[cavar] While reading Let The Moon Wobble, I was thinking not only about its genesis but about the role of absence and loss in it. I’m curious how, through the process of your writing, you were engaging with this notion of absence, that we as poets so often are trying not to fill, but to write around in our work.
A lot of the poems in this collection were written when I was in my MFA program from 2019 to 2021, so early pandemic times. I was in a city where I didn’t know many people and I was feeling true loneliness for the first time in my life. The poems were born from a place of absence, the lack of connection with other people, which I felt in a real physical way. And I was also thinking a lot about ghosts and hauntings — as poets love to do — both in the context of this time of mass death and people being disappeared or erased from public life, and the different ways that erasure and ghosts appear in my own personal lineage. One thing that I love about poetry is that these absences can exist without having to be filled or be narrativized into making logical sense.
And that relates to a question I have for you about holes, which I know is something that we both are obsessed with. We both have hole-related epigraphs opening our books. I was thinking about the different ways that holes appear in both of your books as a concrete image, but also as redaction, as white space on the page, as gaps in memory and narrative. What meaning, possibility, allure do you find in holes?
Holes are so interesting because they’re a site of loss, injury, and trauma, but also a site of escape and possibility. In my first book, Failure to Comply, a big thing that I was thinking about is what it would mean to find these literal, physical holes in institutions of violence and be able to crawl through them. And particularly when I was writing the end of that book, where the narrator is crawling through the vents, I was thinking about — have you ever seen Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide? On that show, they’re often breaking the rules while crawling through the vents in their school. It’s played for laughs, but there’s also something very compelling about taking this institution that polices everything you do, including your bodily functions, and being able to literally be in their walls and haunt them, destabilize them.
Like Failure to Comply, Differential Diagnosis has a lot of speculative elements. It’s also a way for me to think about my experiences with psychiatric incarceration and abuse and all this stuff. And the hole, again, comes to me both as something created by trauma, and yet still something whose possibilities of escape I’m constantly finding and relocating in ways that I don’t expect. And the last thing I’ll say about holes is that I love how uncomfortable the word “hole” makes people. Using this language that’s jarring and upsetting was a primary ethos that I brought into Differential Diagnosis, and “hole” is something that is so intimate, uncomfortable, violent, and startling. The black hole draws me ever-closer to new meaning.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that discomfort is also what I find very compelling about holes, especially in the sense of the abject. In terms of bodily holes, that’s where the border between the Self and Other is blurred and disrupted, and I think that is really unsettling to people. Like, your body is more permeable than you ever want to think about. I mean, it literally gets under your skin.
Because I read Failure to Comply and Differential Diagnosis back-to-back, I feel like I was primed to see them as existing in the same universe. They’re obviously dealing with different subject matter, but a lot of the themes are similar, and there’s also this linguistic play and fracturing and subversion of language, grammar, syntax in both of the books. I’m curious how you see these two books in conversation and relationship with one another.
I think that Differential Diagnosis was me finding the courage to say things that I euphemized within Failure to Comply. I recently spoke to a book club that read Failure to Comply, and there was this one trans member who got everything that I implied beat for beat, laying out all of the narrative points and their implications. Like, “This is when the narrator was abused, and this is when they develop a severe eating disorder.” It was so jarring. Sometimes the reception you get is kind of like, okay, whatever. And sometimes the reception you get just absolutely reads you to filth.
Failure to Comply was, in many ways, a trial run, a way of speculating on feelings I wasn’t ready to feel. I wrote the first draft between the ages of 17 and 21, and it took me several years to revise it and to publish it. I published it when I was 25, but I wrote it when I was not ready to deal with the things that I was actually inadvertently dealing with in the text.
With Differential Diagnosis, I was more prepared to speak explicitly about my experiences, to name them, to use a word like “anorexia” rather than erase it. I was in my PhD program and in a sort of dissociated state, yet every poem that I wrote was cracking the shell a little bit more and a little bit more. I have since completed my PhD. I turned 27 in December, and now, the shell is kind of broken. I’m leaking into the world. I view both of these books as partners in this project of leakage and seeping. There is something freeing about this, but there is also a sacrifice. There are fewer places to hide.
