interrogating your poetics
a prompt, a catalog of quotations, some news, & a mini gift-guide
Happy Wednesday, all. I hope you’re doing well.
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
A Poem
Self-interrogations (today’s call-to-action)
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
(It’s a lengthy one, with lots of footnotes, so please open up this email in a new tab if you want to read it all the way through)
Housekeeping:
I’m grateful to have some art out in Shenandoah & a little shoutout in The Patron Saint of Superheroes.
& here’s a poem by James Davis—titled “Club Q.” Please read it.
Self-interrogations:
I’ve been trying to read more lately—if not for the sake of intellectual enrichment, then at least for an escape—and have gathered a number of quotations I liked enough to write down for you here. The writers named below all are working through big ideas and questions, and I thought it might be an interesting exercise to use their words as entryways into thinking through (y)our own poetics.
So: here are eight questions
for you to ask of yourself and of your work—along with the quotations (footnoted) that inspired said questions. Some might overlap, but I hope that, taken together, they’ll help you think deeply about your own work in myriad ways.
What do you write in resistance to? 1
Who is your intended audience? Who do you write to? Who do you write for? 2
Who informs your work? What traditions are you writing into? 3
What story are you afraid to tell? 4
What themes do you explore that necessitate implicating yourself? 5
What places do rage & vengeance have within your work? What are these in response to? 6
Finish this sentence: “All my poems arise from ______.” Then try: “All my poems are about ______.” If you had to overgeneralize your work, what words would you choose? 7
What beginnings does your work explore? What endings? What transitions appear within your work?8
What I’m reading:
a hookup yields reflections on trans life (this is very good)9
To read:
Trans Horror Stories and Society's Fear of the Transmasculine Body
A BODY IN TRANSFORMATION: CRONENBERG’S BODY HORROR AS TRANSGENDER CINEMA
Quotations:
Wet, where all I had longed for
was the determined touch of softness.
Today I saw
a willow precisely
severed of many limbsand thought, a fool,
of Venus de Milo
as though I could marbleand vein the heart
and sinew, as though
I could project my senseof helplessness onto
a greening tree.
Even as I prayed each night, I’m not sure I ever really believed. In a small town, the promises of religion are the language of protection, and I was being promised unconditional love—just as my body, and my very existence as a girl, had begun to betray me. Just as my desires had begun to consume me. Just as I was being taught to believe those desires were warm, that they would mark me irreparably.
-Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland
It wasn’t enough to be saved; I wanted to be the savior.
-Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland
There’s a murky line between story and myth.
-Melissa Faliveno, Tomboyland
[I want to die]
in the arms of everyone who’s ever loved me, each
appendage a tendril expanding into the ether
of every moment I am leaving behind.
Know this: I have dabbled
in the enterprise of affection; cut my teeth on what it means
to hold and be held.
Have you ever fallen for something empty
as a word?
Flash of fur — wolf burst
out from the highway’s hidden,
forbidden margins.
For a long time now, I’ve trusted in desire as a route to freedom; or trusted that freedom can be found in the honest embrace of desire. This is because I owe my desire everything.
Desire need not always be fulfilled—in fact, I think it oughtn’t be—but it should always be acknowledged, if not explored.
There was a popular meme, for a minute there, that non-binary people were sharing that said something to the effect of If you’re attracted to me, you’re gay. Which, if that’s your experience of yourself, sure, fine. But I’m much more interested in the challenges of maintaining what are, for most of us, deeply held understandings of our own genders and sexualities when they are fundamentally incompatible with those with whom we vibe and fuck. How can straight people and gay people have sex? It happens all the time! How can dykes fuck fags? Literally every day. How can one be a monogamous sex worker? Easily! How can your identity not invalidate mine when our bodies push against each other? I don’t know, but it can!
Gender, the haint of a lifetime.
Art is experienced in its environment; it’s never distinct from it.
I first learned about grounding techniques during the press junket for How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) in People magazine: After Jim Carrey kept having panic attacks in his costume and prostheses, which took 8 hours to get into, an ex-Marine was hired to teach him to tolerate his claustrophobia by counting his fingers over and over again. I can’t find that article now, but a more recent one with so-called “fun facts” says that it was CIA agents who were hired, only their “distraction tactics” were “eat everything you see,” “smoke as much as you possibly can,” and “punch yourself in the leg.” I suppose it’s heartening, how little our American war criminals know about withstanding their own torture practices. I wonder how much they charged.
