AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: torrin a. greathouse and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Form as Open-Source Software and Being Loud on the Page

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYS)

torrin a. greathouse: (RECORDING OF POEM PLAYS)

each morning checked the skin my lover abandoned.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I'm Cindy Juyoung Ok, bringing bits of poetry, poetics, and prompting to you and your day. Joining us is torrin a. greathouse, transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist whose second collection, DEED, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in fall 2024. torrin’s first book, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, published by Milkweed Editions in 2020, includes the much-beloved line, “Some girls are not made, but spring from the dirt.” Studied in disability justice in archival critique, torrin innovates poetic form. Today we focus on the burning haibun, their own creation, writing from prompts, and the words that burn. torrin, welcome back to the podcast!

torrin a. greathouse: Yes, I'm excited to be here.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You created a new poetic form, the burning haibun, that has become incredibly known, taught, transformed. What is it like to have created something for your own work that has now become almost like an open-source software that others are writing in and returning to you as a reader?

torrin a. greathouse: I really love that concept of the form in relation to open-source software, and, you know, I think this is so true of any time we write poems, right? They are something that leaves our hand and inevitably are altered by being in the world. And I think, as you know, the baby poet who wrote like the first attempts toward this form in 2016. I think my past self would have never imagined that the form has the life it has now. I mean, to now see all of these writers and, you know, some writers I really love, developing a relationship to this thing I made -- it's just something that I don't know if I'll ever quite emotionally be over.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: How did the haibun come to you before you burned it?

torrin a. greathouse: Yeah, so my relationship to the haibun initially began with the work of two poets. Uh one is Ocean Vuong and the poem “Immigrant Haibun,” which is referenced in the essay, and then also the work of the brilliant poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil. And the haibun form, for folks who don't know, is a traditional Japanese haikai form, beginning with a prose block and concluding with a kind of capstone haiku. They were often travelogues, and their creation is attributed to the poet Matsuo Basho. They're just a form I really love because of a kind of inherent tension existing between the more maximalist prose block and the more minimalist poetic gesture required

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The haiku.

torrin a. greathouse: in that haiku. Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And then the burning haibun reworks that traditional form, but also expands it. So there are three segments, and we have the prose poem, an erasure of that poem, and then erasure of that text to create the haiku. And the latter two have text redacted, which is really visually also stimulating. So maybe let's hear a recent burning haibun of yours to kind of indicate how listeners might visualize it with “Dancing in the Dark.” This poem takes up the lyrics of a Bruce Springsteen song and actually started with the haiku and not a prose block.

torrin a. greathouse: Yeah

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, let's start with the first section, which is a prose block.

torrin a. greathouse: Alright.

(READS POEM)

“Dancing in the Dark”

After Bruce Springsteen

I spent summer cloistered behind the curtain of my room, chest wrapped in stolen bra & panicked sweat. Woke each morning, ribs check-marked with the red echo of skin’s dreaming—what it might become. First learned the failures of my body in what a lover abandoned. Saw, in her discarded clothes, my chest as absence. Sold the whole season on a dream of looking like someone else. Danced with a candle’s soft pirouette of smoke, Springsteen crackling in the speakers like harsh light across a mirror’s torn silver skin. He sings “Come on, baby” “this town” “’ll be carving you up” “you gotta stay” “baby” “I’m sick of” “this” & I wanna sing back, finish this broken lyric: “body.” I let the song play over & over, ’til Bruce’s voice fails him. I wanna press my lips to the hole his voice has burned in the dark & ask him if he ever stopped wanting to change. I stand in my bathroom with all the lights off, clothed in nothing but the word “man,” the first lie I ever stripped off my tongue. I shave down to my scalp. Each strand ignites, hair of brilliant wicks, stubble to sparks, lighting my face, leaving a silhouette of ash.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thank you for that emotive reading. Um, the second section, then the second part is a much shorter prose block with strings of words that have been redacted, leaving some of the words spaced apart. They're all in the same order as the first section. Let's hear that.

torrin a. greathouse:

(READS POEM – NOTE THIS POEM CONTAINS ERASURES WHICH YOU CAN VIEW VISITING THE POEM ONLINE)

