- Reginald Shepherd

To pretend that a conversation about beauty isn’t, in fact, a conversation about privilege is an act of privilege. When an emerging writer pens an essay praising Anne Sexton for her beauty without quoting any of her poems, I sigh. I go read an essay by Audre Lorde. I try to work on a poem, but can’t concentrate. I think about how few gay men were in attendance at the Adrienne Rich memorial reading at Columbia last month and I wonder if, perhaps, she wasn’t beautiful enough for them to show up.

In response to the extensive comments his article “Anne Sexton, Aesthetics, and the Economy of Beauty” has sparked, Jameson Fitzpatrick contends “My aim was merely to defend an aesthetic (which, for me personally, is not raced) I feel is too often dismissed, disregarded and disparaged in contemporary poetry.” Not raced?

Just what are the aesthetic values that Fitzpatrick is championing? Aesthetic is defined as a set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement. And so, I go back yet again to his article in search of the aesthetic he claims to defend, but find none whatsoever. Instead of examining Anne Sexton, Alex Dimitrov or Eduardo Corral’s aesthetic(s), the article prioritizes their bodies over their bodies of work.

All of this is to say, I have a sneaking suspicion that a discussion about the poetics of beauty isn’t really about poetics at all. Once we face that, what are we left with? An article about a beautiful dead woman, a Latino man who makes people “bristle,” and a young “pretty” New York-based poet. And, besides, what good did Anne Sexton’s beauty do her?

When I look at pictures of her, I don’t see glamour. I see a woman who wrote, “Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself…”

“I suppose at bottom we are all beautiful queens,” writes Toni Morrison in her essay “What the Black Woman Thinks About Woman’s Lib,” “but… one wonders if Nefertiti would have lasted ten minutes in a welfare office.” Morrison’s questioning of the “use” of beauty reminds that being pretty has never helped anyone write a poem.

There is nothing wrong with beauty. I certainly am quite fond of it, but we are doing ourselves no favors by pretending that beauty is what we are really talking about. Fitzpatrick’s article is in praise of a certain type of entitlement. It’s in praise of a certain brand of glamour that, more often than not in Western culture, is married to both race and class privilege. For Fitzpatrick to not understand how this supposed aesthetic could be perceived as “raced” is a perfect example of how blind a person can be to how culture works.

I could go on but we all have poems to write, so I’ll conclude with this: I know Eduardo Corral is beautiful because I’ve read his poems.

In the first line of the book, Duberman explains the title; a saving remnant “has historically referred to that small number of people neither indoctrinated nor freighted into accepting oppressive social condition.” In researching progressive activism from the mid to late 20^th century, Duberman became interested in the fact that many ‘remnants’ of the time, such as radicals David McReynolds and Barbara Deming, were gay men and lesbians. As his researched continued, it became clear to Duberman that he wanted to write about the two friends who met through activism.

Barbara Deming (1917-1986) remains one of the most influential feminist voices within the non-violence movement in America. As Duberman explains, Barbara felt “the genius of non violent action, was that it combined two impulses long treated as distinctly masculine or feminine: self assertion and sympathy.” (160) Her essay On Revolution and Equilibrium is a touchstone for those following Gandhi’s message.

David McReynolds (born 1929) cooperated with Duberman for the book. He is a longtime anti-war activist, who in 1980 became the first openly gay man to run for president on the Socialist Party ticket. A collection of his essays, originally written in the Village Voice, came out in the 1970 book You Have Been Invaded by the 21^st Century. Early on the book, Duberman shares the following quote from Reynolds: “you can’t make people do good, but you can create the conditions that make it easier for them to be decent.”

Interestingly, considering the eras in which they were raised, Deming and McReynolds both informed their parents about their homosexuality before they moved out on their own. Deming was part of an intergenerational love affair with a neighbor woman, and at 19 McReynolds simply told his parents. Throughout the book, Duberman shares such parallel facts without trying to make statements about what they could mean. Duberman uses his research not to dictate to readers. Rather it seems all a generous effort to provide context: into the lives of Deming and McReynolds, into the times in which they were living, and most satisfying, into our current political reality. Regarding her participation in the 1963 Quebec-Washington–Guantanamo Peace Walk, which included revolving arrest actions, and hunger strikes, Deming wrote, “ We assert: Here we are and we won’t disappear….we refuse to let them forget they are imposing on us.” After reading this, if you didn’t already know, Occupy can be understood not as something new, rather as the latest incarnation of activists putting freedom and body on the line.

