I'm going to try really hard not to do
too much bantering because it gets weird when I do that.
But I will say that I have a PowerPoint.
Because in addition to being a poet,
I am also a gender studies professor.
And so I have to have a PowerPoint.
And I'm going to read three things to you.
I'm going to read one long, two regular.
And the long one is, as TC was talking about this,
it's kind of a poem, kind of an essay directed
to the 20th-century poet, priest, lawyer,
co-founder of the National Organization of Women with Betty
Friedan, He-She personality Pauli Murray,
who sometime in 2020, I was like,
I need an example of somebody who has lived the kind of life
that I might live before.
And I became obsessed with them.
And then I wrote an academic essay about them.
And then I became profoundly embarrassed and ashamed
of that essay.
And so then I wrote this thing which
is a palinode, which is a poem which retracts something
about a former thing that you have written.
So this is a palinode about an essay I wrote about polyamory.
Yeah OK.
It's going to take me like 12 minutes to do this.
So here I go.
Palinode.
It begins with two epigraphs.
"The proximities of the archive disperse the feeling
of otherwise being consumed by the present and its many
emergences-" Jules Gill-Peterson.
"Reading only with and for transsexuals.
I read for my life," Jay Prosser.
Palinode.
Dear Pauli.
I've been trying to write about you for some years now
and cannot, have not been able.
Well, other people might say I have been.
I've given talks, there is an essay under contract.
But I haven't been able yet to say what I mean.
Lately, each thing I do is a form
of the epistolary, apostrophe, some particular impossible you.
The problem is, of course, one of audience address.
I cannot have a single thought.
From what I can tell, you didn't have that problem.
You were, I think, able to hold something like a nation
in your head.
Still, it must have eventually driven
you mad from scene to scene, institution to institution,
looking for felicitous language.
The precise vocabulary.
Syntax for making clear what to you was always clear.
That you were alive.
Anyway, I've been having trouble lately.
The sentences either do not come or lie flat or say only
what is obvious to say.
Life hangs beneath the question.
Dear Pauli, am I right to say that for you, the poet was
at best a kind of prophet.
Not a fortune teller, but in the biblical tradition,
someone who could sense the future looming in the present.
Who issues the warning, if we do not change our course,
we will be, and thus are already doomed.
Dear Pauli, in interviews, you say
that writing was what enabled you to bare
your life beneath the question.
It was what you did that is when no other action was possible.
A little valve for when the pressure built, anger
otherwise would kill you.
When asked at 67 at the edge of your fourth, fifth career,
if you would ever let yourself rest,
you said, in short, I'd be dead if I did.
In the essay, the one under contract,
the one I am already ashamed of, I make arguments or try to.
First, I argue that you understood yourself
as living somehow in the future.
Ahead of myself, is how you put it once.
21 years ahead.
Second, I argue that this is a trans way of occupying time,
living out the future in the present tense, embodying
for others, for yourself, Ernst Bloch's not yet.
It's easy to idealize being imbued
with a sheen of futurity, endless becoming, longing
that propels us et-cetera.
But it's terrible, you know.
Or it is also terrible.
People take up all kinds of postures toward the future.
Hope is one, dread, militarized fear.
I write, if all goes well, to find out what I do not know.
Dear Pauli, before the war you had been in love.
Not just, that is, experiencing the feeling of love,
but held inside of it.
Held, and then no longer held because love could not
see you as you were.
A man you tried for over a decade to become.
Sex was a scene of your impossibility.
People interpret this in all kinds
of ways, false consciousness, schizophrenia, ego, dystonic,
lesbianism, trans sexuality, the disease of reading.
And sure, sure, me too.
In a prior scene, I am 13.
I've just finished a novel, Middlesex.
I am crouching on the blue carpet of my blue room.
I am straining to sense how I might too have secreted
inside the capacity to change.
Dear Pauli, about you it was once
reported that your errands were carefully
planned so that you could travel in a circle, not wasting time.
In the essay, I argue that although by the late 1960s
or so you had fallen out of the future,
taken up residence in the past, present tense.
Come to feel history more and more
as a series of closed loops.
We can sense, nonetheless, in your poems, your photographs,
your strained sentences, your trans life preserved
in the aesthetic, you're still latent features given form.
Dear Pauli, in 2011, in California,
I rode my bicycle for miles to the office
of a doctor whose name I do not any longer know.
He gave me what nearly a century ago,
I had wanted with a kind of fervor I can never muster.
I'm not saying it was easy.
There had been psychologists and letters and prior attempts
and protracted conflict and years and furtive transit
and paperwork and endless deadening talk,
but it was possible.
Dear Pauli, I encounter a thought
that breaks a little more.
My heart.
You say, finally, that race and sex are biologically permanent.
You grow from a child to an adult.
An alien may become a citizen and so on.
But where you have a permanent characteristic,
it is on the basis of one's birth
that one becomes a member of that case.