I spent summer behind the curtain of my panicked sweat Each morning checked the skin my lover abandoned. Saw my chest looking like a candle in the mirror I wanna finish this broken “body.” over and over, I press my lips to the dark & ask to change. stand in my bathroom lights off, clothed in “man,” the first lie of my tongue. I shave my hair to sparks my face ash.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The final section is the haiku with five syllables in the first line, then seven, then five. So it's a smaller, three-line section with further redacted space. Let's hear that.

torrin a. greathouse:

(READS POEM)

“Check my look in the mirror I wanna change My clothes my hair my face.”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: This poem removes so many curtains of space and self. Meter's shifting, meaning is shifting, and within that first part, there's shaving, igniting, selling, discarding, crackling. So I think this almost indicates what the erasures are really about. Not erasure, but in what might become and what becomes present in absence. How has working with a form so interested in getting to some core of language and of ideas affected your relationship to the possibilities of poetry?

torrin a. greathouse: You know, a lot of the books when I was a young poet that I read about poetry and poetics, talked about the kind of end goal of the lyric poem being this epiphany. And that's something I always really resisted. But in a way, I ended up creating this form which inherently pushes toward the haiku as an epiphany buried in the text that we burn the text away to reveal. I was a kid who was obsessed with spies. And I remember the kind of secret code things that you would do. And one of them, right, is writing on paper with lemon juice.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes!

torrin a. greathouse: And you can reveal that by holding it over a candle or a light bulb.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Classic.

torrin a. greathouse: And in a lot of ways, this form, it's a similar gesture. There's a kind of hidden code. And this is much more true of the later versions of this form. The first burning haibun, that haiku came out of the process of erasure.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

torrin a. greathouse: Since then, I figured out this is maybe not the most efficient way to write my own form.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

torrin a. greathouse: And I've started by having that haiku in mind. And really it was this poem, It was “Dancing in the Dark,” The second burning haibun I wrote, that kind of taught me about how the workflow of my own form should work. And, you know, going back to that metaphor of open-source software, I kind of had to keep working with the software it already made to work out the bugs. You know, I did not create the burning haibun to create like A capital F form. At its inception, it was a nonce form, you know, um this term meaning a form used for one specific poem. And then I realized I'd kind of struck on gold.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

torrin a. greathouse: That it was such an interesting approach that I returned to it and have continued to return to it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think it makes sense that the process has changed as well as the matter, the words moving into it. I'm curious, why do you think you were so interested in spies and what made you so excited about this idea of coding and decoding?

torrin a. greathouse: You know, I was a very shy kid. You know, I didn't have many friends growing up. We moved around a lot. And so as a kid who, you know, most of my time was spent in my internal world, the idea that even as I was not interacting with the people around me, you know, as a very introverted child who, you know, there was a lot I was working out as a kid. You know, I didn't know I was trans. I didn't know I was queer. I didn't know I was autistic. But I did always fundamentally feel like I was hiding something.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mmm.

torrin a. greathouse: And I didn't know what those things were, but life dictated, you know, as someone growing up in the 90s, that these were not things I could reveal, even if I had fully been aware of them. And so the idea of being a spy, of having this external face and everything going on underneath the surface of moving unseen, this really I mean, isn't it such a great metaphor for being closeted, or for, you know, masking as an autistic person?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mmm hmm.

torrin a. greathouse: And I think a lot of this comes through in my work now. I am still an incredibly introverted person. And I think maybe that's why so much of my work has a very maximalist bent. The page is the loudest I ever get to be.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The essay you wrote about the burning haibun for the summer issue of the magazine is from this new prompt series. The series is called “Not Too Hard to Master.” And it includes Tishani Doshi writing on shape poems, Terrance Hayes writing on the sestina. He's even included a little DIY worksheet. Both are incredibly resourceful poets and turn on existing forms, as are you and as do you. And you've worked with a sestina, the abecedarian, prose poems. I see all three of you, among others, working against how form worked before, trying to create an invitation rather than a set of rules. Are there other frameworks in poetry that have guided you in this way and given you an opportunity to share and shift without imposing a specific dominant form?