In the same spirit, the most prescient aspect of the book centers around a disagreement Deming and McReynolds had over the film Snuff,  which allegedly included the real murder of a woman. Deming, along with Adrienne Rich and others, was on the side of censoring the film. McReynolds was not; he worried about the implication on freedom of speech. In the conflict, which played out over a series of letters (almost inconceivable in this age of Facebook flame-outs), are the complex relationships that exist between feminism, the left, and the early days of gay activism. Duberman frames their difference of opinion around Snuff in historical context, situating it not only as a conflict around old and the new left, but more so deeply influenced by the tension within the feminist movement that was pitting straight women and lesbians against each other, and even more so, the growing divide we see being articulated today between the lesbian and gay activists who want homosexuals to be seen as “just folks” and people like McReynolds who are not willing to so easily reconcile sexual identity at the cost of conversations around class and race. In the end, these tensions could not stop a friendship. As Duberman tells it, they exchanged mutual sentiments of love and respect, again over letters.

A Saving Remnant is at its most engaging when viewed through the lens of the present, easily done when Duberman puts flesh to history. In one of the most fascinating and underplayed moments of the book, Duberman recounts how McReynolds’ friend and legendary activist Bayard Rustin was blocked from leadership roles within the war resistance movement by A.J. Muste, famed pacifist and mentor to McReynolds and Deming. On the surface, the book is a portrait of two committed people, enmeshed in overlapping causes, entering each other’s lives through circumstance. In giving ink to what happened to Bayard, Duberman flexes his muscles as a writer and presents the theme of the book with a subtle but powerful punch: History is relation, these relations shape our present.

A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds
By Martin Duberman
The New Press
Hardcover, 9781595583239, 336pp.
March 2012

All submitted work will also be considered for publication in the online version of Cobalt, in the June, September or December issues. Authors will be notified before any publication, and no work will be published online without author’s consent.

Since this contest is designed with the specific purpose of fundraising, we are also offering that entrants can pre-order Cobalt’s first print issue, which will be released in September 2012, at a discounted rate. If you would like to participate in this option, please submit your entry under the “Entry + Print Issue” in your genre. This is available in the online submission manager.

The first print issue of Cobalt will include:

Cobalt Writing Prize winners & runners-up
Exclusive author interviews
“Best of” online issues 1 through 4

Submissions for online content will remain open during the period of this contest. However, our standard “Donation/Submission” option will not be available until the entry period has closed. Only submissions accompanied by an entry fee will be considered.

For complete guidelines, please visit http://cobalt.submishmash.com.

If you have questions, please leave them in the comments section below, or email them to cobalt@cobaltreview.com, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Thanks and good luck,

Cobalt Staff.

Our current theme is “Victim” – whatever that word may evoke for you. We accept a variety of styles, from poetry all the way to investigative journalism. The current deadline for submissions is July 31, 2012.

We also accept short pieces, on any theme, for our e-newsletter on a rolling basis.

For more information on what we accept and how to submit visit www.kalyanimagazine.com or our Facebook page.

Anne Sexton as I remember her on our first meeting in the late winter of 1957, tall, blue-eyed, stunningly slim, her carefully coifed dark hair decorated with flowers, her face skillfully made up, looked every inch the fashion model. And indeed she had briefly modeled for Hart Agency in Boston. Earrings and bracelets, French perfume, high heels, matching lip and fingernail gloss bedecked her, all intimidating sophistications…

Later she continues:

In addition to the strong feelings Anne’s work aroused, there was the undeniable fact of her physical beauty. Her presence on the platform dazzled with its staginess, its props of water glass, cigarettes and ashtray.

Sexton’s beauty (along with the tragic details of her biography, of course) has proven just as captivating in posterity; few late poets stare solicitously from the cover of their collected works, or are captured in a candid yet glamorous exclamation of laughter on the cover of their selected letters. (I still remember seeing the cover of The Complete Poems for the first time: I was fourteen; the first boy I loved had just left for college, not before rekindling his relationship with his girlfriend; and I was browsing through the stacks of my high school library during a free period. I pulled the blue paperback off the shelf, took one look at Anne hugging her knees to herself, and opened to “You All Know the Story of the Other Woman.” I feel like I’ve never put the book down since.)

