Jos Charles, there’s room in “thees wite skirtes” for thee and me, so let’s compose these rites alchemically.
I’m feeld-ing your guide, in which after all i will be fielding your queeries and questyons and in addition i will be getting emotions. Through which i am talking about reading your book makes me personally in a continuing work of effortful yet trans*lation that is fruitful. wen which i am talking about i’m holding your guide, holding you beside me when I cross personal feelds (trans-latio: to carry around).
Yours is just a language made strange: stretched and slanted and folded against itself so that it veers in and out of recognizability. Flux language, queer language, dense/dance language: graphically compressed, sonically ambiguous. Truly your Medievalist history being a scholar comes to your fore—and certainly, I’ve seen numerous reviews describe your projects as “Chaucerian.” Nonetheless, this assessment seems reductive if you ask me: your homophony relishes in countless possibilities—makes space for any other impacts like Louis Zukofsky (their sequence that is catullus Tommy Pico (their text lingo). Your gleeful misspellings also invoke a childlike purity: preadolescent glory times whenever probably the pleasures of our figures had not been so completely delimited.
Like a young child, you treat terms like Lego obstructs and build your“whorld this is certainly very own.
Jack Halberstam makes a trans* that is delightful away from Legos his most recent guide : “The realm of Lego is regarded as constant change, even though there’s always the chance of going back to the instruction sheet and after the step by step guidelines, the uncharted territory of creation constantly beckons.” This is really what you are doing with language: toss the instruction guide out, enter uncharted territory. You show us that language could be a transitional feeld, like our very own trans systems. Step by step redirections, detours, digressions.
This will be to say you discover power in tearing aside words and making them anew, in deliberate misapprehension and remaking. Terms as escape velocity: evading our grasp then hurling us into brand brand new globes thought between your lines. The work of naming falls apart so the term speaks for it self, calls it self a fresh title. Meanwhile we are able to just ravage for almost any “anteseedynt” we are able to find, then sow “a feeld / a felt // past thru / i wuld see u.” And so we remain, terms echoing our baroque (although not broken) figures. Behold our fecundity, our excesses. Where we’re “teemd”—teeming, teamed up.
Like numerous option: “inn / these the dreggs / the girl beguines”
a) in thee the drag / the growl starts b) within these the dregs / your ex beguine c) in this the gown / the gurl b gone d) all the above
There was pleasure that is queer unraveling many of these permutations. There was toil, aswell. The polysemy is conceptually and materially interesting but in addition exhausting (due to the fact connection with navigating the globe in a trans human anatomy is). Reading hurts since it is an excavation of wound-sites. We have a time that is hard, by way of example, your all-bared “XXXIII:”
We trace the wounded “whord” throughout the poem, run my little finger along its protrusions regarding the page, its anagrammatic splintering into existential concerns of being (“who”), intercourse (“whored”), and “historie” (“woonds” recorded in “wood”). “I care plenty abot the whord we can’t reed”—you spell “reed” and into the act of reading, you simultaneously grow a sheet of lawn and plant a track for a unsuccessful instrument. The word that is illegible be recognized with its singularity, with its complex polysemic harmonies. We worry to know the tune your reed carries: lamentation of their violent history. The whord renders a mark in the human anatomy. These lines (melody lines, poetry lines, history afrointroductions mobile login lines, slash lines, scars) dual as vicious lions, licking “woonds,” pecking wood. A whord is similar to lumber insofar since it marks the trans body—history protrudes in the type of scars or aging bands for a tree. The whord folds upon itself, markings circling all over border associated with the lumber.
Annotating your guide is like fielding strings of constant ampersands. Teething your well-plotted industries for tithes. Language traipses porously, edges subsumed so wee can keep the space beyond the original traps (“boye / grl / or worker // bee / all of this bad det”). We could refuse interpellation, insist alternatively regarding the joy of interpolation. “Interpolation is a skirte / we ware.” For them to fathom between thee and me, I think it’s more fun being too early, too far ahead.
NOA/H AREAS is a performance and writer musician located in Chicago. They’re the writer of AMONG (Ghost City Press, 2018).