torrin a. greathouse: In relation to form and poetry, no matter what form I'm working in, you know, whether that is a nonce form I’ve constructed for a poem, whether it's a received form, or an invented form. And I think at this point I've invented like four or five poetic forms just because that seems to be a very generative space for me. I'm often thinking in terms of form as an architecture of meaning. That being, you know, we can write anything into a form. But certain things about how these different structures are shaped, inherently alters how we write in those spaces. You know, a sestina because of its repetition, to me it will always be a form about obsession or traumatic memory, because we return and remake, and return and remake, and return and remake.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes.

torrin a. greathouse: And you know, similarly, a sonnet always inherently kind of going to be an argument because you need that turning of the volta. If we imagine a poetic form as a room, it's not a room we arrive to, that you know, doesn't have furniture in it. These are furnished rooms. They might have the history of who is written in them, what the common themes are, and so when I approach any kind of received poetic shapes, I'm also thinking about how do I work with those pre-existing ideas in relationship to them, how do I conform to or subvert these things? So like the sonnet has this common relationship to love. And in particular a kind of high courtly love. So what does it mean then, to write a sonnet about lust or a sonnet about the failure of love?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mmm hmm.

torrin a. greathouse: And so these are ways in which I'm thinking about entry points to all of the things. You know, poetry is full of so much received material and history. And I think we're kind of doing a disservice if we don't also think about that history as a building block we can play with.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think play is such a good word for what you do. You're acknowledging and understanding what exists and you're playing with it, messing with it, and you're also questioning it. I think about the poem that the series is named after, its, “Not Too Hard to Master,” taken from a line from the very famous and infamous villanelle, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. And this form similarly has this recurrence of feeling, these memories that shift and fragment, and a refusal of some of the received language and material while also a play with that language. Let's hear an excerpt from that poem read by the wonderful poet John Murillo.

John Murillo:

(RECORDING OF JOHN MURILLO READING “ONE ART” PLAYS)

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The “not too hard to master,” slightly ironic, a kind of story we tell ourselves maybe to contend with loss. In what sense do you conceive of the burning haibun also in terms of that fragmentation, the art of losing and the art of transforming?

torrin a. greathouse: You know, in some ways, to keep going with these computing metaphors we've had going on, I think a lot about the idea that when you move files from certain types or compress them, there's such thing as lossy conversion.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mmm.

torrin a. greathouse: Where you lose more data from the file.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Whoa.

torrin a. greathouse: And I think about this a lot, particularly in the move from like a rich file type, like a PNG down to something like a jpeg.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: OK.

torrin a. greathouse: You always lose data that you can't regain. And in some ways, the erasure is a kind of poetic lossy conversion. I think this is very clear in the first published burning haibun. I don't think it's a particularly strong haiku. I have a lot of love for this poem. But you know, I've sat with it now for seven years. And, you know, looking at it, part of the reason that I've changed the way I enter the burning haibun as a form, is because I saw working in only one direction in that way, as creating a kind of loss where the end result is definitely not the strongest part of that poem.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mmm.

torrin a. greathouse: Whereas if I could seed those words from a planned haiku, it felt like there was less of a sense of loss in the translation between these different poetic gestures.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So the lossy conversion prevention includes now starting with the central haiku, building them out into longer versions of the poem, into that first part, into that second part. And, versus the first one, came from the full version being narrowed down. I wonder if there's an equivalent process for a poetry collection. For your first book, or now your upcoming second book, DEED, out next year, were they both created in the same way, having all the poems and then finding the core within them, versus knowing what would be the key, what would be the version of the book haiku, and then building around that.

torrin a. greathouse: Actually, a very fun way, I think the two books separately really represent those two versions of the process.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (GENTLY LAUGHS)

torrin a. greathouse: The first book I did have a kind of guiding idea. It really is, you know, a concerted four years of working toward a book, largely by working toward poems. I didn't find its key until the year before it was picked up for publication. And that was the, I'm forgetting the word. It's not titular. It's...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Eponymous.

torrin a. greathouse: Eponymous. Yes.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Eponymous.