A quick Google search will yield dozens more stunning photographs of the poet, including a number from Sexton’s short modeling career. Though her time as a professional model was a virtual blip on what would prove to be a very impressive resume, this detail makes its way into even the shortest biographies, as if to remind us that Sexton was not only a poet beautiful enough to be a model, but in fact, both—the very model of a modern model-poet.

Which, really, she was: Sexton enjoyed (and some argue, was ultimately consumed by) a celebrity foreign to most contemporary poets, and few of her own contemporaries as well. Maya Angelou and Billy Collins might have similar name recognition today, but they are firmly literary celebrities, whereas Sexton’s fame went beyond her work. Allen Ginsberg perhaps loomed as large in the American imagination of the ’50s and ’60s, but for more explicitly political reasons, and with the momentum of the countercultural movement behind him. Sylvia Plath, to whom Sexton is most often compared, was not nearly as famous and certainly not as celebrated during her lifetime (Sexton, in contrast to Plath, was already mourning a career in decline when she committed suicide in 1974).

At her height—winning a Pulitzer for 1966’s Live or Die, followed by the commercially successful Love Poems and Transformations (poems from which appeared in Playboy and Cosmopolitan)—Sexton was a star, her readings famously standing room only and her fee among the highest of any working poet. “An actress in an autobiographical play” (as she once described her public persona), she had succeeded in a calculated move to market herself as the mad housewife turned poet, never forgetting the fact of her beauty, or how essential it was to her self-performance.

* * *

Full disclosure: Anne Sexton is my favorite poet. I love her work (even the later, critically unpopular poems), her shameless exhibitionism—and yes, what she looked like.

Recently I’ve been thinking about her a lot, as there’s a conversation about beauty happening today in the world of gay poetry. Mostly it’s a whispered conversation, conducted behind backs, reflecting a discomfort with a shifting landscape in which a gay poet’s self-presentation seems as important to his success as do his poems.

Of course, as Sexton’s own celebrity suggests, this is not a new phenomenon in poetry (I’d credit any feeling of novelty to the broader culture’s relatively recent acceptance of literature with explicitly gay content, and the subsequent proliferation of young gay poets). And, as Sexton explored in a 1973 essay for The American Poetry Review, aptly titled “The Freak Show,” every poem is, by its nature, concerned with a performance of the self.

There’s no doubt, however, that this is making some gay poets uncomfortable. In the past year, some of this private skepticism has started to appear in more public forums—on Facebook and in comments sections, for instance, as well as in interviews.

Just last week, guestblogging for Ploughshares, Michael Klein interviewed Eduardo C. Corral about his newly-released debut Slow Lightning, winner of the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets award (a bold and imaginative book I’d recommend to anyone). Asked how he was acclimating to life in New York, Corral had this to say:

The queer poetry community in New York City is full of beautiful people, which makes me an outsider…I’m disappointed in many of my queer peers. So many of them want to be part of the hipster crowd. So many of them value looks over talent. The cool kids form clubs, become gatekeepers. So many of my peers are clamoring to be let in.

Though I’m impressed by Corral’s candor, and lament his experience of exclusion because of his appearance, I bristled when I read this. I found myself worrying that this sort of attitude, taken a bit further, could lead to the devaluation of something important to me—namely, fashion and beauty. Moreover, I’m afraid such an attitude sets up a false dichotomy: looks or talent, style or substance. I refuse to settle for one or the other. Silly as it might sound, I want to be beautiful and I want to write beautiful poems.

I’m not, of course, arguing poets need (or should) be good-looking, nor do I advocate exclusion within the gay poetry community on any basis. I’m certainly not claiming the hunger for celebrity I share with Sexton is noble. But this is the truth of my life: I’ve wanted to be famous longer than I’ve wanted to be a poet. And I’m apprehensive about what happens when we privilege one experience of the world over any other. I may be young, I may be an aesthete—I may one day recall my great longing to be desired as frivolous—but I don’t believe that makes my experience any less worthy of artistic representation.

