poetic statement

transpoetic me

~ jacobalden ~ Leave a comment

I chose the blog name “transpoetic,” with the intention of iteratively defining a poetics of transgender experience. I had a general idea that I would be sketching out a poetic method, structure, or way of reading that maps the emotional terrain of moving among genders, or at least my own experience of it. I wrote myself into existence.

I’ve waited this long to try to define the name of this blog because I feel too new as a writer and too unfamiliar with trans/trans* politics, and to ignorant of poetry as a genre to assert something. I still do.

There is something liberating about sidestepping intellectual and politicized approaches to knowing. I’m an academic burnout who used to study the sociology of gender and identity. I say burnout because I exhausted the limits of academic critique, empirical observation, and theories of identity politics. It wasn’t enough for me and I felt I wasn’t offering anything to anyone else either.  I was hollowed out, as if my emotional life, my memories, and even my ability to feel had been cut out of my brain. So now I write differently, to grammar-fuck language, and then link it all back to the personal, political, and intellectual meanings that otherwise have structured my sense of the world.

My graduate training, and even my liberal arts college experience, didn’t expose me to poetry. In the seventh grade my English teacher, who sported a glass eye that was a different color from his fleshy eye, taught us how to interpret the meaning of poetry, of quotes, or short stories. He’d begin the class by writing a short text in colored chalk on the chalkboard, usually in orange, and then challenge us, like a drill sergeant, to push beyond its obvious meanings. He’d intersperse his challenges with sexual comments about the girls in the class and innuendo about what he wanted to do to them. Before the end of the school year he was sent to jail for statutory rape. He was the first person that inspired me to creatively think with and through language and he was one of the most (though by no means the worst) terrifying and despicable man I had encountered.

The next year I wrote poetry was for an English assignment. We were assigned to write five poems and I composed and illustrated just over twenty (proud overachiever). They were inspired by psychedelic soundscapes of Jimi Hendrix, the surreal horror of Steven King, and the probably rhymed too much.

Will I live tomorrow? Well I just can’t say.

No sun coming through my window, feel like I’m living at the bottom of a grave.

I wish someone’d hurry up and execute me, so I can be on my miserable way.

I don’t live today, maybe tomorrow I just can’t say.

– I Don’t Live Today, Jimi Hendrix Experience

My juvenile poems were the only place I could express a shitty situation: I had a crush on my teacher who also liked me very (too) much. I wrote about his car, his curly graying hair, his blue eyes, and the impossibility of our love. I wrote another one that made fun of a different teacher — an anxious football coach whose teaching strategy was to have us write answers to questions out of the back of our textbook while he ignored us. I was pissed because he was going around telling other teachers that my beloved teacher was acting inappropriately toward me:

You drink too much coffee
and your toothpick makes you drool
you keep on smoking cigarettes
because you are such an ignorant fool

Adults didn’t understand my feelings and I didn’t like being seen as naive or a victim; I felt deeply misunderstood. While writing, painting, or playing music I could leave my own body and head in a wash of color, refractions of sunlight on water, heavy behind-the-beat drums, and uncanny juxtaposition. My life was intelligible only when it was surreal.

I tossed poetry and these memories aside, forgotten, for nearly twenty five years. A friend of mine, whose mind I admire, is teaching a course involving Mayakovsky’s poetry and I overheard a conversation between him and a colleague. The colleague called Mayakovsky a “shill,” insinuating the critique that Mayakovsky lost his poetic greatness in his loyalty to the Communist Party (around the time he also started to write about love). My friend, generally cynical, countered the critique of Mayakovsky, saying simply, “I love him.”

I needed to know more about this poet and this thing about love and alienation. I started reading Mayakovsky in translation and I was struck by the ways it moved between cynicism about love and longing for love. I intuited something queer about Mayakovsky’s poetry, though I couldn’t really justify my sense of it, given how little poetry I’ve read — was it that I think there is something queer about a man writing poetry, especially poetry about love? Was it that I identified with the cynicism and longing that is so common to those of us living outside of normative genders and sexualities? So I did what any post-academic, amateur aspiring poet would do, I googled: Mayakovsky queer OR gay.

