Jamie Townsend & Isabel Bezerra Balée

THE WORLD WAS DISAPPEARING: ISABEL BALÉE AND JAMIE TOWNSEND IN CONVERSATION

Jamie: Hi Isabel! What a treat to get the chance to dialogue about your new book diluvium // a bluejay, published by the Dogpark collective this year. I wanted to start by asking you about the process of writing this book, which deals with tragedy and loss, both personal and global. How were you able to enter that space in these poems and, like the Paul Celan epigraph to your book, find some sense of security in the process of writing it?

Isabel: Hey Jamie! I’m looking forward to hearing about your book too, Sex Machines, which was published by speCt! earlier this summer.

diluvium // a bluejay was written intermittently over a period of 4 years. The collection is named after the title poem, the earliest piece in the manuscript, written a few weeks after my mother passed away in 2016. At the time I was back home in New Orleans, where my shock-state of grief was reflected in the environmental devastation that Louisiana continues to suffer from post-Katrina. The world as I knew it was disappearing. It was springtime, and our backyard was filled with bluejays, anole lizards, and cicadas -- forms of life that provided some sense of security against the debilitating agony of losing my mother.

In processing my grief, I kept trying and failing to write about loss. And the reason I say I “failed” is because I believe the language of loss is a lack of language, a failure to describe the grieving mind, soul, and body. I consulted Paul Celan because so much of his grief work addresses this kind of silence -- the absence of language that is a language on its own.

In Sex Machines, I’m interested in how pop culture manufactures the aesthetics of queerness and gender expression. I get a sense of feeling “seen” by a continuous return to cultural references: Lady Gaga, Heath Ledger, or Gucci, as well as more avant-garde nods to the likes of Monique Wittig, David Cronenberg, Dead Can Dance, and many more. What was the process like of navigating queerness and gender euphoria through an externalized lens?

Jamie: In Sex Machines I tried to purposefully keep myself open to situations in my day-to-day that for whatever reasons helped me make conenctions between gender expression, capitalism, and libidinal or sensual experience. I came out as pansexual and non-binary/transfemme later in life and for the past few years I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to learn my own vernacular for embodiment. Writing the book helped me to better understand sexual and gender identities as shifting sites of recognition and pleasure, to think of my body and mind writing in tandem, a holistic engagement.

Pop culture is so interwoven with assumptions about a gender binary and its social expression. These assumptions are beginning to shift, but often in the most easily commodifiable and retrograde expressions (promotional ads for queers in the military, the co-option of genderqueerness as a designer fashion trend, the increasingly vocal rhetoric of terfs, etc). As I intentionally kept myself open to new and sometimes challenging expressions of queerness, I found them presenting themselves to me in often unlikely places -- a music review, a targeted ad on social media, an obituary. There’s a strange security in this, that the languages of transgression, desire, revolution are not always rarefied or simply tokens in an academic economy of theory; that there are sites in our everyday experiences that can help us explore more deeply our own mutable, and latently joyful, understanding of ourselves.

This makes me wonder though, about my need to mine resources for resistance from a fundamentally oppressive economic system. I appreciate so much your understanding of the limits of language around the persistent disasters that reoccur throughout your book, and your refusal to inscribe your own experiences of loss with some message or lesson learned. Silence in this regard can be revolutionary as well.

With that said, I’m wondering how you entered into this work “without a center” as you write in “lacerations,” and how the inscrutability of loss played out within the very real concerns of living in a material world? What compelled you to stay in this difficult space beyond the hope of language’s restorative abilities and do you feel like the writing of these poems changed your understanding of loss?

Isabel: There is a certain sense of incompleteness surrounding loss. The process of writing through my grief revealed the limitations of language. I understand why the universal response to such a tragedy is that there are “no words.” In terms of writing at the confluence between the abstraction of grief and the mundanity of real life -- the material world seemed futile in relation to the existential weight that was pressing on me nearly every day. I was experiencing the world as a grieving person, wondering: what was the purpose of all this crap?

