The Brooklyn Rail

Alexander Dickow: Dear Jay,

When I read Men and Sleep, and even before the explanatory note at the end of the book, I kept wondering about the process of its creation, which you announce succinctly just before the poems begin as a procedure of modified erasure. My question isn’t so much “what does that mean” as “what do you think of creative procedures in relation to the result?” In other words, should the procedure matter here? How should it inform our reading of the work? Do we read the work differently when we take its mode of creation into account, or is that procedure no longer really a part of the story by the time the reader reaches the published page, where the excised or modified text is no longer visible?

Jay Besemer: This is a damn good question! I know my own motives involved a desire to credit my sources, a sort of accountability. But I also have a desire to show what can be done with erasure, and to make my processes and poetics transparent. It’s political—I am not interested in preserving a kind of preciousness or secrecy about my work. 

But I also am very much about making it possible for readers (etc.) to drive their own experiences with my work, so there’s a tension sometimes between that and the desire to reveal my processes. Does knowing the process steer readers into a particular interpretation of the book? I think that may be another way to consider your question. I can’t answer for my own readers, but for myself, I am always interested in other poets’ processes. I come to poetry most of the time with an intense curiosity; I read as experience and that’s what I hope to offer my own readers—experiences. So I imagine that on the first read of my work, knowing the process will probably direct the reading … but subsequent readings may not be so directed. I write in hopes of multiple readings, because that’s how I read.

This invitation to multiple readings and experiences of a book feels like a good bridge into a question I have for you. I am intensely curious about how you decide to write in French or English—which linguistic room to enter, as it were, in any project. I know that as a reader/listener, I have very different experiences of your poems depending on which language carries them. That feels obvious to say, but I suspect it also comes into play quite early and deeply in your writing process. What kind of experience do you anticipate inviting readers to have in French as distinct from English? How do you, as someone comfortable writing in both, experience the poems happening in one or the other—is there an appreciable difference to you as the poet?

Dickow: I definitely feel the desire to provide a reading experience in the full sense of the term, and in multiple ways, and I do think that’s likewise a part of the switching back and forth between languages for me—it makes the single work multiple by way of (mis)translation, or even adaptation; it breaks open the work in a way. But I don’t always make versions in both languages, and how “I decide”—or how the work decides, I guess—to be in French or English, I’m not sure. My usual answer is that the reasons are utterly mysterious to me; it’s as though the work reaches out and says it needs to be in one or the other language. But since you’ve prompted me to think about it again, I wonder if Le Premier Souper didn’t need to be in French because it was a return to narrative. I hadn’t written anything strictly narrative, at least in prose, for some fifteen years or more when I came to writing Le Premier Souper, and it was a bit of a “défi,” a challenge that I set myself to do so. And it may be that I was sort of alienated from narrative writing, and that it was therefore easier to come back to it by way of French rather than through the language I wrote narrative in as a teenager. But I wouldn’t say the same for Déblais, for example, my collection of critical fragments, where it was a matter of the ease of dialoguing with a huge tradition of aphoristic writing in French. English just doesn’t have La Rochefoucauld, not to mention Max Jacob, Reverdy, Malcolm de Chazal or any number of other aphoristic practitioners. So it felt “right” to speak to that tradition in its own language. Each work has its own rationale, but I don’t think I have much insight into that rationale until long after I write the work—in the moment, a language just imposes itself. As for whether there’s an appreciable difference between writing in French or English, not that I can tell internally, but my career trajectory is different in each language, I’m sure—but there again, I can’t see it clearly and can only make guesses about how things are different. I’ve published more in French, at least, and I’m more well-recognized in France, whatever that means, and the vast majority of translation I’ve done has been from French to English rather than the reverse—mostly by accident, but I’m doubtless considered first a scholar and translator in English, and only secondly a poet. Perhaps I’ll work to balance things out; I would very much like to translate that damn novel into English. I just have to find the time….