I am starting to learn that growth is not a zero sum game.
I feel a kinship with those boys and their zits and confusion and desires, reminding myself that when I am at a loss for what to do with my irritability, excitement, horniness (did I mention that?), sore throat, urge to move—to drive fast and punch walls, which as a grownup I can do with fewer consequences than teens can—that it’s because I am still getting used to a vitality I hadn’t felt since I was a little girl who wanted to be a little boy.
With my second puberty, the things I have spent my life fearing—having trained myself, as most queer people do, to hate and fear what I want—were finally happening to me.
Where I was before, pleasure was almost impossible. I was hardly capable of it.
The logic seemed to hold up in the inverse, in that if one wrote words that appeared on the TV or in a book, those words were important by default. To commit pen to paper in one’s own little volume, even if no one else ever read it, rendered the ink consequential, and the inker, of consequence.
What is wrong with a child who wants to be of consequence, to be seen and heard and regarded? Nothing, I think. Writing is just one of the ways we attain that goal. No one is lost who is still writing.
I had been writing with a secret to myself and to the world.
-Cherríe Moraga, OUT/LOOK 1989
As long as you’re trying to copy white men, you will be a cheap imitation thereof. So you might as well go for the one shot you’ve got, which is your own natural voice.
-Cherríe Moraga, OUT/LOOK 1989
I’m a white girl gone brown to the blood color of my mother.
-Cherríe Moraga
I feel that if sexuality and spirituality have both been used as a source of oppression against women of color, in particular Chicanas, then both of those have to be taken in consideration in our liberation.
-Cherríe Moraga, OUT/LOOK 1989
We were writing in resistance. As long as you’re writing in resistance, you’re on some level explaining, and having to explain does not produce great art. Though we’d like to think otherwise, it just doesn’t.
-Cherríe Moraga, OUT/LOOK 1989
The way lesbian and gay issues are defined in this country, on a national level, is from a white, dominant class perspective. There’s no way around it. Even the way the question of sexuality is originally conceived is from that perspective. It’s part and parcel of it. Even in the effort to have diversity, it means that the person of color has to be able to translate his or her concern into that dominant language in order to be recognized. […] The solidarity movement is conceptualized from an Anglo, dominant perspective.
-Cherríe Moraga, OUT/LOOK 1989
Over the years, I have encountered many Anglo individuals, a number of lesbians and gay men, that on a personal level, have really responded to my work. I’m not saying that that’s impossible, you know. And I’m gratified by that; I want anybody who can to respond to my work. But I am not going to put my time and money, as they say, investing in that because I have tried to do that before and came out empty-handed.
-Cherríe Moraga, OUT/LOOK 1989
I always feel that the poet, on some level, is saying the stuff that the politico can’t say.
-Cherríe Moraga, OUT/LOOK 1989
Life is much more complex than that. Women will not always wind up being heroes and victims and the men will not end up being bastards and ogres. The family is the place where, for better or worse, we learn how to love.
-Cherríe Moraga, OUT/LOOK 1989
It’s October,
warmer than you’d suspect,
as if summer were holding us hostage.
-Patrick Dundon, “Exchange”
You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.
-Barbara Kruger
You reek of hot sweat,
of fist to back, of a man who
mounts a man to get close
to the light.
-Jim Whiteside, “Mosh Pit Ode”
I climb down to the beach facing the Pacific. Torrents of rain
shirr the sand. On the other side, my grandmother sleeps
soundlessly in her bed. Her áo dài of the whitest silk.
My mother knew her mother died before the telephone rang
like bells announcing the last American helicopter leaving Sài Gòn.
Arrow shot back to its bow. Long-distance missile.
She’d leap into the sky to fly home if she could. Instead she works
overtime. Curls her hair with hot rollers. Rouges her cheeks
like Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern. I’m her understudy. Hiding
in the doorway between her grief and mine, I apply her foundation
to my face. I conceal the parts of me she conceals, puckering my lips
as if to kiss a man that loves me I want to be loved.
I speak their bewitching names aloud. Twisted Rose. Fuchsia in Paris. Irreverence.
I choose the lipstick she’d least approve of. My mouth a pomegranate
split open. A grenade with loose pin. In the kitchen,
I wrap a white sheet around my waist and dance
for hours, mesmerized by my reflection in a charred skillet.
