poet or trans or both, pt 2

This week has been a large week for my Queer Poet thing. I’m not so sure this is a great thing.

It started last week when a Visiting Poet told me I needed to surrender to my pronouns, or maybe make up new ones, and we all just stared at him.

Then I read Ely Shipley’s lovely book Boy with Flowers and thought about what he’s said about being trans and being a poet (he doesn’t want to be labeled, but at the same time he wants to write poems about being trans, and so I find myself kindof bogged in the conundrum sometimes).

Then last night in poetry class I talked about Ely and his book and we got into a thing about labels. Do I think they’re useful? I don’t know. I think they CAN be. I think that if you are just coming out, or just starting to transition, or coming to terms with being the only _____ in your neighborhood, and you’re damn certain you won’t find much (or any) representation of yourself on TV, then yes — being able to go to the bookstore, or on the interwebs, and find a writer who speaks for some part of your experience… That is invaluable.

But I am more kinds of poet than just trans, I think. I write about love, and loss, and goats, and Chincoteague… And yes, my experience as a trans person does have some impact on all of that, but sometimes it’s a very tiny impact. But then I circle back to the teenage girl I once was, who would have sold her feet to find non-scary examples of someone who had successfully done what she wanted to do more than anything, and who was able to write about ponies or herons as a result.

The reality of it is that I don’t know what kind of poet I am, or even whether I’m supposed to be a poet at all. This week has been hard — the writing has come slowly, and not very successfully, and everything else is weighing on me too — and now, on another Friday with another bad cup of coffee (if I can’t make a decent cup of coffee, how the hell am I supposed to make a decent poem?), I barely know who I am at all.

I’ll throw a couple more poems up on the poem page later today, though.

Pax.

Look at me! I wrote a ghazal!

note to self: traditional forms of poetry are much harder than just writing a damn poem.

Maybe I will keep exploring this form — some of the other folks in my poetry class wrote ghazals that just blew the form apart — they totally pwned it — so there is hope… but jeez louise.

Anyway. Here’s MY ghazal:

ghazal

Nobody knows who the first one was: the patriarch of our trickster
folk, perhaps Prometheus, or a matriarch (Mouse Woman too is a trickster).

Perhaps our first, our motherfather, our spark, was both, Promethean clay
– shifting sex, shifting gender, shifting shape – these are trickster.

We come from everywhere and nowhere, both/and, never either/or,
making up our backgrounds and our skins to fly the flag of trickster.

Odysseus took his time cruising to Penelope, back to Ithaca, dallying
or captive (depends: who did you ask?), exploring: he too is a trickster.

I follow foxes through the cemetery, ink their pawprints on my hide, tell myself
their myths, change my shape and story, recreate myself as trickster.

Hyde wrote of the loss of shame, of lines drawn in sand or grass
or garden by cranky angry vengeful gods, wishing they had not made trickster.

But they did, unleashed chaos (Hermes, Bluejay, Coyote, Monkey, Loki, me)
upon a world that in five thousand years of hijinks is still not ready for Trickster.

Are you open to the dreams we bring? Do you invite Eshu to your household, offer him,
or her, or them, a bowl of soup, a sandwich? What do you feed a trickster?

If you can see a true self (release the binaries) behind your own imaginary images,
if you can change to match your true skin, and shift it, then you can be a trickster.

(I kindof don’t love this poem, but I will fix it later).

a small piece of witness

Here is the poem that brought this all to the fore last week in class.

Stella thinks

Stella stands in her East Village doorway and smokes a cigarette,
picking flakes of tobacco from her tongue.
Across the street a man she would love for free pulls
the gate across the door of his fake Western bar. When she was young,
when Stella was Tommy, a boy still in the mountains north of Tucson,
he watched a stallion mount his mare, thick corded chestnut flanks straining, and
shriveled in himself with the glare of sun and the groom’s dark beard. Later
that afternoon, the sun lessening his shadow from the west, he found a girl, the
languid dark-eyed daughter of the groom, and in the shriveled
shadow of a cottonwood he bent her back and thought of horses, the
tangle of their manes.

Now no longer a stallion she stands
in the doorway on Second Avenue, smoking her cigarette and drinking
gritted black coffee in her rusty silk robe, not quite chestnut,
imagining the straining of the barman’s flanks at sunset.
Is it possible he loves her, that he stands in his own doorway
his dark eyes roaming her flanks, that he fills pints with Guinness or Harp or Budweiser
and remembers horses of his own, trees beneath which he has held a girl,
the women he has cast aside to prosper?

