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My pronouns are “he” and “they”. Okay, I’m done. End of subject.

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UPCOMING EVENTS  ::  Got a few of these this month so hearken here! On Saturday, July 13 I’ll be reading and hosting a Poetry Brain Party at Medicine for Nightmares Books on 24th Street in the Mission. Excited to be reading and will be reading excitedly with Richard Modiano (up from LA!), K.R. Morrison (up from Mermaid Land), E.K. Keith, Paul Corman-Roberts, Milo Starr Johnson, and Dee Allen. Dendritic!  ::  Then on Tuesday, July 23 I’ll be leading a free poetry workshop for the North Beach Poets Society at the North Beach Public Library. Gonzo! Please bring a poem to discuss and we’ll write some too!  ::  On Saturday, July 27 the Beast Crawl rumbles into downtown Oakland with 42 readings in three legs. #we will be there with Edward Gunawan,  Julia Serano,  and Shilpa Kamat. I’ll host and read briefly as well. Time and venue TBA.  ::  And last but not least (and probably not last), on Sunday, August 11 I’ll be reading at the East Bay Media Center with Steve Arntson, Jan Steckel, Glenn Ingersoll, and, and Deborah Fruchey, among others. Should be a smokin good time!  ::  Deets for all these on the Events page as usual.

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But wait, I just said “I”. That’s another pronoun, and kind of a confusing one, in my experience. That’s because I don’t, genuinely, at base and essence, I don’t experience a static self. I don’t experience an “I”. I’m not sure if anyone else does, if anyone does, or maybe everybody does except me, but I do suspect that it’s very easy to convince yourself that you do. First of all, it’s in our language, or at least contemporary Western language. I mean, if we have to say “I” to convey an experience or perspective, then there must be an “I”, right? But honestly, perceptually, it just doesn’t make sense to me. I think it never has, and though it took me a long time to realize that was the case, I’ve been writing about it for a long time. In fact the first poem in my first little book, The Orange Book, contains the line, “Of course there’s not quite your or me.” And I meant it. Basically I feel like a very different being, or entity, or whatever, when I’m with any particular person, say my mom, than when I’m with another, say Steve Arntson – blending and amplifying the blend like a song – than when I’m with a group of friends, or in a crowd, etc. And when I’m alone, when my body has no other in proximity, well that’s a goddamned circus, that’s a panoply, that’s when I feel like multitudes. It makes so much more sense to me to refer to myself as “we”, which is part of the reason that I like using “they”, besides the gender thing (more on that below). But referring to myself as “we”, boy does that unnerve some people, and confuse even more. Language. And that’s right – language – our (somewhat) handy communication tool helps to reify the “I”, denotes the “I” as a tool within, a subtool in its pronoun submenu. And it’s a handy social tool as well, at least for the purpose of avoiding unnecessary confusion, or any more than we’d usually have attempting to communicate. So I continue to use it, continue to refer to myself as “I”, much as I hold the term, the concept, in disregard.

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PODCAST  ::  My new podcast “My 12-Month Video Fast” is still going strong and should have five episodes up by the time of this posting. For those unfamiliar, I got mad at how much time I’d been spending in front of the 40-inch, so on June 1 I put my tv in the Time Out Corner for one year, to see how that effects my life and whatever. So far a lot has changed, which you can hear about directly on Buzzsprout , as well as on Spotify and iTunes.  Each of the episodes talks about different changes this is causing, except the fourth ep in which I go into detail about the rad 1978 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander. I was worried that one would turn people off since it’s twice as long as the others and essentially a book report, but turns out it’s one of the most popular episodes so far. My old friend Deborah Perry even forwarded a fun 2012 song called “Four Arguments” by Big Foot Torso that’s about the book, which is kinda awesome if you ask me. You can also check in with the ‘cast any time on the new Podcast page on this site, to which I just added before and after pics of the televisionary removal. Happy listening!

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Here’s another alternative that I came up with to the pronoun “I” a year or two ago, only half in jest at most, if rather unpracticable. You might recognize it if you have my recent book Mammal.