Do you feel like the shell is forever broken?
Part of breaking the shell is realizing that the mask that I was wearing was not a very good one anyway. Many people knew what was going on with me, even when I believed they didn’t. But I wouldn’t say so much that it’s broken forever as now that there are things that are on the surface that cannot be buried again. There are still things left to unbury. Perhaps the project that I have to take on for the rest of my 20s (at least) is one of digging up the grave.
Ooh, another hole.
Always more holes! I am also curious as to your experience, because your poetry book has been out longer than mine has. What has the reception been like, and what have you sort of learned about yourself and about the text?
It’s been good and weird! I’m really grateful for every bit of readership and critical engagement the book has gotten, but there was also a lot that I wasn’t expecting. I was prepared for the idea that once you publish a piece of writing or a book, it’s no longer solely yours. People will interpret it however they interpret it, and you just have to come to terms with that, which I have. But what I was less prepared for is how people will interpret you as the person behind the work. The literary world and publishing feel very invested in categorizing people into labels and the marketability of different identities. I feel like more of myself and my identities have become public discussion than I was expecting, in small and large ways. Have you encountered that with your books at all?
I have, but more so with Failure to Comply. Novels get assigned certain genre categories when they’re published. I think we picked science fiction, dystopian, and LGBT for Failure. The LGBT one is really weird, because Failure is a book about queerness set in a universe where this particular set of identity labels is, by design, unthinkable. It’s really strange that I’m inviting readers into this deeply defamiliarized world where the language that we’re accustomed to using to understand ourselves is elided because self-understanding in the context of Failure to Comply is the enemy. And yet, I log on to Goodreads, and it’s like, “LGBT dystopian sci-fi,” and I’m like, I don’t identify with any of that.
The concept of genre-noncompliance is something that I’m really invested in, both for gender reasons, and also because I think that genre categories, like gender, are really carceral, and they limit the possibilities that books can bring.
I wanted to talk about this defamiliarization of language that is a big characteristic of both of your books. There are so many syntactical surprises in your work, and the way that you destabilize the English language delights me. It sometimes feels playful when you do it, but it also reminds me of Quenton Baker’s book Ballast, where they wrote about how they took a violent text and wanted to enact violence upon the text through erasure. Your poems aren’t necessarily erasures, but I feel like what you’re doing with language and grammar evokes a similar sense of violence, both towards English as a hegemonic language that has been forced upon people, and towards language and grammar itself as a form of Mad resistance against normativity and the ableist logics of syntax and grammar. Does that resonate with you?
For sure. Throughout history, violence against marginalized groups throughout history has been profoundly bureaucratic. The written text as a bureaucratic weapon is something that has emerged again and again in my personal life, and being a student of history, I’ve seen that the most violence is done not with a sort of gun or a sword, but with paperwork — particularly in the way that that paperwork serves to separate persons from one another, the harmer from the harmed.
I certainly approach my writing with that philosophy, but the wordplay and the gaps and the strangeness is also something that I don’t really need to try at. I have been asked how much of the wordplay in Failure to Comply was added in during the editing process, and the answer is almost none of it. Some of it was actually taken out because I was the only one who thought it was interesting. A lot of my best poems and my best prose — and I don’t really agree with that separation either — come from me following the weird connections and gaps that my mind makes. I try to follow the way that my mind works as an ecosystem and approximating it on the page. My work is written the way that my brain operates, and carries with it a broader acknowledgement that the way that I operate has been abused and pathologized and incarcerated.
In Differential Diagnosis specifically, I’m playing with the idea of psychiatric diagnosis as linguistic violence, and seeing what I can do to parry that. I try to keep a balance between both playfulness and seriousness. Not to mention, uphold my responsibility as a traumatized person to also be very funny.
Yeah, your work is very funny — often in a dark way, but also in a way I found delightful. I do love how much play there is in your work, even though it’s also very intellectually and formally rigorous.
