Thank you.
Torrin, that was beautiful.
And the range and the scope and just the energy
of the work that comes from you, the poet, into the work
is just palpable.
So I just want to thank you for sharing
both work that was submitted and then also work that's upcoming.
I'd like to ask you a few questions about the newer work.
You mentioned that you have a second manuscript that you're
actively working toward, and I wondered
if you have a title for that manuscript
or a tentative title.
The titles that you're floating around.
I do.
The current title on this manuscript,
which I'm very much hoping stays, is Deed.
- Aha, I like that.
The one-word title.
It's a difficult art.
I'm somewhat dubious of them most of the time.
Yeah, me too, but it says so much to
just do the one-word title, but that's great.
I had a question that is more maybe a comment,
and maybe we can talk a little bit about it.
I am really inspired by the way that you
write about sex and intimacy, and how violence sometimes
can often play a part in those two things.
How they're separate together, right?
And I wondered if that's something
that comes very easy for you or for other people that
might be trying to incorporate some of those aspects
into their writing.
What do you think about that?
I think sex is a really, really hard thing to write about.
And I think anyone who's ever been to an open mic
knows just how easy it is for someone to do it badly.
There's always that one guy.
But I think a big thing for me is most of my poems
that are about sex are also not really about sex.
And I think there has to be necessarily something
more than sex in the poems.
Just like writing a poem about joy that is only about
joy is so, so difficult to do.
I mean, even Ross Gay, who I think
is thought of as like the poet of joy in our current canon.
You really dig into those poems, and most of them
are about many, many things other than joy.
But joy becomes the thing that kind of
allows those poems to move through themselves.
And I often--
I think sex connects to so many things,
in how we move in the world, desire
and the politics of desirability.
Often, we move beyond the bedroom, right?
There's a really fantastic study on the failings of empathy,
and I think it's referenced in the book Against Empathy.
So as an autistic writer, I think a lot about the way
that we talk about writing toward empathy,
as someone who doesn't actually experience a lot of empathy.
I think, one, we often misname empathy
when we really mean compassion.
And also, I think there are some failings.
So one of the things that I think is hilarious
is among the different things that
come into statistics around how we experience empathy is people
are more likely to experience empathy
for people of the same gender, race, socioeconomic class.
These things, if we look at our culture,
are all pretty easy to understand
just like on how society has structured itself
and like the hegemony created through like white cis hetero
patriarchy.
But studies also show that people experience
less empathy for people they aren't attracted to,
and this thought kept returning as I
was trying to write about a kind of politics of desirability.
Because the way that my body is like a disabled trans woman's
body is encountered by a politic of desirability
very easily shades over into the kind
of disposability politic that people
extend onto disabled bodies, and particularly,
transfeminine bodies.
So I don't think I can write about desire without also
writing about violence, without writing
about the way in which my body is
made to be disposable by both the state and individuals.
And I also can't write about desire
without wanting to write into the people who
don't make me feel disposable.
The ways in which desire can be a positive thing,
and how that's often an extension of community.
Sorry, that was a very long answer.
Oh, but that's what we're looking for is the long answers
because that's what it takes.
These sorts of thoughts and considerations
are the things that go into crafting.
I hate the word craft because that's not really--
just in sort of in birthing, or that's also not it
but just in the creation or being close to the truth
and being able to bring all those ideas and thoughts
and synthesize them in a way where they are being presented
to someone in a way where you're reading one thing.
But you're reading about all these other things.
And I think that that's part of the comment
that I made earlier about the way that your poems expand.
And because we can't see the poems on the page,
how are your poems normally on the page,
or that last poem that you read, what does that look like
on the page?
Do you have that?
Yeah, so I think my poems tend to go
kind of all over the place.
The most recent book, Deed, tends
to cleave a little bit more to the margin of the page,
more so than Wound From The Mouth Of A Wound,
where the poems are kind of going all over the page,
though there's still a bit of that.
This poem is actually one-- it took me a long time to figure
out formally what I wanted to do with it because it's structured
around these--
Sorry, my light is very bright.
Oh, I see some stanzas, maybe five or six line stanzas.
Typically, between four and five,
sometimes six-line stanzas interspaced
with all of these monostiches, a monostich
being a one-line stanza.
So like, the first one that occurs,
and when I made this lane break it felt very brave to me
as someone who--
I consider myself a coward about my own poems.
But the first one of those is a perfect pastoral--
"I'm sorry" as one line.
