“the
wages due”
the
wages due women, the wages due as reparation, the wages for the labor
of care, the wages for emotional labor, the wages for reproductive
labor, the wages for the care of children, the wages for the work of
sexuality, the wages due for housework, the wages for the most
difficult of affective labor, the wages due for listening to people
at the end of their ropes, the wages due sex workers, the wages due
mothers, the wages due lesbians, the wages due transgender women, the
wages due for surviving, the wages due to those who serve, the wages
due to those who make us possible
notes
toward a queer theory for losers
or
that the pain of difference is the commonest thing. all the
shipwrecks which i come to know as forms of listening. i buy this
pink book in the bright light but i forget how to read.
i raised
myself like a wolf with some of the old ideas of western men like a
self is some kind of responsibility, something you make yourself.
because of who
my lover is all my ideas will have to change again
and that’s
an old story.
my dears,
since you live also in the margins i could talk to you forever there.
my brain is
all made up like a culture.
+ you listened
to me and i had to admit i needed such gifts of attention.
our pity
party, not to get over + give up solutions as western medicine.
they’re all love poems- we could be better animals?
then i realize
she is completely scrupulous and chivalrous like a girl &
sometimes i want my experience without language.
then i realize
she is completely chivalrous and scrupulous like a girl.
implicate
me-make me complicit in your stories.
my idea of
grace is not the same as behavior.
hey high
lonesome-what is that construction?
comparing her
body to theirs & that being whatever identity is, identity not
separable from desire.
the experience
of embodied love which is what i have when i have it
I DO
WANT TO BE INVITED
i do
want to be invited even though i don’t know what outfit to wear and
i really don’t know what words to use i feel undefined and too soft
for something like “cunt” which i will say to sound like i’m
doing something and inhabiting a body and a social position which can
pick an outfit i’m not going to the dance party and i’m not
making performance art i’m sitting in a rowhouse where the eternal
city dogs bark through the evening and really it’s something
softer than that something more gentle i want to say and that there
isn’t language for it just means i’m disarmed
The
Abjector (3)
I don’t
give a shit how my hair looks in the intellectual soap opera another
lie the price of believing in abject miracles like a gaze
forever the construction normal/abject would have to be undone
slowly we always start out talking aesthetics & one beer later
it’s nothing but feeling
ARROWS
a poor
person’s
version
of bourgeois
contentedness
or a queer
weirdo’s
version
of a stable
relationship
co-existing
with the taste
of iron
a taste for
blood
constant
fantasies
of suffocating
statesmen
of shooting
arrows into
the hearts
of Anoka
schoolboard members
years and
years and years too late
to dream
of scathing
emails
always
thinking of David Wojnarowitz’s
blowdarts
of the feeling
right before
aggression
all the words
too late
You're one of the only poets I know
who dropped out of a prominent MFA program. Why?
Ok, so I’ll try to answer as candidly
as possible. I will have to travel back in time to 24/25 year old me.