Speaking of time, one of my favorite pieces from Theories of Performance was “The Clock.” And since I’m jumping to another topic (ostensibly), it seems worth diving right into a poem, headfirst. It seems to me this poem is as much about time as it is about living in a body, with lines like: “our / flesh sunk beneath fear / of itself and of flesh not like it” (though of course, in the very moment of quoting these lines, I’m suddenly struck by the homophone our/hour that seems encoded here). And alongside the clock is the emblem of the heart: “hear the heart / rattle within. what was once / a fond apple now tumbles / loose as stone in the torso.” I just love how these lines allude to a whole set of expressions or associations: the apple of one’s eye in “fond apple,” the stone heart, paradoxically here not at all indifferent or lacking sensitivity, quite the contrary—this stone rattling around in its rib cage seems full of some kind of pathos (though I suppose there’s also something jubilant in this percussive heart, like a tambourine). In any event, the body is a theme you return to time and again. And as someone who often feels sort of estranged from my own body, the theme often resonates strongly for me in your work. I’d like to leave this question as wide open as possible, but I guess the question would be something like this: how is “The Clock” about time, and/or the body? Would you consider these themes important to your work, and if so, how and why?

Besemer: I’m resistant to wordings of aboutness because I’ve found they set up expectations for a certain kind of cognition and language in what I make. Generally I use words like “engages” or “emerges from” to orient people within my work. This applies to the visual work too; you can’t take in my video pieces or my still images—photos, collage, painting—and come away certain of what any of them are “about.” But you can get a sense of what they do in you, and where they come from maybe, and where they take you.

So, if I may separate your question into two areas, I notice a curiosity about the specific poem “The Clock” and how two major poetic themes meet and take form within it. I think I’ll respond to the poem-specific query first. 

Recalling my process of writing this poem requires a trip back into hazy memory, because it was some… eight years ago, and it is not a poem that came from a documentary need to make language to hold an experience (unlike “Ramesh,” which is an actual dream account, or “He Falls,” which I talk about in the afterword.) Theories is a book of poems that came through me, as are the books of the trilogy I will talk about in a bit with the second part of your question. When I write in that way, I am a conduit rather than a pilot, if that makes sense. I am there to serve the poem that needs to be. It is not always possible or necessary to have my conscious, rational mind in play while I put a poem on paper. That’s one reason why I can’t claim a piece to be about something! Basically my memory wasn’t engaged for this poem, and I think I was playing with the tensions between social/artificial capitalist time, and the bodily and seasonal time that holds more sway in my life. This is actually a major theme in my work because it is a major source of stress and conflict in my life. My body’s time is imperative in my life, so I am not surprised that the bodily element in the poem is inextricable from the temporal. I remember being interested in the language used to describe a clock, and how its bodily allusions helped blur the line between clock and human. The clock and the human have hands we can raise in surrender or frustrated resignation, and I think the poem emerged from a place where I was very weary, very frustrated. The spareness of the piece is a typical distancing move on my part; I had to externalize and abstract something that was taking on an oppressive presence in my life at the time. 

My response to the second area of your inquiry also slops over into temporality, just as the first one oozed into the body. I actually laughed when I read the question about whether time and the body were important themes in my work, because it seemed such an understatement to say yes, no matter how emphatically i say it. :D But it is a very recent development, in the context of my overall working arc. I don’t often have a chance to talk about it from that angle, so thanks.

Before I began medical gender transition I tried very hard to keep bodily subjectivity out of my work. There were many reasons for this, among them basically being dissociated from the body I was inhabiting and its needs and realities, the conditions under which it existed internally. I say that because it is important background for what happened to my work when I began accessing regular health care, and the hormone therapy that resulted from/informed that process. It felt like I was suddenly thrust into a body. I mean, I had never had awareness of my body as anything cohesive, only as a set of circumstances and feelings that were all wrong in a way I couldn’t name or even fully experience. The now-standardized framing of the medical transition narrative completely obscures, for many people, the ongoing and concurrent transition to full awareness of, inhabiting and identifying with my disabled and autistic bodymind, which is also a trans male genderqueer and queer bodymind. 