From there I found Frank O’Hara, a bunch of esoteric reviews about writers I didn’t know, written in prose I couldn’t understand, and a review of this book: Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. This was it! An anthology of trans and genderqueer poets who were self-consciously engaging in gender-language-fuckery, playing with pronouns, syntax, and imagery of crossing. I adopted its format: poems alongside poetic statements from the authors. I didn’t gain any further insight into Mayakovsky, at least not any I’ll develop in this post.

I’m most compelled by poets that express trans experience and identity through form rather than content. Poetry about identity struggle or about being trans is too literal for me; it gives me the same cringing sensation as rhyming poetry.  I don’t want an explicit roadmap about where the poet is going. I want to get lost with them in their own raw confusion. I want to feel the immediacy of complex emotions that they have not yet categorized or labeled. I want to find myself amidst their deepest expressions, and be wrapped up with them in their vulnerabilities.

Given the thickness of the anthology and the number of seasoned writers within it, I don’t feel I have a right to claim that I am constructing a transpoetics. (But clearly I do, or I wouldn’t have bought the domain; I just like to perform a degree of modesty though self-depreciation, which are two of my strongest character traits.) Here’s my instructions to myself as I construct my own transpoetic voice:

Trans*Piece

confuse the subject
implode pronouns
overburden subjectivity with false idols
strip bare to the flesh
trace the evidence of gendered violence
write about sex
love and desire
disorient time
collide conflicting memories
fuse biographies
sit between everything and nothing
speak the unintelligible

This is my aspiration, at least for today.

death in the afternoon

~ jacobalden ~ Leave a comment

I got into an argument with a friend about whether writing about rape is misogynist. It wasn’t an argument really. I got so nervous that I killed the conversation almost immediately by putting words in his mouth. He asked me if I had read Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, which is a series of short stories on bull fighting.

I don’t think I could have read Death in the Afternoon before I started writing about sexual violence and healing from it through therapy. I have had such an aversion to any depiction of violence because I identify with the person or animal that is suffering and I am terrified of the motivations, emotions and power of the person enacting the violence. I can’t even watch nature documentaries. Like some of the spectators Hemingway describes, I identify with “the most obviously abused thing” in the bull fight, which is the horse.

My friend had underlined this passage from the introduction, and it struck me too:

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you truly felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion you experienced.

I am wary of  writing about intimate violence because of the ways that the writing can affect others or be taken out of context on the web. My own memories are foggy, my identity is fragmented and still fused together with those of people who have harmed me, power and control are cross-wired with affection and desire in my brain. What does it mean to write about what I feel, distinguish it from what I was taught to feel, and to access what actually happened in my own past? Can there be a language for (trans)men to talk about experiences of sexual abuse and the way abuse shapes desire and sexuality without reproducing violence against ourselves or others?

Hemingway writes that those who identify with the horse are capable of the greatest cruelty and goes on to describe how the audiences demand that the horse wear protection, not in such a way that prevents the horse’s suffering, but only in such a way as it prevents the audience from facing the suffering, while making death slower and more painful for the horse.

I don’t disbelieve Hemingway’s account of these audiences, but I’d make a different interpretation about the meaning of their behavior. I remembered talking with another friend about about the Buddhist principle of not exposing oneself intentionally to gratuitous depictions of suffering, because there is enough real suffering within the world. This conversation may have been in reference to our mutual aversion to Game of Thrones. Those audiences that identify with the horse will make the horse suffer more greatly only if they are unwilling to face their own suffering and to accept their responsibility for the horse’s suffering. She told me, “bearing witness to suffering is one thing, but practicing compassion for self is critical until you can witness suffering with compassion but not self-immersion.”

I’m still wondering, as I write about sex and violence with (con)fused subjectivities, in abstract language, on the open web, what is my responsibility to myself, and to my reader?

sacred/profane

~ jacobalden ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been contemplating whether I should create a trigger warning or an age restriction on this blog. I’m writing about violence alongside sex, intermixed with evocations of sensuality, suicide, rape, emotional abuse, love, anxiety, and gender dysphoria. So far I’ve done so through poetry and abstraction, which is healing for me. I’m developing a use of language or a poetic system where I can excavate my own memories, articulate the interdependent relationship between the sacred and profane acts that become fused together in intimate violence, and trace out my own biography as queer transman and radical lesbian feminist, whose emotional life has been shaped by sexual abuse and trauma.

But what about you, my dear reader? The random wordpress user who follows a tag, or a friend interested in my poetry or in my process may not be prepared for what they find here. I don’t know where this blog will go: Nowhere? Nowhere I could ever imagine.