torrin a. greathouse: Yeah. So the key of this book really came in the writing of the eponymous poem “Medusa with the Head of Perseus.” I often tell students when I go and visit classes, that this was the poem that made me realize I'd kind of been writing about intergenerational trauma the whole time and not realized that that was the core thread that held all of the other themes of the book together. On the other hand, as I was working on the second book, DEED, I had a very clear vision. I've actually been working on the second book for longer than the first. At this point, it's about eight years.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Whoa.

torrin a. greathouse: And as I entered the process of writing this book as a whole, I knew it was fundamentally a triptych.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mmm.

torrin a. greathouse: So a triptych for folks who don't know, is a form of religious art. I think maybe the most common kind of triptych is birth, life, and then crucifixion of Jesus. And I'm really interested in the triptych form and its relationship to Christianity as a cultural mythology. And because this is something that comes up frequently in my writing, particularly in this new book, I wanted to play with what it might mean to do this structure. I was thinking about the triptych mirror in which, you know three-paneled mirrors—the two on the sides partially reflect each other, and so looking into one, you can also see yourself in another. And so I wanted to play with how poems would relate across the span of a collection. And so the composition of the book also necessitated planning these relationships. And so it was very much built with a particular architecture in mind and knowing what I wanted the end product to be.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Do you think that you could have written DEED, your second book, if you hadn't first written Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, your first book?

torrin a. greathouse: I think it would have been a very different book.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

torrin a. greathouse: Most first books, to be frank, get picked up through the prize system, which in some ways necessitates writing your book differently. You'll see all kinds of advice online about frontloading a collection. Because, you know, the first-round readers might only read the first ten pages. The way I structured that first book, yes, it was about what I thought worked. But it also wasn't necessarily not to front-load those first ten pages and then to also make sure the back ten were very strong. There was a little reorganizing once it was already under contract. But in writing my second book, I didn't want to give up anything about, kind of artistic integrity of the book, for the more capitalistic elements of surviving as a writer.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, the incentives.

torrin a. greathouse: And you know, I'll admit, the book has been mostly done for about two years. And it took that long to get picked up. I think it's important to talk about this stuff because they're not things I ever heard when I was starting out. But not making those sacrifices against what my vision was, I think have paid off. I'm really happy with the way that this book has turned out in a way that, you know, I still love my first book. But there are ways now, looking back on it, there are things I would change. You know, almost any poet will say that looking back at their earlier work.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Poetry published a series of poems from your new book, DEED, which is out in 2024. “There's No Trace of the Word ‘Transgender” in Adrienne Rich's Biography” is one of them. I wonder if you would read this for us.

torrin a. greathouse: Yeah. So this poem, which was in part inspired by a tweet from the fantastic trans poet Jameson Fitzpatrick, responds to the publication of the biography The Power of Adrienne Rich by Hilary Holladay, which not only fails to reckon with Rich's complicity and helping Janice Raymond pen her famously transphobic manifesto, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, it utilizes Raymond as one of the primary sources. So I wanted to engage directly with Rich's poetry as a way of also playing around with this idea of legacy. So this poem remixes some lines from Rich's poems, “Diving into the Wreck” and “Song,” as well as utilizing a line from her essay “Women and Honor: Some notes on Lying.”

(READS POEM)

"There’s No Trace of the Word “Transgender” in Adrienne Rich’s Biography"

The term transsexual does not
appear—anywhere at all.
& this is how a history is written

out of itself. Blood bleached
from a cloth till no mark remains
but the chemical burn. Antonym

of a shadow. Lying is done
with words, & also with silence.
The book does not concern itself

with blood. Is best known for new
revelations about her sexual past.
It’s so easy for us to forget, history

& biography share no common root.
God knows, this is neither poem
nor myth nor biography, but
fact, with its gift for burning:

She helped to pen a book which
buried us; which named our gender
a Transsexual Empire—ever-expanding
border of “male” dominion. A metaphor

failing itself into a blade. They tried
to name us by a blade as well,
you know? Sappho by Surgery.

