JP: What brought you to poetry and to this investigation? 


RLU: I started being interested in poetry when I was in high school. I watched hours of Button Poetry on YouTube. I studied Gender and Sexuality Studies in college, which opened me up to worlds of language, theory, and philosophy. Importantly, these classes taught me how to read—not just books, but people, art, and landscapes. I found that dialectic framework of reading, legibility, and viewership really helpful for developing a relationship with what I was looking at and for moving through the world as an exchange and not just as a sort of flat experience. In developing a sense of self esteem within my queerness, poetry was a way of doing that. There was, and remains, a way that by journaling or writing—having my interiority reflected back at me—I learn how to read myself. That process allowed me to see myself.


JP: You are a reader of poetry. Do you write poetry?


RLU: I'm working on a collection, a manuscript-in-progress, right now. I never thought I'd be writing a manuscript. I have this poetry fellowship right now and it’s the first time that I've ever thought that I could do something like that. 


What about you? Were you a writer or reader of poetry first?


JP: Definitely a reader. It almost seems like a philosophical problem. It does feel like a lot more of my practice has been around writing. I started by writing poems in Venmo transactions to people, partially because I felt some pull towards language in verse. It began that way because of partial identification of poetry as kind of this weird, embarrassing thing. Maybe I associated it with some kind of sentimentalism or romanticism, and I wasn't that interested in that. It was also this way to make the poems public, but in a low key way where getting published wasn’t the goal. At that time, it was really just about free association. I didn’t know what I was doing and it was only at a certain point that I was like, I guess I'm doing this. 


RLU: Is there a relationship for you between embodiment and poetry?


JP: I'm not sure. I'm a little bit agnostic about what poetry can do to develop one's identity. Consciousness is mysterious to me, and I like it that way, even though it's also frequently very annoying. One day I woke up and was like, I guess I'm queer, and I think that makes its way into writing, whether I want it to or not. This is, in some ways, an answer that denies a level of self consciousness or agency.


Does writing your identity actually impact or develop one's identity? I don't know. But on the other hand, as a formal problem, finding ways to express my life as a queer and trans person, that is something that I do think about a little bit more consciously in the work. I don't know that I’ve figured it out. So much of it is the circuitry of what the lived life is like right now. The moment we're in right now is one in which transness is variously under attack. It’s being vilified in these interesting ways that for me line up eerily well the sort of milieus that I move through, these kind of radical political milieus that happen to contain a lot of queer people. I think it brings up these questions of abjection and criminalization and surveillance. So I think those might be themes that come up for me when writing.


RLU: Yes, and of the place from which one writes, there’s an intrinsic mystery to queerness; it’s not just some outward-facing or externally-enacted identity. 


JP: Yes, and at the same time, maybe this is backtracking on what I said, but you also can't escape these projections onto you. There is a process of looking or engaging with where this dense web of associations lead you to be able to make that conclusion (that an art-object is queer). I think a similar thing happens, probably, with poetry too. It’s hard to escape that.


RLU: And all of this lives on a spectrum of or becomes triangulated with association and signaling. The involuntary ordering against that which we’ve seen previously and the purposeful expression of style or affect. 


JP: That makes me think of a quote from Bay Area poet, hometown hero named Bob Gluck. I've seen Bob read so many times, and he's so fucking brilliant. He has this really eloquent formulation where he says, “Gender is the extent we go to in order to be loved.”


RLU: Oof.


JP: Right. It's brilliant. Killer. I might want to come back to another part of this quote, but I think just to what you were just saying, you know, we put things on and take things off in order to resist an amount of gender discipline that exists seemingly ambiently in the world. And also, we have to put things on that allow us to feel recognition and closeness with other people, which might mean that thing that maybe he's referring to as love, which is searching for something that feels—I don't know if I believe in authenticity—good. Something that will allow you to be recognized, seen, and in proximity to the people that you like to be in proximity to. 


RLU: I guess I’m just thinking again about what you were saying earlier about queerness and transness and how those identities come to be recognized by others—either recognized adequately by people we love or not viewed with generosity, or not even viewed with love.


In troubling visual and aesthetic renderings of poetic cultures and whatever overlay there might be with alternative modes of moving through the world, I wonder how we come to learn these languages. I’m wondering how we share and then speak this shared language of queerness within poetry and art? I think it has something to do with gaze and the quality of our looking. I deeply appreciate and am moved by the photography of South African artist and visual activist Zanele Muholi, who allows those being photographed the dignity of choosing how their image is captured. (Even these words orbiting the work of the camera like “capture” and “shoot” evoke what is taken or has the potential to be taken from someone). These queer images of defiance and vulnerability is a posture that’s learned as a queer subject moving through the world that, like you said, is constantly legislating against like queer and trans lives.


That point of recognition, or that desire to be seen, is very fraught as a queer person. If you want to be seen, you're also by making yourself visible, making yourself vulnerable to violence. I’m curious if the queer image, queer visuality, or queer language of poetry, also lives in that state of feeling—this desire to be recognized coupled with a recognition of the potential violence that can follow publicity.


JP: I do think, about what is queer poetry, that those kinds of identifications are probably made after the fact. Then they influence the writing that comes after. When you're in dialogue with the existing lexicon, you have some idea of “this is what it means to write like this.” Other people will then find that work. Even if it sucks it'll still play a part in this kind of—God, I'm trying to avoid saying the word ‘dialectical’—


RLU: Well, you haven't yet, so you can use that as your one.


JP: I don't know if I want this to be my one use of ‘dialectical.’ Partially because I feel like I'm struggling through this answer to your question, which I think is a good question.


