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round 1, poll 260
click for better quality & to see the full image. sometimes they get cut off weirdly!
which cover do you like best?
troubling the line by tc tolbert and trace peterson
The American Queen by Vanessa Miller
remember, you're voting for the cover, not the author or the book!
"Violets are permanent / roses are impermanent / thank you for becoming me / offering to embrace your form your fate..."
Have you read "Exclusively on Venus" by Trace Peterson?
Yes, before this
Yes, I just followed the link and read it
No, but I recognize the title, author, and/or quote
I've never heard of this
Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!
In socialist realist syntax I am shouting up at a distant apartment window trying to provoke any action from a complacent person in power.
*
from “NO ONE COULD SEE THE VAST CROWD” by TRACE PETERSON
Since I Moved In by Trace Peterson
goodreads
Have you read this trans book?
Yes and I liked it
Yes and I didn't like it
No
No but I'd like to
I've never heard of it
A new & revised edition of the classic book by pathbreaking poet & cultural critic Trace Peterson. This edition contains a new Introduction by Joy Ladin.
Mod opinion: I haven't heard of this poetry collection before, but it sounds like an interesting trans poetry collection.
With a Petroleum Coating
The exoskeleton dries by the radiator. What is the usefulness of shells, as in putting them up to one’s ear to detect the poem? Isn’t it infringeable that we carry our mating rituals into teleology? Isn’t it lately that our mates don’t often insert parts? The problem, as if splashed onto canvas in a never-drying medium, isn’t it that we can be hurt from without as if by wifi, by rumor? By cell tower? By stork? Thanks for caring. The storks along the beach stand on one leg, and then slowly generously fly away, including me, like a teacher who warns against trying to make absent things present. What do all these little knobs on the console do? This one flies us straight into battle with a petroleum coating. This one parodies the last erotic feeling. This one entices us to have babies with the reader, sitting lax on a conveyor belt that suddenly falls off at the end into someplace decent. In your guest room, draped with necklaces, we feel thinner than a Mobius strip, real wolf fur rug inside and out, real antler chandelier. In your guest room we peel an alien tangerine.
Copyright © 2020 by Trace Peterson
[Link to listen]
Exclusively on Venus
Exclusively on Venus
Trace Peterson
Roses are red / violets are transsexual / welcome to womanhood / now get to work honey
Roses are biological / you have the nicest skin / I can’t stop kissing you / let’s read more nondualistic queer theory
The Rest Here
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accepting surreality - further structural analysis
In an earlier post, I discussed how surrealism is used as the tool to create surprise and thus humor. To finish up this project, I would like to continue to my structural analysis and show that the way the poems reconcile with surreality is what makes them queer.
Once these poems have broken from reality and entered the surreal, their surreal qualities continue to escalate. In “A Supermarket in California,” we start with running into dead poet Federico Garcia Lorca, breaking the initial reality, but soon there is another dead poet in the form of Walt Whitman, who is hassling grocery store boys, and the narrator following and joining him on his ventures. In “The Valley Are So Lush and Steep,” the side effects start with “’phase shift[ing] into a fourth dimension”, but soon include other impossibilities like telekinesis, “punk rock anamorphosis” and growing a mouse ear in the palm of the hand. The drugs themselves also have increasingly strange names, so that even if the effects do not initially seem bizarre, they are placed in a surreal context by the naming of them. Some examples include Novascotia, which provides “remoteness” but “made me feel slightly alienated around other poets”, or Jamieleecurtisol, which “made me witty and urban” The name provides a context that makes the side effects humorous and bizarre.
We might expect to return to reality by the end of the poem, to find ourselves grounded again. There are moments when that almost happens. The best example is in the Ginsberg line, where he says “(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the / supermarket and feel absurd).” Here, amongst the various moments of surrealism, the narrator critiques their belief in these events. They find an absurdity in the more-than-possible odyssey he has taken.
But the poem doesn’t end there. What we get in the end of both these poems is not a return to reality, but instead an acceptance in surreality. “A Supermarket in California” ends with the lines
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
At the beginning of this stanza, we are still tied to reality - there are blue automobiles in driveways and silent cottages. But by the time we reach the end of the poem, with Whitman standing on the shores of Lethe, we have moved away from that. We are not in the world of the supermarket. We are not in a reality that would require us to disbelieve in the presence of the dead American poet. Instead, we have fully accepted and embraced the surreality of the world.
Peterson also resists the urge to return to reality, with the final stanza:
“I think I am going to stick with Pastoralwenchtrin for awhile and see where this goes. It’s quiet here and there are sheep and no wolves masquerading as bears climbing the hillside of an apple danish I bought from my student loan debt ceiling. As long as I pay the credit card bills by end of the month and get my name changed in time for the church basement sale, maybe I can find a way to live. As my body reaches a kind of equilibrium, I am trying to have as small a percentage of me as possible be fabricated as method acting and as great a possibility as a pink skull half-shaven skyline be real. The valleys are so lush and steep. How to end not wanting to be myself being not quite myself.”
In the end, the narrator is still on medication that has surreal effects on her body; however, instead of switching medications again or of trying to find that one perfect medication that will make everything okay and normal, there is an acceptance of the surreal situation that has occurred. And there’s a queerness there, for both poems, in destabilizing expectations of reality. We all watched Wizard of Oz - you go to the magical land, but you always come back. Surrealism is fun, but the normal ending of the story is that we return to reality. These poems subvert that, queer that, in ignoring that impulse; instead, they are seeing the world shift away from reality and accepting it.
To sum up in overly simple terms, the comedy in “A Supermarket in California” and “The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep” comes from the way they break from reality, while the queerness comes from the way they never return to that reality.
makin’ references - humor through allusion
One of the ideas I’ve thought about a lot in terms of queer comedy is recontextualization. It’s a form of disrupting expectations and queering a situation (practically a tenet of queer comedy), in which we take something and put it in a different context, a new context which comments on and makes that thing funny. The humorous use of recontextualization can be found in these poems. One of the prime examples of this concept is when Peterson references John Keat’s poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, quoted below:
But the hyper-concentration that Crepusculane offers caused me instead to stare at a Grecian Urn for days on end, transfixed by thoughts of lighting up and smoking the latest poet laureate or at least getting a medical prescription for him/her to become culturally all over me.
“Ode to a Grecian Urn”, which can be read here, is a famous poem, which in one analysis by Stephen Hebron, is described as “a consideration of human experience” and “a poem notable not for the answers which it may or may not present, but for the skill and intensity with which it asks the questions” (Hebron). There’s something queer, then, to take a poem, an experience, that is held with reverence and completely disregard that. In “The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep”, the consideration of a Grecian urn is not special or significant. Rather, it is one of a whole litany of strange, surreal side effects, sliding in between experiences of drugs such as one that makes “my skin fluorescent green and stretchable over any nearby hardwood surfaces.” The humor at this moment comes from the irreverence - the recontextualization of Keat’s poem serves as a way to parody it, by ignoring its literary position to make it one of many strange occurrences. We laugh because we recognize the reference and how Peterson has queered it by placing into a different context.