First Person Nothing

O am going to try out a new word. O have been trying to think of a way to express a lack of singular self in language for some time, and it occurs to O that “O” is a not a bad signifier with which to start. “O” suggests a lack via its similarity to the number 0, though O think of it as having a shape like the letter and a sound like the letter while it is not the letter or the number but a word. In a way the association with zero is the main negative in the usage (pardon the pun), because O don’t really perceive the “self” as nothing or nonexistent; rather O just don’t experience it as in any way singular, bounded, or static. Own[1] current view is that the common belief of the boundaries of self is brought about by the apparent if illusory limits to the body, which we often view as the outer tissue or skin. This comes to advantage however in the usage of “O”, which is represented vocally as an open sound created by the expulsion of breath, in effect dispersing parts of the body externally. Even more striking is its typographic form of a single, uninterrupted line with no apparent beginning or end, in continuous creation or motion as a Moebius strip. It too like the body might appear at first to delineate an area that might be called the “inside”, when it is just as well observed that the line is in fact, noting the redundancy, delineated, created, given existence and form by the area around it, on every side, those being both what we might see as the “inside” and the “outside” without which the line would not exist. Indeed is not the line, the circle of the line, as a conceptual and abstract form, insubstantial, imposed upon the substance which seems to hold it and which it seems to limit? It follows clearly that in actuality the circle bounds nothing, just as the concept of self, however handy a social tool (as well as one of oppression), bounds nothing. The “I” then, as a concept that contains nothing, is as insubstantial as that line, while in the actual world roams the boundless we, blending, swirling, shifting in countless cross-currents, shaping and unshaping, everywhere. O think O am going to like this pronoun a lot.

[1] I’m liking the use of “own” for the possessive.

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NEW PUBLICATION  ::  I am mortally honored to have a piece in the upcoming (as in this month!) new anthology from great weather for MEDIA, Beacon Radiant. Their annual anths are always something to look forward to, and when I occasionally have some work therein, I’m just a little too excited (don’t ask). Somewhat to my surprise, for this issue they chose to accept a short story of mine that is either really scary or not at all (or both). It’s called “The Extraction”, and I won’t say any more. This year’s book contains a total of sixty-two writers in various genres, all of whom I’d be willing to bet will kick your radiant beacon. I don’t know all of them (wish I did!), but I do know some, whose names are something like Youssef Alaoui, Austin Alexis, Kat Georges, Aimee Herman, Karen Hildebrand, Tobey Hiller, Taneesh Kaur, Ron Kolm, Jane LeCroy, Yuko Otomo, Puma Perl, Han Raschka, Danny Shot,  and Francine Witte. The rest I’m gonna ask one by one on dates and I’ll let you know. The looming pub date is July 22, and you can pre-order this essential text for $22 right darn here. With all those 2’s, how can you go wrong? Plus I hear they’re going to be gluing red yarn to every single cover! (I don’t actually know that and I probably just got in trouble there.) In any case, do yourself a favor, click on through, and get Radiant!

NEW REVIEW  :: I am abashed by the honestly amazing review that my book Mammal received this week by Ben Tripp in Heavy Feather Review. I don’t get reviewed very often (does anyone?), and though I’ve certainly had kind words said, both in person and in print, I’m not always sure that the speaker entirely gets what I’m doing. I don’t disallow anyone that reaction – I know my work is not easily categorized, even within itself; some find pieces too complex, others find others too simple, and parsing them into a singular voice can be a bit much. I get that. But that’s not the case here. Mr. Tripp seems to have really sat with the book and reflected in many directions. (I just hope it didn’t hurt too much.) He’s the first writer, to my recollection, to note that “if we didn’t know any better, we might think the book is written by more than one person.” I suspect that most people would consider that rude to admit, but in fact I feel the same way!

