In her compelling new collection, DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), award-winning writer torrin a. greathouse, a cripple-punk poet and essayist, funnels her passion for research and etymology and her lyrical and formal skill into a poetic triptych to illuminate her experience as a queer, trans, disabled woman through a discussion of art, myth, queer sex and desire, and surviving oppressive systems.
greathouse’s debut collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, won the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Minnesota Book Award, and was a CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares,the Kenyon Review, and The Rumpus. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop and the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
We met over Zoom to discuss how research plays into her creative process, the reclamatory nature of her work, and the ways operating “closer to the cultural center” inform how she writes and what she writes about.
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The Rumpus: How did you come up with the title DEED?
torrin a. greathouse: The earliest version of this project was an unfinished chapbook titled Ode to My Mouth, and it was written before I finished my first book. There’s an acknowledgment in the back of DEED to my friend Nicole—“You’re to blame for me starting this project”—because Nicole dared me to write a chapbook entirely of poems about blowjobs, which ultimately became this book. When it was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts as a work in progress, it was called The Faggot Lexicon. It’s fun and compelling and touches on many aspects of language the book covers, but I ran into a problem because I didn’t want specific audiences to say that word. I was thinking about how much I hate one-word titles because they’re hard to pull off compellingly, and I set myself the challenge of coming up with one. DEED, on one level, is about commerce—a piece of paper that marks the exchange of property. This shows up in the ways the book talks about sex as a deed and its use in the language of the Bible. “Deed” is also a pun—it’s a book about “doing the deed.” I like the capaciousness of the single-word title and the fact that the reader has to spend time with it to figure out what it means.
Rumpus: Did you have the concept of DEED when you decided to expand the chapbook?
greathouse: It’s actually made up of parts of two incomplete chapbooks. One was Ode to My Mouth, and the other was Cell, which was about a bunch of things: chronic illness, growing up in the wake of stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS, growing up in the ’90s as a queer person whose entire experience of queerness in a cultural sense was framed by how I’d encountered systems. I realized I can’t talk about sex without talking about medicalization, systems of reality, and the social stigmas surrounding queerness and disability. When I saw these interconnections amid my MFA program, these older projects merged into a new book.
Rumpus: Does the book’s organization into three sections relate to the two chapbooks you mentioned?
greathouse: It doesn’t, but it’s one of the things I’m proudest of with this project. The book is modeled after a triptych mirror, like a vanity mirror, where the side mirrors reflect one another but not the central mirror. The central poem is doing its own work but still applies to and connects to the other sections. For example, the poem “Aubade Beginning in Handcuffs” in the first section is fundamentally about liking to be handcuffed. The third section of the book includes a poem about the origin of my relationship to being handcuffed—violent abuse encountered at the hands of my father, who was a jail guard and handcuffed me as a child. So, the poems are interconnected. I love doing this as a compositional strategy. It becomes rewarding to re-read the book, as you can start to parse out where it’s going. It also maintains the movement of light and image as though the sections were a stack of three mirrors.
Rumpus: What inspired the connection to the three mirrors?
greathouse: In the poem “Vanitas Vanitatum,” in the third section, I was thinking about the connections of sex to the self, image to vanity, but also the triptych that is fundamental to religious art—the birth, life, and death of Christ. In the book’s first section is a poem called “Oral History: A Triptych.” I was thinking about what it looks like when multiple themes are being acted on, not only at the level of individual poems and forms, but in the form of the entire book. One of the best pieces of advice I was ever given about structuring books is that a book’s organization should make it a poem larger than the sum of its parts.
Rumpus: Did your background in journalism inform how you researched this book?
greathouse: I did a ton of research into mythology and etymology. I bugged Merriam-Webster enough that I have a direct contact person, a professional etymologist, at Merriam-Webster, so I don’t keep hitting up their helpline. During grad school, I took a postgraduate course for a Master of Social Work degree on sexual function and dysfunction—the hardest class I’ve taken in my academic career—and the poem “A Novel Dysfunction,” in the third section of the book, came out of that class. I was trying to read into a form of sexual dysfunction I’d encountered in my own body. I hadn’t been able to find any answers. I was doing a ton of reading and having many conversations with the professor about the gaps and failings of this research, how different endangered populations are left out of the research, and how all research on this condition is applied explicitly to gay men. There’s so much structural homophobia in those studies. It was also never applied to cis women, never mind trans women, which would have connected these two data points of dyspareunia and anodyspareunia and shown that the etiology is not this fucked up homophobic idea that it comes from the shame of being gay that Dr. Karl Hollows—who wrote the most famous study on this—concluded, but that it’s a traumatic etiology. It’s a mess, but I spent an entire semester doing this high-level coursework because I knew it was the only way I would have the guidance and help needed to write that poem.
