[Jazz music plays]

Avren: From Dublin, California. This is Waves Breaking, the podcast in which I, Avren
Keating, talk to and converse with my contemporaries of trans and gender variant poetry.
Today's guest is Joy Ladin. Joy is the author of seven books of poetry, including the
recently published Impersonation, which we are going to be talking about quite a bit.
She's the Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transmigration, and a Ford Fives Award
Winner for Coming to Life, her memoir of gender transition. Through the Door of Life
was a 2012 National Jewish Book Award Finalist. Her poetry has appeared in many
publications, including The American Poetry Review--and she has spoken about gender
identity issues around the country and was featured NPR's On Being with Krista Tippett
and other NPR Programs. She holds the David and Ruth Gottesman chair in English at
Stern College of Yeshiva University and has also taught creative writing at Sarah
Lawrence College and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Avren: Hello, Joy, and welcome to Waves Breaking. It's so nice to have you.
Joy: It's great to be here.
Avren: I just finished up Impersonation and I was wondering if you could talk to me
about how you compiled the work? I know that it's in a sense a retrospective on poems
that you composed before transition, and then during. Could you talk about that?
Joy: Yeah. And compiled is a really good way to put it. I've never done a book exactly
that way before. So I had the usual first book experience of you keep writing and revising
and throwing things out, and when people accept whatever is left at any given moment,
that's your first book. SoI went through that process, and it wasn't really a compilation
process it was just this process of, "Well until I have a second book, I guess I'm writing
my first book." So, a few things survived overit was a long time, so a few things
survived and other things were added to. But it didn't have any architecture other than
happenstance. And there was my second book, The Book of Anna, was reallyended up
being a kind of novel-in-verse sort of thing, that was a focused project. That made me
feel great, to know what I was doing for five years. That was awesome. And then, when I
was finished, I really had started gender transition. And, there was this little break. Once I
started getting into the transition process, I just wrote all the time and I wrote a bunch of
books. And they kind of came out in these blocks thatone of my books was written in a
couple of months during the summer. Soit released a huge amount of creative energy,
perhaps it suppressed a certain amount of editing and critical energy, now that I think
about how much stuff I published in such a short time. But those things were bound
together because they were kind ofof a piece...it was the stuff I was concerned about.
But right after The Book of Anna and before I started the transition process, that during
which I wrote the poems in Transmigration, my third book, I was in this strange position
of saying to myself, "Well, okay. I've spent five years kind of surviving by writing in the
voice of Anna, this female fictional character. She's writing about horrible stuff but I was
a great time. Partly just because of the formal experimentation she pushed me into. But
also because I had this way of, you know, making alive some part of my female gender

identification. Even though Anna wasn't me. And when I wrote, I could write in the first
person. And the first person referred to, not to me, but actually somebody smarter than I
am. But, you knowto this female person. And I could evenI shared those poems with
my, then wife. Who was definitely not somebody who was into my being trans. But she
was very enthusiastic and encouraging about the poems, and she helped me with them.
And she didn't have any problems with this. It was a way of sort of publicly expressing
my female gender identity without publicly expressing my female gender identity. So
then it stops. And it's over. It's done. And...(whispers) I was like, "Do I go back to writing
as a guy? What a drag. What do I do now?" And, it would be stupid to say, "Whoa. Why
don't I make up another female character in another city?" That didn't make any sense
either. I had probably a couple of years of writing thekind of the poems that came to
me. And they were an odd assortment. Some of them were father-focused poems. And,
just I had before The Book of Anna, I was writing persona poems, which would enable me
to write in the first person, without it being the first person. And these were poems from a
mostly, from a male perspective. So that was one kind of poem I was doing. I was always
taken with Biblical language. In The Book of Anna, isshe's obsessed with...making
Biblical language tell her particularly horrible story that's kind of her revenge on God. I
wasn't doing that anymore, but Iwhen I was growing up, Biblical language was my
only example of language that had the force of poetry, that had cultural authority. Limited
cultural authority, it still had wide resonance. Nobody I knew read poetry. So I went,
"Okay. Well, I'll do something like that." And so I took Psalms that I liked and I wrote
sort of riffs on lines of those Psalms. And, as before The Book of Anna, those were also a
lot about not being able to be really alive. It was disappointing. It was likeI'd gone
through this whole thing. Anna figures out a way to not kill herself. But as soon as she
was gone, I was back in the same thing of...I'm writing poetry that's reflecting a vision of
life, is something that essentially, that you can't do. Or when you have a chance, you
chose not to do it. I did a lot of work of that kind. And then, I let myself write a poem in
the voice Batsheva, the woman that King David messes around with andit's not so
much the adultery thing that's scummy about what he does, as he's married, but he's
allowed to have as many wives as he wants. She's also married to a guy who's one of his
major military figures who's on the front lines. And he lets it be known, that it would be
convenient if her husband was placed at the part of the battle where he's most likely to be
killed. And he is killed, and then David swoops down and takes her. So I'm writing in the
voice of Batsheva, it's a persona poem. It's very much from the perspective of somebody
who's trapped and has nowhere to go. I shared it with a friend that I had made in Israel
and we'd stayed in touch. And she said, "Yeah. It's really strange, because in the Batsheva
poem, and when you've shown me poems that you've written in the voice of a women,
they seem to have to have this soul power to them. Do you have some kind of odd
relationship to gender?" And I said, "Yes. You know, it's complicated." And she said, "Oh,
you mean it's theoretically complicated?" I guess she figured, I don't know what. I was
reading Judith Butler, or so(Avren laughs) I don't know what sheI said, "No. It's not
really that. We should talk about that." And so, that directly led to her being the first
person that I came out to as trans, at this phase, I was on the cusp of transition. She was
the one who...suggested that I not kill myself, and that maybe I should see a therapist.
She did many other helpful suggestions. She became the designated friend and lifeline for
a while. And it's amazing to me that that poem and the poems from that periodbut that

