1010 Reading Challenge

As you know, I like the whole READING thing. I like it more than almost anything. At some point during this past autumn I was chatting with my splendid pal Kalen about the reading thing, and we decided that this year we would do the 2010 challenge.

What am I talking about? Each year, the folks at Library Thing do this – the 2009 challenge was to read 9 books in each of 9 categories by 9/9. This year is 10 books in 10 categories by 10/10. You can make up your own categories, or you can hitch your reading wagon to the categories that Kalen proposed and I liked, which are below.

Here’s a link to Library Thing and their structure. http://www.librarything.com/groups/1010challenge. You can track your reading & categories there if you like, but I am going to track mine here, at the page called THE READING.

Kalen and I are using these categories:

YA fiction
Not Yet Read classics
8, 9, 10 (Books pubbed in 08, 09, or 10)
Bio/autobio
Indie presses
Mysteries
One Word Titles
Guilty Pleasures (Re-reads, brain candy, etc.)
Authors That Are New to Me
Short Story collections

If you are going to do the 1010 Challenge, too (whoever you are), please tell me so I can follow along.

December? Seriously?

How did it get to be the end of term already? I have finished one final project (a ridiculous story SORTOF in the vein of Salman Rushdie, but mostly in the vein of too much caffeine and desperation) and am now supposed to be working on the other (a volume of my poems, original AND revised versions, from this semester). And what a semester it’s been! Although I have accomplished almost zero on things I was “supposed to” be doing (e.g. Tammer), I wrote several very good poems, a bunch of very interesting story fragments, and a nice little essay about a rat.

One of these days I will post more of those things here – for now, I just want to take a moment to breathe, and to thank those of who you have read through my variety of sloggings, offered your comments and ideas, and been generally extremely helpful.

Now back to the poems, and then the weirdly difficult task of figuring out what the hell I’m going to read tomorrow night at the MFA open mic. Usually this would be easier – I would only have one thing short enough – but this year I have all these poems, and all these pieces of other stuff…. It’s a little weird and a lot overwhelming. Wish me luck!

Loraxing for Bookstores

As most of you know, I am an Enemy of Amazon.com, mainly because it’s killing the local independent bookstore, but also because they continue to refuse to add trans benefits, diversity training, etc., into their variety o’ benefit packages. When I see an independent bookstore die, which is happening more and more as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble compete in an insane literary survival of the fittest with CostCo and Sam’s Club, it hurts me.

It also hurts the communities in which these stores are small but vital parts of the distinctiveness of a given neighborhood, town, region.

This is especially true when the bookstore is devoted to a particular group, as the late & lamented Hue-Man Bookstore was in Denver, or the more recently late and lamented Oscar Wilde Bookstore in NYC. Now we hear that Lambda Rising is going away after Christmas, both its Dupont Circle location in Washington DC and the annex at Rehoboth Beach.

This hurts.

I know that many of these stores are not always the most trans friendly of places, but dammit…

Sometimes the queer bookstores are the only place a kid can go and find a book about other people who are the same kind of freak and weirdo. The same kind of queer. Sometimes a person struggles to find community, and can’t, but at least there are books. I was not a very good lesbian, ever, but I was damn glad to have Rubyfruit Jungle and The Revolution of Little Girls, People Like Us, and the ever-invaluable Dykes to Watch Out For series. Without being able to go to the queer bookstores in Denver, Albuquerque, and, yes, Washington DC during my late teens and early 20s, I don’t know what I would have done. And now, trying to find trans references… Yeah.

So help your independent stores. And help the queer stores. Right now a dear splendid friend of mine is trying to save Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia. The Giovanni’s Room people have a lovely store, are extremely decent people, and need your help. If you’re buying something queer, order it from them. No, it won’t be as cheap as it would be at Amazon.com. But it will matter more.

For Rudy’s thoughts on this, read this lovely post. For my thoughts on imperative books that you can get from the sweet little story in Philadelphia, watch this space. More coming soon.

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.