This playlist contains content that features frank discussions & explorations of the following: cissexism, sexual violence, racism, police brutality, recreational drug use, blood, dysphoria, suicide, self-harm, sexually explicit verse, and physical abuse.

Please (please!) take all the care and time you need working through the poetry and videos. 

Hi cutie, 

In the wondrous, sticky agony of writing Everything is a Deathly Flower, I made myself a playlist of poems that I nicknamed “The Sleeping”. It was a way of making the work of writing less lonely, to gather poets I admired, feared, envied, and loved as they coaxed me into thinking about sexual violence omnidirectionally. The playlist also helped stretch both my ability and my imagination, by challenging my idea of what poetry could achieve. It also helped ground me in the nit and grit of poetics, the theory of literary forms. Like I said, it was sticky work, but wondrous work.

Poems, like me, are quite small. At times compact, at times epic and sprawling, poems nonetheless stubbornly carry the reputation of being luxurious, indulgent, and inscrutable. But as Audre Lorde put it, poetry is not a luxury.

I’m very lucky that I was exposed to the work of Black South African poets very early on, and I clung to the work of elders like Ntate Keorapetse Kgositsile, Mme Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Ntate Mongane Wally Serote, Mme Makhosazana Xaba, and Ntate Don Mattera. I met their work right at the beginning, when I was starting to think about race and empire, domination and liberation, mischief and joy. 

But something powerful happened when I discovered the work of trans and queer poets. Suddenly, poetry had a heartbeat, had blood, and bones. I could point to the ache in my chest after reading Danez Smith’s “Waiting For You To Die So I Can Be Myself” and finally give it a name. I remember the chill of the floor I fell on after reading Dr. Cameron Awkward-Rich’s “Faggot Poetics”. As much as they gave me language, trans poetry also gestured towards the unsayable, the deeply embodied, the ambiguous, the vulnerable, the quiet. I think alexis pauline gumbs writes about this quality beautifully in the introduction to Left Turn Magazine’s Other Worlds Issue :

We don’t know how to say it: the shapes our hands make in the world we deserve, the names we call each other past gender and domination, the feeling of how free we could be and the ways we will recognize the signposts and markers for how we get there. The meaning of life that we are building with our breathing is so radically different from the structural oppression we live under, we couldn’t describe it if we wanted to. And we want to. Revolutionary poetics is about the shape of that desire, the queer untimely affirmation that another world is not only possible, but is here waiting for us to recognize its presence and transform ourselves accordingly. 

This playlist is a collection of some of my favourite poems, all written by queer and trans poets. I love how they map out worlds within and beyond violence and trauma. I love how they hold and interrogate power and language in deeply sophisticated, sexy and mysterious ways. Poetry’s fucking amazing that way. I’m excited to talk through interpretations and questions with you. I’m doubly excited to listen to how and where they land.

Starting us off, and giving us a little structure, is the epitome of Black brilliance herself, Dionne Brand (she/her). I encountered Brand’s work on Coast Salish territory (vancouver, canada), where she was Toronto’s Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2012. Here she is, in conversation with the American literary scholar, poet and essayist Harryette Mullen: 

Next, is Joshua Jennifer Espinoza (she/her), a trans woman poet and author of There Should Be Flowers and i’m alive / it hurts / i love it. Pay attention to how she uses repetition skilfully to draw you deeper into her poem, “It Is Important to Be Something”:

https://poets.org/poem/it-important-be-something 

Next up, is Yanyi (he/him), a poet, critic and author of the BEAUTIFUL collection, The Year of Blue Water. Have a look at how he plays with duality here, and chew on this delicious line: “In a dual body, there’s no room for both of you”:

https://granta.com/two-poems-yanyi/

Also, have you ever read something as immersive as Danez Smith’s (they/them) “crown”? No-one can turn a phrase, or switch a rhythm, or spin a spell quite like Danez. “if my blood was not a moat, i’d have a son / but i kingdom myself, watch the castle turn / to exquisite mush.” (phew?!):

https://granta.com/crown-smith/

Poems that wink at race and power flirtatiously, while experimenting with form, are my favourites. Like Vivek Shraya’s (she/her) clever little dagger, “a lover’s bookshelf” from her brilliantly titled debut poetry collection, even this page is white: 

Speaking of race and power, no-one sketches violence quite as precisely as the aforementioned professor and poet, Dr. Cameron Awkward-Rich (he/him). Watch the worlds he traverses, before he arrives, stunningly, here: “The truth is, most black folk look at you & see a woman. White people / look at you & see a reckless boy. Either way, there you are in the room / with your body.”

https://aprweb.org/poems/black-feeling

I’m just going to leave these two poems by the goddess Jay Dodd (Xe/Xis - She/Her) here, and walk away slowly:

http://dreginald.com/index.php/issues/issue-nine/jayy-dodd

And what of joy? No-one celebrates community louder and brighter than the poet, social worker and fierce femme Kai Cheng Thom (she/her): 

(Bonus points if you read her early essay & open letter to QTIPOC in the McGill Daily; this essay flipped my shit as a baby queer):

https://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/02/a-modest-proposition/

Speak soon? 

Until then, cutie. 

X

M