[ad_1]
KB’s debut poetry collection How to Identify Yourself With a Wound was selected by Ire’ne Lara Silva as the winner of the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize, and contains the kind of words that stay on your mind and in your skin. KB plays with pop culture (“self-portrait as Frank Ocean song about drugs,” “Break up with your gender, I’m bored”), humor, and awe to engage with harder, more painful realities. As a Black, queer, transmasculine poet, educator, and culture worker living in Texas, KB has approached the world and their life with curiosity and compassion. Or, at least, that’s my suspicion after reading this collection that moved me deeply.
I talked to KB about gender, geography, and grief.
Jen St. Jude
“How to Identify Yourself With a Wound” is a recurring poem throughout the book (2007, 2012, 2016, 2018, 2020). It moves through stages of violence: anticipating, participating, suffering, sickening, healing. One line reads: “To you, the witness to what cruelty does to the brain.” How do cruelty, pain, and violence inform these poems and your experience living in yourself?
KB
These poems were birthed mostly from 2018 to 2020 — a span of time where I had moved from Fort Worth to Austin and was reckoning with the wreckage I made during a relationship. Because so much of my identity was wrapped up in being “in love,” I had almost no time to reflect before then, and when I was present with myself — in a brand new city I didn’t know — I realized a lot about the cruelty I had experienced from childhood up ’til then. My history informs these poems — as poet Theodora Goss once said, “we can’t escape our context.” To be a Black, queer, and trans person in a state where violent people have held positions of power for decades is to have a thick layer of dark shit projected onto you, I think. My hope is that these poems are caricatures that can highlight a coming-of-age story. A reclaiming of the things that really wanted to hurt me.
Jen St. Jude
You use creative formatting throughout the poems – strikeouts, sideways text, lowercase letters, etc. I know this is a technique used by writers to indicate different things, but it felt particularly queer to me in the context of your words. Do you agree, and if so, how did you decide where to scratch out or break?
KB
I feel like such a novice when it comes to form, haha, so this will be hard to answer. But I’ll try. Poetry started for me in the tradition of spoken word. The first time I ever encountered a poem was actually a teacher recounting this surface-level poem about a dude not texting a girl back with conviction, and you could feel that in her hands, arms, voice. I wanted so badly to mimic that, from the age of 15 to 21. As I continued in poetry — and realized everybody in these academic spaces cared so damn much about the page — I asked myself “how do I convey the feeling of this piece in the way that it looks on the page?” That’s what form has been so far, for me. Giving a reader a roadmap on where to breathe, pause, see my inner thoughts, etc. The strikethroughs in this book are like subtext; what you wanna say but are too scared to be embarrassed, or don’t feel empowered enough to say it. And the Women’s Restroom poem, well, that one’s weird. It was turned on its side initially because of spacing, but I think that extra work that the reader has to do lends well to the content.
Jen St. Jude
In “Do you know what they did to Muhlaysia?” you write, “Slipping between genders sometimes causes a fall, after all.” This seems to capture this loss that is (unfortunately) inevitable in a world that isn’t built to hold people like her, like you. And then you demand more: “I am alive & you can never take that from me, we said.” How do you balance both this loss and this fight for solid ground?
KB
So much of life in a Black trans bodymind is grieving things, so I can’t not acknowledge that if I want to stay alive. I had to mourn not being “normal” and having the shit that everyone else gets — a safe home life, the picket fence/partner/marriage type thing that everyone was saying was the ultimate goal of life when I was growing up. I had to mourn friends that left here because of disease, their own hands, or someone else’s bigotry — FAR more than any white, or cis, or straight person ever will based on how much American culture demonizes my personhood. In this poem, my goal — or at least the goal of the magician part of me that writes poems — was to say the fucked up thing, which is that Black trans women are murdered, and Black trans people don’t get to live the American dream or whatever, and when we die, it’s gossip for everyone else. White supremacy has really fucked us, Black trans people, up and it’s dark. As all the things I name in that poem. I balanced loss in this poem and in life because I had to, you know what I mean? And I think that 2018 to 2020 KB was wanting to memorialize women like Muhlaysia while also saying that this is not the end for me.