* * *

Presumably, one of the clubs to which Corral was referring is the Wilde Boys, the queer poetry salon run in New York City by Alex Dimitrov. The subject of a front page story in the The New York Times Style Section last November, the salon has also received attention from The Atlantic, The Paris Review, BOMBlog, and a number of other websites and publications (including Lambda Literary Review). In keeping with the Style Section’s voice and point-of-view, the Times piece focussed primarily on the social climate of the salon, rather than the quality of the literary discussion—an angle which inspired considerable internet backlash when the article was published.

Dimitrov’s career hasn’t suffered for it, however: his first book, Begging for It, is forthcoming from Four Way Books next year, and this June will mark the release of American Boys, a gorgeous digital chapbook from Floating Wolf Quarterly. Not to mention that he’s featured in this month’s Out as part of its Hot List 2012, in a piece which describes him as “poetry’s next great gay hope.” When Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog, picked up the story, it ran with the cheeky headline: “Alex Dimitrov is Hot.”

I talked with him a bit about beauty and poetry in preparation for this piece, and loved his take:

I think about beauty in my poems, but so did Keats and Rilke and Sexton. I think many poets are obsessed with beauty and its power, its allure, its danger, how fleeting it is. And when I say beauty I don’t just mean in the corporeal sense, like being at dinner or in bed with a beautiful person. Rilke wrote, ‘beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.’ Yeah, definitely, I get that. I mean, why is beauty necessary? It makes life bearable. Even if it’s impossible to hold onto it, or enjoy it without being destroyed by it.

I think he’s exactly right, and that it’s only natural if poets’ preoccupation with beauty sometimes extends to their self-presentations. Content aside, poetry is a highly aesthetic form—as poets, we labor over how our lines look on the page and how the sound of each syllable affects the ear. Why shouldn’t we give some thought to the dramatic impact we make when we give a reading, or what image comes to mind when someone reads our name? (Anyone who’s read a chapter of Butler knows that we’re all performing all the time, even those of us who deny the importance of beauty).

Ultimately, the poems will always be the test. Sexton may have capitalized upon her looks to gain readers, but her gift as a writer remains singular and irrefutable. Likewise, Dimitrov (his attractiveness aside), writes tight, honest poems that interest me. I suppose it’s presumptuous to assume I can speak for anyone but myself, but as someone who thinks constantly about beauty, desire, death, America, and, of course, New York, Dimitrov is writing some of the most exciting poetry today. That he is young and pretty shouldn’t count against him.

Lambda Literary believes discourse is important. That being said, we also understand that opinions on aesthetics, exclusivity, and “beauty” in the gay poetry community are as contentious as they are varied and, even if unintentional, are terms that can be racially coded. Since Jameson Fitzpatrick, the author of the opinion piece, is also the poetry editor of the Lambda Literary Review, we feel it’s important that we apologize to anyone, including Mr. Corral, who was offended by this post– this was neither the author’s nor Lambda’s intention. Additionally, we intend to post a dissenting opinion during the upcoming days, and welcome further commentary on the content of the original piece.

Complicated is one of those words that, upon looking closely, can apply to nearly everything. Shoelaces. Nipples. Physics. In day to day moments we encounter just the tangible tips of things, surrounded by icebergs, if you will, a universe of causal intricacies underlying a deceptive surface. Roughly paraphrased from the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, “the universe is in the tree.” Everything is in everything; nothing is simple except in its interconnectedness.

But don’t let that overwhelm you.

Writers know that writing is complicated. Any written piece is a performance, a tightly condensed fragment of an idea. Every body of work is merely a thread of a broader story, a story so vastly complex that no alphanumerical symbol, no string of words, no structure of grammar or symbolic stroke could ever fully hold it. All artists, writers among them, are caught up in the wild dance of trying to convey some piece, some part of this unsayable story.

But let’s not simplify things.

“Constantly risking absurdity,” we walk a line of seemingly conflicted dichotomies. We convey the universal; the universal is impossible to convey. We embrace the full profundity of life and nearly sink to madness to share it, and then calculatedly submit to those journals, press houses, or galleries most likely to enhance our prestige, with a bland cover letter carefully constructing our calming normalcy. We enrich the world with our work—we have the potential to liberate the world or ourselves with our work—but yet and still we fall back into the manacles of alienation, of mass advertising, consumerism, self-promotion, and Facebook, where we confuse digitized bits of sound and information for worth and connection.