Poetry is a like a Rorschach, in that you will see in it what you bring to it. But the mirror I provide is not smooth, flat or clear. It is riddled with scratches, distortions, and jagged edges. What it may show you is not random. It could cut you in places you are not yet prepared to heal. I see this peril in my attempts to express my feelings and experiences with trusted loved ones. As much as they may love me, we end up in conflict, alienated. I trigger their vulnerabilities and anxieties as I expose mine. I defensively cover up my insecurities as they challenge my assumptions. I cower as they push back against my own projections on them. Tell me, won’t you, if it makes you feel? Tell me, won’t you, if you understand? They grow silent, weary. I retreat into poetry.

I posted a poem today that is self-censored and I’m not comfortable with it. I am uneasy about tagging, password protecting, or otherwise filtering out the most difficult pieces and emotions because as a writer, it is about integration, fusion, and visibility of what has been hidden, suppressed, and silenced. The dashes are my compromise, as was a revision from c-ck to d-ck in the fourth line below:

I’m the best at collapsing make room for your insatiable

I don’t need fuck
you myself

big dick little d’clit always a girl

show me your t-ts
whore
hide your c-ck
monster

Its the compromise to keep the sacred and profane in the same space without excising what is difficult and ugly and to address my concern about how algorithms will rip these words out of the context of the poem, of my biography, and of a poetics statement such as this one. The meaning is chopped up and processed back through the binaries and associations I’m working to fuse and decouple. But get this. My anonymous readers are filtering in from three places consistently: self-help, Christian evangelist, pornographers. Did I ever mention I grew up Baptist in puritan New England? Its peculiar nexus of guilt/shame/sex must show.

when our lips speak together

~ jacobalden ~ Leave a comment

The most generative theory I read in Prof. Hays Feminist Theory course in graduate school was Luce Irigaray’s essay-poem “When Our Lips Speak Together” from The Sex that Is Not One. It was the kind of text that I felt from within myself, not just one I wrangled with in the intellectual spaces of my brain. This got to me in a different way, and like poetry I could see myself reflected and refracted in it, shifting my interpretations with each read. I sensed I was a sex that was not one and found the possibility of myself in her critique of the gender binary.

If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will reproduce the same stories…Get out of their language. Go back through all the names they gave you. I’m waiting for you. I’m waiting for myself. Come back. It’s not so hard. Stay right here and you won’t be absorbed into the old scenarios, the redundant phrases, the familiar gestures, bodies already encoded in a system.

I know I must. Getting out is survival. Irigaray’s critique is resonant with Rich’s: men have used language and philosophy to construct the subjectivity of women in their own image, and as a repository for all of their aversions and fears. (Western) writing about women, female, and the feminine, has silenced and erased actual women’s subjectivities and experiences. Women in poetry, stories and philosophy are not women, but mirrors and projections of male subjectivities.

As a feminist queer transman how can I use language against and between the gender binary, in generative synthesis? I’m turning it over and over in my mind, how these feminist thinkers and writers, in making space for women subjectivities, both gave me a sense of empowerment and a deep sense of alienation from my masculinity and male identity. I don’t know how to talk about it.

I am a mirror of a mirror, absorbing the projections of women’s fears about men, generated by men’s fears of women, my subjectivity defined as a choice, and a dangerous one (with questionable politics) at that. I’ve been feeling very alone in this journey.

Irigaray compels me in the way she tantalizes the reader with the possibility of authentic connection, a healing from split connections and fractured subjectivity. That the “you” and “I” that have been severed by gender, by fear, by power could actually be reunited. I find myself longing for such connection with another person, never realizing that it was a disconnection in myself that required care.

When you say I love you — right here, close to me, to you — you also say I love myself…This “I love you” is neither a gift nor a debt…This currency of alternatives and oppositions, choices and negotiations, has no value for us. Unless we remain in their order and reenact their system of commerce in which “we” has no place.

When I first read Irigaray I was lesbian-identified and the possibilities for authentic connection in the taboo of women’s sexual/love relationships with women seemed like my salvation. Maybe I could connect, I could reach, you, and thereby find myself.