(I’m in this position a lot lately – I’m working with my past,
my younger self in writing – the self I like to think is more
fucked up and vulnerable than my present self. What is that
relationship – how can I be accountable for the choices I’ve made
even when they seem like the choices of a completely different
person?) I was in a sort of coercive, abusive mess of a relationship,
money was super precarious and I was really focused on “learning to
be a poet.” My poems were bad. I had actually picked up all of this
poetry knowledge which was totally esoteric to me by dating a woman
who had just finished her mfa at Naropa, all of this experimental
poetry stuff I was just learning about. These people who made it seem
possible for me to write poetry. Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer
and Frank O’Hara. New York school stuff and New American stuff
which was still new to me in the mid 2000s. So when I was thinking of
mfas I was investing them with my dreams of learning to write and
also escaping service jobs temporarily. I ended up going to Temple
because I didn’t want to leave Philly. Pretty much as soon as I got
back into school I remembered that I didn’t really like the feeling
of being in school. I have some issues with authority. A friendship
or a love relationship is always the place where I learn a lot. It’s
hard for me to learn in a classroom. I’ve been a super shy person
my whole life. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say it’s a
disability (that writing helps me to live with.) So I had a lot of
trouble talking in classrooms. I was intimidated by the language
people were speaking. I was the only woman out of the six people in
the poetry program that year. I think anybody who’s othered gets
used to the feeling of being the only whatever in the room and learns
how to deal with it somehow. But I didn’t know how to deal with it
then. At that point in my life I just felt uncomfortable, overly
gendered. Like I was trying so hard to become a lesbian and then
trying so hard to become a poet – but to be a woman, what did
that mean, how do I represent that? The idea of workshopping the
diaristic, emo lesbian angst poems I was trying to write was also
kind of terrifying. So mental health, gender and also money. I was
taking out loans to be in school and it didn’t seem like it was
worth it for me. I left after only half a semester. It seemed like a
big fuck up then but I think I needed to find my own space to learn
poetry. I worked at a coffeeshop for years after that and tried to
figure out the writing thing. I realized that I wasn’t going to
escape my life and I could just write out of the precariousness and
struggle of things. I could just write out of that. I could just
figure it out slowly. There was some liberation in that; that I
wasn’t looking to a program or institution to make me a writer
anymore. I was just living in the process.
Why bother even being a poet anyway?
I bounce between really idealistic
thinking and the feeling of “what the fuck am I doing?”
Like poetry is totally a great form.
There’s Sappho and Rimbaud. (And there’s Frank O’Hara and
Eileen Myles and Audre Lorde and Ariana Reines and Jackie Wang.)
There’s just total beauty in it. In some ways it’s a really
accessible way to make art. I wanted to write fiction when I was
younger but it didn’t work. Poetry was something I could do. I
think it can be an honest kind of language in a world full of
dishonest speech and language. You can use it to call out an
oppressor. I think it’s a great art form for marginalized people.
So I love poetry but the being a poet
thing is hard. I am a person who tends to be really invested in
identity when sometimes I think it would be healthier and less
painful to just do the things and not identify as the person who does
the things. I long to be a poet, I want to be a poet, I never really
merge with that identity. And sometimes I wish I could get rid of my
attachment to wanting to be a poet and go to school and become a
social worker and be more helpful and less broke. And some people
could be a poet and also do the other practical things but I can’t.
Wanting the thing with your whole heart and living the process of
longing and doubt – I can’t get over how beautiful that is to me.
What are your poems about for you?
What do you try to put in the poems?
I think I try to put in the things I
know that are hard to talk about in daily life, for all the reasons.
I’m driven by different kinds of tension. I think of this Chris
Kraus quote all the time which is something like, “When the form is
in place everything inside can be pure feeling.” I’m trying to
find a container that can hold as much feeling as possible. All the
feeling of being a person passing through time, shame and desire, the
materiality of moments, wanting to affirm one’s own self and praise
the beauty of others.
This emphasis on feeling rather
contrasts with the ideas of a generation or two of poets just prior
to us, does it not? Can you elaborate on that?
In a sense I might be overemphasizing
how important feeling is to me - to form an oppositional stance to
certain trends in poetry world. I want to rebel against aesthetic
rules that seem prescriptive or limiting. Not just to be oppositional
but as a way to make space to do what I need to do. Writing for me is
also a way of integrating experience and theory, thought and feeling,
a way of thinking through and feeling through. Some of the ideas that
I’ve chafed against: that it’s uncool or unsophisticated to be
sincere about anything, making direct statements is bad art, if
you’re political it has to be super oblique and elegant and
theoretical, too much personal emotion is embarrassing.