Depression can completely warp our perspective of reality into meaningless noise, and negate our sense of belonging. It is incredibly isolating. I was incomplete, lacked a sense of self, felt like I had no “center.” The world was constantly unfamiliar. For several excruciating months, I had difficulty discerning what was real and what was not, in part because I didn’t know how to define “real.” One day, it suddenly fell apart, severely: my experience was interrupted by the system,  filed under bipolar psychosis, assigned an ICD9 number, a laundry list of prescription medication, and an intensive outpatient program. While these days I am a huge proponent of mental wellness, and I happily adhere to daily treatment of my issues, this was absolutely not the case at the time, and I refused to go on medication or acknowledge that there was something “wrong” with what I believed to be a profound spiritual experience. I am still sometimes curious about the validity of these diagnoses, and if these disorders would be considered abnormal within a different material reality, context, structure, system, etc. Now that my mental health has been restored, and I am very lucky to have survived, I read back on my writing between 2016 - 2019 and I hear a person who is very hurt, and is intending to escape reality.

Your poems unravel the contradictions that arise in the construction of identity with such ease and fluidity. The language is constantly in motion, flowing in and out of a very immediate libidinal and social experience. Nothing is off the table. In the poem Adam and Eve, you write: “I wanted more than I knew / I felt the impulse sucking me in / I bought a bralette at Gap Body ” and later on “We can all go fuck ourselves / and thus unsexed be reborn / I steal a bodysuit from Aerie / There’re limits to what we understand.” What strikes me here, and throughout the text, is a reactivity toward “wanting:” libidinal desire is left unsatisfied, social consciousness is limited, the temptations of consumerism are endless and unquenchable. Can you speak more about the idea of wanting? Does it emerge from a state of “lounging where imagination ends” or “at the edge of something unexplored” as you write in I Wanted to Say Forever?

Jamie: I think lately I’ve been trying to write from that middle point of “wanting” at the edge of both insufficiency and desire. For me, real fulfillment comes from the transgression of boundaries. I think theft, particularly theft from corporations, the state, or bosses of any kind is beautiful and necessary--I don’t want to support maintaining any sort of equilibrium between art and commerce. However, I also struggle with this desire for things, and how that desire connects to my identity as a queer person living in a country that wants me to signal my queerness through the clothes I wear, the books I read, the music I listen to. To be visibly queer in America today is still too often partying on an Absolut Vodka float in the middle of Pride.

That being said, I’m not unmoved by libidinal desire and the pleasure that a new outfit can inspire. I fall in love a little almost every day; sometimes with friends, or sometimes with books or records, an errant eyeshadow palette or a velvet bathrobe. Despite the shame I struggle with coming from a spiritual tradition that has a history of denying this world for the next, I think these types of relational aesthetics are super important and I need to be reminded a lot that there is a material world my slippery body exists within. Embodiment through sensuality, a sensuality in resistance to normative modes of expression, can also be a powerful fuck you to those who would seek to regulate pleasure through economics. So in a way I trust objects a lot more than ideas because they provide an immediate physical interface; they start at the point of experience and wake me up.

diluvium // a bluejay feels like such an effective wake up in a different sense. There’s an unflinchingness to it, a desire to push back against easy platitudes in the face of grief. In a way I see this book performing the work of depression and anxiety - in the sense that during a time that seems unlivable, reaction seems to be among the most honest and instructive feelings. What do you think poetry’s role is right now in a world battered by climate change, predatory capitalism, fascist ideologues, and countless other disasters?

Isabel: The institution, thankfully, is being seriously challenged right now in the poetry world. In spite of such a dismal reality we’re living in, I am hopeful about the dismantlement of hegemonic standards that define quality, and the whole idea of prestige. That said, I’m a bit off in the poetry-fringes (along with you and other folks I’m friends with), in a place where resistance against the canon itself is very important. So in that sense, the work being done is always being done. On the plus side, I’m excited about new forms of writing in the digital era which strike me as very resistance-oriented - a ‘fuck you’ to the capitalist poetry machine that determines how many hoops we need to jump through to get a few lines published. When I need a fix of poetry, I love how instantly I can get it. My absolute favorite is when poets share what they are working on in Insta stories. Better yet - screencap the whole thing! I’d much rather go down an Instagram rabbit hole than pick up a copy of the Paris Review or something. Of course, holding a letterpress book in your hands is a separate experience, and the book as an object is the ultimate source of pleasure. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to read and think about yours.