But it turns out that’s not how love works, at least not the kind that doesn’t flame out in disappointment. Looking at the broader context of Irigiaray’s work more recently, I understand that she was not advocating lesbian separatism and in fact trying to make sense of how women, in a full empowered subjectivity, could engage in authentic relationships with other humans (including men). She later wrote a book called I Love to You where she articulates an alternative expression of love, between equal subjects. Her discussion of love in “When Our Lips Speak Together” used to read to me as advocating a total loss of one’s subjectivity in another person, a complete union in which there is no distinction between self and other, almost as if trapped in a feedback loop of blissful co-produced fantasy fulfillment. I read it differently now:

I Love You

Subject (writer) --> Object (fantasies / desires of the subject)

Male writers have constructed women in the image of their fear-desires

vs.

I Love to You

Subject (speaker) --> Subject (another person)

Love's existence is not dependent on the response of the loved

I’ve internalized the projections of others about who I am, who I should be, and who they need me to be. Coming out as a transman has broken their mirrors and my own need to find myself in the face of another.

lies, secrets, and silence

~ jacobalden ~ Leave a comment

During college I picked up a copy of Adrianne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence at a Borders bookstore (remember those?) in Portland, ME. I used to meet up there with my boyfriend who worked full time at a factory making rubber seals for car doors. We could spend an entire Sunday pouring over books, magazines, and CDs despite the miles and life trajectories that were already pulling us apart.

The words in the title — lies, secrets, silence — struck something within me: someone was writing about what is not supposed to be uttered, what she has been told she should not say. The book felt important, bold, and expressive of my deep cynicism of humanity, which I mostly kept to myself. I felt like the world was keeping a secret from me, that there was some joke about gender and sex and love that I was not getting. Everything felt uncanny and inverted; I felt I was the only one who saw it.

In college and graduate school I tried to tackle issues of gender and sexuality on an intellectual and political level while avoiding them personally. But even academic writing was hard. I would hit a wall and hit it again. Writing about men and masculinity could break the writer’s block, but I was still constructing a voice based on an idea I had about how a woman’s critique of men was supposed to look, feel, and sound. I was still voiceless on matters I desperately needed to speak, write, and understand.

And here was Rich, writing about how language makes certain things unspeakable, and poetry makes them speakable again: “The victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society, language and structures of thought. They will go on being tapped and explored by poets…We can neither deny them, nor will they rest there.” She writes of the possibility linguistically and culturally, of women shedding a male consciousness, or false lens upon themselves, and creating an entirely new expression of subjectivity.

I read Rich’s chapter “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision (1971)” with great interest because it was about rewriting, revision, and redefinition: “It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing disorienting, and painful.” I wanted that consciousness, to use language in a new way to undo the lies secrets and silences around me. The chapter analyzes how women writers have used detached tones, male subject positions, or reaffirmed men as sources of fascinating power and women as suffering from Love. I set about a mission: adopt an alternative subjectivity, as a woman who loves women, as a way out of this gender trouble and to cut through the repression and suppression that was suffocating me.

I made friends with some queer women, started playing in grrl punk bands, and eventually had my first crush on a woman. As I was writing songs about these experiences I found it was very hard to write about women, and I didn’t even approach trying to write about myself. I caught myself using heteronormative language that objectified and pacified women as objects of the male gaze. As remedy, in my early 20s I wrote a song Your Release, which was a self-conscious attempt to write love and desire for women differently, or at least to call myself out about the ways I had been writing about women as “a dream and a terror.”

empty and fragile my love
a dream and a terror you are
you fight in your chains I’ll come free you
with my words I’ll trap you back again
you are more than a dream
you’re a real and possible being (but I always found myself singing it as “real impossible“)

Rich’s essay opened my mind to the possibility that certain subjectivities (women) have not had a language with which to express themselves authentically, because as writers they had internalized (strategically and by enculturation) some other subjectivity’s ideas about the world and about themselves. I didn’t get very far creatively or personally in my attempts to find an authentic voice as a woman, but this crucial concept stuck: a class of persons can create a new language, new forms of expression, and new genres as a practice of liberation. I apply it now as a transman, as a person who has had to remain silent about my identity and my experiences, and as a person who has deeply internalized transphobia and self-doubt about my own memories.

I reconnected with Rich’s writing recently in my attempt to reconcile my lesbian feminist identity with coming home to my queer transgender male identity. My therapist suggested I read Rich’s Diving in the Wreck as a metaphor for my dive into a history of past sexual trauma that was happening in tandem with a rediscovery of myself as transgender. This time I found inspiration in Rich the poet, where gender is more fluid, multiple, and fraught, than in essays that address the political and cultural formation of a distinctive female consciousness.