It is completely imposed upon one,
and there is no way that one can escape.
I don't know when this thought, the finality of it, seized you.
Was it your admiration of Mary Daly,
her writing, her beautiful tan?
Was it that you could no longer bear hope's disappointment?
Was it that you were, in some important way, already dead?
All I know is that, by the end of your life,
having discovered no other way, you
had become convinced that race, that sex, were closed forms.
Pauli, listen.
They aren't.
It isn't.
Dear Pauli, if you were alive now,
I suspect I wouldn't so admire you.
Lawyer, priest, National Organization
of Women acquainted with the president's wife.
But because you are dead, I do.
Of course, if you were alive now,
you wouldn't be in every important way you.
I spend my whole life trying to convince my students of this.
Our categories have histories, I say, gesturing wildly
with my little nub of chalk.
They're at work.
I use words like contingency, discursive formations, rupture,
rupture.
And yet, today, walking with F around our Massachusetts town,
I insist, as always, on a circular route, coffee,
then groceries, then flowers for its tender efficiency.
Oh, Pauli, how can I help it?
The first, the beautiful thought, you, you.
Dear Pauli, I have been wasting time.
Doom is, among other things, why I'm here trying to speak to you.
Dear Pauli.
I guess the truth is that I am not brave.
Do you not want to be brave?
I want my classes, my students, my domestic poems.
I want to move in small circles.
I want 20 minutes in the morning.
The blue couch.
My blue room.
Dear Pauli, across the country, across the Senate and House
Chambers, and governors' desks and Twitter
feeds, and liberal papers, some of they
is busy legislating sex, race, the people, the human,
et cetera as closed forms.
They are busy, that is, making life impossible.
Always in the name of life.
I can offer endless impersonal explanations,
but I feel at first as numb, hand clenched,
thought bird in the throat.
What was it you said?
Race is the atmosphere we breathe from day to day.
The pervasive irritant, the chronic allergy,
the vague apprehension that made one,
makes one uncomfortable, jumpy.
Dear Pauli, even now, I can't say what I mean.
Dear Pauli, I am writing to you because I cannot write.
Everywhere there is language, language, language,
enumerations of the problem, diagnoses the problem,
beginning as far back as I can imagine, farther still.
In class, I pace with my chalk.
I circle the room, the words e.g. neoliberalism, biopolitics,
coloniality, modernity, the nuclear family form, and so on,
draw desperate crooked lines.
I say and say and what for?
Increasingly, I think, the only word that might matter is no.
Dear Pauli, the more I look at you,
the more I am overcome with an eerie feeling.
A visceral near identification that
seems, against my better judgment,
that it might rescue me.
I have become, frankly, fixated on this image of you,
you who are prolific amidst Jim Crow,
the fascist American mid-century, the Great
Depression, your endless dislocation and pursuit
of meaningful work, the atmosphere of anti-blackness,
the deathly race, gender politics of the University.
Your loneliness, your unruly mind.
The thwarting of your trans desires during a tipping point
when sex change was heralded as newly possible.
Fixated on the questions of how you
thought under these conditions.
How you endured the present tense, dear Pauli, no!
No.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no.
No.
Dear Pauli, I am standing before a crowd of people.
People I admire, talking incoherently about you.
My pursuit of you.
What everyone will remember is that I am lonely
or that I have formal questions about loneliness,
about whether it is a feeling that produces continuity,
a desire for continuity where there might more ethically
be rupture.
All day they come up to me to report
that they like what I said about loneliness,
which makes me suspicious.
Am I lonely?
My days are crowded with other people.
Dear Pauli, I look for as long as I can stand
at one particular image of you.
You as young man.
You as Pete.
You as self-proclaimed vagabond and a leather coat.
I go tender for this image.
You are young, little brother.
So young.
This is before Bellevue and the rest home.
Before the arrests and the intake forms
and your desperate lines.
Before you spread beneath the knife
in search of hidden organs.
Before the first end of love.
Before you are refused and refused and refused and made,
I can't help but think, into the bravest thing.
Black girl, Black woman.
Once, after a talk, someone asked
if I thought the name your name Pete was a biblical reference.
Peter, Paul, et cetera.
Honestly, it hadn't occurred to me.
Dear Pauli, there is, as far as I know,
no tense, not in English, to describe the shape of time
you help me see.
The was will be.
The salted circle.
The still not yet.
Dear Pauli, your name for her, your first great love
was Pan, Pete and Pan, the boy who would not grow up.
The boy who returns and returns to the same house.
The same window.
Though nothing ever is the same.
Pauli, the truth is, after all this time,
I want him, simply, to have lived.
I think this means shamefully, inconceivably, I want to live.
To have lived.
And though no word was uttered above the tumult of advancing
tide, you came, uncalled, and placed your hand in mine.
Thanks.
[CROWD APPLAUSE]
I think maybe I'll just leave up this image of Pauli and Peggy
at the beach.