Avren: From Dublin, California, this is Waves Breaking.

[bass music plays] A podcast where I

talk to my contemporaries in trans and gender variant poetry. [music fades] I'm your host,
Avren Keating. Today's conversation is with Zoe Tuck author of the chapbook Terror Matrix,
which is out with the press Timeless Infinite Light. She's on tour with her partner and traveling
to Amherst, Massachusetts from Oakland. I was able to have a quick chat with her the day
before she left town.

Avren: So Zoe, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me on this hectic moving
day.

Zoe: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Avren: So, are you moving to the East Coast for grad school?

Zoe: I am. I am starting in an English Lit Phd program at UMass Amherst, and my partner is
doing an MSW at Smith.

Avren: And what is your focus going to be on in your Phd?

Zoe: Well, glad you asked. (Avren laughs) What I want to do, and what I sort of pitched in the
application is I want to create some kind of critical apparatus for trans lit, because I feel like—
it feels like it's very much on both ends of the spectrum right now. On one end, it's sort of, you
know, the bigotry that everyone knows and hates, or loves. And then on the other side, there's
a little bit of like a “boosterism,” like a trans person made something and dammit isn't that all
we care about? I guess my question is—is there a way to dig in and really talk about the
aesthetics and the politics of certain work, in a way that's complex and critical without being
one of those two things either, just denouncing it or being really "ra ra."

Avren: Yeah, because I've noticed, I think I was reading an interview and Tom from Topside
Press was talking. And Tom mentioned something about how white liberal guilt sort of hinders
trans peoples' real critical insight into trans poetry. So it'll be like, "you did really good! Good
job trans person for writing this poem." And backing it. Which in a way is really cool because
we need more support. But I've also heard this argument about how...this sort of like I guess
what you called "ra ra" energy, doesn't continue a critical outlook on trans lit. I don't know if
that's making any sense or—

Zoe: Yeah, no, no.

Avren: Or if I conflate—if I'm conflating two different things but...

Zoe: I feel like they're very related. And the issue that you brought up feels harder to address,
because I feel like I have a relatively clear sense of how to at least get started on that first
task. Because I feel like I sort of came up as many trans and genderqueer people who are
writers did, in a writing scene that was super, super literary but centered cis-gender
perspectives, just because the numbers, you know. But also, you know, I mean, well let's just
go with numbers now. (Avren laughs) So I'm like carrying this canonical or counter canonical
literary knowledge, and then I feel like I have the sort of social and experiential knowledge of
the other side; which is my trans-ness and my queerness. You've got to go in with both to do
the kind of criticism that I'm hoping to so. But then the other question is harder. How do you as
a white person, find ways to center works by people of color without being tokenizing and
without being the great explainer. Which is a lifelong project.

Avren: Yes. And it's an individual effort and it's also a collective effort at the same time. I guess
going into Terror Matrix, a little bit, you also write about the privileged and muddied territory,
the ambiguous territory of being privileged person in this culture that is inflicting terror on
other countries. And, it's this sort of lifelong project to figure out your place in that, but also
knowing the government uses these specific boundaries in order to separate and divide people.

Zoe: Yes.

Avren: And I was reading an interview, and you were talking about how this manuscript fails in
dealing with that complicity.

Zoe: I do think it fails. But I think everyone thinks that their first published thing fails.

Avren: So why? Why do you think it fails?

Zoe: I just don't know. That's a good question. I don't know if it's something that is possible to
succeed at within literature, possibly. But it's also...it feels equally impossible to not write
about, so you're in this bind. I don't know, is it better to—I don't know. This is a community
wide debate and I feel like I wrote this thing, and was lucky enough to get it published and
then get involved with the press that published it. But then it's been this sort of open question
that has fueled other podcasts, like that Bay Area poetry one. And even certain presses have
emerged, to answer that question. Like I'm thinking of Commune Editions, which falls more on
the side of we should write about this stuff but our writing about it isn't necessarily going to
produce material change. And maybe I've come around to that a little bit.

