Jos Charles, feeld

III.

there is noting

funye bout this / u

alowne /          on a tip

that is the tip of whorld

teemd inn / no biger

                                                than a goodsizd fiste

/ ur growndling hart /             fission in round

                                                               lisen /

                                    1 daye u wil be all ere /

a ewe alowne / inn a feeld

      off mare / i am older /        & the sayme /

      than the naymes u gave / this

is the corse / a tran /

a feeld /       a corpse

Selected by Fady Joudah as a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series is Jos Charles’ second full-length poetry title, feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018), following her remarkable debut, Safe Space (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2016) [see my review of such here]. As the online press release for the new collection informs, feeld

[…] is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary.

“i care so much abot the whord i cant reed.” In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles’s electrifying transliteration of English—Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect—what is old is made new again. “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage.” “did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye.” The world of feeld is our own, but off kilter, distinctly queer—making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy.

The effect of her language is both jarring and musical, and quickly forces the reader to slow down considerably, comparable to first experiencing the work of Canadian poet bill bissett, or Anthony Burgess’ classic novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). How does one easily read, except for slow, and with a deep attention? For Charles’s feeld, language is the engine that propels the work, as well as a means with which to examine, as she writes as part of the “Author’s Note”:

A tran learns early such resemblances, familial or otherwise, will leave us. Only some garment left, stuffed in our open mouths. At best, and after much labor, a tran may be assigned the I of woman, while also having, to varying degrees, to receive and reject the violences constituting it. It’s aesthetics: a tran is a thing exactly the size we demand. And her promise—of legibility, of entrance—is likewise an assignment, requires gatekeepers, equivalences, and pharmacies.

The limits of this scene, like any totalizing structure—gender, property, and so on—construct an interior as much as they obstruct one. Not just possibly, but essentially. It is true, especially now, when political representation is overdeterminative, when interest in conflated with access, visibility with autonomy, we must remember the line we trace conceals even as it discloses.

There are elements of feeld, also, utilizing an older language (and all the implied, inherent baggage that comes along with) as an exploration of being transgender (reclaiming that language, as well as utilizing as a counterpoint) that are comparable to Chase Berggrun’s recent erasure of the Victorian novel Dracula, reworked as a reclamation and reconstruction of gender and the body. Composed during Berggrun’s own gender transition, the result was the stunning debut poetry title, R E D (Minneapolis, New York, Raleigh: Birds, LLC.: 2018) [see my review of such here].

    interpolation is a skirte

    i ware / & inn a hiv / u r born

boye /                   grl / or worker

be / all this bad det /

betweene

me (“X”)

Composed as a single unit, constructed in sixty numbered lyrics (numbered via Roman numerals), all but one that exist on a single page, the lyric of Charles’ feeld is staccato, whip-smart and inventive, fearless in its intimacy, and declaration of an open heart, writing not of becoming, but revealing. In a recent interview at Divedapper, conducted by Kaveh Akbar, Charles responds:

With feeld, it’s slightly different because it’s less like an exaggeration of this world. It’s a world that exists quite like ours, but it took a slight turn, so things are off-kilter. That’s reflective of how anyone comes to write or speak, I think. You choose, or you come across, or are given the texts, your sex, your family. And maybe you choose a different family, imagine other texts or sexes, or maybe you take up what you’re given. You reject it or choose it, or any number of possibilities, and you end up with something like a history that, yes, participates in these broad structures, but also remains quite distinct and idiosyncratic.

I wanted to embrace and run with all of the idiosyncrasies, the ways that gender or language are or aren’t similar to what they are presumed to be for me, and to push that as far as I can. Of course, I wanted to keep it within the realm of intelligibility to a reader, or at least clear enough that it doesn’t shove them out of the work at any point. Like, in Safe Space there’s this line, “red like an apple or photograph of an apple,” where the ‘I’ is a child and they’re embarrassed or ashamed or whatever it means as an expression for someone to be ‘red.’ Which, of course, carries with it tons of other connotations and power and so on. But for me, this idea of the photograph of the apple has a personal resonance. It needn’t be explained, and I find it much more effective unexplained. The challenge is to render the image in a way that’s immediate and carries that weight without betraying it in language. To me, that’s the same gesture that’s happening again and again in feeld, it’s just that I’m taking a little bit more liberty, which means I have to back off with taking liberties in some other instances, so as to keep it intelligible.

Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead

this is how we are born: come morning

after we cypher/feast/hoop, we dig

a new one from the ground, take

him out his treebox, shake worms

from his braids. sometimes they’ll sing

a trapgod hymn (what a first breath!)

sometimes it’s they eye who lead

scanning for bonefleshed men in blue.

we say congrats, you’re a boy again!

we give him a durag, a bowl, a second chance.

we send him off to wander for a day

or ever, let him pick his new name.

that boy was Trayvon, now called RainKing.

that man Sean named himself i do, i do.

