This is part one of a conversation between Violet Spurlock and Wendy Lotterman. Read part two here.
Violet Spurlock:
Your poems have a habit of establishing an erotic relation to immaterial things – time, light, chance, intention, etc. What is motivating this separation of sex and matter or material? What sorts of fantasies become more or less possible when the libido is let loose in the realm of concepts or immaterial substances, and how do those kinds of fantasies inform your poems?
Wendy Lotterman:
I like the idea of sex being a widely distributed quality that accrues as a substance or feeling, not a personality, or even an act. That’s closer to my initial encounter with it. As a kid, sex lives around and about you both as a hazy and unintelligible origin story, and as a sphere into which you are not yet welcome. I think there’s a line that describes it as “how you got here, and why you will eventually leave.” It’s also an original division within the family that disrupts the fantasy of relational parity. As an adult I still believe sex attaches to things in strange ways that are not commensurate with the physical act, and I’m interested in trying to access that feeling. I don’t think the concepts of fetish or aura fully work here, but there is some quality of the periphery being closer to the center than the bull’s eye. There are also specific objects that have felt particularly invested with this quality, like certain fabrics, or various kinds of light. When I write “I couldn’t come home on half-days to find the light of two perverted suns doing sex things on the bed,” that’s as close as I can get to the experience of coming home early from school and witnessing one’s room in an unfamiliar light. Sure, you’ve seen that light on weekends, but then you’ve also watched it progress over the course of the morning; you’re not walking in to find it hitting a made bed, creating a mood or scene without you. Walking in on something is always a bit erotic; it gives momentary access to what things look like when you’re not there. And that’s what I originally felt sex was, at least in the constellation of parents and child. It’s what happens when I’m not there.
My hope is that the writing re-ambiguates what sex might be or become before it is demoted to reality, which is closer to my experience of where it actually lives. The last thing I’ll say, which touches a bit on the title, is that I’m drawn to the inversion of coming out – or at least creating a less abridged space for entering desire into life. That’s not to say that I’m against disclosure, just against the way certain corners are cut in order to make life amenable to language. I think writing allows one to keep the corners, and invite others in. It’s kind of like the game sardines – it revises hide and go seek by turning the once hidden individual into an intimate, expanding assembly. It’s like: come find me, and then stay; the rest are coming, too.
V:
Thanks for that. As I mentioned in our first conversation, there’s this thread of accident and intention – obviously various models of an affirmative consent logic as well as a basic understanding of libido and drive with sex and eroticism as the product of intention, and moving towards something consciously.
W:
I think my that attachment to incident and accident had to do with not wanting events or behaviors to bear my signature in a way that would consecrate an identity or pathology. So fantasies often centered around situations that would yield pleasure in ways that were not reducible to will. In the book I revisit this more affirmatively, playing with the tension between intent and accident, enunciation and dissimulation.
V:
It’s reminding me of this argument about religious opposition to gambling, particularly among Puritans because it de-links labor and value, like you can just accidentally have the nice thing without deserving it, without working for it or even forming a definite intention. Just by throwing the dice, which is kind of maybe how it feels to write poems.
W:
That’s really interesting. I feel like the dice has already been thrown on some of the biggest things, but maybe it’s cowardice that I don’t realize I’m allowed to roll again.
Your poems seem magnetized to two different but not necessarily opposing poles – on the one hand, a rootedness in specificity, names of real people and places, parties that feel like they’ve actually happened, and then on the other, apparent solace in the broad strokes of an “uncountable mass noun.” It’s almost like lyric strobe, these flashes of discontinuous appearance. Can you say a bit about the subject of and in these poems?
V:
I would say two things. One, I became very interested in the special status of anecdote or confession in poetic argument. In a lot of the moments where personal experience breaks through, it’s almost being used like an ingredient, to emphasize an idea in a certain part of the reader’s brain that relates to familiar experience, but often in a way that should somewhat fail to blend in, I think it sticks out as a somewhat manipulative tactic, and I wanted to highlight that it was being used that way, as I think it often is. I think you're right that it is like a strobe, like it's there and it's gone. I don't really dwell on it or let it grow. It's like a glimpse.