Scalpel-born dykes. They say
our bodies are violent by virtue
of breath. That to make our skin
livable is to render women down

to objects, to commit a kind of
theft. A misappropriation. They say
to claim our womanhood is nothing
less than an act of rape. Metaphor,

again, scraping its edges sharp.
Tasting blood. In the end the author
thanks her for her “Creative criticism,
& constant encouragement.” Her words

were purposeful. The words are maps.
I won’t forget the damage that was done.
The meds denied, surgery withheld,
the girls who suffered. But she’s dead

& unapologetic. Her violence buried
along with her. Our wounds rubbed
nameless as the stone of a grave.

& here I am—in the meaningless
wake of it—the thing she denied:
The girl & not the story of the girl
the thing herself & not the myth.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I remember first learning about Adrienne Rich's role in making white feminism an anti-trans space so actively. It was really disappointing not just about her, but to think that I never heard that when being taught her work or just until so many years later, and it wasn't in school. Was that something you were educated in initially? Was the biography a moment of accessing Rich's life in a different way?

torrin a. greathouse: Other than searching for any reference to this history, I didn't bother to read the entirety of this biography. I'm not particularly interested in acquainting myself with a revisionist history of Adrienne Rich as a figure. I think importantly, that biography, particularly was an entry point to the poem. But these were already things I was ruminating on. It was maybe not the best choice for my own emotional place, but I read the entirety of that transphobic manifesto—which it's long, it's really long—for this poem.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Whoa.

torrin a. greathouse: You know, in a lot of ways, I think it was a positive experience. Not the reading of it, but in reading that, I really became acquainted with a playbook that has not changed. That transphobes are still using in the same ways as they were in the 1970s.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

torrin a. greathouse: And that is a kind of baffling thing to me. That all of the transphobic laws that are being pushed now are built on the same rhetoric that was established then. One of the reasons that this poem and another poem which responds to a deeply transphobic poem by the poet Sharon Olds, are in this book, because I think particularly in this moment when legislatively transphobia is being pushed across the country, and this is the result of concerted efforts by supposedly radical feminists who have put themselves in the pocket of the right-wing, in the pocket of oftentimes fascists for the purposes of pushing a deeply transphobic agenda. You know, when this is so (SIGHS) it is a constant element of life right now. Today, the day of us recording this, it won't come out, you know, for a while. But today, a news story came out about a trans woman in Milan, Italy, being beaten and tortured in the streets by police. This kind of transphobic violence and rhetoric is being pushed worldwide, not just in the US. And I think given the political climate we're in right now and what that means as a trans woman, it feels deeply important to look back at the histories of these feminist poetic figures and, you know, in particular, and I think this is inextricable from it, these white feminist political figures. Because so much of transphobia is also tied up in white supremacy. I think it's important to look back at these histories, and not to let these women off the hook. And so this is among many things that this new book is trying to do. One of the missions is to really look at rhetoric existing among feminist writers, among medical institutions that reifies cultural transphobia.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think it's so true that there's this impulse that some may have to see writing differently, this note about letting people off the hook, when language is so key to state violence as well as the normalization in policy or in culture through language. And for writers who have been a part of that persecution, it feels so heinous and particularly important to focus, as you have, on the language, on the poem level, and in the ways that there is maybe hypocrisy or telling on the self on the part of some of these writings.

torrin a. greathouse: I think a lot about language in terms of its existence as a tool. You know, if we look at the history of humanity, so often, even in the absence of access to a weapon, tools have been remade outside of their purpose. This is actually a phenomenon talked about in terms of tool abuse. But so often, people have taken up things like pitchforks. And they become no longer a tool for moving hay, but a weapon. Language is the greatest tool humanity has ever made, and also quite possibly our most violent weapon. You know, I think this is particularly true of a settler colonial language like English, which is constructed on so many historical thefts and borrowings that exists in a really odd kind of phantom linguistic space. And so language is a thing that we as writers have to be particularly careful with. Because we are wielding a weapon or we are wielding a tool that if used wrong, if abused, becomes a weapon. And so in my own writing, as well as in my interaction with the writing of others, whether that's other poets, writers in the medical space, it's so important for me to think about this relation of weapon to tool. To make sure that not only am I bringing to task violences that have been done with language, but also to make sure that I am not doing violence. I think that's one of the most fundamental parts of our jobs as people who espouse a love and an interest and a lifelong investment in language.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I certainly agree. Identifying with power as well as the lack of power can be a really important way to contend with reality. There are emotional experiences that may lead toward one or the other, but to be able to hold both, I think, seems difficult and really important. Are there moments where that has kind of come to a head for you? Are there moments where you had to work with your role in a way that felt complicating or felt confusing?