Rumpus: How do you navigate between the freedom of self-expression you find in language and its inherent oppressive nature?
greathouse: It’s one of the fundamental difficulties of being invested in language while being highly critical of language, particularly a settler colonial composite language. I don’t believe one can be a good poet while being uncritical of the English language. Language is, first and foremost, a tool, but like any tool or technology, it can be made into a weapon. As someone who has encountered so much linguistic violence—a queer, trans, disabled woman—I cannot think about language without thinking about the violence it can bring. This means my work has to operate on a couple of levels. One is the reclamatory—what does it mean to take these tools that someone has sharpened into weapons against me and dull their edges? There’s also the level of retooling language. The concept of “tool abuse” is using a tool for a meaning it’s not intended for. I’m often thinking about how I can take language and its complicated but enclosed meanings and break it away from its intent, which usually results in my poems being the way they are.
Rumpus: The concept of tool abuse and reclaiming language reminds me of the two erasure poems in your collection—“Dancing in the Dark” and “My Mouth Is the Mouth of a River.” What made you decide to use erasure in those specific poems?
greathouse: Both poems are written in my invented form—the burning haibun. They speak to the erasure poems in my first book. The first burning haibun was a pun. It’s a poem about alcoholism and my relationship with alcoholism that literally blacks out. From there, I thought about what it means to be someone who has experienced so many forms of social negation and social erasure, and I took that tool of erasure and used it to pare away and get closer to the truth of my own experience. The poem “Dancing in the Dark” deals with the strange complicatedness of how important the song “Dancing in the Dark” by Bruce Springsteen is to my transition. I know I’m not unique in this.
I’ve met many other trans women, particularly butch trans women, for whom Springsteen was huge, for whom the lyrics “Take a look in the mirror. I want to change my clothes, my hair, my face” were a rallying call to our experience of ourselves. The poem is a way to say to my reader, “Pay attention to what I’m telling you. This helped me survive.”
The other poem, “My Mouth Is the Mouth of a River,” is perhaps the most reclamatory piece I’ve written about doing survival sex work when I was young. One-in-eight trans people has, or will at some point in their life, have to do sex work to survive. One-in-eight is a huge number, and this is often shunted away and hidden from societal view. It’s either a stereotype, a stigma, or ignored altogether, especially by or about people who have worked through academia, who exist in the mainstream, and who are publishing books. People wish they could ignore me and my history, but I wouldn’t be writing this book if I didn’t do that to survive back then. I can lyricize those experiences, but fundamentally, sex work is how I fed myself. I turned the erasure on its head, and instead of using the form to hide, I used it to illuminate.
Rumpus: You’ve said that what pushed you—and I’m paraphrasing—toward poetry and away from journalism was that facts don’t always provide emotional truth. When weaving research and statistics into a poem, is your process different from writing a more personal poem?
greathouse: The process for any two poems is never the same regardless of their similarities. But a poem like “Masturbating to Greek Myths,” which is about finding a relationship to pleasure despite the shame I’m taught culturally to feel about my body as a trans person, feels quite different because it’s individual and personally implicated. Whereas “I Want to Write an Honest Poem About Desire” or “A Novel Dysfunction” are about things that don’t just affect me and can’t be talked about by only talking about their effect on me.
The fact that anodyspareunia is under-researched, and the research, for the most part, is extremely homophobic and focused solely on cis gay men, affects so many trans women because of the high percentage of us who have been victims of sexual violence. One of the core ways the etiology of dyspareunia is traced is because the women who experience it have been victims of violence. To ignore that connection in the research affects so many of us. “I Want to Write an Honest Poem About Desire” says:
Every time a body like mine
enters a poem, It threatens
to turn that poem into nothing
more than an equation.
The speaker—a statistic. I won’t
say the number. Only
that my story isn’t special
except that you’re listening.
Except, maybe, just maybe
you’ll actually believe me.