Avren: I think that it's interesting that people assume poetry has to have—or it has to create a
material change in order to be impactful.

Zoe: Well I don't really believe that. I mean I totally think that it's impactful.

Avren: No, no. I don't think that you do. I don't think that you do. I'm just saying the whole
question of is poetry a form of activism?

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: That whole thing. And that was something I was grappling with a lot. It seems sort of
like not the question we should be asking.

Zoe: Right, right, yeah. Or maybe if you ask it in an evocative way, which I think is some
people's project, then you can help people to realize that's not the right question. And then
they'll figure out what the question is, or questions.
Avren: Yeah.

Zoe: But I'm totally evading it, I don't know. I feel like I"m supposed to talk about Terror
Matrix a little bit. (Avren laughs)

Avren: We don't have to talk about Terror Matrix, like I'm interested in—I was at the last
performance—it's probably not the last performance you did, but the sponge performance?

Zoe: Oh yeah. That was the last. If I had done another one after that, I would be dead.

Avren: Yes, so could you talk about your process of intuition and writing, your tapping into
subconscious archetype and all that good stuff?

Zoe: Yeah. It feels so old school because that's the surrealist shtick, and the
romantic [00:06:34] shtick. Lots of people historically have professed to do that. It felt like a
logical extension because the work...not the work in Terror Matrix, but the work even
in Troubling the Line, looking back at it now, makes me realize, oh, there have been a lot of
years now when I've been either writing tarot poems, or writing poems using that to create
some sort of recombinatory method and it's like just enough of a structure to hang a poem on.
Because it's this malleable thing that you can shuffle or reshuffle and the images are very
specific, they they're also general enough that you can really run with them. But mainly I had
just been assigning cards from the tarot to certain books in my library, or things that friends
have written and stealing lines from people, or writing lines and then rearranging them. But I
think I had been thinking a lot about the process of actually giving tarot readings, which
involves a certain storytelling aspect, you have to kind of wrap it into a narrative, and I enjoy
that challenge. And I like to talk. And I also like the talker David Anton. I don't even think I've
read much about his method, I've just read his work. But I think he has something general in
mind and then he just gets up to the podium and talks. So I'm into that.

Avren: I was wondering if it was connected to spirituality with you at all—or if it makes you feel
weird connecting poetry and spirituality?

Zoe: They're totally connected, I think. I was talking about wanting to make trans literary
criticism. And I feel like I'm trying to train myself to be a better critic and I'm practicing on my
other passion, which is spiritually inflected poetry. I just wrote a review of this book by Alana
Seagal, and I've been involved in a lot projects that my partner [00:08:18] does, and there's a
lot of magic in there. I...am an ex-Catholic, so that always leaves people with a real hankering
for ritual and smells and bells, and magical words that produce changes in the world. So and
also, I went through in the depths of late teens, early twenties, being mostly closeted about
gender stuff. I...I was processing it all through my reading. I went through all the second wave
feminist classics, and then I read all of the stuff, the sort of more contemporary stuff I could
find. And being sort of oriented towards the "woo," I got into the cul-de-sac of Neo-Pagan
feminist spirituality. Which is in retrospect a kind of funny thing to get into if you're a trans
person, because it's so deeply binaristic—you know, the "male energy" and the "female
receptive" and the "empress" and the "emperor."

Avren: And also very exclusionary towards trans women—

Zoe: Yeah. Yeah.

Avren: I don't know if I just made that word up.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: But holding menstruation and the womb up—

Zoe: Right.

Avren: up to this pedestal of womanhood—

Zoe: Yes, yes.

Avren: And closing trans women out of the conversation.