torrin a. greathouse: Yeah. I mean, I think importantly, right, even as I talk about this politic in relation to language, this is not to say I don't fuck up. I am a human, and, like a young human, I have not been on the earth for that long, and you know, there are times I've messed up. There are times that I have caused harm with my writing. You know, I think about particularly in relation to disability politics, the way that so many layers of the way we think about metaphor are tied up in cultural ableism. You know, I've had to be called in by other disabled writers who occupy different identities. You know, like using deafness as a metaphor. It happens so often. And, you know, I've been guilty of this and have been called in and have changed this in my work. And I think it's important to address the fact that no matter how good our intentions are, we're gonna to screw up, we're gonna get things wrong. And the only thing that, you know, as people who espouse care for language, we can do from there, is fix it, is be better. You know, the poems that I had that made those audist kind of moves because I was undereducated, were, you know, they might have been published with that language and it was fixed by the time it was in my first book. This to me is deeply important. And I think there's such a fear of screwing up, of getting things wrong, that we sometimes freeze up. You know, fundamentally, no one's going to get it right 100% of the time. I can really only hope for like a good 85, and to have my ears – and even there, see, like this is a moment where I'm like moving toward a hearing framework --- but even when I screw up, just having a willingness to be corrected and to then correct myself.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Also, it's such an act of love, the fact that you had these poems that were in an early stage and you were able to have conversations that led you to understand the language differently and transform them before they were in your book, akes community, takes care, takes courage, and is such a way to connect and to care for your work and to care for you as a writer.

torrin a. greathouse: Yeah. And you know, this is one of the things that poetry has given as a gift to me, you know, to have all of these spaces of community. Almost all of my best friends are poets. And, you know, there's folks that I've got to grow alongside since, you know, I first started writing. And those friendships have nurtured me and taught me. And I'm sure the people closest to me would say the same. It has offered this space for constant intellectual and emotional and political growth. And I think I will never have a short acknowledgement section in a book because my work and my thought owes so much to the writers I've been lucky enough to surround myself with.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Was that always the case for you? Were you always surrounded by writers, or did that come to be once you were publishing and once you were in your MFA?

torrin a. greathouse: A lot of my early career was really quite in isolation. You know, I had an open mic I would go to, and some of the people associated with other readings around that. But, you know, I was in undergrad in Orange County at the time. It's not a great spot for poetry. You know, it's just a little geographically isolated. We don't really have access to the wealth that is the LA poetry scene. We don't really have access to the wealth that is the San Diego poetry scene. And so I kind of started as a poet in a bubble. And it was by publishing my own work and by running a small, now long-defunct magazine, that I was able to start creating these other relationships. You know, I think a lot about my relationship with the poet George Abraham. Incredible, incredible poet. And, you know, this is someone who I met because when I was running this little tiny lit mag out of my college apartment, we were one of the first places where they published. And now, this is one of the people who's in closest community with me, part of a collective of poets and multi-genre writers, artists, critics, etcetera, called the Double Six Collective. And this is a relationship I never could have guessed would exist as it does now. But it was really reliant on, at the time, just using the Internet to give myself community, even when I was in a kind of isolation where I didn't have enough community, where I physically was then.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, the internet. Seems like the Internet has been key for you and that you've also found ways to surprise yourself as this poet now, for what you would have imagined as a younger poet, as a starting poet. And those surprises hopefully give back to that time and to the efforts you made to build community. We are starting this new segment called Question into the Void. And we have a amazing question from Omar Sakar for you. It is a question that he gave not knowing to whom it would be played. And his question seemed really relevant to some of the work you're doing in terms of reconstituting and recreating language and envisioning English in a different way.