I mean, what the hell does it really mean to “like” something?

—

Whole communities of people—queer people among them—are actively, violently spliced from visibility. Forced to choose between coherency and safety, many separate and seek to create validation and authenticity for themselves in hidden pockets of society.

And within these suppressed communities the splicing continues, hierarchies slicing whole people into fragments of identity, where telescopically we speak only a bit of ourselves at a time, turning relevant parts towards the brightened center of the lens, revealing selves distorted and fractured in a fishbowl of light edged with shadow.

We are hungry. Hungry for wholeness. Hungry for stories that send fault lines, tiny cracks fracturing down the side of the iceberg, schisms we follow to find the whole of the thing. We are a world in crash, in crisis. Even as we are full, others starve for our fullness. In the jagged tips of the iceberg that we touch, there is nothing clean left.

Artistry is an opportunity to advance the well-being of our selves, communities, the world: a chance to forge or reveal wholeness.

—

I’ve known that I am a writer since early childhood. I did not know this because of how often or how well I wrote. I knew it because I heard voices; I listened. Words moved in me. I saw them, I felt them. Sometimes I found the courage to write them down.

I am not now, nor will I ever be, a writer because I received a fellowship, or attended a distinguished MFA program, or got published in the latest experimental indie magazine that I not-so-secretly jones over on Facebook.

I’m a writer because I seek connection, because I listen. My heart stills as I listen, or hummingbirds up my throat with glee. And when I write what I hear, or when I spend hours crick-backed with a pot of coffee in the late of night wrestling my interpretation into something mildly coherent on the screen, I am filled with stupid, simple joy.

I’m a writer because I let something uncertain move in me. Sometimes, with courage and dedication, that shivers through the world freely, cracks things up, stirs up splinters, sparks, a tiny revolution.

I listen, and someone else feels heard: a wave. Art is connection. Creation is a desire to connect, to hold, enacted.

—

Coherency is not a privilege that transgender people enjoy. Sometimes in our separate pockets we feel held, but even then the telescopic splicing of hierarchy reduces us to something smaller than the greatness of what we are.

We are forced to find new language, new ways of thinking and story-telling to forge coherency in a world built around the assumption of our subjugation.

There are days that, in hopes for a little rest and simplicity, I have wished that I were dead instead of trans.

It is worse, for some reason, in the shower, where I alone with my body am pitted against it in a spray of water and steam. My skin itches, reddens; the parts of my hair that I allow length droop and plaster; water rebounds on tile in hot streams simultaneously continuous and broken. I wonder if my body, witnessed as I witness it then, would cancel out the truth of me. I wonder if I believe the truth of me. I wonder why, of all things, this truth has splintered so ridiculously to gender, why the physical fact of my flesh, its lumps, scars, discrepancies and contours, should take such pendulous priority over my life. Which will persist, the breasts or the heart? Better without you, I think, meaning the whole thing, that ambiguous monstered body of mine that so rarely seems a friend.

This gets old, the existential showering thing. But what a power. Every day I question fundamental assumptions of my own existence. Every day I must find or create my own coherency. Every day I must knowingly perform what others enact unquestioned, or knowingly refuse and live the consequences.

Incoherency. What a blessing, an opportunity to touch below the iceberg tip.

—

Liberation goes beyond revolt, beyond shock.

Liberation entails a connection so fierce that the surface level slips, and what was presumed fractured is seen as whole and deep.

And I don’t mean campfire songs. I hate campfire songs. I don’t mean people liking each other. I don’t like a lot of people. I don’t mean tolerance and I don’t mean inclusion and I don’t mean separation with later intentions of equality.

I mean something far scarier than that.

Something beyond new language, beyond innovative approaches of telling personal stories, beyond erotica anthologies.

Something like listening, searching, a receptivity. An opening of self that is less like “trying new ways of thinking” and more like splitting skin, until our senses are so raw that the passing of air between our lips feels exquisitely new.

Something like discomfort, pain. Waking to it, greeting it, trying again to transform and release it. Taking nothing for granted.

Imagine the artistic connected to the spiritual: we create to build wholeness, universal coherency. Conscious creation: listening for the world to crack, shift, reveal itself.

—

A few nights ago I dreamed about a three-headed snake that hissed with three tongues from the bloodied chest of a purring cat.

