Book Review: Tara Hardy's My, My, My, My, My,

Last month I went to the the book release for My, My, My, My, My, and I was completely blown away by Tara Hardy's performance of her works and by her immense generosity with us as an audience. Her warmth engulfed us. And since then it's taken me a month to read through her book. Yes, because life is busy (graduated from my MFA program and all so woo hoo), but also because the 124 page book of confessional and musical poetry and prose is huge and magical. We're talking a freaking Tardis of a book here people.

Let me explain. To me, the most remarkable trait of My, My, My, My, My, is its cohesive tone. It maintains this unity of voice despite the wide range of themes and topics and especially despite Hardy's diverse use of poetic and prosaic forms and approaches. These potentially disparate elements are held together in part by the repetition of motifs and scenes. The recurrence of a scene between a spider and a ladybug, and the refrain of a lilac tree named Miss Lady offered solid welcoming footholds and echoed the harsher but similarly steady echoes and monotonous repetitions of what it is to live with illness or what it is to live with your trauma always in you.

What cements the cohesion of My, My, My, My, My, as miraculous, what gives it its strange magic is that it is held together through deep dives into many and particularly heavy topics. This book is not a simple book. It is not an "easy" read. In the month it took me to read it, I had to put it down several times because it struck me so strongly. I know it's corny and I don't care: It brought me to tears on multiple occasions and made me laugh out loud alone in my bedroom and once while on the train to the airport. My, My, My, My, My, is a book about growing up, it's about body, it's about divorce, it's about getting sick and getting sicker and fearing death until that fear becomes as familiar as the feel of a butterknife in your hand, it's about abuse and incest, it's about the saving grace of a dog's face, it's about survival and it's also a guide for how to survive and how to revel in this sharp glinting gift of life.

My, My, My, My, My, is not a book about balance, it is balance incarnate. It embodies the deeply shifting struggle and triumph of staying alive. The specifics of Hardy's life will draw you in but it is her alchemically balanced mode of storytelling that will invite you and your own struggles and triumphs into the book. Hardy's gift in My, My, My, My, My, is the pocket she opens for the reader to crawl into. When you finish My, My, My, My, My, the book, and everything in it will belong to you completely. And also you will belong more to yourself.

On The Antioch Review's choice to publish and promote transphobic content

Content warning: transphobia, sexism, cultural supremacy (esp in the first link, click with caution!)

In its Winter 2016 Issue the literary magazine The Antioch Review published Daniel Harris’s essay titled “The Sacred Androgen: The TransgenderDebate.” At the beginning of his essay Harris brings up the topic of the transgender experience as one might broach a topic at a fancy dinner party. He nervously presents a few nonspecific facts (eg: high rates of depression and suicide among transfolks).

He presents these facts like he’s testing the room. He wants you, the reader, to know he’s hip, that he reads the news. Citing the facts seems neutral enough. But, as many oppressed individuals know, the facts are never neutral. By pre-empting his views with a three sentence patina of cold hard facts about the suffering of others, he wants to show you he’s objective, that he has no skin in the game, that his perspective is fully formed and informed.

I don’t have that luxury. As a transgender author and active member of the literary community, my skin is always being dragged into the game Harris wants to deny he is even playing. My conception of transgender experiences is constantly being informed and re-formed. And I can’t write about the experience of transgender people objectively. The facts hurt me too much. I can’t write this from the perspective of society, only from myself.

I'm a transgender poet, nonfiction writer, and graduate student in Antioch University's MFA program. I also work as a peer writing consultant at Antioch University Seattle. Although Antioch College (the source of the publication in question) and Antioch University are no longer officially affiliated, they share names and a lot of history. Even though these institutions are not longer connected, I am ashamed that the university I currently attend shares so much with an institution that now supports such bigoted views. Harris's words threaten my very existence, as well as to the work I do in validating and archiving transgender voices and narratives in the literary landscape.

The essay itself made me physically sick to read. It was sometimes so blatantly wrong the only thing I could do was laugh. (Did Harris do ANY research?) The way he uses people's bodies and the choices they make about those bodies to prop up his bigotry was absolutely horrifying. The way he shames women and trans people for making surgical changes to their bodies combines both sexism and transphobia into one revolting sour note of supremacy.