The embrace of decadence, excess, and pleasure is such a crucial point in the type of transgression that Sex Machines introduces. This refusal to shame, or feel shame, is so refreshing. Your book brought me back to the kind of feeling I used to get when flipping through a glossy Elle or Teen Vogue back in the day - more than anything, it was a completely gratifying experience, just total enjoyment for my eyes. Flipping though the pages of Sex Machines, I got to experience so many aesthetically pleasing objects and moments, like “an orange pool toy glowing,” a “DIY perfumer,” “pink jelly,” “two tablespoons of epsom salt,” to name a few. Which brings me to my final question: where do you see contemporary poetry headed? What tendencies or characteristics of the genre really stand out to you right now?

Jamie: I think that the increased visibility for queer, POC, immigrant, disabled bodies in contemporary poetry is worth so much celebration and continued support. Over the past few years I have been heartened to see a variety of writers coming from oppressed and marginalized communities find wider audiences, more critical engagement, and publishing support from presses both mainstream and independent. I think of individuals like Ocean Vuong, Raquel Salas Rivera, Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, among many others who are making a large-scale impact on the mainstream poetry world, where even just a decade ago that landscape looked a lot straighter and whiter. That being said, we still have a long way to go on this front.

In terms of my own practice, and small press publishing / experimental literature, I’m also excited to see what develops from a generation of writers who spent their formative writing years writing almost completely online. Of course, there’s been a cultural outcry about the detrimental effects of the internet on the publishing world, the effects of technology on grammar and the further development of English vernacular, not to mention censorship and corporate control; this seems to be the way things go when a new medium supersedes an old one. However, I think that the opportunities the internet provides to exert larger individual control over digital publishing, book-making, distribution, as well as developing networks of connections with other writers around the world is going to continue to support diversity and visibility. This seems particularly true for younger, more internet savvy queers who have built support networks and audiences for their writing through online events, magazines, blogs, and reels.

This of course is all dependent on access, corporate control, and the exponential development of new communication tech, as well as larger issues of surveillance, content ownership, ideological siloing due to algorithms, etc. It’s hard to think what the world, much less poetry, will look like one generation forward; we have huge obstacles in front of us with climate change, the rise of neofascism and populism worldwide, and the consolidation of wealth and resources by the richest and most powerful. What gives me hope however is seeing a whole generation of younger poets begin to coalesce around these issues, using poetry not just as artifice or promotion but rather as an opportunity to trace lines of oppression and moments of freedom, both personally and culturally; to find connections. I see new forms of politically engaged poetry emerging that aren’t hung up on these old aesthetic institutional arguments pitting art and activism against each other. I think your book, with its movement between personal loss and larger environmental disaster, is an excellent example of this -- touching the ligature in the larger body of our lives together. My sister texted me a quote the other day about poetry which resonates for me in this moment: “The more a person can make connections between seemingly unlike things, the more the world opens up to them. Poetry is almost our only tool for teaching this kind of thinking.”

Isabel: I’m so grateful that I got the opportunity to read and think about your work so closely. Yes, like your sister said, being able to interpret connections between seemingly unlike things in your work has opened up so much insight into my own everyday experience. Between vibrant pop culture imagery, queer aesthetics, femme expression - and the deeply personal embodiment of these phenomena - Sex Machines heightens the senses and saturates the reading experiance with delicious imagery. Thank you so much for having this conversation with me - I feel inspired to delve into writing again after a long hiatus!

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Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet and editor living in Oakland. They are the author of 6 chapbooks as well as the full collections Shade (Elis Press, 2015) and Sex Machines (speCt!, 2020). They are also the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat, 2019) and Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (Jet Tone, 2019). With Nick DeBoer they curate Elderly.

Isabel Bezerra Balée is a poet, artist, and educator who lives in Philadelphia. In 2015 she received her MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University, where she translated poetry from Portuguese, wrote poems, and produced projects across forms and genres. She has previously taught creative writing at Tulane University. Her work has appeared in Dreginald, Jacket2, and EM Wolfman New LIfe Quarterly. Originally from New Orleans, and with roots in Northern Brazil, she lived in Oakland for several years before finding her way back to the east coast. Her first full-length book of poems, diluvium // a bluejay, was published in the summer of 2021. Isabel manages accounts and projects at a creative agency.