Stella pulls her silk closer. Later she will go to Central Park and
watch the carriages, eye the straining flanks of worn-out nags and
geldings, look deep into the staring soulful eyes of tired horses,
and find another man who will pay for a ride around the park,
battling the shrivel of himself with other trees, buy her other robes.

September 2009, RTP

an update

Hello. So I have changed the theme and created a dedicated page for the poems, in the hopes that now my linebreaks will work. While I am not desperately in love with the new look, at least now the poems will work. So that’s all good.

Poems are now at The Poems, in addition to being threaded throughout the site.

Also, the new picture, which has replaced the white cat from Fredericksburg, is from my pal Lisa’s garden. Thanks Lisa!

Am I a Trans Poet? Or am I a Poet who is Trans?

I don’t know how to be a trans poet without being a TRANS POET. Half the things I write about have nothing to do with the trans thing… But then sometimes I DO write about it. Sometimes very deliberately.

Valzhyna Mort says, quoting someone else (probably Carolyn Forche?), that poets are the secretaries of the invisible. Which might mean that I have a moral imperative to be the voice for my people, because we have need for voices. I will not ever be our King or our Milk or our X, but I might possibly be our Taliesin.

Last night a poem of mine got slammed (by one person, not universally) for having trans issues in it, which apparently added “too much weight” to the poem. Is it a real criticism, or is it a reaction to me going on and on and on about trans things? I’m not sure. With some people I would be absolutely certain, one way or the other, but this time…? I think I will have a clearer idea next week, when another poem with the same issue will come up (and not one of mine, either). Will it be deemed too weighty?

In my poetry class, meanwhile, we are going to talk about the poetry of Patricia Smith, who is exactly the kind of secretary, and witness, that Forche describes. Her book Blood Dazzler about the murder of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the Bush Administration is maybe the most beautiful, most painful, most wrenching book I have ever read. It is, in Friends terminology, a “freezer book.”

I don’t know if I can write a “freezer book” of poems about the trans experience. But I am pretty sure I should try. I thought I was going to be the voice of the Bay — write my region — all that good stuff — but it seems that in fact I may have a different task. And I don’t know what to do.

Recently on view in the world…

…this short essay of mine, which appeared in Baltimore’s Urbanite Magazine.

the many lives of Xander

Yesterday I went and bought a book of Keats, since he is following me, and was particularly struck by his poem “To a cat.”

Why?

Because as near as I can figure, it’s a poem about Xander (or, as Kid #2 calls him, Mister Doctor Alexander).

Cat! who hast pass’d thy grand cliacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroy’d? – How many tit bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears – but pr’ythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me – and upraise
Thy gentle mew – and tell me all thy frays
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -
For all the wheezy asthma, – and for all
Thy tail’s tip is nick’d off – and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a mail,
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
In youth thou enter’dst on glass bottled wall.

Xander is much like this in personality, but also he is asthmatic and missing the tip of his tail.

Overall I thought this explained a lot.

More about Keats, and why I think he’s following me, later.

Tonight, tonight, more poetry tonight…

Hello all.

I am ever so hopeful that I will be better again this fall. Have missed so much! Weirdly, with less to do in the summer, I…do less. Go figure.

However, school has begun anew, and this year I am Professor Faunboy AND Grad Student Faunboy. Whee!

I will endeavor to chronicle the two-ended adventure as it happens.

Tonight is my poetry class, which excites me no end. LOTS of good things about it. Plus, I need to be writing poetry again.

Like this, which I am just going to type out as it happens and see where it goes, and leave it for you to regard:

last night I drove
along the spooning curves
to the moon
climbing a Jacob’s ladder
of cicada shells
their murmurs silenced
and as I drove
I thought of you
descending curves say
the signs on
Pennsylvania highways
they meant you
your lines unfettered
ungendered
like an apollo of wittendorf
or rilke’s bust of venus
and the moon smiled
her craters winking
tycho and tranquilium
calling me home
to you

How is it possible…

….that I have not posted in so freakin long?

Well. I’ve been busy with the Usual Stuff, plus a nice visit with my kids, plus getting ready to teach in the fall. I still have to make my syllabus, but… I’m getting there.

Meanwhile, it’s a beautiful Thursday here in Baltoville, and I am going to post another poem, inspired by my Twitter friend @kwalsham… And then maybe tomorrow I will manage to put something fresh up at FireCat Club, which has been sadly neglected for MONTHS. Which is embarrassing.