And when I realized how good that was,
I started trying to shape the poem around having
longer stanzas, and then one of these bridging monostiches,
like another, "Kill me.
Late fall, and the foothills are ablaze."
I'm very interested in the way we
create meanings with the line break,
and the line as an individual unit of meaning.
So the kind of puzzle of this poem for me became,
how can I create these pulled-out lines
that become their own unit of meaning
when read alone but then also were part of the thread of all
of the rest of it?
If you've ever been sewing, and somehow
the distance of the two sides of the thread end up mismatched.
And so in your whip stitch, you have one thread
that just sticks out.
I wanted to kind of do something with the form of the poem that
created that shape.
Wow, that's fascinating.
Just as a final question, since we're talking about form,
can you say a little bit about why you were drawn to haibun?
I'm somebody who's very into tanka and haiku.
And I actually have attempted haibun many times,
but I just haven't been able to really clear the field in a way
where I'm like, this is my haibun.
But I love the form.
I love a lot of those forms and just want
to know what that form kind of prompted
in you to not only utilize it but then
also to create this new form.
I think you called it the burning.
Is it the burning haibun which I found
really fascinating and lovely.
And I wondered if you could just say a little bit more
about that.
Yeah, so on one level, I like the haibun
because it feels like cheating because haikai forms, the tanka
and renga and haiku, they're so rigorous, especially when you
get into the more dense historical requirements
of like the season word, the fact that you should not
be telling the reader what to think or feel.
I think they're so fascinating when you get down
into that granular level that I kind of love
the fact that the haibun lets you cheat that a little bit
because you get the prose.
But you still have to, at the end of the day,
write that haiku and understand what you're doing
and also be able to connect those two parts.
The burning haibun came about, I was reading a couple of books,
but primarily, Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds.
And I was particularly drawn to "Immigrant Haibun," which
is a haibun, but it's actually multiple shorter prose
poems capped off with a haiku.
And then "Aubade with Burning City",
which threads through it little fragments of the song "White
Christmas".
And this got me thinking, because it's also
very much the sort of fragments of song
being played over the radio as Saigon burns.
This got me thinking about burning and fragmentation.
At the same time, as I was really
enamored with a multi-part haibun,
and I ended up kind of trying to put these two ideas together
utilizing erasure.
The first one I did was--
it was bad.
It was absolutely terrible and ran for about five pages.
So I put that away for a year.
Eventually, came back, completely
changed the topic of it, and the first burning
haibun in my book Wound from the Mouth of a Wound.
I ended up keeping only one line from that initial draft,
and so I think a lot about this is
like one of my favorite moments of radical revision
because I kept the idea and one line, which became the opening
line.
Yeah, and from there, I just played around
with different approaches.
I figured out at a certain point,
it's much smarter to start from the haiku
and then write upwards as opposed to writing downwards,
which is what I did the first two times.
I'm going to have to try that.
I think I'm somebody who is like, if I
have an idea for something, I write seven pages toward it.
And then I spend like two years trying to filter through it,
and then I'll end up with a few lines.
But then you only keep that amount,
but then this other way is like you're
more likely to keep these other things potentially
that you're building, versus this other thing,
but that's fascinating.
The one line that you said that you kept,
did you read that during the reading?
If you didn't, can you read that or even just repeat it
because now I'm really curious?
Yeah, I didn't read it during this reading,
but in the very first burning haibun, the only line
it kept is the opening one--
"Once, my mother accused me of throwing alcohol,
gasoline on my emotions," which it's funny
because I mentioned--
actually, I've realized in two of the poems I read today,
the way in which poems lie.
Poems don't necessarily bear an allegiance to the truth,
but that line is 100% a quote from my mother.
I think it's one of the wildest things in the book.
It's something my mother said to me.
I really love it, and I love that it's
just sort of like an opening to what you
are going to be experiencing.
Well, I want to thank you for spending time with us
and reading your amazing work.
I'm hoping that once all of this passes,
we'll be able to invite you back,
and we can host you in person in Tucson,
but it was just beautiful to hear your work.
And I wish you the best on your next book
and make sure, everyone, if you have an opportunity,
to pick up Torrin's first book Wound
from the Mouth of a Wound.
And yes, there's the book.
We'll also be on the lookout for your second book, Deed,
which fingers crossed, we'll be able to read soon.
So gracias, Torrin, it was really
great to spend time with you.
Awesome.
OK, have a good night.