Before that I dreamed that my ex-best friend who was really my ex-girlfriend who married my ex-boyfriend danced with me in a broad grassy field. We wore only neon-colored doughnut costumes.

Anything can happen in dreams. Flying, dying, ass-fucking straight men by bonfire deep in the woods.

I like to write like I dream: the artistic connected to the spiritual. When nothing is taken for granted, anything can happen.

—

Lately I’ve seen a lot of articles written by writers, passed around on writers’ Facebooks, rallying against the stereotype that writers are crazy and poor.

These articles really cheese me off.

Crazy, tortured, hungry artist? Got it. Let me keep my archetype. They already put the rest in the DSM.

Even when I rode the short bus, everybody knew I would do at least this much. Listen, explore, create.

I find artists that claim sanity suspect. Creativity is similar to fetish wear: if it ain’t hurting, you ain’t wearing it right.

Bones reknitting, muscles tearing, dead tissue broken down and reabsorbed: growth hurts. Wear it proud, wear it right.

—

The trend in Special Ed these days is to “include” most Sped kids in “regular” classrooms. This purportedly helps Reg ed kids learn tolerance while allowing Sped kids to feel “normal.”

When I was a Sped kid, I rode a separate bus to a separate school, where I socialized exclusively with Sped kids as taught by Sped teachers.

The Swang-banger, a beefy red-bearded ex-punk who taught us some semblance of social studies, liked to remind us,  “Y’all didn’t drive me to drinking, drinking drove me to y’all.”

The Swang-banger taught me many things. He explained how turtles fuck and how fat men fuck skinny women (she rides or he does it from behind, he said. I asked. [I could give him additional suggestions now]). He appreciated, even collected, the snarky posters that I made with Clip Art, claimed to see a budding graphic artist in the grungy fifteen year old playing with their shoelaces on the floor. He gifted my friend a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook, and taught me the anarchist version of “Onward Christian Soldiers”, which I then made a poster of, complete with corny Clip Art cross.

I hung it in the back of his room, where he allowed me to tape out a coffin-shaped space on the floor. This was my space. I sat there when I couldn’t take shit anymore. My friends sometimes slept there, or played music and sat around me to discuss who blew who in the time-out room.

The Swang-banger read my crap poetry. I wrote him illegible notes in red ink, turned his assignments to songs that I then refused to sing.

One day he asked me why I never ate bananas. I told him that it reminded me too much of blowing someone. He laughed—a surprised, spontaneous, delighted laugh—and said, “I hope you always keep your honesty.”

I tended to perform the Time Warp as The Swang-banger escorted me to the bathroom. I danced down the hallway, boots echoing, singing poorly, in fishnets, plaid skirt, worn band t-shirt, my camouflage jacket flapping like mismatched wings. The Swang-banger rolled his eyes, waited.

Sometimes exclusion means that there is more room to hold space, to refuse bananas, to dance. “Normal” is not always the best place for world change to happen. “Normal” can mean fitting into a system or institution that is broken or damaging: to see only the tip of the iceberg. Exclusion can be an opportunity to see what’s broken, and hold the space to fix it: to see the world whole and deep.

—

I don’t claim to know what experimental writing is, or should be, or can’t be, or should be called.

For me, experimental creating is a feeling, like fingering the bit of stretched skin beneath a recently shed scab, or gasping for breath around a throatful of wind. What does this actually feel like, to think, to want, to breathe, to have hair or lose it, to swell in the heat or go stiff in the cold, to hurt, to age, to fuck, to die?

Conscious writing. Survival writing. Exploring a wound for passage. Rabbit-holing into the unprecedented: rabbit-hole writing.

Rabbit-holing is enlarging a space to allow entry for the rejected or excluded, not through “including” the excluded by warp or downsizing, but by altering, misshaping, or destroying the hegemony of the “included” altogether.

Like refusing bananas: it’s more honest.

—

Transgender literature and rabbit-hole writing are one and the same to me; Queer writing, as well. Not because “experimental” writing is weird, and as our community is some glittery fringe we must thus hold to our weirder-than-thou cultural claims. I mean, sure, I’m for that, too.

But I also mean that, in order for our art to reflect our lives, our bodies, the shifts of identity, language, and power through time, we have to make shit up. Incoherency, imagining the impossible, conscious exclusion from acceptable genres or forms—these are paths to our coherency, our mediums to convey the inexplicable. “Normal” does not hold us, and it was not meant to.