Zoe: Yeah. Yep, so I don't know why, but it still had something to it. (Avren laughs) You know?!
Everything's problematic. I think—I think it was something that just happened to be within
reach. And I love symbols, I'm obsessed with symbols, so...and there's a lot to it, in the sense of
the re-enchantment of the world, or how do you go back? I mean, fundamentally, it's part of
the same project that I think a lot of queer theory is part of even. Which is like, how do you go
back and...undo the damage that a couple centuries of capitalism and a cartesian world view
have done. And I don't think anybody has—it's like a trial and error process. So you're like okay,
maybe we do it with magical menstrual blood. Oh well, does that work for you? No, it doesn't
work for you. (Avren laughs). You know, let's try something else.

Avren: I did notice a bunch of witchy stuff in Terror Matrix. So is that having to do with your
interest in that sort of second wave feminist?

Zoe: Well, I mean that's where it started.

Avren: Okay.

Zoe: It verged off in its own directions.

Avren: Yes, I think there was mentions in there about—

Zoe: Wonder Woman's in there too, does Wonder Woman count as witchy?

Avren: I think so.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: Very much.

Zoe: Yeah. (Avren laughs) Yeah.

Avren: Witchy being this adjective that's thrown around a lot right now.

Zoe: Right. Well, that's the other thing too, is then you have to—well, I guess you don't have to
clarify it. In the broader culture, or in sort of dominant culture, religion is real spirituality. And
then, there's these other practices that are...para-spiritual or something, in this hierarchy, in
this imaginary cultural hierarchy. But maybe that doesn't have to be true.

Avren: It seems like you're on to something there though. And it's something I've never heard
articulated.

Zoe: What I also wonder too right now, if I'm just continuing to be a cliché, but I don't care if I
am. But I'm reminded of this conversation I had with a friend who was like, "What? I'm so sick of
white trans women and their witch identities." (Avren laughs) When I heard it, I was like "okay,
okay." I didn't know there—

Avren: That was a thing.

Zoe: There was enough of us to be a cliché. In this same conversation, this unnamed friend was
sort of pushing on that, and saying that it's worth investigating. The sort of piece meal magpie
quality of contemporary witchcraft, where it's like, "oh yeah, there's this thing that they did in
Germany but here's this other thing." Mixing and matching from different traditions can be
dangerous.

Avren: Yeah, there's a similar problem with Buddhism right now. I'm a Buddhist, and so the
Western interpretations of Buddhism are also often times very piece meal.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: And secularized in strange ways. So they'll take out the reincarnation bit—

Zoe: Right.

Avren: Of, of Buddhism. Because they feel like it's not their spirituality, and argh! In a way, I
kind of like the piece meal aspect of spirituality, in the sense of—I think spirituality is a really
individual quest of self-actualization, self realization, connecting yourself to a larger
collective. But at the same time ignoring the historical aspects of it, seems like something that
happens with that piece meal process.

Zoe: Yeah. I don't know. It's all something to think about. But you were asking how that
improvisational storytelling—

Avren: Yeah, let's get back to poetry!

Zoe: Yeah, well no. It's funny because getting back to poetry involved referencing a not that
great Terry—oh God, what is his name? Gillian? Jillian? Gillian?

Avren: Gilliam, like Monty Python?

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: Yeah.

Zoe: Film. The one where he's making it and then Heath Ledger died.

Avren: Ohh...

Zoe: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnissus.

Avren: Yeah...

Zoe: Which, this is so embarrassing. I mean, I'm admitting on air that this feels like part of my
spirituality. But there's this moment in the movie where there are these people who have to
keep retelling the story of the world, for the world to continue existing—

Avren: Mm hmm.

Zoe: And, it's one of those God and the devil are messing with each other moments. So the
devil, I believed played by Tom Waits, is like "this is bullshit." And he gets the people who are
telling the story of the world to stop. And nothing happens, and he laughs in an evil kind of
way.

Avren: As Tom Waits does.

Zoe: As Tom Waits does, because the world doesn't stop existing. But then also, a bird shits on
his head. But I was so taken—I mean, I've seen that idea. It's obviously not new from that film.
But, I really, really love the idea that you have to keep telling the story of the world, and that's
a sacred thing.