So. Unfortunately when my Macbook died, I lost some stuff (LOTS of stuff), including my long poem of heartbreak & despair, Why I Hate Portland. So instead I guess I will offer you this:

September 18, 1862

In the sky above the fire, bats swirl through wifting smoke.

Shoeless, the boy sits alone, fingering a book,
small, leather-bound, closed with dirty twine,
the last memory of his brother.
His dog, a roan-flanked hound,
attached in Virgina as his own camp
follower,
sniffs along the edges of the fire.
A gnarled crumb of biscuit, hard and rancid, is theirs to share.

In a year of fighting, digging, marching back and forth,
he has come to expect
horror, smoke, the echoing whistle of grapeshot,
the scream and stink of dying men, the shattering of silence.

But Sharpsburg is the worst he has ever seen.

In a year of war he has never seen so clearly
how battle ground the day into shards of broken men
and horses left torn and screaming in the fields.
Federal guns mowed a cornfield, taller than a man, until
the crippled stalks stood no higher than the
soldiers dead among the rows.

Yet he knows that blackbirds hide throughout the forest,
waiting out the human folly,
that sunlight still flashes
from the steeple of the
church in town,
and he imagines running away and
finding a girl who would
love him
despite the dreams.

I will keep adding more, as I have more. And I will tag them all as poetry, of course, so you can find them. Thanks for reading.

I know what I did this summer (and other confusing matters of tense)

Wow. It has been so long since I posted here that I am rather embarrassed.

Things have been a little crazy, I guess.  Although I STILL have no job (and not much in the way of prospects, which is scary, until the cool but not very lucrative thing starts up in the fall), I do have my awesome project. And I have what you might call PROSPECTS for fall.

What awesome project? I’m glad you asked!  At school they have an award each spring, the Carol Peirce Award, which one student gets to go pursue SOMETHING over that summer.  This year, I won (yay me!) on account of my proposal.  I suggested that I could use it for research to write a more apparently Trans version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, set in the Civil War (from then until now, anyway).  They were all, Ooooh, neat.  So my task this summer has been to use the funding to do research.

So far this has meant a lot of Interwebs, and an ever-expanding stack of books about the Civil War (we had quite a few anyway, because we are CW nerds, but…).  Also, in late May, it meant a trip down to Fredericksburg VA to see that battlefield. And in late June, the Otter Half and I hit the road with the Dog and visited Western North Carolina (ah, the mountains! the waterfalls! the songbirds!) and Eastern Tennessee (ah, the humidity! the mosquitoes! the beer!). It was an excellent trip, in many many ways, which I will describe at greater length soon.

A point of clarification:  Tammer, my hero/ine, starts the war attached to the 35th North Carolina Infantry Regiment, but at some point in 1863 ends up in Longstreet’s personal detail, and thus is at Chickamauga (not a regular stop for the 35th NC).  I am still trying to decide whether Tammer also goes to Gettysburg.  More on that later.  Anyway, from fall 1861 through the middle of summer 1863, Tammer’s path is the path of the 35th.  Which includes New Bern NC, the Peninsula campaign and Seven Days battles, Sharpsburg (Antietam to some of you), and Fredericksburg and 1862.

So anyway, we went to Fredericksburg.  WE, of course, is me, plus my constant companion (no, not the Dog, the Otter Half) (if you read Fire Cat Club, you know her as Muscles). It was both jarring and inspiring, a small patch of battlefield surrounded by subdivision sprawl. Still, with effort, I could imagine the ground on that awful day in December 1862.

Part of my confusion with this project has been HOW DO I AVOID WRITING THE TRANNY COLD MOUNTAIN, because I most certainly want nothing to do with THAT. Alas, Inman hits many of the same battles as Tammer.

Fortunately, the War is only the start of my project; perhaps a more accurate model than Orlando would be Pete Hamill’s Forever, which I can’t recommend highly enough. I am re-reading it now, for the nth time, trying to get a handle on how to write one character over hundreds of years.

Fredericksburg was…. Well, a mix. But Chickamauga!!! That was a really good part of the trip. First of all, they have the best visitor center I have encountered so far. The explanations and narratives are balanced, not offensively pro-Union like at Sharpsburg/Antietam. The Rangers are helpful. And they have a truly kick-ass light board explaining the movements of the battle. Should I ever win the lottery, I will buy one of those for Sharpsburg.

I’ll post pix later. For now I just wanted to show up and say hey. More on the whole trip SOON!!!