Literature built around normalcy or sanity with all its attendant structures of power—its “isms”—will not hold us, nor was it meant to. Thus rabbit-holing can—and, to me, should—also be a spiritual quest, an act of mindful resistance, an icy and explosive exploration of all beyond the supposed surface of things. Embracing the incoherency of our trans lives—an incoherency rendered through our cultural exclusion, through experimental living, conscious creating and being—can also be a path towards our wholeness.

Transgender and Queer literature, therefore, are not to me so much about who wrote what with what content, but how a piece is written, and more importantly, perhaps, why. What cracks were intended? Not just in who is represented in books, but in how books are written, shaped, thought of—did the writer intend to revolutionize, to rabbit-hole, to connect through and despite the violence of imposed incoherency, to bring the draw of breath through lungs fresh to mind, and remind us that nothing can be assumed?

Transgender literature is conscious exploration, mindful incoherency. Coherency through incoherency: it’s complicated, like nipples, like shoelaces, like living.

in conjunction with Kate Millett’s Admirers, Fellow Artists and Friends

presents

‘A Kate Millet Festival’

PLEASE JOIN THESE FABULOUS FEMINISTS

Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, Alix Kates Shulman, Terrie O’Neill,  Barbara Love and the awarding of the Second Kate Millett Lifetime Achievement Award to VFA’s president, Jacqueline Ceballos. 

Featuring a Retrospective of Kate’s Writings, Sculptures, Graphic Arts,and Films by and about Kate Millett.

Date: Sunday,June 24, 2012
Time: 3 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Place: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South in NYC

A LIGHT BUFFET AND NON-ALCOHOLIC DRINKS WILL BE SERVED
Catering by Gillie Holme

Tickets Available Here- $35.00 /person for the event.

$10 for a historic souvenir copy of the retrospective Kate Millett: Her Life and Work compiled for the event.

For more information visit: http://katemillett.vetfems.org/

1.

Michael Cunningham didn’t take the stage right away at the Museum of Modern Art.  This event, billed as a celebration of Diane Arbus, started with a talk by Arbus herself (originally recorded in the 1970s), and a slide-show of her work as well as archival clippings, snapshots and ephemera from her collection.  She discussed her focus on marginal communities, including transvestite prostitutes, nudist colonies, and circus sideshows.  “I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do,” Arbus said.  “That was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.”  Her intention, she explained, wasn’t for the viewer to gawk at these people, but rather to enter their lives.

When Cunningham took the stage with fellow novelist Francine Prose, and Arbus’ daughter, Doon Arbus, the panelists read from Diane Arbus: A Chronology, a compilation of her writings, journals and letters.  Cunningham chose a selection in which Arbus interpreted her own photograph, a portrait of a suburban family, the mother and father in cushioned lawn chairs, soaking up the sun, the father covering his eyes with his hand, and their son, in the background, bent over a kiddie pool in the lawn, seemingly ignored.

“All families are creepy in a way,” he read, connecting the photograph to his own writing:  “We’re all trying to penetrate and respect the mystery of imaginary people.”

2.

For a while, Michael Cunningham was, to me, imaginary.  I had read The Hours and his story, “White Angel,” but Cunningham, as a person, was nebulous, a name on a book, a byline, an author photograph on the flap jacket.  When he came to Houston, where I was studying, to give a reading, I was worried:  what happens when the imaginary person in my head meets the real thing?  Do they cancel each other out, like doppelgangers?  Do they wrestle for supremacy?

I needn’t have worried, of course:  the mental Michael was easily supplanted by Cunningham qua Cunningham.  At the reading, he spoke in a deep, sonorous voice, and afterwards he was affable, even signing a copy of his first, disavowed novel, Golden States.  I wondered:  why do we think we can know who an author is by reading his work?  There’s always—perhaps necessarily—a separation between the author and his work, in the same way that the camera intermediates between the photographer and the photograph.

I got my picture taken with Cunningham.  We stood side-by-side, and my hand is pressed against his chest, as if to ensure he’s real.  Though to someone else looking at the photograph, it may seem as if I’m being naughty.

3.