Yet beyond the reductive misinformation Harris espouses, the patronizing tone of the essay itself was deeply upsetting to me. As someone who writes nonfiction, I simply can't understand writing something like that and not realizing it's so condescending that it borders on parody. It's not just bad politics. It's bad essay writing.

I'm offended by his words and also by the way he uses words. 

No, not offended. I am actively harmed by the form and content of those words.

I am, however, more hurt by The Antioch Review. I know views like Harris’s and the people who hold them exist. I am reminded all the time. I am disappointed and appalled that The Antioch Review gave Harris a platform. Not just because his polemic is obviously bigoted, but because I can think of at least 10 transgender writers (myself included) who could've offered a more accurate, more engaging, and much better written. Yet it's vocally transgender transgender writers whose work is labeled "divisive." It transgender writers whose work about their lives and culture, that get rejected or excluded from so many literary spaces. Or those pieces don't get sent out from fear. Or because cisgender publishers neglected to solicit the opinions of trans people.

The Antioch Review’s promotion of the words in Harris’s essay, more so than any of those words, is an enforcement and harsh reminder of the fact that literary culture isn’t safe for transgender people, that is doesn’t want our voices and our stories. It signals a tacit agreement with Harris, that when transgender people ask to be recognized accurately, that we are asking too much:

TGs [transgender individuals] have ambushed the debate and entangled us in a snare of such trivialities as the proper pronouns with which to address them, protocol as Byzantine and patronizing as the etiquette for addressing royalty

The words of the essay itself also generalize about transgender experiences in a way that erases my identity as a trans masculine genderqueer person. It ignores anybody with a non-binary gender and assumes all trans people want to undergo or have gone through gender affirmation surgery. It’s from this reductive assumption, that Harris claims trans people are enforcing gender norms and that we are "running away" from homophobia, that we, en masse, are trying to assimilate into heterosexual culture. 

(this was one of the parts where I had to laugh)

Harris’s framing of himself and his cisgender gay peers as valiantly resistant to assimilation, and also as victims of purported bullying at the hands of transgender activists who just want to be recognized as who they are, is downright disgraceful. It's disgusting, self aggrandizing, and disrespectful. It’s a naked moment of pushing someone else down to raise yourself up. Harris's need to see himself as more right and more persecuted (aka noble) than trans people has cost me my sense of security in the literary community and has blocked his worldview off from the rich wisdoms, truths, and stories of transgender people.

I fear for myself and my peers because of what he's said. And I pity him. Because, through his own denial, he'll never know or want to understand the beautiful and complex cultures, stories, and possibilities that trans people create. And we create them daily dammit!

Shame on The Antioch Review. Pity for Daniel Harris.

Please sign this petition denouncing the Antioch Review’s promotion of transphobic content.

New Voices: Self-Portrait With Tumbling and Lasso

By Eduardo C. Corral, from his 2012 book Slow Lightning.

Poetry Month Project: New Voices

I've decided to start a small project for poetry month. I'm starting a bit late but showing up and starting is more important than getting it right. So here I am.

The project is simple: Read aloud a new (to me) poem every day in April. Record it and post publicly.

My goals for taking on this project are a tad more complicated so I will try to keep them to a simple list. I might write about how it affects me. But later.

The goals:

1. Familiarize myself with new poets and the lesser known works of poets I already admire.
2. Become more accustomed to reading poetry aloud. Normalize this practice in my life.
3. Become more accustomed to the way that testosterone has changed my voice.

Today's poem:

Richard Siken's Litany In Which Certain Thing Are Crossed Out

This project was inspired by queer and trans magic.

Today a Thin White Giant Fell from Earth

My brain hurts like a warehouse, it has no room to spare.

I have David Bowie to thank for the very first time I waxed philosophical on the penis. At 10 I remember his shimmering codpiece as if it took up 2/3s of the screen. And maybe it did. It's been years since I watched Labyrinth. But this morning I woke up hungry for his peach and nothing else will do. I especially want the worm inside. His was the first force to awaken the dreaming worm of weirdness beneath all my sweet curvatures and juice. The first to offer graffiti'd hints that my pit might be something much more tricky.