Avren: I think poetry does that in a lot of ways, you know. [Music plays and fades]

Zoe: So I'm going on tour with my partner, [00:14:16] and our friends, [00:14:20] and Madison
Davis. And we did some writing together, but then we each have writing from all of us in our
notebooks. And then, we were just charged with editing that in whatever way. So this is the
edited collaboration that I had.

Had we been a hydra?

my old roommate said,

gesturing at our huddle.

Some truth of myself—

our mouths forced open.

Confused we say we are not.

Sitting in the Bart station,
over the edge or below—

a layer of dyed oil and glitter:

what is mashed together in
a nested cauldron starts
to separate nonetheless;

a certain amount of breaking

intuitively called normal.

The wall that separates one booth

from another less destabilizing
than the reality.

With sharp
knives we can carve into the
booth—

what else do we cut open

with sharp knives?

The center of the table,

the price of coffee,
all the names for

a certain amount of taking care.

[Music plays and then fades]

Avren: I noticed that in Terror Matrix and a lot of your other poems, time shifts, setting shifts.
And that might be in part due to the intuitive associative way that you're writing, but I was
wondering if you were doing other things formally, thematically, with the shifting of time?

Zoe: Oh, how boring is it if the answer is just...time is weird in the world. So I was kind of
being mimetic.

Avren: That's real. (Avren laughs)

Zoe: Yeah. Yeah. I think, no—you kind of nailed it in the question. I mean, it's like partially the
intuitive process of writing.

Avren: Hmm.
Zoe: One of my other big literary loves is sci-fi and fantasy. So, obviously time travel is going to
show up even in small, subtle ways.

Avren: Could you tell me about your love of sci-fi and fantasy?

Zoe: I...I feel like I would get run out of an actual sci-fi convention, because I, of course I love
all of soft sci-fi, social science sci-fi. I mean, it's like Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler—I have a
real soft spot for the sort of, I guess you—I mean, sometimes her books are so downright cozy,
but Connie Willis, who also writes a lot about time travel.

Avren: I tried to write speculative poetry for a bit, and I felt I failed. I don't know. I guess
Terror Matrix is along the lines of speculative poetry, in a weird way.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: It has a sort of sci-fi quality to it. Do you think that sci-fi and poetry can work together?
Have you seen examples of that?

Zoe: I absolutely have seen examples of that. I mean, the thing that's coming immediately to
mind is Ultra Violeta by Laura Moriarty, which is basically a sci-fi novel in verse about space
travel powered by thought. It works really well. And, I don't know. The Descent of Alette's kind
of—

Avren: I'm a total newbie.

Zoe: Oh great.

Avren: So I have no idea.

Zoe: The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley, like it was her explicit project to sort of create
feminist epic, which was like a bold thing to do for feminist reasons, but also a bold thing to do
at the time for poetic reasons, because the epic has really been out of fashion for quite awhile.
It's a very gutsy thing to be like, I'm just gonna make an epic, in this day and age of lyric poetry
and experimentalism. But it's all about this figure Alette, descending into a mystical subway,
like train cars populated by people with animal heads and there's a figure called The Tyrant
that keeps everyone trapped on the subway, it's great.

Avren: I'm gonna have to read this.

Zoe: You should read it, immediately. (Avren laughs) Stop everything and read that. But there's
a ton of other examples but I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah. They can co-exist.

Avren: Okay, I'm gonna have to research it more because I was looking up speculative poetry
magazines and there wasn't much—

Zoe: Well, the problem is, and this makes me feel really critical. There's some stuff out there—
I'm always much more drawn to the stuff that is already in conversation
with [00:18:12] tradition because if people are just randomly throwing sci-fi tropes into poetry,
it can get so bad, so fast. Those two people that I named are already working within a poetic
medium? [00:18:28]. But then you run risks on the other side, which is where they don't have as
much familiarity with the sci-fi side, I don't know. Just do your homework.