The change in my bodymind came through as changes in my work too. The “trilogy” I mentioned, which I call the Home Planet trilogy, is a series of three books written sequentially (but not published that way) comprised of Telephone, Chelate and The Ways of the Monster. Because the bodily/neurological transformation of hormone therapy (and other adjustments and awarenesses) was so total and so—let us say—needfully disruptive, these books came to document the new and often terrifying physical experience of living in the world, where the world was as illegible to me as I was to the other humans I encountered. But it was not a series of “transition narratives”—these books were evocative, not descriptive, or at least not in the linear way some people expect. They are all/each one single long poem divided into segments, sections, relational flows, instead of collections of individual, discrete poems. It’s been about five years since the final book in the trilogy was published, and I think I can now say that the ongoing-ness, the relentlessness of the poems/books, was a reflection of the relentlessness and the indivisibility of the experiences of living in my body anew/for the first time, in a world that was as chaotic an exterior as my interior was—to the extent that I had trouble making a firm distinction between what was exterior and what was interior.

I want to return to something I said earlier about being a conduit for my work rather than a pilot, because I feel like it relates to what I’m going to ask next. I’m curious if your magic square of prose/poetry/French/English—at the process level—is informed at all by your sense of your role in or response to an understanding of what a project or poem or text needs to be. That’s very convoluted in wording. I guess I’m asking how much your form/language choices relate to your sense of what the work has to be, is becoming, and how you fit into that becoming. I tend to be very much a surrender-don’t-steer poet, but I find now, in the midst of this Erasmus erasure, I must take on a huge amount of “piloting” because either Erasmus or his translator in this volume, or both, have filled this text with so much packing material and so little variety of concrete nouns and verbs, that I must take a far more intentional role to get any kind of a draft out of the process. I am also intrigued by your suggestion that you ought to put Le Premier Souper into English. What makes you say so? Does the novel seem to want to try on English? Is it a matter of reaching your English readership/increasing the reach of your work? A hankering for the challenge? 

I guess that’s two questions! 

Dickow: I’ll answer the easy question first! It’s the latter, about why I ought to put Le Premier Souper into English. It’s definitely partly a desire to reach a broader readership, I can admit that. And I certainly always like a challenge. But there’s also a sense—utterly fictional, or factitious, and whose origin I’m unsure of—that all my work ought to be available in both languages—ultimately. That’s a sort of ideal, of a double-corpus, that mirrors itself. It’s unlikely to happen. I tried making an English version of Rhapsodie curieuse, and it just didn’t work. It felt clunky. But I still tried. Samuel Beckett was a self-translator, and complained relentlessly in his correspondence about the process, as though he too acted according to some obscure internal imperative.

I suppose this in some sense brings me to the other question, since I’m saying in essence that I don’t have complete control, that I have to obey what the work tells me needs to be done, on some level. I like the idea of the conduit, but I think of it a little more dialectically: it’s more like an active struggle with the material, interacting with it until it “sorts itself out”; there’s never complete control, and indeed, part of making a successful poem seems to me to involve relinquishing control and letting the material, the language, run the show. “Céder l’initiative aux mots,” as Mallarmé said. But I think that that relinquishing of control only happens after you’ve felt around and pushed and pulled a great deal (cf. John Dewey’s descriptions of artistic creation in Art as Experience). One starts as a pilot, and by the time one comes to rest and the poem emerges in its never-finished shape, one has become a conduit.

If I play with solecism, with “grammatical errors,” with oddball rhythms and awkward formulations, it’s in part because that approach to language allows me to let go a little more and figure out where the language will take me—rather than where I would like to take it. The goofiness, the jolting errors, foreground some small degree of humility, an essential and precious incompleteness of control—though from another angle, there’s nothing humble about my fondness for a certain kind of verbal pyrotechnics; I love the grand gestures and the bright lights in poetic language probably more than I ought to (a critic once told me, with a great deal of perspicacity I think, that there wasn’t always enough silence in my work).