Omar Sakr: My name is Omar Sakr. My question for you is this: is restitution or reclamation through language genuinely possible, or are we fooling ourselves?

torrin a. greathouse: That's such a potent question.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

torrin a. greathouse: I really like that inclusion of, “are we fooling ourselves?” Because I don't know that I have an answer here. You know, I would like to believe it is. I would like to believe that when I take language that has cut me in the past and I use that, that it means something, that it does something. And I think maybe in my poetics, I am writing toward the hope that it might. I think that part of the mission of my poetics, at least as it stands with the second book, DEED, is to assert that maybe it does, you know, maybe we can take these words that have held violence and remake them. The opening poem of that book ends with this phrase to say, “When I tell you how beautiful you are, you riot laughter. Kiss me and call me a dyke. Your smile arrives day-bright and unburdens the slur of all its blood.” So I don't know if I have an answer, but I desperately, desperately hope that maybe we can remake this language, that we can take these words from that state as a weapon and make them a tool again.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There are two instances in Wound from the Mouth of Wound that seemed to do that kind of hoping, that respond to moments of so-called humor in a way that changes them. So there are two moments, very memorable, very painful, uh, jokes from a father and from a brother, that have a premise that are cruel—cruel to a trans speaker, to the existence of disability. To me, they sort of bookend the book. One is sort of near the front and one is almost at the end. And there's this grief in the experience of someone else's laugh. And it's a laugh that's not forgotten. It's something said so casually, but it is so infinite in the memory. It's terrorizing. The poems seem to change—in rewriting—what has happened, the premise of these interactions. Do you think comedy can be a guise for violence in this way, whether it's structural or interpersonal? And where do you think the play and the comedy can be a genuine mode of connection and of care?

torrin a. greathouse: So I know one of the other poets that you'll be talking to soon on the podcast, maybe before me – I don't know how it'll end up falling–but is the poet Douglas Kearney, who was actually my mentor in grad school. And as myself, being a deeply vested poet of metaphor, it's an interesting relationship. Because Doug is a poet who fundamentally disavows metaphor for its historical relation to violence, for the way in which insisting one thing is or is like another can be a rendering of a violence. And I think I'm trying, in those poems, to reverse that relationship. To take this thing that is said that is a violence, and by metaphorizing it and remaking its context to try and pull the violence from it. It's up to a reader whether the attempts of these poems are successful. It's up to history to peer review those readers. But I think that is the hope in those moments. That maybe I can take this thing, this mechanism of language, the metaphor that is potentially violent and use it to render something away from its violent state.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: OK, and Doug is so interested in humor and in how it can play a role in poetry or the presentation of poetry that that particularly seems like a great inversion to acknowledge. Your process is so collaborative and at the same time very individual, very personal. You have generously offered this prompt of the burning haibun to others, to the world. And I'm curious about your relationship to other people's prompts. Have you been prompted by mentors or teachers or friends in a way that's been impactful? Have any of your poems or styles come from prompts that you take, whether from poetry, video games, horror movies?

torrin a. greathouse: Yeah. My work, I think, is deeply intertextual at all times. You know, whether this is working with an epigraph from a poet I love working in the “after poem,” which is something I think will be inextricable from my work for a long time.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (CHUCKLES)

torrin a. greathouse: Whether it's ekphrasis and that mode of intertextuality, or even the horror movie and the jump scare, completely remade my relationship to specifically the Elizabethan sonnet. Because the more I looked at it, I was like, Oh, the Elizabethan sonnet is structured in the exact same way as a punch line in standup. Which is also the exact same structure as a jump scare in a horror movie. These things are all inextricably tied. And as, you know, an early poet who didn't have a ton of resources, a ton of teachers, you know, I think up to this point, I've had maybe like five people who I would consider fundamental teachers in my life as a writer. I found these legacies by looking at the notes and acknowledgements of books. By seeing, who is reading who? Who was taught by who. And if I loved a poet, I would read basically anyone I could get my hands on who is in that acknowledgements. And I hope in any project I put out from here to the moment I leave this big floating ball of earth, that folks who like my work will follow those tracks, will see the work of the people I love whose work has shaped me. I think for writers, especially teaching themselves, being autodidacts in isolation, is a beautiful resource to suddenly enter at least the ghost of a community.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: “The ghost of a community.” It's very encouraging to think about the front matter and the back matter of books being guidelines, being starting points for people who read your book, who read books that they love and connect to. There's a line in your book, “I feel most daughter.” There's another with, “the most woman I feel all day.” Are there instances or memories that make you feel most writer, that make you feel most teacher, that make you feel most reader?