That leads to the second thing, which is that I’ve tried to create a subjectivity that you can enter and access and recognize, but following along is going to require disruptions in your own sense of your experience and categories. I think the very crude way of putting it is that for a while I was very much writing with this idea of like, well, how could I make cis people feel dysphoria about themselves, or how could I make a writing experience that would require, in order for it to actually be taken in, adopting these feelings not empathetically, but existentially, and I’m not entirely sure whether or not the methods I used really achieve that, but it is one of the more sadistic and perverse motives that absolutely was in my mind while writing.
Okay here’s another: you’ve mentioned that the title is designed to capture the fantasy that a property owner has of being robbed. All over the book there’s boundaries and violations at the level of fantasy and you bring this to fever pitch with this reversible declaration: “let them rob us and us them” and have some images of mold and steam and these sorts of porous microscopic invasions. Can you tell me more about boundary collapse and how that relates to this larger social construction of boundaries. I’m thinking about psychic boundaries and then property boundaries and what it means for you to be bringing those to a point of collapse.
W:
I used to think a lot about people coming into my family’s house. I was obsessed with what was excluded from the home and how it might destabilize the ostensible limit between private and public. I don’t think I’m a radically evolved post-proprietary subject; I don’t disavow every claim to ownership, but I am interested in how an idea about social life becomes so rigorously reflected in not only the material phenomenon of single-family houses, but also in fantasy and phobia. I’m interested in contradictions, particularly between ordinary attachments and political aspirations. In this book, that plays out mostly between the family and the public. There’s a famous moment in the 1988 presidential debate between Bush senior and Michael Dukakis in which the moderator asks whether Dukakis, a known opponent of the death penalty, would make an exception in the event that his wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered. He answers that he wouldn’t, and basically loses the election. No one trusted him because he put an abstract social value before his family. It’s almost an Antigone moment. I reference that briefly in “Simply Rain,” but I think “Family Triage” is even more concerned with this problem of measurement and scale, how to tare the family, or how to level the emotionally saturated sphere of the private with the anonymity of the public. Claudia Salerno’s bloody hand also makes an appearance in that poem, which is a different question of measurement, but I think it belongs to a similar form of perverse metonymy wherein something individual and affectively charged not only stands in for, but occludes the whole for which it ostensibly speaks.
V:
I’m trying to get at something even more specific – all the fantasy of boundary violation is in the book in an uncomfortable way, what I’m also detecting with this imagery of mold and steam and the final line, the roof was only ever a suggestion. Something different than boundary violation, but just boundary collapse like some radical, flat ontology thing. And I'm wondering if that comes in for you as a way out of this sort of impossibility of having any sensible thinking around boundaries? Is it a satisfying way out?
W:
“Mold” in that line is both a standard reproducible form, but also an invasive fungus, which reproduces in a rapid, chaotic way that threatens the standardized form, so I’m thinking in both directions – unruly proliferation, and formal control. I really like Mary Douglas’s book Purity and Danger; it helped me think about the fear of bugs that I had growing up. Now I don’t mind bugs, but I think I was interested in how the family home is an attempt to block out something that will eventually find its way in. But I think you’re onto something I can’t yet describe myself.
This question builds on my special knowledge of you being an experienced debater. Some of your poems appear to take the shape of an argument. The bulleted lists appear to lead one closer toward truth or conclusion, but instead take the reader through a circuitous thought pattern that produces a mood or feeling instead of an “an argument, an idea, a concept.” The poems often read as though they’re slaloming between logic and representation, trying to avoid the bad faith efficiency of both of these modes in the service of going somewhere else. Do you have a sense, in positive terms, of where that is? Does it have to do with what you, at the very end, call the feminine: “the unification of sensation and emotion”?
V:
Thank you for stitching those things together. The first thing I have to say is that there’s a bit of a slippage in framing that line as a definition of the feminine, which maybe is important to unraveling the whole thing. The line about the unification of sensation and emotion is not about femininity per se, but about how it feels to take estrogen. But maybe it’s in that inexorable slippage from estrogen to femininity that gives rise to the book’s simultaneous rebellion against both image and logic, in different ways. The opening salvo in the first poem is a declared rejection of the image, but its form is laced with a parody of logic, or maybe a kind of frustration with it. I wanted to disentangle various layers of gendered experience which are seen to be inextricable, but I have to admit that gender is one of the categories that is sort of definitionally about unifying all these things that couldn’t otherwise feel like part of the same experience or the same logic. So the idea of gender we’re left with once we try to have it a la carte is very different from the idea of gender that we have if we’re accepting that this power of unification has as a category.