Play is so serious. I actually wrote my doctoral dissertation on gender and psychiatric resignification on the internet — wordplay that can mean the difference between transMad life and death. Play is an absolutely vital way of challenging the cultural boundaries of gender, species, identity, and relationality in a way that people, especially those who are considered to be children or minors, do not get to do in their offline lives.
Yeah, that makes me think about how when I was a kid, I was best friends with my next door neighbor and we would play these really elaborate imaginative games. We had entire worlds we created and all these different characters we would inhabit. We were both very repressed children, but sometimes we pretended to be boys or men in our games, and now we’re both trans. We were playing with gender before we knew that’s what we were doing, and that was the only outlet we had to experiment with it. Play absolutely is life-expanding, and I try to maintain that in my poems as well.
Do you view writing as a form of play?
Absolutely. I think writing is hard in a lot of ways, but it does kind of annoy me when writers complain about writing all the time. I’m like, if you’re not having fun, then why are you doing this? Because probably no one’s making you.
Right, it’s like how if you feel the need to make AI write for you, just don’t be a writer. You’re already not a writer. Like, just stop.
Right. And yes, it is work, but it’s also so playful, especially with poetry, because there’s so much possibility and freedom within the container of the poem, and in form, and in breaking form. A lot of the poems in my book were written in a period of formal experimentation and play, where I was basically like, “What if I try writing a ghazal? Or a poem in the form of a mental health intake form?” And I’d just try it and see what happened. So I think play is a really important part of my writing process because again, why would I be writing poems if it didn’t feel joyful and playful and fun for me? Obviously it’s also sometimes agonizing, but no one’s making me do this, so what’s the point of writing poems if I’m not enjoying it?
Have you heard of the concept of type two fun?
No, what’s that?
Type one fun is regular fun. Type two fun is like hiking up a really tall mountain — it kind of hurts, but it feels good, too. And I think that writing poems for me is largely type two fun. It’s something that my body needs to do, and while it can be delightful, it can also hurt very badly. But for all the hurt, I’ve never considered stopping.
Growing up, I did this thing I called “playing a story.” I would come up with a narrative, and then I would make people act it out with me. I didn’t know it then, but I was dealing with the fact that I had a lot of shame, self-hatred, and confusion as to what was happening when I was growing up. All of that would come out when I was playing a story, because I would always make somebody else be me. I was always somebody else, someone I decided was superior to myself. While playing a story, I could be a force that acted upon myself, to better understand the way that Sarah, me, was reacting and engaging. It would take a team of therapists to unpack that one. But looking back, I can very much see the genealogy of my interest in writing, because when I write characters, I’m taking isolated and modified pieces of myself, and I’m putting them on a game board, and then I’m seeing what happens when these other forces and other issues and other contexts move them around. And after each manuscript I write, I am different because the we of me have, collectively, seen more possibilities.
Do you feel like that process is different in poetry than in fiction?
This was something that I was thinking about in response to something you said earlier, about the distinction that a lot of poets try to make between themselves and “the speaker.” I’ve never really made that distinction. I, or somebody who shares my name, wrote those poems. Maybe we are not the same self, but that self is also one that inhabits my body. It’s not a speaker that I made up out of nowhere. It’s not a different persona. With poems, I think it’s less about imagining alternative possibilities and more about exploring the truth of what happened in a way that frees me from the constraints of consensus reality. The production of sense is no longer a necessity. And when that’s gone, you actually get to truths that you will never get to when you’re trying to be legible.
In an interview about Failure to Comply, you said “I am an author, only eight letters from ‘authoritarian.’ So, I need to make active choices with what I might call my authorial privilege: the choice not to govern, or to govern against governance…The term [transMadness] implies the vigilance with which I have written and edited this novel, vigilance against (among other things) the cop, the psychiatrist, the RSCH & its inevitable voice in my head.” Does this vigilance take similar or different forms in poetry? And what do you feel is the relationship between poetry and authority/authoritarianism?