O, the imagination of a new reborn boy

but most of us settle on alive. (“summer, somewhere”)

Minneapolis poet Danez Smith’s second collection, after the award-winning [ insert ] boy (Portland OR: YesYes Books, 2014), is Don’t Call Us Dead (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2017), a powerful collection of poems that work to reclaim both a physical and a cultural space in “an America,” as D.A. Powell writes in his back cover blurb, “that conspires against black, brown, queer, and trans bodies [.]” “i’ve left earth in search of darker planets,” he writes, to open the poem “dear white america,” a poem that encompasses the entirety of the strength of the collection for its display of intimacy and vulnerability, its savage critique and absolute shock and horror, and for its repeated and passionate pleas for safety, sanity and peace. He writes: “we did not ask to be part of your America (though are we not America?” The opening poem, “summer, somewhere,” is a twenty-page sequence that writes on shootings and young black boys, citing Trayvon and Sean, pleading for peace, and the upheavals of living in a country where black boys are shot and killed with disturbing regularity. As he writes: “don’t fret, we don’t die. they can’t kill / the boy on your shirt again.”

& even the black guy’s profie reads sorry, no black guys

imagine a tulip, upon seeing a garden full of tulips, sheds its petals in disgust, prays some bee will bring its pollen to a rose bush. imagine shadows longing for a room with light in every direction. you look in the mirror & see a man you refuse to love. small child sleeping near Clorox, dreaming of soap suds & milk, if no one has told you, you are beautiful & lovable & black & enough & so—you pretty you—am i.

Part of the strength of this collection is in the way that Smith writes in such an open, intimate and unflinching way on how black men in America are seen and treated, half-threat and half-invisible, as well as from the perspective of living and loving openly as a gay black man. Don’t Call Us Dead is heartfelt and heartbreaking, uplifting and remarkable. In the same tenor as recent titles by American poets Layla Longsoldier [see my review of such here], Shane McCrae [see my review of such here], Eve L. Ewing [see my review of such here] and Morgan Parker [see my review of such here], Smith’s is a poetry of resistance, from proclaiming himself to actively resisting the false narratives so often constructed that continue to do an incredible amount of damage, both within and beyond the boundaries of America. His is a body that not only proclaims itself, but feels an enormous responsibility, for itself and those around him. In a recent interview conducted by Kaveh Akbar over at Divedapper, Smith writes:

I want to do more than talk beautifully about dead black people. I want to make sure black people stay alive. I’m hoping that’s where the conversation will go. I hope it can bridge beyond conversation into action. I don’t want the energy to just move on to the next thing.

francine j. harris, play dead

first, take a fistful of hair

Listen first for anyone. Fill your pockets.

Measure the ditch with a wad of gum. Listen.

Stay still. Break open the gate with your fist.

a back seat to torch. ditch it. You will need

someone, still. Empty your pockets. Check for wild fur

and the pant. who wad seats. or possums who hiss

under wild shrub. Sharp shooters check the wind.

So measure your mouth. the curve of howl. drool

and its drop against the wooden tiles. Possum

under salt and pine. Screech it. Score the rope

with your teeth. Collect the drool in tin.

Check for rust. Pull out the nails. Wait

for the wood to sag of blood. to good and stalled.

Mount the mouth. slip down. Slide under

sludge, until the caves open and break. and

salt your wounds. and play the black cricket.

and nail on the stars. Run low to ground.

until your hairs unseat. and your cheek

full of shotgun howls. and sags. and

and touches its own blood to light.

Michigan poet francine j. harris’ second book is play dead (Farmington ME: Alice James Books, 2016), a rich and lively collection of poems that jump and tumble through syntax and language, writing poems on sex, community and violence with an abiding love, mediated breath and remarkable insight. The author of the collection allegiance (Detroit MI: Wayne State University Press, 2012), there are are overtones of dark histories in play dead, as she writes to open the poem “the cafeteria is also assembly”: “where the lit footage of lynched boys in verdant / trees fills a screen that snaps and rips[.]” In play dead, harris dismantles language and culture to rework the best and the worst of the world in which she lives into discrete poems, blended together to create and critique an incredible tapestry of hope, heart and hearth. Some poems, such as “in Lebanon, a girl who cries crystals,” are absolutely devastating, in part for their unflinching straightforwardness, challenging the ways in which we see (or even ignore) what is happening right in front of us: “Black birds thicket dead sky // and in an Austrian basement, a woman births her father’s children for years // which no one claims a miracle. A woman / in Oklahoma holds up a two-year-old baby girl // to keep her lover from being tasered, which is also not / an act of God.” harris’ poems both reveal and critique silences that require an intricate series of navigations to survive, and in a way that pokes, prods and alters the language. I am deeply impressed with this book, and how she manages to make the language far more dynamic than I’ve seen in some time. In a recent interview at divedapper, she speaks to her approach to language, writing:

You know it kind of reminds me of that Key & Peele skit, “Pussy on the Chainwax,” and you have no idea what that phrase means, right? And so they’re just shooting pool and Key uses this term, like, “Man, I put the pussy on the chainwax.” And there’re a few guys in the room who start laughing and repeating it. And Peele is like, “That’s not an expression. You trying to start a thing, aren’t you?” and the whole thing they’re playing on is the way that people try to insert their stamp on culture, and on how we speak, and try to make something—a thing.

To me that’s a really fascinating possibility with language. I think it’s kind of important, actually, that in that skit, Key kind of has an emotional breakdown about his daily struggles. Like to say ‘man can you just let me have this…this language.’ I guess I realized in the last several years that I’m not the kind of person who’s interested in preserving language. I love how it changes. I’m not afraid of textspeak, I’m not afraid of abbreviations. I think we just wind up doing more fun things with how language appears. Twerking! We’re twerking our language.