My sophomore year of college youtube was still a novelty. Once I found him seducing Mick Jagger into shaking his ass and pressing fiery foreheads together, I watched the "Dancing in the Street" video at least 300 times that winter. I forced all of my friends to watch it too. It kept us warm. It doesn't matter that in the 90's they both took their passions back in respective interviews. Evidence for their overwritten queerness still exists. I still love him. I already miss him through my lack of forgiveness. I would still go down on his ego. Gladly.

The first time I heard "Space Oddity" I almost cried and then the key change saved me from folding in like my mother was prone to. Confident jerking guitar pulls brought oxygen back to the chest cavity his solemn space opera had thrust into vacuum. After that I never again remembered how to breathe normally. My lungs knew from then on, the dazzling strangeness of his universe.

 This morning I full-on sobbed before his hope came in to save me. (My mother would be proud). 
"Tell my wife I love her very much."
"It's time to leave the capsule if you dare."
He dared and dared and dared. Without him I'd never have understood how to accomplish the necessary risk of leaving my capsule.

He, mystical glittery beast, unweaving himself each musical season, and saying "Yes" to every possible version of himself – He, sex on two milky-thin matchsticks, shattered the panicky distance between us and alien. He put a shine on the things my adolescence feared touching: Sex, Loss, & Otherness. In many ways I see his career as a 50-year long public adolescence. Now that he's gone the way only his space ship knows to go; now that his bright flare of earthly puberty has ended, and the rest of humanity remains, I fear we'll find ourselves far too grown up. So let's remember his hair throwing (caution to the wind) and tenor-into-baritone trajectory as we recall our very first tweenage desires, with ache and a sharp-but-tender recklessness.

Gender as Negative Space: A Quick Response to Kat Blaque asking "What Defines Gender?"

To me, as a nonbinary trans masculine poet, I think about the rightness or definition of my gender in a similar way to how I think about a poem that resonates deep down into my soul. Sure, I can point to concrete details big, small, and structural as to why that poem works for me, but that will never be the whole story of why it's so meaningful, why it feels perfect. It's a kind of magic. Which I know sounds hokey, but whatever.

I know that I like slick images, em dashes, and enjambment, but that doesn't mean a poem with all these components will work for me. I know I like getting sweaty, wearing a binder, painting my nails, fixing my bike, and being called "sir," but all of those things don't necessarily add up to my gender.
My gender, just like the meaning in poems, is too big/complicated to be defined just by the currently available language of words and physical/visual concepts (like fashion). Yes, gender is in these words and symbols, but gender is also in the negative space, the implied universe beyond definition. Gender exists in ways we don't have language or symbols for yet. But like a poem we don't wholly understand, yet moves us deeply, gender affects our lives. 

from Kim Addonizio's poetry manual Ordinary Genius

I choose to believe this. It's a belief that keeps me alive and in my body. I hold on to it. Without this faith, I wouldn't have the courage to call myself a trans person or a poet. I know because I spent a long, dark, disconnected time not calling myself either because I didn't believe in the power of the unsayable. I wasn't closeted or hiding (yet). I was closed off to the possibility of being something currently undefined. Now I'm open.

And now that I'm out in this open/negative space, it's a bit scary and kind of lonely. People in a hurry sometime get angry that the words on the page are confusing and tend not to consider the negative space (aka the rest of my identity). Sometimes it hurts to be overlooked but honestly, I'm much happier this way. I don't feel so small. And, though it's sometimes lonely, I don't think I'm alone. Out here in the negative space is, I think, where we can all be our most complex and human.

So, friend, come with me into the ample life-giving void. Let's boldly go where no words have gone before.

<3 Wryly

PS Watch all of Kat Blaque's videos because they are SO amazing.

Reading list for Writing Our Lives Writing Ourselves Workshop (Spring 2015)

The past spring I led an 8 week writing and reading workshop centered on reading and raising the voices of transgender writers. The following is the reading list from that workshop series.