I’m not sure if an emphasis on
feeling totally contrasts with the previous generation of poets. I
see how certain Language poetry ideologies have come to dominate
institutions of (mostly white, bourgeois) experimental poetry but
that’s not the only thing that’s been going on in the last
generation of two, right? There’s a whole multiplicity of stuff
going on – a generation of queer writers and artists are being
radicalized by HIV/AIDS, there’s the second renaissance of Black
poetry. New Narrative was happening at the same time as Language
poetry and Language writers and New Narrative writers were going to
the same events in San Francisco and reading some of the same theory.
(I got that from rereading Dodie Bellamy’s Academonia this
week, a book I find hugely helpful.) So I mean, of course as a
fucked up queer girl with too many feelings I was going to be more
drawn to New Narrative than Language. I’m pretty much taking
everything from like people like Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles and
Chris Kraus. So there is a sort of feminist experimental trajectory
that I’m following (which is oppositional and anti-institutional in
attitude.) That’s where I learn how to put theory and analysis and
emotion and experience together in poems. That’s where I find the
permission that lets me begin.
Do you think of your work as
political and how does that manifest itself?
Yes, totally (though in the most
idiosyncratic way). Partly I think it’s important just to keep
naming the reality of things over and over again in as many ways as
we can. There’s this violence we live in and we’re not allowed to
name it. White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism. These are
forms of violence that have the power but there’s all this gas
lighting about the reality of oppression. Naming is a gesture that
might allow us to begin to move toward another world. So I’m
thinking about structural oppression and I’m thinking of the kinds
of feminism that could teach us to ask the right questions. That work
against all the failures of middleclass white cissexist feminism.
Saying all those things, my poems are
starting from a very personal place. A lot of what writing is for me
is an attempt to make space. Like I’m actually a very repressed
WASP. I keep myself on a leash. I try hard to be “good” in the
ways people assigned female are supposed to be. So my writing is
really a battle against myself as a mild mannered nice girl. The
Abjector was totally my attempt at a personal therapy, an
exorcism of self hatred that was ruining my life. But part of what I
realized writing that was that my self hatred was coming from my
failure to be socially normal, to make money, to be successful. And
that’s totally political.
So I’m interested in the places
social and political oppressions manifest in psychic life. I’m also
interested in the ways oppressed people find to love themselves and
survive and make art. I wrote a weird long poem a year or so ago
called Queer Theory for Losers where I was trying to work a
lot of these things out. I’m trying to celebrate being a loser in
some ways and it’s totally to try put a counterbalance in my own
life to an American hatred of failure, poverty and weakness. My own
version of “queer theory” is ways of thinking that honor and make
space for vulnerability.
I’m also walking lines. The political
poems I wrote last year, I’m not sure how effective they are. I was
trying to get in touch with my anger. Which sounds hokey but is
actually a matter of survival especially for feminized subjects that
are denied access to their own anger. And I was trying to fight
against a pressure to be post-gay. I really don’t feel post-gay at
all. I feel really gay all the time. They were attempts at
interventions, mostly interventions in my life but also micro
interventions in the world. Micro interventions against micro
aggressions. Any time I try to speak for experiences that I haven’t
had I start running the risk of being an appropriative self righteous
asshole. But I have to try to walk the lines, I have to try to see
what I can say. I’m also interested in the shadow side of a
political desire. How easy it is to be self aggrandizing, tokenizing,
myopic, complicit and guiltily trying to cover your complicity.
Wait, are you kind of saying that
it's the feelings that make the poems political?
Ha, ha. Sort of, I think. I mean I
always want writing to be part of desire. Like the desire to have
ethics and for that to mean something in the world. It’s all about
feeling, there’s not really a division between private love and
social solidarity. And there’s not really a line between myself and
my poems. And sometimes I think it makes sense to be super emotional
in writing as a kind of resistance. I could make an argument that
emotion is devalued because it is associated with femininity and I’m
sort of making that argument in Queer Theory for Losers. So like fuck
you white straight men with nice careers and theories, all I have are
my fucking feelings and I’m going to do what I can with them.
That’s kind of an abject position and I feel like I may have taken
it as far as I want to but it makes sense to me sometimes.