In poetry, particularly when writing about suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders, the process is haunted by these questions: “Will this make somebody worse? What is my responsibility to my readership?” Truthfully, as someone who’s been through all of those things, I know that you can write the most horrible, damning, painful account of what you went through, and somebody’s still going to say, “I want that,” or “I want to be worse than that.”
Knowing that, and also believing that people should have the fundamental autonomy to hurt themselves if they so choose, I needed to put aside my anxieties. I’m writing a book that only I can write. It is not my responsibility to look after every reader, but instead to be open about the fact that this is not a healthy book, nor a recovery book; I am not a well-adjusted person, and this life is not a life I recommend. I am writing about what is, not what, perhaps, should be. In that sense, I’m using my authorial power as a way to say no to narratives of positivity, recovery, and hope. There is no promise in this book that I’m going to get better, or that the systems that subjugate transMad people are going to get better.
Beyond this refusal, what I hope to do with this book is situate eating disorders within a broader canon of Mad writing. Both Mad discourse and trans discourse deliberately erase eating disorders because they confound the boundary between mental and physical illness, because they are very deadly and cannot be rehabilitated using standard anti-psychiatry talking points, and because they are so tied to notions of white femininity and existing systems of deadly eugenic fatphobia that people don’t want to address. When I say “No, you’re going to read my anorexic poetry,” I want to push back against this erasure and allow Madness to be the mess it always has been. It is the most authoritarian I’ve ever felt as a writer, and the greatest risk I have taken in terms of my career.
Here’s another question that I’m sure you have a lot of thoughts on. In this current fascist hellscape, what do we expect our poetry to do?
I struggle with this question. I think it’s a bit of a cop-out to say, “Poetry is radical just because we’re [insert identity here] and we’re writing.” That feels a little too easy. At the same time, it’s true that reading queer and trans poets of color as a young person did save my life in many ways, and to downplay that is also doing a disservice.
Writing poetry often feels self-serving for me, because when I’m writing, I’m not setting out to fix anything with my poems. It’s just the only way for me to process and make sense of the bullshit happening in the world, because you don’t have to have answers in poetry. You don’t have to adhere to the same logics of other genres. There is room for the ambiguity and the holes and the what-the-fuckness that characterizes living in this moment. For me personally, the biggest utility of poetry is that it’s one of the only containers that can hold all of the absurdity of living in this reality.
I don’t want to say that I’m trying to change the world with my poetry, because I think some people have the ability to do that with poetry, but I’m no June Jordan. I’m just some guy, and I don’t know if my poetry can fix any of the problems that are happening in the world. I write mostly for myself to find ways to survive, and I hope other people resonate with it or take something from it or feel seen by it. It’s a lifeline for me and hopefully for other people, but who knows? What about you?
What you said about June Jordan really interests me, because while she changed and continues to change so many lives, she didn’t singlehandedly save the world. She made a tool that was really, really useful. I view writing as a process of tool-fashioning. Every time you write a poem and release it into the world, you’re giving the world another knife, and someone can sharpen it and use it to fight the oppressor, or they can use it to cut themselves. You can’t control how they’re going to use it, but it’s a tool all the same.
By this, I mean that poetry doesn’t do anything by itself. It needs interlocutors. I would write even if nothing was ever published, but I publish for a reason, because I want people to read what I’m writing, and I want to start conversations with people that I wouldn’t otherwise have. A big part of the reason that I write is in order to have conversations like this one; writing is a tool of connection and relationship-making.
Lastly, I’ll say that within Judaism, there’s this idea that for every one life you save, you save a universe, not only because every person contains a universe, but because within each person is the prospect of generations of people who would never exist unless that person survived. If I think about poetry as preserving the lives of the people, particularly people who are trans, Mad, disabled, it helps me to understand the power of positively impacting even one or a handful of people. Poetry books almost never make huge bestseller lists. But if five people read my book and feel more able to survive, five is enough. Every single person is enough.
dis/connect: A Hole, A Moon, A Universe: Poetics & Mad Opacities: A Dialogue with Ally Ang was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.