced foresight. Even now, as I look over his words, I’m filled with such gratitude for the guide he was for me, just as I feel a bout of shame for the way I always expected his response, was willing to waste his all-too-brief time on earth with my quibbles about being misunderstood in grad school. I was spoiled by his faithful, tireless engagement, and I know I’m far from the only one.
As I reread Brett’s emails, I notice the undercurrent of longsuffering in his lines. Yet his hope was effervescent, just like his “Tongue is the Pen” poem—“to give the sickness and the shivering meaning.” Perhaps it was his indefatigable enthusiasm that let me plod along in my myopic life without realizing the full extent of what he was going through. He writes, about a year before his passing, of what a normal week of treatment felt like, asking for forgiveness for not responding sooner:
“I'm just tonight coming out of my couple of days of ‘swoon’ that customarily follows my three days of treatment (Wed-Fri) the week before. So every other weekend, basically, finds me mainly bedridden! It's curious—I feel fortunate to be spared great pain during this time (it really hasn't been a torment, in that way one might expect or fear), but it still puzzles me greatly, and leaves me rather blue, I must confess, to be utterly deflated, energy-wise, as the body gets ‘knocked down’ from the drugs. But already, now, I feel a little spirit returning to me, and usually, Monday is wobbly still but far better than these ‘flattened’ Sundays.”
This note came within a much longer email in which he counsels me to listen to my grad school advisors, celebrated poets in their own right, when navigating the job market. I had dreams (and ignorance) of landing a professor job straight out of my MFA, and my applying willy-nilly to Creative Writing jobs galore had resulted in a somewhat stern email from Stanley Plumly, one of my thesis committee members, urging me to stop.
I look back on it all with a healthy dose of embarrassment, and yet there again was Brett in that moment, walking me toward a humility I needed to have: “I think you should listen to them carefully, AND, second of all, make sure they realize that you are hearing them.” I was flustered and naïve as a twenty-three-year-old grad student, and there was Brett showing me how to take a breath, to be considerate to those around me, above me.
This email had been a follow-up after all, to the last time we saw each other in person, the summer of 2014. I had driven in with my wife from Maryland, so that we could attend the wedding of some college friends. A year had passed from graduating, and it felt strange to be back in Illinois, a place I had grown so much in college, and yet obviously still had much growing to do. And there was Dr. Foster meeting me at the Blackberry Market in quaint Glen Ellyn, the downtown brick buildings a kind of picturesque Midwestern utopia. We caught up and laughed and enjoyed good coffee, and then Brett, always in motion, suggested we go down the street to the Prairie Path, a trail that runs alongside the Metra commuter rail in these western Chicago suburbs.
We walked and I had it in me to ask about a lecturer job at my alma mater that had been posted—my mind always occupied, always trying to maximize the moment—and he said he had some news to share as well. Brett was frank about my odds for the job, while still encouraging me to apply for the experience, and I felt, even then, excited for the opportunity. It was then that Brett told me he had a “health issue” come up: that he was having some tests, and that it turns out, he might have cancer. Suddenly, I could only see the small space in the dirt and gravel in front of each step, just as he dissuaded me from fretting. He spoke so hopefully I started to think that with some treatment, this illness would be just a blip. That he would always be there for when I had my next question.
*
A year later, and my wife and I had just come in for the funeral. Driven the ten hours from Kansas to Chicago, and it was here on this journey that we received another call and more texts—another Wheaton professor, Roger Lundin, had passed away as well, suddenly, from a heart condition. A week of horrors. Grief piled on grief, two intensely involved professors, paragons of enthusiasm and charisma, and now they were gone.
I texted a friend, Scott, who I knew would be in the Wheaton area. We agreed to meet up at Muldoon’s, an Irish pub in the brick and mortar part of the suburb. We sat in a booth and Scott, fresh off from work, in a blue Apple shirt, came in and took off a beanie.
He started to recount the events on Monday, when Brett had passed. The college theatre group had adapted Brett’s poems into a production they were putting on that week. There was an energy in the black box theatre, as his lines merged with the play of the actors.
Scott recounted how there was this feeling that the poet’s presence hung in the balance. Midway through the production, Scott watched as an Anglican priest in the audience, Father Martin, was notified that Brett’s death was imminent, and he left to perform last rites.
“Dr. Brett Foster presents his poetry as part of ‘The Open Door’ series in March 2014 at The Poetry Foundation in Chicago.'“ (source, date) Photo by Kevin Schmalandt. https://magazine.wheaton.edu/stories/2016-spring-in-memory-dr-brett-foster
And then the play continued with “new energy,” said Scott. Something had changed with the actors. They were no longer playing a part, a tribute. Instead, their performance became meditated, tender. Brett’s own words whispered as he departed this earth. Inhabiting the sweep of an arm, the angle of a step across the stage.
In researching and remembering that night, I found Fr. Martin’s words on a tribute page: “I got pulled out of last evening to go back and see Brett. He had just passed through the veil, the 'grey rain-curtain,' and slipped away, according to the hospice nurse, utterly peacefully.”
Contemplating the production, Fr. Martin added this: “He was alive and well in your hands and the living, loving way you brought him to life was a justification... of the power of the art... the Spirit convicting, challenging, comforting: and ultimately assuring us that Life, not death, has the last word.”
In Brett’s posthumous poetry collection Extravagant Rescues, his friend Jeffrey Galbraith describes the scene of the theatric production that night. “What was designed as a gift to the poet,” Galbraith writes, “was suddenly transformed into a gift to all those who loved him, giving communal space to our grief. That night Brett was not there, and yet he was.”
Whether in his emails, marginalia in books I’ve received, or his lightning-rod poetry, I consider it a joy to be yet another poet carrying Brett’s words with me for the rest of my days.
Aaron Brown is the author most recently of the poetry collection Call Me Exile (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022) and memoir Less Than What You Once Were (Unsolicited Press, 2022). His debut poetry collection, Acacia Road, won the 2016 Gerald Cable Book Award and was published by Silverfish Review Press. Brown grew up in Chad and now lives in Texas, where he is an associate professor of English and directs the writing center at LeTourneau University. He holds an MFA from the University of Maryland.