The specter haunting the book is biological determinism, the fear that gender can’t be separated from biological determinism. The experience of taking hormones in a lot of ways is an experience of realizing that your body is not a fixed entity and can be edited, and at the same time realizing that hormones have somewhat determinant and predictable effects on the body, which is a new kind of deterministic element. I was scrambling for some kind of indeterminacy within that, and hoping that experience would escape that framework without having to prove it. So some of the poems are attempting to kind of run rapidly through a series of possible framing devices in order to try to do that thing that gender does: to unify a biological experience with a social experience with a psychological experience. And in a way, it’s supposed to feel thrilling, and in another way it’s supposed to feel out of control and uncomfortable — hopefully in a way that nudges towards a way out of the poem, or just a way for it to stop. A lot of these poems feel very throttled, and they also feel like in turn they're trying to kind of shake the reader as a result. That's strange. I don't think I want to do that much more.
W:
That’s really interesting. I feel like sometimes your language is incredibly precise without delivering meaning, and then sometimes there’s a suggestion of meaning from which language actively backs away. I’m thinking of the line: “this morning was beautiful & I was a part of it, I don’t need to explain anything.” I know you’ve said that you believe in ontology, that you believe language and names have a real existence, but it also feels like sometimes the poems don’t agree – it’s like they’re not entirely convinced that their one available tool is actually materially effective. How does that affect the structure of the poems, and how is it connected to gender?
V:
This is an interesting one, gender is sort of out of left field there, but I think accurately brought in. Again, a lot of religious communities view doubt as a sure sign of faith, right? And I think there's a way in which I need to continually suspend or negate the principles that are most core to the operation of the poem. Rather than just enacting them, I need them to come to the surface, not so that they can be proven time and time again, but so that they can be seemingly rejected or tested or put through. It's very interesting to think that the poems don't believe in themselves. When I heard the question, what I thought was, well, maybe it’s that they want to do something else. Maybe it's not that they don't believe that their tools are effective, but they're sort of defiantly asking, why am I being put to work? You know, you were mentioning this sort of impulse of the poet to declare an aspirational political vision. I don't know if you saw but Juliana Spahr was writing about this in the LARB, I think she calls it heroic poetics, and I think I was also very much noticing and annoyed by heroic poetics while I wrote this. I felt that the opposite response was equally unsatisfying, the “I'm actually complicit and lazy,” approach is one I don't care for either. So I think that what I was curious to do was ask, well, what is the work that we’re asking poems to do? And what if the poems don't want to do that work or how do they fail to do that work? How do they slack off while doing that work or what enjoyment are they finding in being forced to do it? And that's the purpose of a lot of the sarcasm, particularly in the final section of the book. It’s not quite my voice; I guess it’s the voice of the disgruntled poem.
And then you ask about the connection with gender, so here’s where I get to admit my naive desire for the poem to do something: at the core of some of these poems is a desire to transition solely through the act of writing. There’s obviously a wealth of doubt about what I can do by changing the words that are used to describe my body. I don't know if I have anything to say about that that's different than the broader question of what work we expect a poem to do, but I will say that I did put my whole heart and soul into it, like I did completely, sincerely try to tell myself that this poem can save me or change me in some way.
Weirdly, I feel like I did accomplish some situation in which the mere act of writing a poem completed a gender transition, but not for me, or for my body. It was for the poem. I tried to enact a poem’s gender transition within the poem. There is something really satisfying when I go back and reread the first poem in the book, I feel not my body changing, but the feeling of body change that the fantasy at the core of transition feels like. The way it's coming to me now, which feels a little sound bite-y, but if we want to be able to transition in our bodies, we have to also transition our language. On the one hand, that manifests as, you know, new terms like “birthing parent” and “non birthing parent” or whatever it might be, all of which I support. But I think I mean it also literally means transitioning the terms we already have, like “mother,” into a new life. I wanted to see if I could actually make a word have a different meaning.
W:
What was one of those words or was it just all of the words?
V:
No, no, not all of the words. I mean, in the first poem the words are “titties” and “pussy.”
W:
Classics.
V:
Later in the book, towards the end, it’s words like “man” and “woman” and “estrogen” and “testosterone.” For a while I wanted to add a component to this book that was about very explicitly trying to delink hormones and gender categories, but I didn’t end up knowing quite how to do it.