poem in particular got me into transitionliterally because it connected me with

somebody that I could talk to as myself, even though she, nor really I, understood what I
was talking about. She'd never heard of trans people. And I'd only heard of myself. So it
wasn't that I was saying that I'm a kind of a person. There are poems from that part of my
life which is really my end of my life as a man and, and this tentative torture, some way
to kind of write about this without writing about this.
[melodic keyboard music plays]
Joy: This is called Batsheva's Version and it begins with an epigraph from The Book of
Kings that explains the backstory.
When King David of Israel saw the wife of his captain
Uriah bathing on her roof, he arranged for her husband to be
killed in battle and married her. The prophet Natan came to tell
the King he had brought Gods wrath upon the child he had
fathered. So the Book of Samuel says. This is Batshevas version.

The king came and the child came. Came

and was taken. I had come to bathe
in the rooftop pool,
sunstruck water
winking toward the palace roof
where the king came to survey

the city God had given. A sunstruck turn

of naked shoulder
hid my fullness from him
As I straightened the hair
knotted between my shoulders
he came to desire
what I had not come
to give him.
Day after day, I turned my breasts
and face away
so that he came to believe
I wanted him to want

the fullness
I had hidden. He could not see
why I came so often
if I did not come
for him. A single body, a single life,
had come to stand
for all that refused
to give itself to him.
A life that could be taken.
Soldiers came
to take me to the palace, a sudden widow
the king desired
to take under the wing
of his compassion. He could not grasp
what he had taken
but something, some fullness came
to weigh on his imagination
as my stomach came
to sway beyond my breasts.
The maidservants whispered.
Only then did he guess:
the child came
from the fullness
that would never come to fill him
now that God had come to despise him.
I knew the king would come to grieve
the ruin of the child
who came, who had only come
to make him see
the fullness God had hidden.

Joy: [melodic music plays] The first step of my transition process really was all on paper,
was all about writing. Because of course you know, you can't change genders unless you
can figure out how you're going to write from the different gender position. Everybody

knows that, like if you go to any doctor they'll say, "Well, we can't talk about hormones
until you figure out how you're going to write poetry."
Avren: (laughs) Or yeah, live as a...as a poet
Joy: (laughing) Right! Exactly!
Avren: (laughing) Full time.
Joy: Right.
Avren: Right.
Joy: Mind bogglingly stupid, but very me, because poetry was the only way that I'd
really ever been very alive. So that was top of my list of how am I going to do that in my
attempt to think about that, I thought well, "This is a really too stupid a question to ask
even Annie," the friend that I was mentioning. I can't say, "So how do you write as the
woman?" I knew that was dippity[sic], but II was commuting to New York. I was in the
New Haven, Connecticut train stationthey have these free newspapers. And for a short
time, there was a newspaper called Woman that was written by and for women. I think it
lasted about fifteen minutes. But as I'm thinking about his, how do you write as a
woman? What can you...I'm looking at this and seeing woman and free. And since I had
no money for transition, the combination was good. "Oh, I'll take this." And I'll only write
poems that use language from this publication. This is kind of like certified woman
language
Avren: Hmm.
Joy: I have no idea if or how this will be different, but it kind of won't be my fault. This
won't be my stereotype of what woman's language might bethis because
it's passed through these filters; it's by women for women. Of course, it's badly written
but that's okay. I'll create the sentences; they'll just give me the vocabulary. And it was
indeed very badly written. But to my surprise, the language was utterly different than the
vocabulary that I'd allowed myself in writing poetry. Not because it was so femme, but
because mythe self-inflicted wound of being terrified of doing anything that might
reveal that I was trans, had led me to label more and more and more of life as stuff I
should avoid because it might give away my female gender identity. Color words, I didn't
use color words because you know, color as you know is something that only women
perceive in certain(Avren laughs) only a woman wouldreveal that she had perceived
color.
Avren: I'm smiling because it seems so obviously untrue, but at the same time when you
internalize that, it is so true.
Joy: Yes!

