Another fantastic Rumpus Comic from Tony Millionaire!

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Bobcat Goldthwait writes about how he found “salvation” by ditching the movie industry.

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Many of the most interesting lyric books of the past few years have attempted a sort of reckoning between contemporary life and the reality of ceaseless war. Nick Flynn’s The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Fanny Howe’s Come and See: these are books that consider what it means to live familiar patterns, yet know that elsewhere persists an unthinkable and unconscionable violence in which you are complicit.

Jessica Fisher’s second collection, Inmost, is a deeply felt and deeply thought addition to this train of thought. Fisher’s first book won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Award; Inmost is the winner of the 2010 Poetry Prize from Nightboat Books, one of the most exciting presses active today. In this collection, Fisher focuses on the tensions of bringing a child into a world of war— of living your regular, daily experience while knowing that others die by violence, both down the street and across oceans. Never moralizing and never failing to implicate herself, Fisher instead locates these tensions in language, exposing with care the dual meanings, connotations, and shared histories of the words that form her place in the world.

“Things that can’t be held, can’t be helped, in the mind. The latest horror of the latest war, never on these shores,” the collection opens, at once announcing its primary concern and accepting its own eventual failure. We are told that there is the war in the same line that we are told it will not reach us. It is a dreadful reality and the speaker is, in a privileged lie, safe from it. This is daily life for many people (although, importantly, many more are not so lucky), but Fisher from the start expects more from herself than a simple realization of her own position. The violent reality “can’t be helped, in the mind.” However, with the introduction of a child, the mind must still attempt to help in some way, to hold what she can’t hold. “Talk is in the head when shushing a child,” the poem reads. “She is practicing erasure, she is practiced at it. Turn the dial: they’re turning to the war. Stitched, like a slip, on a bias. It gives a sense of the body underneath.”

Fisher is a writer of rare agility and grace. Her poems often move through ideas, form, and language with a singular restrained gesture. It is through these gestures that she manages to find something like a balance to the conflicts deeply rooted in Inmost. “We say mortar both for the shell and what it struck, brick & or stone &.” Language is the site of her exploration, the gauzey space where the daughter becomes a mother, or where the body gives birth. It is a place of multiple meanings, and so of course a place of puns, “Immanent or emanant.” It is the way we move through thought and the way our movement is restricted. “A month or a region, something you pass through. The roads on either side impassable, otherwise of course one would have chosen a different route.” And it is in that movement that Fisher stays, not arriving or departing but seeing what happens if the language is taken for all its meanings. It is a dangerous place to be, and it is where we are.

Inmost concerns itself with motherhood and war, two well explored topics in literature. And it lacks any grand structural or conceptual conceit, instead settling comfortably into restrained, precise language, with essayistic strains of etymology and lyricized images. Yet somehow the book feels incredibly unique and needed, like it is using its beauty in order to draw our eye somewhere we knew we should have been looking but for some reason hadn’t. So much of what is unfathomable must be considered, “the little heart an impossible thing / nevertheless marked by a sign.” In “Ravage,” one of the longest and most explicitly narrative poems of the collection, Fisher declares “Thought I could live in it / & not let it in, impervious as / a body floating in saltwater // eyes open to the shifting sky.” Inmost, thank god, places us there, exposed to the beauty and harm of our own inexcusable failings.

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Portfolio Magazine used to be a pretty cool thing.

Vesta!

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(Yeah, like a bird bursting out of a shell. I know, but it’s hard not to traffic in metaphor when your whole body is blooming.)

I went to karaoke last night but couldn’t sing any of my old standbys—Tom Petty, New Order, alto-y, old-school Madonna. Inexplicably sad, I arrived home at 2 am and played through every song on my computer until I found a few with enough bass to keep me from straining.

On the phone, within months of starting the T shots, I passed; as in my voice was read as male, but passing means something more than that. By and large, to be perceived as “a man” is to be translated into “genetic man-from-birth.” The new voice didn’t just bring “Sir’s.” It was a whole customer service chorus of “bro’s” and “dude’s,” and friendly banter; it was a difference of such scope and subtlety that I can only describe it as startling. This passing was not the same as the queer equivalent in my teenager years, strutting into gas stations with a baseball cap pulled down low and a too-wide stance. That was for safety’s sake, and therefore thrilling and scary. This was benign, and full-immersion. My voice embedded me into a parallel world beset with assumptions: about my competency, my sexuality, my predilection for fraternity.