Avren: Italo Calvino does this a lot.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: He's sort of in conversation with the literary tradition, it's also very sci-fi, but he denied
the fact that it was science fiction.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: Which is weird.

Zoe: People get touchy about that.

Avren: I think it's because of the stigma of genre.

Zoe: Yeah.

[music plays and fades]

Zoe: So I've also been—also with Madison, doing these movie collaborations, and it's really an
easy collaboration. We just assign each other movies, and then we watch the movies and then
we write a poem. And the titles are just the movie and then the year it was made.

Vertigo (1958)

What are the preconditions for a story to happen?

Driving ninety miles in my green jaguar,
getting bored and stirring up trouble
or solving it as San Francisco fades.

I was always watching these movies as a kid,

gazing at art, meaningfully ordering flowers, and jumping
into the bay—an actor playing a woman haunted by the ghost of a historical figure.

A gyre tightens in Kim Novak’s eyes

the way psychoanalysis happens in movies.

Why am I looking for the story

and not the shots?

I’m trying to tighten up this thing I’m doing

not fully formed but inchoate, a message from the future

The effect involves the camera moving away while he crosses

the threshold for the possibility of laughter.
It must have made a stamp on my psyche somehow.

Thinking of the people I love, saying this one is you and that one is me,
getting bored and stirring up trouble.

These hills are gained by degrees and

given away with a piece of costume jewelry.

[music plays and then fades]

Avren: I was talking in a recent interview with the editors of Vetch magazine, and we were
talking about archive of the trans lit in the 90's and how there was a lot of vanguardism going
on, already. And how, people in the 2010's and stuff are kind of doing similar things, and it's
because we don't have access to the materials of the 90's—

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: And stuff. It's really hard to find this writing by other writers. Do you see that as part of
an impact of trans lit? And where do you...and what is trans lit?

Zoe: Oh no!

Avren: If you, you don't have to answer that. I think someone I saw recently asked you that
question, and you were like, "I don't know."

Zoe: Yeah, yeah. No, it's—it's, I mean, it's hard to answer. I feel like the answer that got
collectively given at that reading was pretty good because I was like, "I don't know, it's
everything." But then I think, Julien maybe stepped in and said, "well, everything
but..maybe...everything written by actual trans people."

Avren: Right.

Zoe: As a caveat. Yeah, it's so touchy. I mean, I say that this is my project, and it is. But it's
also totally terrifying because people are very touchy on the internet.

Avren: Mm hmm.

Zoe: And people are understandably very touchy about their identity or identities and how are
characterized by other people who may know their work, but may not know them. And,
so...(Zoe sighs) You've got to be very careful. You don't want to hurt anybody.

Avren: Right.
Zoe: No, but I think that the whole collective memory thing is a total problem. And I think that
it involves a lot of things to rectify that. I think that it really relies on having publishers who
are willing to rescue things from the archives, and present them in a way that's accessible to
more people. That's a huge part of the work, and I have—this is sort of a dormant project right
now, but I've been talking to a friend Zach Asbah (spelling?) who was working a lot with Lou
Sullivan's archives, which are just right over there in San Francisco. And you can go and read
them. But that's stuff that should be in print, and not just—I mean, it's accessible, in a certain
way, if you get yourself over to the San Francisco Central Library between the hours of two and
four. So I think part of it is on the part of publishers, part of it is on the part of the scholars,
and I don't just mean academic scholars. But I mean, just anyone doing serious research. I don't
know, but I'm inclined to feel forgiving of people who get a little vanguardy, because that's
what everyone thinks, you know. It's like the way all kids think they invent rebellion—

Avren: Right.

Zoe: You know? And they do. But I don't know. Oh, I had one more thing about the time thing.

Avren: Ple—Yes.