A poem like this requires a different approach because I’m operating closer to the cultural center and have the benefit of writing a book that people will read. I owe the trans women who share my experiences and the trans people who aren’t women who share my experiences to say, “This happens to us. This is how we must survive because we are pushed to the edges of society. Even before we come out, we are marked as different and pushed to the fringes. This is the cost of that.” I don’t believe in that voice for the voiceless crap. I think that’s often bullshit by people from privilege. I know that if I have an opportunity to speak and be heard, there are things I want to say for the sake of people who might not be listened to. I’m not a voice for them. I can only talk about my own experiences, but I can also say, “Think about the fact that when I say it, you’re listening, but there are thousands of people just like me who are not being listened to.” That feels important.
Rumpus: How do you care for yourself when writing through something like that?
greathouse: If I couldn’t find joy, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do. As a younger writer who was less prepared to write about the things I was writing about, I wrote pieces that did a lot of damage to me. I pushed through because I felt like I had to write them. Playing and finding joy through experimentation and constraint is a big part of my process. Some of the hardest poems I’ve ever written are borrowed forms from other writers. There are so many poems after other poets because my way of getting away from the pain is to use structure. I’ve also hidden inside jokes to myself in a lot of poems. My first book references a throwaway line from an episode of [the TV show] Big Mouth, which happened to be on in the background while I was hanging out with my friend Julian. I often hide a pun or a reference to my research in the poems. It helps me move through. I dream of one day having collected or selected works, and if they let me, it could have the funniest footnotes. Publishers twenty years in the future—let me know!
Rumpus: Regarding footnotes, can you discuss “Serenity Prayer with Complete Citations”?
greathouse: That poem is after Julian Randall’s “Pregame Prayer with Complete Citations” from their debut poetry collection, Refuse. I was thinking about the complications of what it meant to get sober, which was so crucial to my survival and allowed me to embrace transitioning fully. The things I hid from myself—my chronic pain and my own identity—were things I could ignore if I were at the bottom of a bottle. The bitterness and complication I felt about going to jail and being forced to do mandatory AA—I won’t deny that it helped me get sober. It’s also a fucked-up social system. AA can be deeply tied to religious structures, which, in a lot of ways, are not good for people like me. For religiously traumatized queer, trans, and disabled people, that’s a hostile environment. Some meetings vilify the use of prescription medications, which, as someone who has to take a lot of prescription medications for survival, makes it a toxic space. “Serenity Prayer with Complete Citations” attempts to work through all that and the fact that my higher power was not god but the idea that I could become the me I am now. When I was fifteen, I thought I’d be dead before I was eighteen. When I was eighteen, I thought I’d be dead before I was twenty-one. When I was twenty-one, I thought I’d be dead before I was twenty-five. When I was twenty-five, I thought I’d be dead before I hit twenty-seven. When I hit twenty-eight, I realized I’d outlived my timeline for dying young and that I had to start dedicating myself to living. That is a complicated thing. My much-younger self never imagined I’d have to contend with envisioning a future.
Rumpus: Based on everything you just said about getting to a place in your life where you have—and get to—imagine a future, how has that impacted your writing?
greathouse: The first two books felt necessary, and the first book spent a lot of time meditating on the possibility of my death. It ends with a poem that asserts, “I’m still alive, and I’m going to make you read this poem, which does not exist without the body behind it.” In the four years between these books, a lot has changed. There’s a lot of past and pain here, but there’s also an attempt to think about the future for myself.
Some of that comes in the form of love. The book comes out at an odd moment because most of the love poems are directed at someone I’m no longer with. I had conversations with that ex about their comfort level with the book coming out as it exists now, and luckily, they still wanted this book to exist. It’s strange to read in the wake of knowing I won’t have a future with this person who was so defining to my life, but the book has also become a container for new ways of orienting myself.
The biggest thing is [that] the new work I’m doing doesn’t feel as necessary because I’m no longer afraid I’ll die before it reaches the world. It doesn’t feel like I’m writing books that have to outlive me. That has given me a lot of freedom and more space to play and experiment. I’ve outlived where I thought I would be by more than a decade. Now it’s time for the hard work of living, and part of that means imagining the future I’ll have and the poems it will produce, but some of that work of living has fuck all to do with the poems. I do this because I love it, not because I feel I have to. For all the violence and pain contained within this book, I wanted it to begin and end with love and joy as a way of escaping and moving beyond the pain.
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Author photograph courtesy of torrin a. greathouse