torrin a. greathouse: I love to tell this story because it is a moment that really made me feel like very officially writerly. And that is a poem from the first book, “All I Ever Wanted to Be Is Nothing at All.” There is a line in this poem. So contextually the poem is about eating disorder and eating disorder’s relationship to my transness, although I did not know it at the time. There's a line, “Each calorie, a single match struck in the gut.” And I fact-checked this metaphor. I went back and I found, like, notes on physics when I was learning physics.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Whoa.

torrin a. greathouse: And I calculated what is the ignition temperature necessary to light a match, converted those units

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Research!

torrin a. greathouse: into calories. And then the calories have to convert into kilocalories because a food calorie is actually like a thousand energetic calories. And a lot of people don't realize this. And then, you know, calculated it out. It was like 0.867 whatever. So it was almost one. I was like, OK, so then the match struck is essentially a single calorie. OK, I can do this because I've checked my math.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mmmm. Right!

torrin a. greathouse: Yeah. And I don't know there's ways in which these engagements with my work that forced me to push outside of the bounds of just creating that require this relationship to inter-text, to making sure what I'm saying actually holds water. This to me is often where I feel the most writerly. Not necessarily like a good metaphor, but creating something which feels like it holds water and like it holds weight.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: For some reason, learning about your process of how to find out if this particular line holds water is making me think you're not one of the poets that really struggles with taxes.

torrin a. greathouse: Oh, no, no, taxes suck. The IRS has taken years of my life I will never get back.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's horrible. All the apps.

torrin a. greathouse: There's really something about getting to the point where you're successful enough as a poet, where you're actually making money, and then realizing you have to file as a self-owned business.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Employed. Yeah, self-employed.

torrin a. greathouse: And then they take all your money away.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes. It's a lot. Sorry to our listeners who are hoping that it's easy and fun and delicious money. To send our listeners off, do you have any favorite prompts or practice to give or do for poetry, especially thinking about summertime as often a time of rest, often a time of shifting. Any plans that you would suggest or practices that might be generative?

torrin a. greathouse: I'm not the most restful person. This is something I actually have to put active work toward,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

torrin a. greathouse: which maybe defeats the purpose of rest. For anyone listening to this podcast who is like an astrology person, I'm a triple Virgo and all of the problems in my life are caused by this. So I will give a prompt that unfortunately has nothing to do with resting and is maybe a little masochistic on the poetic side. So this comes from one of the people who I consider a former teacher, the poet Luther Hughes. It's a little modified because it doesn't have like poems to go along with it. But often as writers we kind of avoid saying what we mean. And I think one of the dangers, especially as a developing writer, is this avoidance, this writing in circles around the point. So: Think about the things you've written circles around in your recent poems. Think about the things lurking at the border of your poems that remain unsaid. Take those things and then find a way in a poem to just fucking say it. Because sometimes that is the thing that most needs to just, out loud, be said.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I Love that. Thank you so much! torrin, it was so nice to chat and hear so much about your process.

torrin a. greathouse: Thank you all.

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Cindy Juyoung Ok: A big thanks to torrin a. greathouse. torrin's debut collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound from Milkweed Editions in 2020 was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second collection, DEED, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in fall 2024. They teach at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the lo- residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. You can read an essay on the burning haibun form, which includes a writing prompt, in the July/August 2023 issue of poetry, as well as several poems from the forthcoming collection in the November 2022 issue in print and online. If you're not yet a subscriber to the magazine, there's a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. Ten book-length issues for $20. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. That's poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Reservoir, Alabaster de Plume, John McCowan, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Until next time, with cheers to our collaborators, teachers, and spies. Thanks for listening.