Re:Viewed by Hannah Bonner
Illustration (and cover art) by Em Gray
RE:VIEW
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Brink: Can you talk about the figure of the mother in TRANZ? About what the motif of the mother means to you and to the book?
Spencer Williams: The mother figure is, at once, my literal birth mother, my adoptive mother, and a nebulous origin point. For the majority of the collection, I’m speaking to a birth mother I only knew, at the time, through hospital documentation and anecdotes from family members. However, during the pandemic—and crucially, after writing these poems—I actually got to meet her via technology after I wine-drunkenly mailed in a DNA kit my adoptive parents had gifted me for Christmas prior. I think I’m starting to feel a kind of maternal tug in my life that I’ve only just started to unpack, but at the time of writing TRANZ, these three iterations of “mother” interested me because so much of being adopted is learning how to be comfortable with gaps—in personal, familial, and medical histories. These poems were my attempts at filling some of those narrative holes, just to see if I could, and to see if they felt real to me once filled.
B: This collection is so much about language: the words we use, what words we can’t use, the violence words can inflict, the ways in which we can reappropriate language, especially epithets. What do the sexual/gendered epithets mean to you in these poems?
SW: I love my epithets, which are naturally epithets that have at one point or another been used to inflict harm upon me. I think my relationship to the word “faggot” is the most complicated it marred so much of my early development and yet I’ve grown to love it and use it daily about myself. I’m lucky to have grown up in a time where I feel comfortable enough to reclaim that word in particular. It still holds violence, of course. But when I use it in a poem, it becomes a tool like anything else. Maybe even a kind of anti-venom.
B: I love the use of spacing throughout the book—so often the indents feel like a room for breath or even like a Greek chorus call and response, especially in “this night too will end,” which is so propulsive. When does a poem or a line necessitate the use of a space or an indent for you? What effect do you wish that spacing to achieve?
SW: I like a sprawling form. With that poem, it didn’t make sense for me to make it look clean, since it’s such an ode to punk music and the jarring, jagged progressions of that genre. Aesthetically, I wanted the poem to match, or parallel, the rage and discomfort that a punk show allows one to explode in all directions (respectfully, of course). I was interested in creating a kind of mini–come down at the end, with the breaking of the tight coil—a chance for breath, for possibility beyond pain.
If I’m trying to bring the reader into that kind of cacophonic state, I’ll try to scatter the form as a means to visually cue them for that kind of energy. But not all poems can be punk songs. I think about form—or line breaks—most often in relation to attitude. What would a break here do to the emotional current I’m trying to build or dismantle? Do I want to edge the reader? Do I want to give them the satisfaction of a clean line? Do I want to give it to myself?
B: In the titular poem “Tranz,” you have this incredible line “in the economy of tranz.” So much of TRANZ seems to comment upon the traffic of that economy: in pop culture, in the news, in online chat rooms or dating apps. And your book, in many ways, feels like a disruption of that economy. Part of that disruption seems apparent in the ordering of the book. The last poem ends with a greeting “hello / hello”: a desire to be seen or recognized or acknowledged. And the first poem is so much about sex, hunger, desire, assertion: “I'm not some / final girl with a death wish and a septum ring.” Can you talk about how you organized the book and what narrative you wanted that structure to achieve?
SW: I knew I wanted the lines “hello/hello” to be the final lines of the book. So rather than invite closure, I was holding the door open instead. It’s a bit of a utopic sentiment, but I feel like so much of the discourse around trans life revolves around precarity, the always looking over one’s shoulder. While my work does consider those precarious elements of trans life, I wanted to end the collection with a gesture of longevity. In terms of ordering the collection as a whole, I knew going into the editing process that I didn’t want to siphon any single tone to one section of the book. So rather than my depression poems being put in the back, I wanted more ebb and flow, more peaks and valleys and surprise. I knew that “origin” and “mother tongue” would kind of float in the collection as their own islands of text, and so I wanted to surround them with other emotional pockets so that they wouldn’t end up swallowing the book with their depressions. I also knew I wanted to begin the book with a provocation, as is my general move, which is why the first poem is about gross sex. I think I wanted to do away with respectability from the jump so that people weren’t jarred by that kind of language later on. It’s a poem where you’re either with it or you aren’t, and I wanted to give the audience (probably like 10 people) an early out if they wanted it.
B: There’s also a theme of time throughout the book: looking back at childhood or the narrator's parents. There's also this gorgeous ending to “Revising the Danish Girl”:
i believe i will be old
when i die,
and when i die
my love will hold—
no—keep
like a door held
open.
What kind of temporal quality do you want TRANZ to evoke? How do you think of the thread of time throughout the book?
SW: I’m always thinking about time. This is probably because my parents are older—in their eighties—and I’m constantly trying to brush off my own concerns about how long I will have them in my life. I also think my relationship to time, as a trans person, is fraught. On the one hand, I like to imagine my “true” life beginning at the point of transition—or making a claim for it—and yet, on the other hand, my life has been so defined by the moments that occurred before it, when I was still learning how to apply language to myself. So the book kind of jumps around a bit because I think that’s also how memory works—just a constant leaping from one past blip to the next. So I don’t think there’s necessarily a clean temporal thread. But there is a messy sketch of one. I also played with time as a kind of corrective tool. So for the Danish girl poem, I wanted a narrative that honored Lili Elbe’s life more than the awful movie with Eddie Redmayne did. Same thing with the poem about Adrienne Rich. I wanted there to always be a kind of footnote that stood against the more common narratives of these figures. Many people don’t know that Adrienne Rich helped Janice Raymond edit The Transsexual Empire, one of the most transphobic texts ever written.
B: Who were some of the writers you were reading while writing the book? There are poems in homage to Cameron Awkward-Rich and torrin a. greathouse. Who else were you reading or in conversation with while writing these poems?
SW: I was rereading a lot! I used Natalie Eilbert’s Indictus, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, and Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s What Runs Over as my main trio of formal guides throughout. I think all three use the space of the page so thoughtfully.
B: We begin every Brink meeting sharing what’s exciting us right now. So what’s currently exciting you?
SW: Currently, I am living for Hannah Bonner’s debut collection Another Woman! And also Jill Ciment’s latest memoir Consent. It just crushed me, in the best of ways.
SPENCER WILLIAMS is a trans writer from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of the chapbook Alien Pink (The Atlas Review, 2017) and her work has been featured in Literary Hub, Indiewire, and Polygon, among others. She received her MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark, and is currently a PhD student in poetics at SUNY, Buffalo.
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