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.