I don’t want to wax (well I do, but…), but he doesn’t just plunk that observation down (as I suspect many have in their minds), but eventually takes it further: “The joyful expression of the lifestyle of the poet finds better expression in this daring exploratory indigo style, where personhood almost disappears; as opposed to the eminently conservative, transparent, predictable style so common among other poets … sentimental conformity as moral duty. Somewhere along the way, recently all creativity become “content” just like “voice” became subservient to “brand,” but not here. Loranger’s writing gets even broader, searching for a new ontology of what it means to be human, as one body a part of many others that together form a larger one.”

There’s much more, and perhaps a few of you kind folks will click through to it, but I’m so excited that I need to leave you with my favorite quote from the essay. “If one could imagine hallucinated re-vamping of fragments of poems from The New Yorker, stitched together and newly electrified to make a kind of rainbow-Frankenstein, that’s Mammal.” I’m not quite sure what that means, or what relationship my work have to that in The New Yorker (to which I can’t afford a subscription), but having my work described as “a kind of rainbow-Frankenstein” completely giggles my day.

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So, the body, whence all of this confusion springs. What a problem that thing is, and I’m not talking about how poorly it’s designed. The big enigma is how poorly it is defined. What do I mean? For instance, does it end at our skin, or does it include emanations? Sure it’s made of our organs, but what about all those microorganisms, our biomes, our symbiotic friends? No? What? Why not? Then we have the whole aura conundrum (at least on the West Coast), the electromagnetic field that leaks out of us, and which we take in. And our breath! We yank it in from outside us, so not part of the body, right? Until said body steals its oxygen and incorporates it. That same old poem, by the way, that I mention in the first section of this essay also contains the line, “Of course our bodies have no size.” And I meant it. So another ongoing topic here. The body may be the biggest misnomer in the supposition and calculation of the “I”, the biggest trick, the biggest feint and manipulation – because our bodies, or our lumps of flesh if you will, can be manipulated, and are and have been throughout human history. This body, in short, this lump of flesh is how we can be controlled, is a primary tool and means of control by those who wish to do so. Want to oppress? Threaten the body. Want to indoctrinate? Seduce the body. Want strength in numbers, Embrace the body. But they say, don’t they, that you can subjugate the body, but you can’t subdue the person/spirit/soul/self, or whatever swarm word you like to use. They’re all trigger words to me, by the way, since they oppress and control us with the notion of dualism. Language. There it is again. So you’ve got this body bound to earth, and this spirit which inhabits it but is somehow free of earth, right? All based on the supposition that matter and energy are separate. How high school is that? And how is it, if our bodies are actually separate from each other, how can we blend and merge and amplify? Because our spirits do? What did I just say about matter and energy? All that seems like cognitive dissonance to me, and I find it comfortable to address by considering “each” of “us” as a locus. So when we’re in the same room and I’m looking at you, that’s what I’m thinking and that’s what I’m looking at: a locus.

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REFLECTIONS ON  ::  Hand Me the Limits by Ted Rees (Roof Books, 2024)

In the latter part of Hand Me the Limits, Ted Rees’ genre-queer document of sur-viving colorectal adenocarcinoma and the ensuing abdominoperineal resection surgery required to save his life, Rees has a burst of anger. This outburst, though, was not in reaction to the anatomical horrowshow that he’s been living, and had in fact been written, so say the acknowledgements, a couple of years before that began. His ire erupted after being referred to by a friend and colleague, in print, as “so fucking punk.” “Let me tell you,” Rees goes on, “that really pissed me off. Being recognized is terrible. It is having a fucked mirror placed to your body that reflects only the most outlandish identifiers.” Then he goes on to talk about how punk he’d been and continued to be for some time after the remark – not as a matter of style or fashion, but as an ontologic state, a way of living. I’m right with him in these passages, having bathed myself in the sea of punk’s first waves twenty years before his embarkment, like him for its anti-capitalist rigor and disdain, sporting old torn clothes and mussed hair for years, eschewing material things for wandering the country with my thumb in the air. Though Rees paints himself as conflicted about the lifestyle both then and later, I have to wonder whether his reaction might have been founded in sentiments similar to those I have felt, when being named as “punk” by someone who has not been there belies their ignorance that punk as we experienced it was not an identifier but an anti-identifier – it was not at base a way of saying, “This is what I am,” but rather, “That is what I’m not.”