RLU: I don’t actually think there are answers, for what's worth, to any of the convoluted questions that I'm offering today.


JP: OK.


RLU: Your poems are very political. Can you talk about that? Why you write into the political so explicitly? What came to mind as I was reading was June Jordan. Her commitment to revolution, liberation, and making poetry a place for realizing those aims. 


JP: Thank you. That's a high compliment because she's brilliant. She's definitely someone I look to. I write about the things that I feel like I can't escape and that feel variously seductive and enraging and totalizing and intractable. One way to talk about this, kind of under the shadow of queerness that I'm gonna say with some trepidation, is that for better or worse when writing about marginal identities, we're always going to be wrestling with this question of freedom and unfreedom. One of the most clear forces of unfreedom is the state and the police, the embodied form of discipline and enforcers of hegemony. 


In order to get to a better world we need to destroy the police and that's a step on the stage to destroying the state. It's their unfortunate historical position that they have to occupy that they're the symbol for this impediment to human flourishing. Maybe where it lands in writing is they're both a symbol. They're a symbolic representation of that impediment, and also they are the real thing that stands in the way of a better life for everyone, not just queer people. 


I’m trying to remember what the part was that I had trepidation about. Oh yeah, just that there can be a kind earnestness or sentimentalism to dreaming of freedom. Though I do think that we have to do that and that poetry is probably a good place for it. I struggle with it a little bit because we need to do some dreaming, but we also need to do some fighting. I'm forever ambivalent on whether poetry can actually make that happen. It's something that greatly preoccupies me, and because I feel like I can't escape it in my conscious life, it has to go somewhere. So poetry, it is.


RLU: That question, what does poetry do?


JP: And we’ll continue asking that until, I don’t know, until—


RLU: —we don’t have police?


Which part do you struggle with? What does poetry do for people? Or how does poetry motivate the reader off the page and into the streets?


JP: There's always a mixture of anger and shame about being a poet. I'm in an arts community, most of my friends are poets and artists and it's my social life where I found a lot of people who share similar political commitments. I guess I'm wary of getting too comfortable in the space of the arts. I don’t want to turn “the streets” into a fetish object or some kind of resistance porn.


RLU: I think this can even happen in leftist or movement spaces itself, if I’m understanding you correctly. What I think you're gesturing at is an importance of remaining in movement. It’s not just about reading what's on the page, listening to what's happening at the reading, sitting with accomplices or comrades around the table, but it's about taking the next step of doing—always occupying a space that is agile and maybe even a little bit disruptive.


JP: Yes. That commitment to motion and dynamism is really important to me. When you’re moved to something, you're making a commitment. You're making an assessment about, is this the right thing to do? Is this the right thing to say at the right time? It’s an attunement to the present, which requires humility.


I was just re-reading some Diane di Prima, who is one of my favorite poets. There's so much there that feels resonant, but she was writing in a totally different historical moment. As I’m thinking out loud, are we even talking about social antagonism, or are we talking about writing? Maybe it's both. I don't want to equate the two, but I think that this willfulness to act combined with an attunement to the present is the kind of thing that I think about all the time while writing and also while organizing, but they're towards two very different ends. 


RLU: A question that came up a lot for me this summer was, what is the point of poetry that doesn't organize? I came to realize that question was putting a bit too much pressure on  the poem. That maybe I should let it breathe. A friend reflected back to me that the space where poetry is spoken or where a book is sold can itself become the organizing space. Maybe the poem itself doesn't have to do much heavy lifting, but when we gather together, that can be where the organizing happens, and the poem can be a springboard for further conversation or for connection or for meeting people. 


I think I had underestimated the importance of that. Because in thinking about our housing arrangements, where we live, how we commute, the tedium of our daily work—all these different architectures of relation have separation built into them to varying degrees. Maybe this gives art too much credit, but art can bring us into the same room and that itself is reorganizing the barriers between us. 


JP: This is something I was thinking about recently, too. I have this instinct to be somewhat of an ideologue or a totalitarian about it, and be like it's not inherently political. Still, I also host a reading series. I love the room of a reading, having people gather. I think it's lovely, but it goes back to this vascillation between love and shame and the question of, what is this doing? There can be these political moments that are born out of readings. I think one of the people who hosted Woolsey House readings back in the early 2010s when Occupy started to kick off here started to host these open mics at the massive general assembly meetings at Oscar Grant Plaza where everyone was camping. Suddenly it became this thing that was a weird set of abilities and social gestures, and curatorial talents that found a home in this massive political upsurge. Suddenly, a bunch of people who had never been to a poetry reading or given a poetry reading were exposed to it. There’s this kind of moment where subcultures—which is what I think of poetry and most art world stuff as being—suddenly become useful to something bigger than the subculture that it was. That’s my more optimistic swing on the role of these rituals that we do. 


RLU: What does it mean to be useful?


JP: You know, as I said that word, I was like, is that what I mean? In some ways it’s like the lowest common denominator form of, okay, we have a bunch of people out here sitting and their backs probably hurt and maybe they’re grumpy, hungry, or thirsty. Maybe people are starting to get kind of horny for each other. You can let that all happen and have it potentially end in total chaos or you could have something to do, some structured activity. Being able to provide that structure—and this might be a really bold claim—feels to me psychologically useful for the group.


Maybe I'm just grabbing associations here, but so much of what I've been thinking about, particularly in some organizing spaces I'm in now, is there's almost this countervailing force in groups that wants to make nothing happen. That's where something is being asked to intervene—these structures, a game, a poetry reading. Otherwise people do just seem to flail. This might be a stretch, but I think also that's maybe some of what poetry does. It gives you language to try to intervene into all of the chaos.