At his second PEN World Voices Festival event, Cunningham was on-stage with Deborah Eisenberg, Edmund White, and Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann to discuss Gregor von Rezzori’s ‘Bukovina Trilogy’:  the novels Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, An Ermine in Czernopol, and the memoir, The Snows of Yesteryear.  After each panelist read a selection from von Rezzori’s work, they expanded upon why they had chosen that passage.

“Reading for relevance,” Eisenberg said, “is a crummy way to read.  What these books do is examine what prejudice and xenophobia are, and how they’re cultivated.  They’re anatomies of the psyche, and they point out what we should be scrutinizing in ourselves.”

From l-r: Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Cunningham, Daniel Kehlmann, Edmund White.

For Cunningham, that scrutiny went further:  “I discovered,” he said, “that Cunningham is an invented name.”  His grandfather, upon immigrating to the United States from Croatia, changed the family name from Grig to Cunningham.  And it was only after reading von Rezzori that Cunningham decided to search for his roots.

After the talk, Cunningham didn’t sit at the signing table with the other authors.  Instead, he snuck into the May sunshine for a cigarette.  I caught up with him there, outside the Museum of Jewish Heritage, smiling and laughing with two young women.  Former students, I assumed.  Maybe current ones.  I brought out some books for him to sign, and he did so, as gracious as ever.

“I should be inside with the others,” he said, taking a drag.  “But I’m being naughty.”  And as Arbus pointed out, maybe that was one of his favorite things about it.

The biggest bi culture event of the year in NYC! Celebrated 2011 bisexual book authors, finalists & nominees for the bisexual Lambda Literary Awards, read from their works. Plus live music, live theater, graphic art & soul food after-party!

Hosted by Bi Writers Association, co-sponsored by Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Tickets $8

Purchase advance tickets at http://www.nuyorican.org/ or pay at door.

6pm Book signings

6:30-8:30 Program

8:30-9pmBook signings

9-11 Soul Food After Party nearby

Host: Sheela Lambert, Founder, Bi Writers Association

Readings:

The Correspondence Artist, Barbara Browning -Lammy Award finalist

Sovereign Erotics, Qwo-Li  Driskill -Lammy Award finalist

The Horizontal Poet, Jan Steckel -Lammy Award finalist

Triptych, J.M. Frey -Lammy Award finalist

Surviving Steven: A True Story, Ven Rey -Lammy Award finalist

a + e 4ever: A Graphic Novel, Ilike Merey

Bisexuality and Queer Theory: Intersections, Connections 

and Challenges, Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio -Lammy Award finalist 

Straight Jock Pussy by Christopher Trevor

The Last Nude, Ellis Avery

Musical Performances:

Viva

Rorie Kelly

Theater Performance:

Scene from Confessions of a Homo Thug Porn Star By James Earl Hardy (author B-Boy Blues)

With Johnathan Cedano as Tiger Tyson

Art

Art slideshow from a + e 4ever: A Graphic Novel by Ilike Merey

After Party

Soul food after party nearby

Questions? info@biwriters.org or 917-583-1797

WHAT ABOUT WHEAT BEER? DOES GRAIN ALCOHOL COUNT?

“why are you
so against snacks?”
the friend asked
after i refused the rice cakes
having refused the tangerines
the peaches the pizza
already.
i shrugged,
poured more beer
then more green taurine caffeine
energy
drink named monster,
carbonated chemicals a garnish
in my ceramic cerulean mug that reads café—
the vessel that’s been lately feeding me
my meals of
tall boy
seltzer diet soda
tonic and vodka
black coffee
vitamin c powder, green tea extract drops
dissolved in water
caffeine concoctions
that always come out
grainy at the bottom
(some are work, the others, play).

my mother tries to remind me what new york is:
she brings me everything bagels with cream cheese
for breakfast
the tin foil tells you its toasted
they say toasted bread is better for you
but i am skeptical
(of bread in general)
and i have been hearing that everywhere—
on the l.e.s., a woman says,
“yes, she doesn’t really eat grains anymore”
to her friend about a friend— as
the toxicity of wheat and yeast
hits mainstream,
it amazes me
that we can speak easy on the street
about not eating.

——

REX LEONOWICZ is a trans-identified intersectional feminist from New York City. His poems have appeared in Bodies of Work magazine and Testimony, an exhibition and online journal of lgbtq creative work.