Yet within the punk milieu, even from the beginning, in squats, warehouses, industrial art spaces, dive bars, and thrash pits (before they were called mosh pits), there was a sense of community, of belonging, almost like a secret society, a society of rejection of the power structure. And from that dissonance, that conflicted empathy and antipathy, winds a thread of one of Rees’ underlying themes, of belonging/not belonging/belonging/not. The essayic piece that begins with his outburst, “Taking Revenge on the World for Not Existing,” outlines his introduction and entrance to the abstractish and disarranging New Narrative school/anti-school/sect of wording. He in fact swings hapfully from the warmth of belonging, of mutual appreciation of perspectives and styles and forms, to a sense of existing outside and resentment of the movement’s inherent hierarchies of class and influence. The dislocation between New Narrative and his queer punk baseline seems to be forever frictional for him – I’d even say fricative at risk of a stretch. Isn’t there some theory-something about underlying tension being the engine of art something something? I dunno.

I’ve spent what seems like an inordinate amount of time on this one thematic point because I think it illumines so much of the book and Ted’s work in general. But here, in Hand Me the Limits, that mainspring of not/belonging is met with another that appears to animate the crisis that he’s addressing, but which may in fact be animated by it. The first line in the book, which, to my mind, knowing that crisis, hits like a sledgehammer: “Everything is rearranged,” has more connotations than his text/body has layers of tissue. Top and center of the page, hailing a cancer that has rearranged your fucking body, it perches like a flag. It reads like an immediate injection of turmoil, and fittingly so. But as I read the various sections, and gather, and put the not-pieces not-together, and maybe because I’m an old queer punk hitchhiker who had many friends coming up, punk and queer but not usually both at once, who never felt much sense of cultural belonging until the queer punk movement formed literally around me in late 1980s San Francisco, it strikes me: punks don’t get thrown easily by things being rearranged, because they’re constantly rearranging, and we’re commonly more comfortable with that and with being ungrounded in general than most people. As well, looking in from the outside, because I don’t enjoy the embrace of the New Narrativistas (nor have ever really felt a sense of belonging with any authorial school or sect – a note for perspective but not a complaint), it seems to me that this (anti-)school to which Ted feels some connection is also quite comfortable with the act and experience of rearranging, and to some extent is founded in it. So from that vantage, the very fact that Ted Rees, master free-spirit in a rearranging world, would need to state that so blanchedly lends that sledgehammer even more heft and wedges its head inexorably to handle as it is swung by the arm of [insert your favored belief system here]. Bodily autonomy aside, right there’s the psychic loss this book reifies.

When I referred to this text at the start of my discussion as “genre-queer”, I wasn’t being flippant, nor trying to borrow or re-coin the term. In one sense I was mixing “genre-bend” with “genderqueer”, but I was also thinking of how mixed genre work (and texts) are by definition “queer” (in the best sense of the word), and also thinking of how Rees’ work is so damn queer (in the queer sense of the word) because every one of his cells is as well. And though this book, run through by loss like a fist, appears to present several distinct genres, many of them bleed into each other readily. The opening poem, which pedestal-centered leads us into the medical horror, is unusually narrative for Mr. Rees, at least in regards to poetry – which was exactly what the moment required. Besides “Taking Revenge…”, you’ll find two further memoir/essays, all tonally quite different. Early in the text, in “Make Me Real, Make Me Sick”, Ted delineates his birth into punkdom via teen alienation, his mother’s cancer and decline, aloof adults, and Courtney Love. He ends the book with a slightly hallucinatory narrative detailing the medical treatments and where the experience led him, aptly titled, “My Rectum, My Grave”. Spoiler: it leads him elsewhere than the grave. In between you’ll encounter an application for a fellowship for a poetry/performance project (fellowship name redacted), a letter to his beloved mentor Kevin Killian written some time after his death in 2019, and several sections in the form of poetry.