Avren: So I understand that pain that comes along with that. But I'm smiling too because
I recognize now the joy in getting that out, you know
Joy: Yeah! It was like this whole other universe. [cell phone noise] William Carlos
Williams says, "A new line is a new mind." So he was always focused on what it meant to
write a line of poetry, essentially if you were not organizing it in terms of traditional
prosody. It's not what we remember him for, but that was one of his driving problems.
And his theory was that if you can imagine a new kind of poetic line, that'll bring you to a
whole new way of thinking. And...I think he says a lot of things that are questionable,
truth, value. But, it is true that new words give you access to new ways of being alive,
newrealms of human experience. So, when not using these words in my poetry, I was
saying, "Oh, my poems are not going to touch in all of these areas of human experience.
So, why is it that I could only write poems about not being able to live? Well, if you can't
use emotional words, and you can't use color words, and you can't use texture words, and
you can't use smell words, and you can't talk about relationships, and...you know what I
mean? What do you have left?
Avren: Right.
Joy: That would bethat would represent being alive?
Avren: It reminds me of my dadwas a very macho man kind of guy. And I had a
stepbrother and (sighs) due to the incredibly limited sources of entertainment in my
childhood, my stepbrother and stepsister were arguing about a color of a towel on my
mom's porch. And my stepbrother goes, "No, it's fuchsia!" And my dad turns around to
look at him and says, "Men only see in primary colors."
Joy: Whoa!
Avren: "Men only talk about primary colors." So, it's really interesting how in trying to
navigate what you can and cannot talk about in poetry, how much of that is also a
reflection of how you navigate being and seeing in the world too.
Joy: Yes! And you've made me realize that I wasI was trying to pass to your father
Avren: Mm hmm.
Joy: In avoiding these kinds of words. I was really accepting his roles of the game.
Avren: Yeah. And how toxic that is...It's definitely readable, especially in the first section
of Impersonation, where there's so much pain in the lifelessness of these characters, that
doesn't really come out until this one poem where the speaker is the voice of this
feminine envisioning of God.
Joy: Blind Date with the Shekinah.

Avren: Yes, yes! That one! And that's the one where besides the Batsheva poem, where I
really see this in your poetics, a changing of what "impersonation" isif you could talk
about that a little more.
Joy: Yeah, absolutely. That poem was one of my efforts to ask the question of how do I
write if I'm gonna write as a woman, after Anna, was...well, what if I write as this kind of
character, even if it's not part of a whole novel kind of thing. And, I spent five years
thinking of writing as a woman, as thinking of writing as an extremely pissed off smarter
than Baal kind of woman. So that really came out of that. But imagining meaning that as
the Shekinah is what marked it as something different, as being the life-force, being
something that's divine in life that is being assaulted by the man, who's kind of too
they're having sex but there's no ground of needing between them and it's penetration
without any inter-penetration. And he turns away and leaves. And she's still there. That
for me was flipping the script from identifying with the perspective of being stuck in this
dead male persona, with this way of actually being alive, always watching that walk out
the door and not being able to follow. Suddenly, I'm writing from the perspective of that
aliveness, of a very unhappy version of one. But, it wasn'twhen I was writing it, it
wasn't about transition any more than Batsheva is. And it is a static unsatisfying situation,
there isshe's the Shekinah but it's not like she gets to do anything, other than have a bad
date and get left. So when I started writing these poems using words from women's
magazines that are in the second section, "Transitive Venus," it was like Dorothy going
from Kansas and stepping out in Oz. Suddenly my poems were filled with all of this stuff
that they had never had in them before. And, I couldn't...claim it. And it was
overwhelming. I couldn't say, "I," and write using that language. That was like, too much
to me. But one of the things that I noticed was that in this magazine and a lot of other
magazines that I started picking up, it's much more common for people to be writing in
the second person. Women's magazines areare based on the idea that what's important
is that somebody is telling you what you should do. And what you shouldn't do, and what
you should know. And, what you probably feel like you should you know, but have never
really learned, and figured out, and here are the twelve things you should after a breakup. And here are the six things you should eat if you want to lose weight. And here are
five easy outfits for a party night to dress up without looking like you were trying to dress
up. So to me it was very hardening that people who'd been born and raised female, had
this kind of amnesia where every month they needed to be re-taught all of the basic things
about getting dressed and having a relationship, and putting on lipstick, like apparently
those things nobody had every learned them. You had to reread them and relearn them
every month, being a woman means having sort of short-term memory. (both laugh)
Avren: Yeah, yeah.
Joy: I can do that! II don't know any of this stuff, so if ignorance is what qualifies you,
I'm already halfway there. But the thing that I noticed as a poet was American poets have
a tremendous difficulty claiming rhetorical authority. Speaking with authority about what
is and saying we mean it...that is all you know on earth and all you need to know, like the
voice of the Grecian Urn at the end of the Keats' poem. If you think about a lot of premodernist poetry, that kind of authority is really common. I studied the modernist poets, I