To follow up on your wonderful response a little: I really wanted to ask about Theories of Performance, even though it’s an earlier volume, because it is, as you pointed out to me, quite different from Men and Sleep. It’s in some ways less spare—the sections of Men and Sleep are sometimes just a few lines, as if the words had condensed like dew. You mention things you were frustrated about or struggling with when you wrote the poems of Theories of Performance (or at least “The Clock”), but they struck me as often very exuberant, even ebullient at times. There’s certainly anguish and difficulty too—Theories is a diverse collection after all, where Men and Sleep felt more tightly woven to me, cohering as two very distinct poems rather than a series of shorter lyrics. But—regardless of theme—Theories often made me grin; it generated for me many moments of recognition. Men and Sleep felt different: when I read it I wanted to talk about ideas and the interesting things the language did; it didn’t generate the same sense of emotional complicity that Theories did, the sense of interconnected experiences. This might sound pretty vague or complicated, since I’m trying to articulate this on the fly! And I’m not setting up a hierarchy: I like both collections, and all the more so because they are different. But both books have this amazing “quotability”—I think it’s Valéry who talks in an essay about this quality of poetry—moments that resemble inscriptions that feel suddenly, ineluctably true. “to seek color / to learn how”: those are two of my favorite lines in Men and Sleep, because those two quests feel vitally necessary to me in my own life. Is that quotability, that capacity of words to inscribe themselves in memory and to feel true, something that you seek in words, either in your own poetry or that of other poets? I mean, is it deliberate? That’s not a very fair question to ask the “conduit,” but I’m wondering how this feature of your work reflects something about your core sensibility.

I also want to hear more about the Erasmus erasure project. In the past, I’ve been skeptical about erasure as a writing process, to be honest: but the proof here is in the pudding, as they say, and one ought not (as a friend once irritably told me) categorically exclude any form or writing procedure. In other words, not all erasures are created equal; each is a new project with new implications, new creative avenues, and new results. And therefore, I wonder how your erasure working with Erasmus is a different writing experience from the erasures you worked with in Men and Sleep.

I guess that makes two questions also!

Besemer: First thank you for the kindness of the “quotability” comment that led to the first part of the question (or first question). I take it as a compliment because quotability is also memorability; your comment suggests that the words and what they evoke stay in the body for a while, for a long time perhaps, and surface into awareness again and again. That is something I hope for in my work, yes, but it is not something I seek deliberately to pursue as a goal for the work. I may sometimes edit my language to become more precise and/or more evocative of bodily states and experiences, to pass along to readers/audiences. But the effort is to align the language with what the poem and the experience demands. Direct transmission is what I’m after, not description. Sometimes language must be stripped down, concentrated, for that. Other times it needs to be scrambled and chaotic. I suppose both of those modes supply quotable fragments! I know I get bits of my own poems stuck in my head long after publication. Incidentally, I read my own books like anyone else’s, repeatedly. I may get phrases and lines of my own stuck in my head, but the memory-phone is mostly off the hook when I try to pull up where the bits come from! I know this has to do with both how I write and the relationships of the books to one another.

I only just now caught what you said about Theories being an “earlier” book than Men and Sleep. It actually isn’t! It may have been published three years after Theories, but it was written between 2013–15 or so, and Theories was written 2015–17. I work on many projects at a time, using many methods of writing, and everything is at different stages. Given the realities of publishing schedules, reading periods, etc., as well as the relationship of writing to my overall cognitive processes, I simply can’t work on one book at a time. This means that a lot of my books leapfrog each other in publication order etc. I guess I can’t stick to a linear organization or mode of any kind ;D

It seems as though in general I tend to publish an erasure between the non-erasures, which I find interesting. That is semi-intentional at least in that, given the reading period schedule I mentioned, the erasures and non-erasures alternate in their readiness to be sent out, in relation to the reading periods. I’m not sure if that’s stable enough to be a schtick, though.