Zoe: To backtrack a little bit because I was thinking of Zach. And we've also had really
interesting conversations about—and I'm sure there's work out there on this, I can't cite it off
the cuff. But, trans temporality and the way to have any kind of non-normative gender identity
is to experience a sort of skewed temporality, in the sense that you've got multiple timelines
going. You have your straightforward biological timeline, you have timelines with coming out;
you have timelines with have you done anything with your body. And then sometimes,
embarking on any of those things that changes your life or changes your body, it affects things
in the past, and starts these parallel speculative timelines, so anyway, sorry, that was my last
thing about—

Avren: No, that's a problem that I've just had in my personal life (Avren laughs). Just trying to
think about childhood and what the hell that was. You know, and thinking about myself now,
and relating to that, relating to family. I'm so used to thinking about time in a linear way and
then realizing that my life was not linear.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: And also, when I'm thinking about my childhood, I'm recreating memories by rethinking
of them—

Zoe: Yes.

Avren: And so I'm imposing a trans timeline—

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: On it too.
Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: Where I didn't think of myself as trans, and didn't really realize I was trans and you
know—

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: and all that fun stuff.

Zoe: That's always hard.

Avren: That's...yeah.

Zoe: But there's a narrative out there that's like, you're three, and you're wearing a princess
cupcake dress or you want to wear the princess cupcake dress.

Avren: I didn't have that. For me, it didn't come till I was sixteen.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: You know?

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: My brain is trying to join archives with experiences of trans temporality and trying to
write about time in a way that isn't—because I feel like there are tropes and clichés of trans
literature out there.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: But it's also really hard to know what those are when you don't have the archives for
them—

Zoe: Well...

Avren: And you don't have the criticism. (Avren laughs)

Zoe: Well, read...so far, my answer to that has been read Trish Salah. (Zoe laughs)

Avren: I have been.

Zoe: So, and take good notes because I mean, it's that whole thing where someone first is like,
"Oh by the way, other people have written poems about Tyriseous (spelling?).

[music plays and fades]

Zoe: I've figured out another connection too. This was an assignment for a class that I did with
Zach. We actually falsified an archive because we were having an epic beginning to our
friendship. We were like, we have to collaborate about it, sing about it to the world. So, we
both procured old pictures of ourselves and our families, and either replicated or
manufactured [00:25:39] of growing up and edited each other into our lives, as if we had had
this childhood together, through like image transfers and Photoshop and things like that. But
that's one way of doing it, that's an artistic response, is to just say, "well, maybe you can
invent part of that archive."

Avren: Yeah, that's really sweet.

Zoe: It was really tender. And especially...it was kind of interesting too from the perspective of
temporality because I think we have maybe seven year age gap? So, it's impossible in that way
too. It's not only impossible in that we didn't grow up together. It's impossible in that we
literally like temporally didn't grow up together.

Avren: I'm really excited to hear about your adventures over at Amherst and I feel like, more
critical work needs to be done in terms of interpreting, understanding, supporting trans poetry,
trans literature. And the fact that you're doing that is really cool.

Zoe: Thank you. I have a very checkered history with school. I dropped out of high school. I
went off and on to college, and mostly off and going back before finishing a BA even. And I say
that because there are a lot of reasons to be critical about the academy, and just going about
your day and being on any social media at all, you know, you're really aware of it. And
especially being attuned to, okay, I want to do this critical writing about trans creative work.
There's a lot of critique out there, which I think is really fair, of academic gatekeeping, or the
ways in which as an academic, you have this whole system that's set up to foreground your
voice. So I'm just saying it on the record—that I really want to keep being aware of that, and
push against that, and to find ways to give myself some checks and balances.