did a critical study of them for my PhD, and so my driving question is: what happens to
authority during modernism? Because you can really see like the before and the after, as
kind of growing up in poetry workshops, I knew that you weren't supposed to talk about
anything with authority except your own experience. Any other time you used
authoritative language, you had to use it ironically; collage and juxtapose it, make it clear
that you were using the discourse of banking but not that you actually were a banker.
Right?
Avren: Mm hmm.
Joy: Or use the discourse of medicine but you're not really a doctor telling people what to
do. But actually, in 19th century American poetry, if you go back, which almost nobody
does and read the normal onesnot Whitman and Dickenson, but the ones who were
really popular in the 19th century. They're all telling people what to do all the time.
Avren: Huh.
Joy: And in fact, Edgar Allan Poe was a marvelous critic, trashed somebody...I can't
remember. He read the book and he said, "You know the problem with this book is it just
simply is not clear enough about its moral prescriptions. So it's not fulfilling what poetry
is doing." It was taken for granted that poetry had authority, had absolute cultural
authority. And so poets were responsible for the content. And if a poem had immoral
content, of it simply did not have sufficient moral contentthis is particularly after the
Civil War, things started shifting and you started getting more of aestheticism in poetry.
It's very interesting that when I went back and sort of tried to figure out where did this
modernist that stuff that happens in the teens and twenties, where did it come from? And
reading the stuff that goes guys grew up on, it was much more complex than I had
realized. So there was this enormous amount of authority that poetry had, it lost its
cultural position. The modernists, they all started trying to write like 19th century poets.
If you read early Williams, which nobody should really do, but if you do, you see that
he's trying to imitate Keats. And Pound is trying to imitate Browning. They're all trying to
be somebody else who had authority, for the folks that the admired when they were
growing up. And they couldn't do that. And so they developed these modernist techniques
of what Robert Pinsky called, "saying but not saying."
Avren: I wonder if this has to do with poetry's relationship with spirituality and religion.
Joy: Mmm.
Avren: I'm thinking about really ancient poets, like Rumi or then I'm thinking further
along, like John Donne and stuff. And it's like when they are speaking with authority, it's
often because they're speaking with a clear spiritual grounding. Whereas I feel like a lot
of what was lost in the early century was this connection to spirituality, especially in the
wake of World War I. But I do thinkit's interesting to think about this, in the sense of
I'm thinking about Marianne Moore, and maybe this has a lot to do...I'm reading this giant
biography of Marianne Moore right now too. And I've always loved her

book, Observations. She speaks with a lot of authority, which is maybe what clashed
quite a bit with her in terms of the other modernists. So the period, and why a lot of the
critics kind of took her down, because in one sense she is borrowing this language from
other specialists in whatever field she's using cull into her own work...Anyway, I'm sorry.
I don't know why I just started talking about her right now
Joy: No, that'sashe's a really cool example. Actually, she was fast tracked. First of
all, as...my research can tell, she was the first one who published what we would call "a
modernist poem."
Avren: Mm hmm.
Joy: Post-Modernist in retrospect. She made it into print first. She's not usually credited.
Pound and Elliot were still floundering around on the cusp. But she is a perfect example.
Because those quotation marks and the collaging of it, she speaks with great authority but
not in a way that is paraphrasable.
Avren: Mm hmm.
Joy: So she speaks from a kind of authority but it's in, I think her, her best work, the
poems in Observations. There seems to be this wellspring of really old fashioned 19th
century moral authority, but it'sbut you can't actually trace the kind of sense that you
get in a 19th century poem. Theshe has what Robert Frost, really nailed it, called "the
sound of sense." And she has it earlier and in far more abundance than the boys who
came after her, because she really has distilled it. She's like writing the footnotes for a
book whose text is lost or something. You know that it's there somewhere.
Avren: Right. I'm thinking about authority in terms of your work too. Especially in the
second section, where I did notice that there was a lot of this second person perspective.
And, I think there is more authority. Actually, it's weird. The "you" that is being told what
to do also has more agency, in a strange way. It's like you found this complication or this
contradiction in this language that you were being influenced by from this magazine. In a
sense of women being told what to do, women having...what is perceived to be like a
cultural amnesia due to...having to constantly shift for the male gaze. Right? But, you
manage to bring up, to bubble forth this real sense of strength and agency in the
characters in the second part.
Joy: Thank you. What I felt was that the split that I was seeing this these women's
magazines, that is as long as you're telling somebody else what to do, you have no
absolute authority. But you know everything about them. You wake up in the morning
and you feel like this. And you are wondering, "How will I ever get through the day, if I
feel like this first thing in the morning?" "Don't worry. I am going to tell you what to do."
(laughs) For them, "you" really is "you." But it's also a phenomenological "you." Because
part of that authority comes from, I've been there. There may be no "I." There is no first
person. But the second person is filled with this, been there done that...First person
authority that has been generalized into laws of female existence. And for me, this is