Speaking of erasures, you wanted to know about the Erasmus. To be honest, I’m trying to figure out myself why the experience was so different inside me, so your question helps. I think in many ways it is different because I am different. Now that you know how long ago I started what became Men and Sleep it may make sense; I am literally a different person now. I am also ten years older, and those were a brutal ten years. My progressive illnesses have progressed. I am far more cognitively compromised than I was ten years ago. The physical process of word selection in the source text(s) is that much more draining. But also, frankly, I find the type of language use and the humor in the original (In Praise of Folly) to be not to my taste at all. Some may be down to my neurological alignment—the kind of snark Erasmus embraces tends to fall flat with some autistic people. But whether autism is in play here or not, I found the text itself frustrating to engage in a way I couldn’t put my finger on.

I’m going to expose some elements of my erasure process to you, which will also touch on your “proof is in the pudding” observation, but it is mainly in service of trying to figure out why the damn thing frustrated me so. I’ve referred to erasure as a type of formal constraint like a sestina, but in the process of generating the first draft (inside the source text itself), it is also a word puzzle. You might say that the resulting draft is the “solution” to the puzzle. I allow myself various “cheats” depending on the text’s own limitations. For example, I will mine individual letters to force a word or a word order I desire, which is often necessary in a dull or plodding or unvaried source text. I found myself doing this a lot in this case, because as I mentioned elsewhere, the version of Folly I had access to has a dearth of concrete nouns and verbs in variety. I really did feel I was fighting with Erasmus to get this draft together! 

I think this relates to your pudding observation because I think the less interesting erasures are too dominated by the limitations of the source text. It’s true that the source text will overwhelmingly influence the direction and the tone, the “feel” of an erasure, also the flow of it. But if the poet stays too bound by the source, tries to preserve too much of it, that is not going to work. I think a lot of people were "taught" erasure in this way—that they should make sure the source is reflected or preserved. I have been doing this for far longer than it ever was acknowledged as a methodology in MFA programs (like, in other words, since I was a kid) and I’m damn good at it. If I let Erasmus’ limited vocabulary in this text limit my poem in turn, I’m not following the evolving poem’s needs. I feel that the most honest erasures transform and transcend their sources, and that’s what this poem wanted to do. I can use the words Erasmus (his translator, actually) curated, but I don’t need to use them as he did—in fact, it is imperative that I do not!

Here’s what I mean:

Assuming you can read my scrawl! (I plan to send you the whole thing when I type it up, by the way—I normally don’t share manuscripts but since you did me that honor I want to reciprocate, and you have a special connection to this one, I think). Here I have transformed his words/letters into a self-teasing ars poetica that also swaps in my own sense of humor. 

So this is a nice connection to what you talk about here: 

If I play with solecism, with “grammatical errors,” with oddball rhythms and awkward formulations, it’s in part because that approach to language allows me to let go a little more and figure out where the language will take me—rather than where I would like to take it. The goofiness, the jolting errors, foreground some small degree of humility, an essential and precious incompleteness of control….

I’d like to ask about the origin of your “grammatical error” mode, and how you came to use it. I think you do this effectively, which is difficult to do. It seems to unlock something in the language and allow for a freer association in the reader/audience—and from what you say above, it seems in the poet too. Can you say more about your sense of the (poetic? general?) power of deliberate "error"?

Dickow: The “quotability” remark was absolutely meant as a positive comment, and memorability is definitely a big part of that. And I can understand finding Erasmus frustrating: the slippery ironies—I think often subtler and more ambiguous than snark, though he’s certainly got plenty of that in In Praise of Folly—could feel tiresome and relentless to more than one reader, autistic or not; it’s a certain kind of snide humor that’s so clearly meant for a kind of intellectual elite (European humanists of the sixteenth century, I mean). And it’s a work of theme and variation, which can feel repetitive—the series of examples. I wonder what you’d think of Rabelais, who is a crucial figure for me, and was an admirer of Erasmus (I think they corresponded). Rabelais is extremely lettered—so much so that he’s often considered the hardest writer in the French language because of the density of allusions and learned references, and the sophistication of his literary games—but it’s also scatological and full of jubilatory language, and it’s much more fleshy than Erasmus—there have been many writings about Rabelais as a writer of the body. You probably know all of this already, but our readers might not know about Rabelais’s work. Have you encountered Rabelais in your readings?