I laugh her laugh, the way my grandmother laughed
when she taught me to pray the Chú Ðại Bi, when I braided her hair
in unbearable heat, my tiny fingers weaving the silver strands
into a fishtail, French twist. Each knot a future she never named, buried
in the soil of her, where she locked away the image of her sons and daughters
locked away. I’m sorry, mother of my mother, immortal bodhisattva
with a thousand hands, chewing a fist of betel root, your teeth black as dawn.
No child in our family stays a child their mother can love.
-Paul Tran, Lipstick Elegy
I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truth, the way fiction can be a harder piece of truth.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
When I began there were just nightmares and need and stubborn determination.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
If I know anything, I know how to survive, how to remake the world in story.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Women run away because they must. I ran because if I had not, I would have died.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is just this—if we cannot name our own we are cut off at the root, our hold on our lives as fragile as seed in a wind.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Let me tell you about what I have never been allowed to be. Beautiful and female. Sexed and sexual. I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats. Ask any white Southerner. They’ll take you back two generations, say, “Yeah, we had a plantation.” The hell we did.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
I am no longer a grown-up outraged child but a woman letting go of her own outrage, showing what I know.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
I grew up to be a lesbian, a dyke, stubborn, competitive, and perversely lustful.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
I’m not supposed to talk about how good anger can feel—righteous, justified, and completely satisfying.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that change when it comes cracks everything open.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
What I am here for is to claim my life.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Don’t talk to me that way. Don’t come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life—the life we make together. Take me like a turtle whose hell must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
I am all muscle and wounded desire.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Therapy and mindfulness and transition are supposed to unfuck the bad habits that I go to “oldest daughter” Twitter to watch people vent about; my friend S, a fellow oldest-daughter-turned-dad, calls the self-harming behaviors these habits become “the masochism of caretaking.” Too many children—not always the oldest and not always daughters—are put to domestic work for which they’re not emotionally or physically prepared or supported. It’s not like, “Let’s introduce them to mutual communal support,” but like, “Someone needs to make sure the babies are clean, fed, and not taken by CPS and you’re the second-oldest person in the room.” (This can come with a healthy measure of, “I also need a dad and a therapist and someone to shit-talk my ex with and they’re already up to speed on all that bullshit and if they have a problem with it I can simply punish them.”)
It feels good to do something because other people need me to do it, especially when it’s not reciprocated. That feels safe, doesn’t it? To be the martyr. To be disregarded by a crowd of adult children while being the only one who truly understands the sacrifice being made. To be the one who doesn’t need anything, because everyone else has demonstrated the primacy of their own needs. Who is stronger than the person who doesn’t need anything?
Marginalization is like a crystal: The more facets you have, the brighter you become. The more ways in which you’re marginalized, the more obvious you are. You pass less, pass less thoroughly. You are less legible, more difficult to understand.
Not only were some of my clients concerned that being attracted to me complicated their heterosexuality, but some were invested in the “truth” about my racial and ethnic background. At first, I thought it was my makeup or the dim lightning that made white clients sometimes ask, once we were alone, if I was Jewish or Greek, once even Egyptian. I had to learn more about the machinations of white supremacy from the workers of color around me to understand that in highly sexualized, raced, and gendered environments, like the space of a sexual financial transaction, we’re all under more scrutiny, and any deviation from the norm just comes out louder. […] Because being sexualized first as a woman, then as a prostitute, and then as gender non-conforming/of ambiguous gender, despite my whiteness, made me less coherent and therefore less human to my clients—and as we know, it’s more acceptable to interrogate less-human people about their lineage, where they’re “really from,” what’s in their pants, why they’re using a cane, etc. (My non-white clients never questioned my whiteness, although it was very important to many of them, and one of the main reasons why some of them came to see me at all.)
Like any single-celled organism worth its salt, you can learn how to live under a microscope, but I don’t know that you ever get used to it.
Living as the wrong gender is a non-stop horror movie, and a lot of us live inside it for years, if not our whole lives.
As trans people, we are our own ghosts, but the demarcation between our past and future selves is never as simple as before/after pics, never as clear-cut as alive and dead.
Originally when I was conceptualizing the book project, I took more of a wide-angle lens. I thought, I’m going to write about global capitalism; I'm going to write about large cities in general and how they physically get developed. I threw that draft away because it wasn't personal enough. It was too large and wide and I wasn't implicating myself in it.