But I didn’t worry too much about it at first, so glad was I that I no longer sounded reedy, womanly. My voice always bugged me. I remember pitching it so deep it disappeared, warbling off-tune to my favorite songs, trying to get low enough. Now I can still sing “Walking in Memphis,” but not “The Only Living Boy in New York.” I’ve passed right through the axis of space and time that made that possible.

Passing: I called my mom and she mistook me for my brother. “That’s a good thing, right?” she said, because she has been breathtakingly supportive. If she misses my old voice, she never says so.

Passing: a lot of trans folks hate that word, and I get it. It suggests something duplicitous, it undermines one’s identity, suggesting there is such a thing as a “real” man or woman and that you are not it. Being a man, for me, is simply about looking in the mirror and seeing myself reflected. I no longer have a dizzy, dysphoric allergy to my body, which is a miracle. But passing is different, strange. It creates in me a feeling in the gym, the train, and the bathroom where I translate as someone unfamiliar: a stranger who understands the rules of binary gender engagement; or worse, who has agreed to them.

My queerness isn’t as clear as it used to be, my rebellion masked by a bookish adulthood, a tailor, a body that suddenly seems to make sense to a world that’s never seen me. Perhaps now the most non-normative aspect of my gender is how reflexively suspect I am of the lens in which I’m newly seen.

Passing: at a sporting goods store in Seekonk I test the weights, no longer worried about danger, no matter the broken-down strip mall or wall of teenage football players goofing off beside me. “Can I help you, sir?” The salesman asks, and when I say no, he backs away respectfully, like I am an animal.

Animal logic is visible to me in ways it never has been before. I calculate, size up, turn my head at the sound of a motorcycle in tandem with the crowd. In high school, all my friends and I had shaved heads and wild, fuck-this-town posturing. Now I speak a pigeon language of past and present.

My wife says that when people discuss “masculinity” derisively, they’re talking not talking about neutral gender descriptors but rather about masculine privilege, and I think she’s right.  Masculinity gets a bad rap because of its lowest common denominators, but in the weight section I too gave the pack of young guys a wide berth. They walked with their chests-out, dared each other to lift heavier and heavier dumbbells; their soft faces twisted into something ugly. The salesman didn’t approach them, just let them horse around. I exhaled when they finally left, pushing their boys-will-be-boys bodies out into a summer afternoon, my new affiliates, my butt-slapping colleagues. Two surprised me by nodding my way in acknowledgement and I nodded back, peaceably. Passing is an ugly word, but not always an ugly feeling. That said, I know when I’m passing and when I’m being, and the break is something I work daily to bridge.

I’m trying to tell you that, after I broadened beyond question, how I was seen suddenly ceased to be my goal and simultaneously became a kind of responsibility.

Over and over, I think, I’m Thomas. All you have is your memory and your body, and those are barely guarantees.

Passing: gay men hit on me with flattering regularity. I know I am neat and put-together in a region where that is a rarity for dudes. I know that we are lighthouses, sending signals into the sea. I am something different; I am refusing the new, distressing, self-policing voice. It’s the one that says, “A man shouldn’t ______.” A man should, I counter. A man should take fancy baths, drink white wine, admire another man’s looks, cry. A man should say he doesn’t know; and say it often.

On my worst days, I feel alien. On my best, I see myself in everyone, and there is nothing more queer than either of those positions; inverses dependent on how much you give a shit about what anyone else thinks. Most days, I sing whatever song is within my range, because who knows; maybe I’ll become the kind of person who can do it in front of a crowd. I wrestle through “Here Comes Your Man,” my voice squeaking until I learn to handle its new pitch, thinking maybe someday I will stop passing as someone unafraid of being myself, and just become him.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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“I think all writers live off of obsessions. Some of these come from history, others are purely individual, and still others belong to the realm of the purely obsessive, which is the most universal thing a writer has in his soul. My obsessions are in all my books: they have to do with fear.”

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“As one of Newsday’s truly outstanding literary talents, you are hereby officially invited to become the co-author of a best-selling novel… There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex. Also, true excellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion.”

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