fused with my experience of Hebrew prophetic writing, particularly late Isaiah. There's a
lot of "you." "You Israel should do this, and the other thing," and you know. There's a lot
of second person speaking from the future, saying do this now because I'm speaking from
your future. And here's what you need to do. And so for me, that "you," authoritative
language, felt to me like the voice of the future, trying to talk me into existence. And
doing exactly what you said. You know, I had noas the poems in the first part showI
really did not have a sense of agency, because I didn't have a sense of existing as a
person. And, that second person that's pushing around whoever the "you" is, in telling the
"you" what to do, is implying that the "you" can do things. You're doing this now, and
you could be doing that. To the extent that that "you" is a displaced first person, it is the
voice of the future, that I am writing from the perspective of somebody whos already
become the person that you can't even begin to imagine. And so I know totally what
you're feeling. In fact, unlike "you" I have words to describe it. Unlike "you" I can tell
you that there is this Technicolor future that is full of colors and sounds and shapes, and a
vitality of life that is completely beyond your capacity, because you're so involved in this
dying process. And, I can name that process of dying for the sake of people you love.
From the perspective of somebody who has survived it, whos stopped dying and who's
started living. So my voice can sort of be like a blood transfusion from the future, adding
this vitality and life, that you with this dying male self, is nonetheless deeply loves my
wife and children. And, for them is constantly sacrificing agency and feeling, and any
sense of feeling alive. So this blood transfusion from the future says, "All right. I'm going
to name your situation and your love. But I'm going to do it in a language that forces you
to feel, the way that you are going to feel in the future. [guitar music starts playing] And
that knowledge of the potential of what it will be to really be alive, that is gonna demand
that you become...can't they know that?
Avren: You weave together so many voices past and present in a wayrooted very much
present, but it's also very much not. In weaving all these different voices from The Torah,
or from this magazine that you're looking athow do you navigate embodying these
personas, which do have a completely different context or a different story. And, how do
you navigate mending that together? It's also something that I've also been trying to
navigate in looking back into history, to try to find people who were trans in some way,
and trying to find identities that resonate inwith myself. And the fact that you find
these identities in these voices, in very eclectic sources. How is it that you are able
to...mend all of these together, in a way to create a voice that feels like yours?
Joy: Well, that's an awesome question. It's making me wonder if I actually managed to do
that. When I look back over my work, there is something that's there. But it always feels
to me like the voice ofmaybe like the voice of a person that I wish were. I feel like the
idea of identity has been very powerful, politically and psychologically, for trans people.
It's given us a way to name things about who we are that otherwise is very difficult to pull
into the light of language, make visible and intelligible to other people. But it's also very
limiting in a few ways. It makes us focus on nouns, when people are basically verbs.
Identity is always an act of imagination, like wenobody needwould need an identity
if we actually were identical towards something. The fact that if you look at us at any
given two moments, we've changed. That requires us to engage in this act of social and