Reading list for Writing Our Lives Writing Ourselves

From THEM Issue I/2013 :

Janani Balasubramanian, Maybe a little girl will kill me tomorrow (poem)

Calvin Gimpelevich, Innovation, Reversal, and Change (short story)

Mx Glass, Errae and American Crow (prose poem)

Van Binfa, Four Years (poem)

Joy Ladin, Letter To Radfems (poem)

From Troubling The Line:

Amir Rabiyah, Escape Artist (memoir/personal essay)

Aimee Herman, to soften (poem)

Ari Banias, Exquisite Corpse (poem) Solve for X (poem) & On Being a Stranger. Instinct. Messiness,        Binaries, Failure, Discomfort, and How I Think I Write Poems (personal essay)

CA Conrad. Somatic Poetry (prose poem) & DON'T TAKE ANY SHIT!! A (Soma)tic Poetics Primmer      (personal essay)

D'Lo, Poetics Statement (personal essay)

Duriel E. Harris, Portrait (poem) & Poetics Statement (prose poem)

Eli Shipley, Encounter (poem), Six (poem), and Boy with flowers (poem)

Fabian Romero, My Name (poem)

Jaime Shearn Coan, circulation (poem) and forcing the hand (poem)

Jen (Jay) Besmer, Eels Look Like Snakes (visual poetry)

Jenny Johnson, Tail (poem) and Poetics Statement (personal essay)

Joy Ladin, Ready to Know (poem)

Lori Selke, Woman/Dog (poem)

Lizz Bronson, Creation Myth #3 (poem)

Oliver Bendorf, Split it Open Just to Count the Pieces (poem)

Stacey Waite, Poetics Statement (personal essay)

Meg Day, Sit On the Floor with Me and When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

Eric Karin, Verses Vs.(poem)

Y. Madrone, Listen, we are coming down to straighten everything out. (poem) & a chest is an        embarassment to have. (poem)

Natro, Naturaleza. (poem)

kair edwards, each moment its own atmosphere (poem)

From Captive Genders:

Paula Witherspoon, My Story (prose)

Ralowe Trinitrotoluene Ampu, Hotel Hell (prose)

From Gender Failure:

Ivan E. Coyote, Many Moons. and A CautionaryTale (prose)

Rae Spoon, How to Be a Transgender Country Singer (prose)

From Julia Serano's Whipping Girl and Excluded:

Julia Serano, Barrette Manifesto (prose) and Love Rant (prose), Whiping Girl

Julia Serano, Margins (prose) & Transfeminisms: There's no conundrum about it (prose), Excluded

From Janet Mock's Redefining Realness:

Selected excerpts

From Nia King's Queer and Trans Artists of Color:

Selected excerpts

From Seasonal Velocities:

Ryka Aoki, Proestrus (prose) and Raccoon (prose)

Online Video Resrouces:

Andrea Gibson, Andrew (poem and performance) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfCWiVUWQa8

Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase (poem and performance) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtZp7MQE2ZM

Andrea Gibson, Jellyfish (poem and performance) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgALhKr4ZZo

Malic White, The Pink Stallion via The Moth (storytelling and performance) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a46JPv_30u8

Miscellaneous Sources:

Pride and Exile by Eli Clare

Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker by Joe Kadi (formerly Joanna Kadi)

Pretty Eyes Ellis, The Great Gape from Portals (Lion's Main publication)

Cody Pherigo's, [The Voice of Internalized Oppression]; [It wasn't like _____, or _____] and [Write about being an unwinged thing] from Animal Sabbath (poem)

E. L. Bangs Interview with the Famed Roller Sara Zephyr Cain from Taking the Lane (fiction)

Aevee Bee, The Story is a Spell. The Story is a Curse. by from Mammonmachine.com

Wryly T. McCutchen, Wrestling with Pronouns (poem), Either Oar and Hard Rituals (personal essay)

Aaron Apps, selected excerpts from Intersex and Dear Herculine (prose poetry)

Even Aud, On being a disabled Bi trans person and the idea of passing

Red Durkin, A Roman Incident from The Collection

Supplemental works of (presumably) Cis authors (for reading gender transgression into cis texts)

Ranier Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo and selections from Sonnets to Orpheus

Sylvia Plath, Tulips

Junot Diaz MFA vs POC