In the poetic work we see Rees’ art of rearranging as an act of agency. The work is oblique and intimate, and performs on me at least the experience of being drawn in and pushed away simultaneously, that act of not/belonging. Sometimes I find abstract poetry of this type (of what type? give me a fucking label! 😀 ) to be hypnotic, wrapping itself around my mind and making me feel trapped in its own textural psyche – and my mind resists, much as it sometimes resists being carried away by music. So I found the first poetic series here, the eponymous “Hand Me the Limits”, particularly hard as it brings you so close to loss and disconnection: “dry / ribbon my fist followed / through to my nudity / in mirror […] deleting every day, / never more wanting to be wetter.” And: “the summer commands / in its wretched glopping / shriek the sort of grief / you love like not / believing it’s not…” Man that’s tough to feel. I called this a series though it might be page-spaced stanzas and who cares, and I don’t know if it’s auto-writ or carefully chosen intimacies or a lashing out of mind – maybe all – and whatever the case is again what the moment required.

The three other poetry sections are also in this style but as the essays with shifts of tone and content. Re one of them, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” included after the letter to Killian, Rees notes in the acknowledgements to have been fashioned by feeding excerpts from their personal emails into GPT-2, to sculpt an unpreformed collage of friend-words. I so appreciated that insight into his process for this piece, and it was a pleasure to reread it as the genetic blend that it is. I don’t produce work like this, so exploring it is always scented of new territory. I don’t know whether the other pieces contain genetic blends, or lyrical, or intertextual writhing of limbs, but one thing I do know is this: Ted Rees’ writing, in this book especially, grabs me by the anatomy and pulls me in close, to the point where, at times, I feel like we’re sharing a sternum. There’s a prospect of danger in engaging with work like that – I think of Wojnarowicz – a sort of leap beyond empathy. I don’t think of myself as a particularly brave mammal in many situations; I’m socially inept, for one thing, and I fetal at the first sign of violence. But I do think I’m capable of being a brave reader, at most times anyway. If you’re of a similar ilk, I recommend giving this book a fly and taking the risk of possibly sharing sternums for a few minutes as well.

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I’ve kind of misled you a bit, haven’t I? Because I did start this topic by claiming that I use “he” and “they”, didn’t I, common monikers currently used to denote gender. So I led you to assume that would be the theme of this missive. And I ask you, hasn’t it been? Have I disregarded gender in this convoluted explication of self and identity? Is it not part of the array? Okay, I’ll stop messing and get to it. Being non-binary comes in one perspective from the social/cultural presumption that “gender” is based on anatomical sex, or what is sometimes now referred to as being female or male assigned-at-birth (except, of course, with intersex persons who don’t fit either category and are often – still! – mutilated to conform). At least that’s how I take it, not having read gobs of gender theory. To be honest, the gender distinction, much like the notion of a static self, never made much sense to me. I have a recollection of being around ten years old and hanging out with neighborhood friends in front of our house in a little suburban development outside of Philadelphia, and coming to the revelation, for whatever reason and with no regard to my genitalia, that I wasn’t really a boy or a girl. Who knows what sparked that or what it meant to me, but I do recall it happening then and there. It must not have been shocking because I don’t recall paying it much mind, then or after, and though I never mentioned it, it just always felt pretty much matter-of-fact. All that independent, like I say of my anatomy or my sexuality, which I didn’t even begin to figure out, consciously at least, till I was nineteen. But I have to wonder, and often have, especially now that I have some knowledge of intersexuality and the panavarium of life as it teems, whether the concept of gender should be limited to the binary, whether non-binary means (or should mean) something in-between, as I think it usually does, or something else entirely. What if gender is so ecstatic that it goes beyond the flesh, as, in my mind, do we? So yeah, I usually tell people that I use “he” or “they”, while the multitudes of me clamor to be known as not non-binary, but non-numerical. Perhaps we might consider starting from there and moving the conversation forward.

Sincerely,
Richard

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