private imagination that is identitythat says, "I'm going to identify with all of these
different versions of me." It's what we do in a relationship. So, identity itself is a noun
that conceals this verb process of becoming and reflecting and mending the past, present
and future, together, into ways that make us intelligible to ourselves and to others. So
there's revision, there's wish and there's imagination. So for me, one of the things that's
powerful isbecause I'm really still, at this point, not sure exactly what I mean by "I" in
the present tense. But I do have a much clearer sense about who's the person I wish I
were. And I know that I can act like that person. And I know that people are defined more
by our actions than by the stories we tell ourselves or other people about who we are. So,
in some ways, thinking of it that way in my writing, also. When I'm writing and revising
a process which, you knowI'm always dissatisfied with my own limitations. But I
think that I'm always kind of striving to create poems that represent the language that I
wish I could write, the person I wish I were, the best of me is what I would like toand
not just the best of me, but actually better than that. The best of what I could ever
possibly be. Or even if all went well, and my poetry, my poetry would be better than I
could possibly be, it would be a place where something infinitely greater and better than
me had happened. So, when I've thought about being trans as an identity, it's very hard for
me because I can't find that crystalized version of myself. I was this, well no, I didn't
really feel like I was that. But now I am me. And, you know, I feel guilty about this. I
get the willies when I think about saying thatand who is that? (laughs)
Avren: Yeah.
Joy: You know? I'm a work in
Avren: Yes.
Joy: progress. I'm working on this book of creative non-fiction. It's actually a book of
trans theology. I centers on readings of The Torah. The Five Books of Moses in particular,
but not limited to that. And, I realized that I don't see The Torah as representing
transgender identity. And in fact it's suspect, when we look at other cultures and we say,
"Oh look. They have a transgender!" That'syeah, actually, we're kind of projecting our
own categories on that.
Avren: Exactly, yeah.
Joy: But what I think is universal is transgender experience. I think that because
whatever way a culture and a place and a time conceives of gender categories and this
includes the cutting edge, queer, twenty-seven flavors of ice cream version that we have
now. All of those nouns will be inadequate to describe the messy richness of individual
humanity. There are always compromises that we're making. And that means everybody,
whether or not they identify as transgender. That's uncommon. But it's very common for
people to have experiences that point out that they are other than what their gender has
defined them as being. It's very common for people to move from one version of gender
self-definition to another. Often, like, if you watch a mother talking on a phone to a
friend, while also making dinner for children, you see that, different genders. Literally

you are literally a different person to your children than you are to your best friend. They
interpenetrate and collide; they go on at the same time. This is transgender experience.
So, while it's uncommon for people to say that experience of not all fitting into gender is
so intense, and so constant for me; that it really is defining for me. I have to identify
myself in terms of that experience, it's persistent, and has shaped me and my relation to
life. So that's an identitythat's a transgender identity. That's not common. But it isI
can't believe there's any human being, worthy of the name, who has not had transgender
experiences. So if you look for transgender experience, or awarenessif you read Emily
Dickenson and you see her saying, "I'm afraid to own a body/I'm afraid to own a soul." If
that isn't a transgender experience, I don't know what is. There's body here, and there's
this soul here. They're supposed to be mine but damned if I want to claim 'em.
Avren: It's like a gendered existential crisis, it's like specifically gendered in its angst.
Joy: We're always falling through those cracks because we can't make any nouns that are
sufficient. But we need them in orderyou know, we need these, this parts of language
in order to present ourselves to others and be intelligible to them, and also to understand
ourselves. So I'm personally, and this may be because I'm old, you know, I personally
can't imagine myself living without gender. Even though, I know it will never be
adequate to represent, I still rely on it to represent me. So that paradox is something that I
think everybody is stuck with. And everybody has moments when they realize that they're
stuck with it. And those moments are moments of transgender experience.
Avren: I feel like the arc of the book is naming that existential crisis that the speakers
face, the various personas work through naming that crisis that you're talking aboutthat
sort of selfing. You're not a self. You are selfing.
Joy: Yes. I wasdo you know Trace Peterson?
Avren: I know her on Facebook and through her poetry, but I don't in-person-know her.
Joy: Last semester, she actually got to teach a class that was all on trans poetry. And so
she invited a bunch of trans poets to come in. And when I came in, I realized all my life,
I've done two different things with trans experience when I tried to write about it in
poetry. And the first part of Impersonation reflects the first thing, which is, when I was
writing as a guy, the only thing I could think of that felt safe to do with trans experience,
was to try to generalize it into this human problem of existential emptiness, or angst, or
whatever it is. It's like thiswe can't connect to whatevermy first book, there was a
poem, I wasI'm a terrible titler, you must notice but you're too nice to say. But, I've
very little title imagination. So I was inordinately proud when I titled the poem, "The
Soul Wakes Up On the Wrong Side of the Bed." Just cause it had more than two words in
it. I thought
Avren: Titles are the worst for everybody. I think your titles are totally fine. I think a lot
of poets get away with creating a long poem that is actually spaced on pages, so that they
don't have to title stuff, because it's actually theone of the trickiest (laughs) parts.