Avren: Yeah, that's a whole—that opens a whole conversation about academia's relationship
with the rest of society.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: A lot of the problems I feel like have to do with education and making the language of
articulating art and appreciating art and understanding art for your own internal self,
accessible for everybody. I feel like everybody can understand poetry. It's just that the skills
haven't been widely distributed—

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: To all people. And so, I feel forgiving towards people who are in academia, because it is
really important. And there is really legitimate criticism about gatekeeping. So it's like, instead
of criticizing just the academics, we could also shift that criticism towards how do we educate
everyone in society about art, in a way where people have a greater appreciation for it? And I
mean, bell hooks has talked about this a lot. And she's much more articulate, and there are so
many other people who are more on point about this. But, all that's to say, academic criticism,
has a place. (Avren laughs)

Zoe: Yeah, yeah. I hope so.

Avren: Yeah.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: If anything because otherwise we start doing this sort of echo chamber thing, kind of
like what's already happened. In terms of, we keep on writing things that have already been
written.

Zoe: Right.

Avren: Doing things, that—and I think poetry does that a lot anyway.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: It always goes in cycles of, we're going to do more romantic lyric work, oh now we're
going to much more conceptual, now we're gonna react to that and be more lyric.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: You know there's that whole cycle.

Zoe: The pendulum keeps swinging.

Avren: The pendulum keeps swinging. So we do keep doing similar things, but it's also
important to articulate trans lit too.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: So, I don't know, I'm rambling.

Zoe: No, I mean I've thought about this a lot because there—I've been part of several iterations
of local projects to have free school, and it's so complicated to try. A lot of the reason why I
ended up applying to PhD programs was just that, I kept looking for this way to be a writer in
the world and be supported and the longer-term projects that require support, but there's not
a lot of space for it outside of institutions.

Avren: There's not.

Zoe: So at a certain point, the world wears you down. But I did, I did often find it really
interesting, the ways that even in these free school style spaces, that academic conversations
still set the tone. There would be one person who would be in both things, you know, at
Berkeley and then going to the public school. And then suddenly everyone would be reading
this certain book.

Avren: I've been trying to think about other spaces that could exist for poetry outside of
academia. And I mean, obviously the spoken word scene is huge.

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: And, I wouldn't say it's an opposite, but it's an alternative—

Zoe: Yeah.

Avren: For academic research. But then, when you're neither an academic not a spoken word
poet, where do you find yourself?

Zoe: At a reading in somebody's backyard.

Avren: Yeah, at a reading in someone's backyard feeling weird.

Zoe: Yeah, yeah. [music plays and fades] You never know, readings, you're like waiting for the
queues from the faces from the people sitting there...

Avren: Uh huh.

Zoe: One queue.

Avren: Oh...This is me nodding, like, yes, please. (Avren laughs)

Zoe: Which one of these other ones? Maybe I'll make you chose.

Avren: Okay.

Zoe: The Life After Beth poem, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, or In the Mood for Love?

Avren: The second one.

Zoe: (Begins to read poem)

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

A letter you’ve waited for your whole life

some news if, had you known it, could’ve given you a whole ‘nuther life
as a people we are given to hunkering down and become legend

as organs and fat

bones and integument

and turned into

abhorring sensationalism

like the lurid cover of a horror rag

this is a mystery

a Mystery

like the prophesies of the Cumaean Sibyls

although I don’t reckon I’d like to live in Europe

owing in part to your attention

to the process of decay

to the shabby gentility of faded glory

The foundation of all this is servitude

freeing up the ruling class to enact

Tragedy

Avren: Thank you.

Zoe: Poems!
Avren: Thank you so much.

Zoe: Yeah!

[music plays and fades]

Avren: That's the show for the week. Links to the various authors and books mentioned will be
posted in the show notes. Please spread the word about the show and what also helps to get
the word out about the show is a rating and review on ITunes. Leaving a review or rating on
ITunes would get other people to see the show and notice it, and more listeners means more
people knowing about trans and gender variant lit, and that's awesome. If you have any
feedback or questions, you can contact me at wavesbreakingshow@gmail.com or on Twitter at
@mxavren. I'm your host, Avren Keating and transcripts are by Amir Rabiyah. And this is the
sound of Waves Breaking.

[Sound of birds chirping and then fades out]