I came to explore the wreck
The words are purposes
The words are maps
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that will prevail
…
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
…
I am she : I am he

I think my About page is probably the clearest expression of Rich’s impact on my writing process. The Markov Chains to me are the beginning of a journey, the deconstruction of language, the reversion to a child-like mind, in order to create the objects (silver, rot, fouled compass, and drowned faces) that I can mold into the voice of a subjectivity that is just now fully coming alive within me.

 

 

algorithm / automation

~ jacobalden ~ Leave a comment

I couldn’t write anything until I could be written.

I wrote my first poem, the first one I shared anyhow, using a Markov Chain generator. I first head about Markov Chains when my composer friend Troy was visiting us with his Robot Rickshaw, one iteration of his project to build robotic musical instrument-performers. At the kitchen table — where I’ve had the best conversations about art and life — Troy told me about Dr. Nerve, also a musician, who programed a Markov Chain generator for text. From our conversation I understood that Markov Chain sequenced notes based on the relationship between what has just come before; that there was something random and ephemeral about it. I tried it immediately with a text I was writing about fear and desire. I hated what I wrote, but that seemed somehow necessary at the time, as a rather inconvenient crush on a friend collided with memories of abuse and reignited my gender identity issues.

My partner tells me its a digital humanities project, which I suppose it is in a way, though far more personal. I’m drawn to the “deformative” work of Mark Sample (who is also an avid Markov Chain methodologist), which plays between the text itself and the performed work of texts: “And what is broken and twisted is also beautiful, and a bearer of knowledge.” 

I tried to learn more from Wikipedia (and you can too). I quickly gave up, lost in the complexities of mathematical theory. But what struck me was the transition from one state to another state on the principle of memorylessness. I’m taking some poetic license here. I’m looking for ways to access and rewrite my own memories, to bring the unconscious into conscious awareness, and all the while to stay present and to let go of the past.

Let me get to the poem itself. I re-ran the original text through the Chain generator multiple times, setting it to generate 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, and 500 words. I copy pasted the results into the notes app of my phone. I had this need to hack the words into pieces. When my memories of violation surfaced I felt like I had broken into countless shards of glass. I needed to break everything apart absolutely, to get it all out, in order to rebuild. I used the resulting texts as a way to read my subconscious and to listen to what I was trying to say. I selected out about 20% of it based on what struck me intuitively, both in terms of style (repetition, surreal juxtaposition, and pronoun shifts), as well as anything that seemed expressive of the fine line between fear and desire. I took these bits and rewrote them into a surreal prose that means something different to me each time I read it.

It was the first time I’d ever consciously juxtaposed abuse, helplessness, and victimization with a desire for intimacy and affection. I kept the broken grammar of those lines that evoked the voicelessness I felt.

He put his mouth for a thousand lashes of me without leaving my mouth for as long as I could. Pretend like about making out.

He put his mouth, feeling stupid passion of skin and it suits me too.

Throughout my current writing, I’m working at the lines between abuse and affection, trying to disentangle the way they were are cross-wired into my brain. This poem along with the others in the Markov Chain series have helped me to craft the kind of voice that represents a sullen and quiet inner child whose internal mind blazes with sensory and emotional light. I write with a simplicity of a child’s vocabulary, with nonsense grammar, homonyms, repetition (as if to commit it to memory), poignant misuse of big words, and playing with words as if they are costumes to put on or take off. Its helping me to dig into trauma and to access memories that cannot be easily verbalized, but are nonetheless intensely felt.

I am willing my feelings and senses into language. As much as I’ve studied, read, and learned, I have a hard time speaking. I didn’t talk in public, or to people I didn’t know well, until I found myself in front of my first class of college students as TA in grad school. I’m trained as an academic sociologist and I can use complex vocabulary to wrap my voice in brilliant gift bags, employing complex theories and expressing elaborate ideas that hide the fact nothing is inside. When it comes to what I sense and feel, when it comes to talking to you while looking you in the eye, feeling your reaction, and staying in my own body, language breaks down completely.

For me, algorithmic generation is doing in its undoing, raw materials that I can build into a way of knowing myself and speaking, really speaking, to you.