I think vengeance is a form of poetry that isn’t done enough and I encourage everyone to engage with vengeance poetics.
What do you do to kill the bro in your own head?
Just because people have various constellations of structurally oppressed identities, doesn’t blanket excuse them from problematic relational behavior. The acknowledgement in the book is intended as an ongoing reminder to kill the bro in your own head.
It's returning to the need to implicate myself in the text or make it work. The text isn't about me, but it is. And there are four or five "I's." This text is very polyvocal. Everyone contains multitudes, especially textual subjectivities. This polyvocality is an attempt to move the text beyond singularity, toward an expansive collective experience. Each of the "I’s" occupies a different formal register at its formation and they also blur into each other, much like Fred Moten’s idea of “consent not to be a single being.” I was faced with the question of, How do I write about the violence of global capitalism, it’s hugeness, in a way that leaves an emotional impact on the reader? I was coming up with the problem of scale and emotional flatness. When you hear about the death of one person, it’s tragedy; when you hear war death counts in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, the largeness of those numbers eclipses what that fully means. The book asserts a collection of slippery "I's" as a way to translate the scale of violence into intimate narratives. […] It's important that I implicate myself in it; otherwise, what's the point of writing if you don't have a stake in it? Why bring it into the world? I see books as book projects because I’m not a lyric poet. I’m not working on a collection of poems; I work on projects. These projects try to tackle large political issues and bring themselves in conversation with other literature and art tackling the same issues. I have to be implicated in it because it's necessary for the emotional register to work.
Hope is a discipline.
-Mariame Kaba
I think pleasure is the way through.
A mini holiday gift-guide:
I sell these. Maybe your loved ones (or you) will like them?
For the reader:
For the art lover:
For the devotedly queer:
Be safe out there—
-Despy Boutris
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Website
Shop
We were writing in resistance.
-Cherríe Moraga
Over the years, I have encountered many Anglo individuals, a number of lesbians and gay men, that on a personal level, have really responded to my work. I’m not saying that that’s impossible, you know. And I’m gratified by that; I want anybody who can to respond to my work. But I am not going to put my time and money, as they say, investing in that because I have tried to do that before and came out empty-handed.
-Cherríe Moraga, OUT/LOOK 1989
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is just this—if we cannot name our own we are cut off at the root, our hold on our lives as fragile as seed in a wind.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
Originally when I was conceptualizing the book project, I took more of a wide-angle lens. I thought, I’m going to write about global capitalism; I'm going to write about large cities in general and how they physically get developed. I threw that draft away because it wasn't personal enough. It was too large and wide and I wasn't implicating myself in it.
&
What do you do to kill the bro in your own head?
&
It's returning to the need to implicate myself in the text or make it work. The text isn't about me, but it is. And there are four or five "I's." This text is very polyvocal. Everyone contains multitudes, especially textual subjectivities. This polyvocality is an attempt to move the text beyond singularity, toward an expansive collective experience. Each of the "I’s" occupies a different formal register at its formation and they also blur into each other, much like Fred Moten’s idea of “consent not to be a single being.” I was faced with the question of, How do I write about the violence of global capitalism, it’s hugeness, in a way that leaves an emotional impact on the reader? I was coming up with the problem of scale and emotional flatness. When you hear about the death of one person, it’s tragedy; when you hear war death counts in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, the largeness of those numbers eclipses what that fully means. The book asserts a collection of slippery "I's" as a way to translate the scale of violence into intimate narratives. […] It's important that I implicate myself in it; otherwise, what's the point of writing if you don't have a stake in it? Why bring it into the world? I see books as book projects because I’m not a lyric poet. I’m not working on a collection of poems; I work on projects. These projects try to tackle large political issues and bring themselves in conversation with other literature and art tackling the same issues. I have to be implicated in it because it's necessary for the emotional register to work.
I think vengeance is a form of poetry that isn’t done enough and I encourage everyone to engage with vengeance poetics.
&
I’m not supposed to talk about how good anger can feel—righteous, justified, and completely satisfying.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
All poems are about loss.
-Jennifer Chang
&
All art arises from longing.
-Kate Greenstreet
&
All photographs are memento mori.
-Susan Sontag
Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.
-Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
&
Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.
-David Wojnarowicz
& you’re about to see a lot more David Davis quotations—as I’ve (finally!) invested in a paid subscription to their Substack. Merry Christmas to me.