Jen St. Jude
In “Notes on Sexual Experiment,” I so loved the line, “Sexuality felt like a college friend that moved away.” It reminded me of how I feel when people ask me about me; I think: do you mean who I’ve been? Who I am? Who I could be? Can you talk more about how this poem (and others in the collection) captures many versions of yourself, the power they each hold?
KB
Ooof. Good question. Between normalized homophobia, racism, anti-Blackness, and stealth culture, I probably have 10 copies of KB living in people’s minds. I’m probably on my 11th one! Code-switching and doing what you have to do to survive is CONSTANT. “Notes on Sexual Experiment” is a poem that is so quintessential 2018 KB: feeling like they were forced to be a lesbian for so long due to biphobia and all-around weirdness around gender expression growing up, and they wanted to see what sleeping with somebody that isn’t a cisgender woman might be like. It’s shitty, but it’s also relatable, I hope. HTIYWAW is my debut, in the sense that I feel like I put every single self that I could locate in it, and told them all that they belong to each other. And they belong in this book together. Isn’t that wild? I’m not sure if it’s working, but I hope that the reader can feel vindicated and invited to put all of the selves that they’ve been in a room to talk after reading that piece, and all the other pieces.
Jen St. Jude
What was it like writing your debut collection of poetry in the pandemic? The line “Bad joy is making it/through 2020 partially scathed, glowing bright, & missing,” really took me out.
KB
Haha! What a weird and avoidable time we’re living in. I want to be honest and say that maaaaaybe three of these poems are from 2020. All others were from 2018/19. The one you quote here is from 2020 though (obviously) plus “HTIYWAW” (2012 and 2020). Most of 2020 was survival, since we literally were bombarded with new information from every which way all the time. Kudos to the people that got writing done that year. I was journaling, and three out of maybe five things I wrote that year ended up in this book.
Jen St. Jude
Your geography; Forth Worth, Austin, adds so much to the text here. How has your writing been shaped by these communities you’ve lived in?
KB
I think my poetic gaze is so specific to writing down what is around me. Also land and water is so built into us by default — our voice, our references, etc. Someone recently told me “you introduce readers to the terrain of Texas” & I was like “oh? I just write what’s happening around me,” haha. My writing is so Texas cause I’m so Texas, yunno? The poems are filtered through me, and I have a lot of pride in where I come from since it’s not on any mainstream stage. I also think I could finally stretch my wings, and write this book, only once I left Fort Worth though. I’m glad that place feels significant for readers.
Jen St. Jude
Who do you most hope finds this collection? Who do you write for?
KB
First and foremost, I write for me. Before anything is bound in a book or on a website or said at a show, I’m writing to acknowledge my feelings, learn about my emotional/physical self, archive my memories (I’m getting older and it’s becoming SO MUCH HARDER to remember anything), and be reminded of my people. When I decide to share what I write, I’m sharing it so people with similar experiences of life as me feel validated, represented, connected to a larger narrative, and ready to move this world forward. I want to inspire people to write about their own shitty ass childhood/adolescence. Their fuck-ups and joys. I also think, even when I’m being critical, I am sending love to Black queer and trans people. A lot of us go through too much, forreal.
Jen St. Jude
What was your path to publication like? Any advice to other writers?
KB
If I was to answer this fully, it would have to take another interview. It’s been bad mostly. The writing industry, just like any industry that runs on capitalism, is full of rich white people that hoard everything from everybody else. So much nepotism. So much tokenism and gatekeeping. These are the things that keep me in traditional publishing though — honest writers, good editors, and readers.
Jen St. Jude
What’s next for you and your writing?
KB
I just transitioned into being a full-time writer, and consultant, so that feels especially present right now. I’m going on tour for HTIYWAW this February — if COVID decides to not ruin that. I got a full-length poetry collection coming out with Deep Vellum called FREEDOM HOUSE in 2023; everything I wasn’t ready to say in HTIYWAW, I said in FREEDOM HOUSE. I’m also allegedly working on an essay collection and a novel-in-verse (among a million other things — sorry, I’m a Virgo). Folks can keep up with all my things at @earthtokb on twitter, instagram, facebook, and tiktok. That is until I decide to cede those accounts to somebody else; I’m TIRED tbh.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
POETRY
How to Identify Yourself With a Wound
By KB
Kallisto Gaia Press
Published January 18, 2022
[ad_2]
Source link