I guess that’s already a question, but in the interest of letting the conversation evolve, I’ll leave it there to take or leave. You asked me about the origins of my use of “deliberate error” (though the term “deliberate” might leave something to be desired—a friend once compared my technique to Pollock’s “all-over” painting technique, and there’s something to that; there’s a necessary element of the accidental in my approach to language when I’m working at this stylistic angle). So how did I find it? It was an example of how the creative process feeds back into the work, recursively: at some point I realized that I was editing out all sorts of interesting linguistic experiments from the poems I was writing. So I started looking at the material I had been throwing out, and saw patterns—especially the temptation to break out of the grammatical molds I felt I had to work within. So I picked up all that debris and ran with it. On some level, this sounds kind of similar to what you’re describing with the erasures—that people feel the need to stick to the text as though it were dictating the rules; your creative process reintroduces a certain transgressive dimension into the erasure process. Transgression is, for me, intimately tied to the poetic process. That doesn’t mean the final work needs to “shock” the reader, à la Dada (though I have long admired Tzara, as you know). But the process needs to shake itself free of our own expectations, and that can only happen by disobeying internalized rules and regulations. And as soon as you shake off the rules and regulations, new ones immediately congeal over the old ones, and the process starts again. My process is trying to work my way out of what I expect from myself and from the language, over and over.

As for the “(general or poetic) power of deliberate error,” I’ve written a little about this in my book Déblais, a collection of critical fragments or aphorisms (in French, from Louise Bottu, 2021). The translation of this particular fragment appears in Plume:

What happens when a reader faces a poem stuffed with agrammaticalities, but which allows her to guess at a more or less coherent meaning beneath the veil of solecism? In such cases, meaning no longer corresponds to what is written in black and white; an abyss opens between the words as such and the meaning constructed. The words do not add up, and yet a perfectly understandable meaning emerges from them. This abyss between words and meaning attracts me constantly as a sort of realized impossibility, for is it not words, and what is written, that leads us to meaning? How can this kind of poetic mitosis, this doubling by which the poem seems both haywire and sensible, possibly occur?

But this fragment doesn’t address what’s “poetic” about this kind of thing. I don’t think poetic language is fundamentally different from ordinary language. The scholar Philip Mills discusses the poetic as something “viral” that’s already encoded into ordinary language; people are constantly being linguistically creative, and poetry just harnesses lots of those potentialities that are already there at work in everyday speech. That’s the case with what I describe here also. One of the reasons that what I do with grammar can work is that so much of our language is based on implicit scripts that dictate what we say. So we can recognize a script at work even when it’s garbled or distorted. The garbling or distortion might be a sort of estrangement (ostranenie, Shklovsky’s term); we take a detour to get to something fundamentally familiar, and that makes us look twice at that familiar something. Look at how weird our exchanges are! They’re pretty weird. Arbitrary, but programmed into us. Hence “Airlines,” based on the spiel that crewmembers give at the beginning of flights, or “Postcard,” based on the vacationer’s missive, or “Examen de littérature” based on college exam questions, or any number of other poems I’ve done. Some are less bound by these scripts than others, of course, but they inform a lot of my work.

Do you think you work with these kinds of internalized linguistic scripts? Does transgressing these, or transgression in general, figure into your own poetic process in similar ways?

Besemer: Wow. 

I’m attempting to be concise here in the interests of pages/word count, but if there’s anything you think should be clarified in what follows, let me know. I wanted to take my time with this response partly because your questions wrap up and come full circle in a way that also gently reveals the overlaps and resonances in our apparently disparate poetics. I think there’s no surprise there, for us, but the surprise may be beguiling for others. I think your Rabelais question is pertinent though in an indirect way, as is my relationship with Rabelais. I know him mostly through Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, which is useful for my “fool studies” efforts. That’s why I began working with Erasmus, but I have not decided whether to attempt an erasure of Rabelais. Though now that you ask, I am perversely tempted to attempt it… I realize I can read the work without trying to derive an erasure from it, but because erasure is a form of reading, and because I can often use that method to empower my completion of a reading project I am resistant to but want to finish, I may do so. It’s like a lifejacket.