Joy: Well, thank you. Okay. All right, I'll try to lose the shame about that. So in this, in
this poem that's exactly what I'm trying to do. I've been reading Dickenson and she gets
to talk about the soul to generalize her own experience into human experience. And the
soul talking about, you know, how kind of sucky it is to be in the human situation, but
really you're just a soul. So that generalizing of trans experience to human experience is
one thing that I've done. And the other thing is to write about trans experience in ways
that are specific to transgender people. And of course, I'm the kind of transgender person,
that Ithe only one that I really know intimately. And the arc of the three sections is to
mourn more trans specific poetry. But I learned to do this because of being Jewish. As a
Jewish, I was the visible minority that I was. So II started writing poetry as a kid, and I
would constantly think, do I write poems that are marked as Jewish? Well, if I do that,
then only Jewish people would read them and I don't know any Jewish people who read
poetry. So that sucks. And if I don't do that, then I'm leaving stuff out. So, that really sort
of taught me to be a minority poet. Thatand I realized there were some ways that I
could speak as a Jew, that were not specific to being Jewish. That's how I got to them.
But I could write about them honestly, in ways that were more general. And then there
were some times I was just gonna have to bite the bullet, and write in ways that were
more specific to being a Jew; certain kinds of stuff about The Torah for example. The
commercially, most viable ways to do that of course, are to write Holocaust poems. It
feels kind of like the same with trans experience. I'm always more interested in how the
particular reflects the universal human experience. But part of what transition has been
for me is, I'm supposed to be particular. I'm not supposed to just be abstract anymore. So,
that's a hard thing for me. I will, literally as I write, say to myself, "Put in a smell word.
Come on. You're allowed to use colors. Stick in a color adjective! You can do it!" (laughs)
You know, because I was just so used to...being dissociated for so long. I don't have the
habits of writing as a particular person. It's still hard for me. So the arc
of Impersonation really kind of does come from this dissociated generality and move
toward a trans specific naming of experience. Andbut at the very end, in that last
sequence, "I'm Still Hoping," speaks to something that is rooted in trans specific
experience [guitar music plays] but is not just trans specific.
[music fades. pause]
Joy: The next two poems are drawn from a sequence called "Transitive Venus." This is
the third poem called "Intimacy."
When the woman you love turns out the light, you try to remember
how much you wanted to give her,
pretend you havent lost her
that love is launching you, side by side,
into the sky of a future
where you can end on a high note, together.
Poor baby. Everything you are is wrong.
Youre married, you have a home, a place,

documents to prove that you are alive,

but you cant stop noticing how hard it is to move,
cant adapt yourself to drowning
inner cravings
for beige, champagne and pink. There are many ways
to address heart-related problems. Drowning
isnt one of them.
Joy: This poem is called "Ready to Know."
Ready to know which girl you are?
Find out while you shave your face
and try to convince yourself
you can look great,
hide tummy, enhance bust,
find the best dress for your shape,
exfoliate your past so gently
you wont even need to shave
the ambivalence that rocks your body,
fleshing out your future,
adding curves to your shame.
If you prefer the privacy of your bathroom,
practicing in the mirror,
smiling at the girl you can almost see,
witty, pretty, and brimming with caffeine,
glowing with passions you try to keep hidden,
the vaginal freedom evolving under your clothes
as Venus sweeps through your bodys twelve houses,
a sun-kissed goddess kissing your contours,
filling them in with love.
See whats in store
in the opposite direction of the hair
creeping out of your bathing suit?
Real life and real feelings
curling gratefully around your navel, winter fading

as the quintessential girl moves into your chest,

offering you up

[electric guitar music plays]

Avren: Do you feel that there are certain tropes or ideas that as trans poets we tend
to...lean on more? Or do you think that there's anything that we could be writing more
about?
Joy: You're tempting me into saying all sorts of things I would regret.
Avren: Oh, I'm sorry. (both laugh)
Joy: How prescriptive I could be right now! (Avren laughs) Isn't that...yes! And it's
always gone badly for me. So let me try
Avren: Oh.
Joy: to go another way. One thing is that there are tropes that are representing trans
experience. And those, about, for the same reason that there are ashes and ovens in
Holocaust poems. Which is, when you're representing a kind of experience that you want
to mark as something that people have not had. So I am guessing that if people were
writing poems in the concentration camps, for other people, who were in the
concentration camps, they would be different. I have no idea what they would be, but
they would be different because you're not trying to invoke a realm of experience that by
definition people haven't had.
Avren: Mmm.
Joy: So one thing that trans poets do, and I think, you know, and it's something that we
need to do, for certain kinds of poemsis make trans experience visible for non-trans
people as well as trans people. And in those things, I think we do tend to lean on certain
bodily markers, for example. That's the conventionalizing demand that language makes,
maybe it's selectivity, butI read a lot of trans poets who are writing using a lot of PostModernist chops, that I think are enacting transness through dislocation and wrenchings
of language and perspective. Rather than making prosaic trans experience visible, that's
not my part of the sandbox to play in. I feel like I'm interested in making sense, so there
are things you can do when you can say, "Yeah, you know, sense that's fun sometimes.
But really, I'm more excited by the other possibilities of language. It'syou know, it's
optional." But for me, I feel like that's where I do the work that I need to do. The poems
in that "Transitive Venus" section...I, at first I was thrilled, I wasn't gonna make sense. I

