Culture

Read Me: This Trans Poetics Anthology Imagines a World Where "Everything Belongs to Everyone"


To learn more about the process of creating this work and the radical intentions behind it, them. caught up with its editors: Andrea Abi-Karam (they/them), a self-described punk poet-performer cyborg, and Kay Gabriel (she/her), poet, scholar, and founder of Vetch, a poetry magazine by and for trans writers.

To start, I’d love to hear more about what intentions you brought to the selection process for this collection.

Kay Gabriel: We knew we wanted to put together an anthology of trans writing that was poetry-heavy, but not just lineated verse. As we put together our call for submissions, we thought about different ways to fit our aesthetic desires together with our political overlaps and the points of connection and alignments that exist in our art and our social lives and our organizing lives. When we got to the point of putting out the call for work, we had some writers in mind. They weren’t necessarily famous. One thing that’s very true about the book is that we didn’t want it to be a reflection of who’s already hot. That felt fake. It didn’t feel true to the project.

This is not your typical collection of poems, of course. Neither is it a typical collection of trans poetics. In what ways did you seek to distance this book from more broadly read trans narratives?

KG: No shade to anybody who’s writing what they want to write, but I think We Want It All is very different from what legacy magazines frequently want from trans writers — a lyric testament of the self that foregrounds identity in such a way that cisgender readers can actually get what’s going on; that translates into their terms; that foregrounds certain motifs of trans pain; that is kind of designed to produce a sort of sympathetic effect.

Andrea Abi-Karam: Right, the standard lyric, “I” that poets always talk about. We didn’t want a self-contained lyric, “I.” We wanted our “I” to be connected to community and agitation.

KG: Totally. Even in the first person singular, we wanted to know: how was this poem speaking in some kind of collective language?

AAK: And we have a lot of beautiful, lush lyric pieces in the book, like Trish Salah’s series and Jamie Townsend’s series. But we also have epistolary work and collaborative work and work that isn’t necessarily legible to forms that are discussed.

I would be curious to hear you speak a little more about why you wanted to resist that typical “I” voice in trans poetics. Why was that so important?

AAK: Oh my God, so many reasons. Before you dive in, Kay, I just want to highlight that the standard lyric, “I,” poems are the ones that get money from the government and win big awards. We’re hoping that the prize system will change and that trans writers will be rewarded as we all should be. But currently, the highly lineated singular “I” is the kind of poetry that makes people into household names in the US. We wanted to distort that.

KG: It’s not necessarily the mode in itself of the first person singular lyric [that’s at issue], but rather what happens to that thing when it slams into the publishing industry. In our introduction we talk about representation in terms of what Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton call “the trap of the visual” [in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility], which describes how capital turns the violence and precarity of trans lives into cultural commodities…I’m not naive about commodification, but I also think that we can say, “Well, in this situation where the publishing industry is trying to — and in some cases very successfully — make a buck on trans writing of a certain variety, what if we ignore that really miserable situation and decide to address a different situation — one in which we face the world as trans people, as poets, as comrades, as people who believe that all our liberation struggles are happening at the same time?” What if we start from that stance? What kind of poetics does that enable?





READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.