I agree with the Mills assertion that poetic language is “encoded” in the everyday; yes, certainly. Interestingly enough my “everyday” is poetic language. I am not terribly good at communicative “functional” language. Social language is not my strength; some of this is about neurology (I miss social cues; I do not easily internalize the scripts you describe; I attempt to move in the social/functional world using the “poetic” language that makes sense to me and how I experience things/words/sensations but that others usually can’t make useful sense of). So in some ways, I can’t help but transgress the scripts. To do otherwise, to switch into communication and other social modes that non-autistic people employ and take for granted, is what autists call “masking.” It’s only sometimes possible for me and always is exhausting. It’s why teaching undergrad rhet. and writing damaged me so much.

I have always been interested in transgressive language use, though. For whatever reason. We know about my passion for Tzara, who I know made more transgressive use of language for his entire poetic career than most people are aware of who don’t look much at his post-Dada work. My erasure modes are always motivated, to some degree, by my desire to slice away the normative/functional communicative language to reveal some of the poetic gem beneath. As I’ve gotten older I seem to have less patience for what I experience as the fluff, the mulch of communicative grease. Just as with any bureaucratic transaction, I don’t want the excess, I don’t want the script emerging from normative “customer service” modes that attempt to make small talk or “polite” performances of, say, condolence or sympathy. I want information, I want action, not a bloody teatime! I think perhaps an impatient poet is one of the oddest animals in the bestiary….

Your linking of “garbling” or “distortion” of internalized scripts to Shklovsky’s “estrangement” makes me think of Brecht’s “alienation effect” wherein the audience member is made aware that they are looking at a play, a performed artwork, and not eavesdropping on a piece of life. The repetition of a realistic scene wasn’t going to work with what he was attempting for his plays. My own theater training is more in that Brechtian tradition, from former members of Bread & Puppet and San Francisco Mime Troupe. I think the connection between my theater involvement, my poets’ theater affiliation, the types of language transgression I employ, and my Fool practice (and aforementioned fool studies) are all relevant here because they emerge from a sort of lifelong attempt to work with language and movement in ways that empower me, others, and the transformation of both tools (like language) and society. Because of who and what I am, all of that is necessary. 

I generally resist the pull of linguistic elision of or play on “trans” in the gendered embodiment sense with “trans-” words like transgression and transformation. But they have the etymological connection, and that elision has also been functionally imposed upon me as a trans person attempting to live in increasingly hostile contexts. Trans embodiment demands transgression of scripts and transformation of language. Life is impossible otherwise. Particularly for the way I do gender (which is not always obvious on my exterior), “garbling” of a gender script makes sense as much as “garbling” of a language script. In both my gendered embodiment and my language use as a poet etc., I must garble and distort to be effective. When the normative word/mode will not suffice, we must twist and rearrange, turn it on its head (or ourselves), run it back to front, get underneath or in between—because we can never, never could, take it for granted. I must take apart received notions and the language they determine. It is not revenge or destruction. I’m trying to find a place to live.

Alexander Dickow is professor of French at Virginia Tech. He writes in French and English. Recent works include a series of aphorisms or critical fragments in French, Déblais (Louise Bottu, 2021). His long narrative/dramatic poem Hob’s Game is seeking a publisher now. He is also a translator, and a literary scholar.

Poet and artist Jay Besemer is the author of numerous poetry collections, including [Your Tongue Is as Long as a Tuesday] (Knife/Fork/Book 2023); Men and Sleep (Meekling Press 2023); the double chapbook Wounded Buildings/Simple Machines (Another New Calligraphy 2022) and Theories of Performance (The Lettered Streets Press, 2020)). He was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry, and a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Find him online at www.jaybesemer.net and on Twitter and Bluesky @divinetailor.