Marion Bell: Poems + Interview

“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.