was just chopping up other's people's language. It was so fun. But as I reread those
poems, I got bored and impatient, and I realized I don't even understand what I'm talking
about. Oh, I needI'm gonna have to start making sense again. I'm doomed by my own
limitation to have to do that. And so, in doing that, if we say we wanna make sense, then
we say, well who are we making sense to? And that starts defining the range of reference,
and possibilities. And that's where conventions, and overused conventions and clichs
start cropping up. So it'speople take on the responsibility of speaking to people who
can't, don't have this from the inside. So you have to make it visible from the outside.
And, for those people it's always like the very first day. It's always, the "I am Caitlyn
Jenner" moment. So thethat's a difficult responsibility to take on. I think that the
question that will be interesting to look at, and some trans fiction writers have been
working on that, is what are the stories about being human that assume transgender
experience is part of the experience of being human? They don't bring everybody to
transgender experience. [speaking in a tour guide voice] Okay, we've now entered that
part of the building called "transgender experience." You'll notice that when you're in the
part of the building called "transgender experience" things work a little differently than
you're used to. Here's how you know you're in the building. Here's how things are
different than you're used to. Here's how they're the same. There's(Avren laughs) Right,
so that's the...bringing in people from the outside, but it's different to say..."You know
what, really. I can't do that anymore. But I do want to make sense. But I want to show
what it's like to be human, a human beingwhere this is part of the definition of being
human. Rather than, a weird exception to the definition of being human, that I have to
explainor that I can only be human in this way if I disrupt all of the conventions of
being human. So that's the postmodernist move is to say, there's only room to be the kind
of person I am, if I disrupt the syntax and vocabulary of humanness that other people take
for granted. I don't feel that way about myself. I'd rather expand on the syntax that's
already there because as I said, I feel like transgender experience is always already there.
And that means that we ought to be able to do a lot using the linguistic materials that are
at hand.
Avren: This postmodern language, this more experimental and disjointed syntax and
formare you saying it's a way to notlike you're working so hard to show how real
you are, and how authentic you are, that this likein order to be my true self, I have to
dislocate everything. In one sense, it's a dislocation of a norm but on the other sense,
you're just like living. You know, there's also this daily-ness of being trans, that isn't
always just constantly a disruption of things. Is that kind of what you mean?
Joy: Yes. Although, it relates to this weird sense that I have that probably is as long as I
live, I'm going to feel queer. I don't expect to have a lifespan sufficient for trans identities
to be really beI don't think we're going to have a new understanding of gender by the
time I kick. So that means being queer. In the sense of being something that people find it
really hard to understand, and having to define how I'm different from other people in
order to locate myself. Not everybody, and probably fewer and fewer spaces over the
course of my life. But I don't think we're gonna be done before I'm dead. I told my
daughter, I'd been invited to speak at a queer Jewish women's retreat and she said, she
was nine, she said, "What's queer, daddy? And I said, "Well, queer is this term that people

use when they say that they are different from you know, heterosexual male and female
people, and even though they're all different in different ways, they are uniting on the
basis of their difference. And saying, even though we're all different in different ways,
we're going to unite in being different." And she said, "Why would anybody want to
define themselves as queer? That would imply there's a normal. You can only be queers
as long as you think there's something that's normal. And also, there's nothing queer about
being gay or lesbian. That is normal." But then she said, "But you, daddy, you're queer."
(both laugh) But I felt like, she was right. That for me, my ultimate goal is not to have an
oppositional identity but to understand what it means to be human and help other people
understand what it means to be human, in a way that actually has room for all forms of
humanity. And you knowwe're so not there yet. I'm not there yet. I'm full of my 20th
century prejudices and limitations. But I do ultimately believe, that we as a species can
find a way to understand ourselves that includes all of the flavors that we come in. Well
never have a language that's adequate, like we'll always be stuck with the nouns and that
will always be in tension with the verbs. But I think we will get to a point, like what my
daughter is saying. Like hello, of course people are different in these different ways.
That's part of what it means to be human. Whereas when I grew up, what it meant to be
human was being the same.
Avren: Before we close, thank you for your work. And for what you do, your thoughts,
and taking the time for this interview. I really appreciate it.
Joy: Thank you so much. I hope to continue our conversations and actually hear more
about you, because I can tell even from this one-sided conversation that you are really an
amazing mind. And I suspect an amazing writer.
[music plays]
Avren: Oh, thank you. Yeah, the interview was a little bit longer than the previous two,
but there was so much that we talked about that I just wanted to make sure that we kept it
all in there. You can find more of her poems and essays at joyladin.com. If you could
review the show on ITunes and spread the word, that would be fantastic. And if you have
any feedback for the show, please email me at wavesbreakingshow@gmail.com. The
music was by Bahati Kiro and this is the sound of waves breaking.
[strange melodic bird noises play]