[bass music plays]

Avren: From Dublin, California, this is Waves Breaking—the podcast where I talk with
other trans and gender-variant poets about poetry. I'm your host, Avren Keating. In this
episode, I talk with Cameron Awkward Rich. Cameron has published poems in The
Journal, Cream City Review, Muzzle Magazine, Hobart, The Seattle Review, The Offing,
and elsewhere. He is a Cave Canem Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine and is
currently a doctoral candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University.
Cam is the author of the chapbook, Transit, from Button Poetry in 2015. And his debut
collection, which we're going to be talking about, Sympathetic Little Monster, was
published by Ricochet Editions in this year, 2016.

[bass music fades]

Avren: Hello Cameron. How are you doing?

Cameron: I'm doing pretty well. How are you?

Avren: I'm good. Welcome to Waves Breaking. Congratulations on the publication of

Sympathetic Little Monster [both laugh]. I was just wondering if you could talk about the
process of putting the book together, and how long it took. What was going on in your
life at the time?

Cameron: I think that it was a book that actually came together fairly quickly, in the sort
of grand scheme of how fast books come together. I think the oldest poem in it, is from
the summer of 2012. And, I finished it last summer. So, it was two and a half, three year
book. And I mean, cliché or not, it's certainly a book that was motivated by the fact that I
had just started medically transitioning. I think that I wrote the first poem in the book,
maybe like four or five months after I started taking testosterone. And I don't know. I was
trying really hard to figure out how that change sort of changed my relationship to
girlhood as a concept, and my own girlhood. And so I just kind of obsessively kept
writing poems about that, until eventually it became a book.

Avren: Do you feel like your relationship to girlhood changed through the process of
writing it?

Cameron: Yeah. I mean, so I guess I don't know how much of it was the process of
writing the book, and how much of it was just sort of growing up. But I think that the
book helped me to find a language for having a strange relationship to girlhood—that like
narrative of "uh, I never was a girl," or to disavow girlhood as a part of my life. But then,
ultimately I realized that was untenable politically. But also just personally, it's an
untenable thing to cut off most of your life. And I think that writing the book, gave me a
language to talk about what the relationship of me, this boy, is to a girl that I was—and a
lot of ways still am.
Avren: Yeah, you kind of talk about it in the metaphor of haunting. Especially in the last
section of the book, where you relay the girl from The Ring, [Cameron laughs] to your
past. And I was wondering why you chose such a loaded figure, like the girl from The
Ring.

Cameron: Well, okay. So if I'm being honest, I chose it because on Halloween two years
ago, last year, two years ago, somebody was like Cameron, we're going to have this
poetry show where I'm asking everybody to write a poem about a horror movie, and we're
going to read poems in a cave, in the dark, on Halloween. So that's why. If we're being
perfectly honest. But also, I think part of it—the other part, if we want it to be like
deeper, or whatever about it—I think a lot of the sort of trans-masculine project of
disavowing girlhood, seems to me to have to do with wanting to not appear monstrous.
And I think that there's something about this little girl, who just like continually returns,
and continually kind of warps the lives of people around her, because she kind of refuses
to disappear, that I—I don't know, I like it. I like the idea of the little girl in the
photographs that is, and is not me, refusing to disappear, regardless of what a kind
dominant trans narrative might want me to say about her. You know? So, I don't know.
That's partially it. Mostly it's just that somebody told me to write a poem about The Ring.

[laughter]

Avren: But I mean, there was a reason—you had any horror movie to chose from, and
that's the one you chose, so—

Cameron: Oh yeah. No certainly, certainly.

Avren: Also, she—the little girl image pops up a few times in your work as related to
fire.

Cameron: Mm hmm.

Avren: The girl with a mouth like a house fire, and there's someone on fire in this attic,
and `no one knows how she got there, or where she came from. And I was wondering if
you could unpack the relationship of the little girl to fire.

Cameron: I think that there is probably a three parted answer to that question. And in
order to stay on track, I will just go, one, two, three. The first bit is probably
unconsciously, I was thinking about the mad woman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's,
Jane Eyre; but that feminist literary critics have latched on to, to talk about
representations, or female writers—mostly the Victorian Era. But, I think that it's an
image that's still resonant right? Because it's this idea of in Jane Eyre, there's a woman,
whose husband has locked her away in an attic, purportedly because she is insane, quote,
unquote. But it's a really interesting image, because it sort of begs the question, did he
lock her away because she was crazy? Or did she go crazy because she was trapped in
this patriarchal relationship with this man? So I think there's a way in which the image of
the woman in the attic, has, in a lot of white feminist literary criticism, has been a way of
thinking about a kind of double bind of patriarchy, of both being produced by it, and also
locked away by it. And, having only this kind of violent speech left, the speech of
insanity, or the speech of fire. But also, ever since I was very small, I've had these like
really strange recurring dreams about my grandmother—so my father's mother, burning
to death, in a house fire. And I know, for a fact, and I've known my whole life, that that is
not actually how she died. But it was a recurrent dream for me. And I think it had to do a
lot with, a similar sort of double bind—she was an alcoholic. And my dad has been very
obsessed with her life, for his whole life, because he has always been interested in the
problem of causing one's self pain, because of the pain that society has caused you. And
that sort of trap. And so for me, the image of my grandmother on fire, it's just a way of
trying to think about—oh you know, like is the pain we cause ourselves an adequate
response, or response at all to all kind of social pressure that's placed on us, whether it's
racism, sexism, etc., etc.? And I said there was three parts, but I don't really know what
the last part was. I think that it's just this image of somebody destroying themselves, and
destroying everything around them, in order to escape from whatever kind of
confinement they've been placed in. Which to me, seems a lot like this trans narrative of
killing off the girl in order to do something else with one's life.

Avren: It's interesting that you talk about the trans narrative of killing off the girl because
in your poem, "Faggot Poetics," you talk about the "need to want to own the image of the
man but not the man, to bask in that memory of what first nailed you to the dark." And
so, in a way, the body holds both the girl and the boy. Could you talk more about this
poem, and your insights into that?

Cameron: Yeah. I think that another thing that I'm interested in, my poetry, but also my
scholarship, is thinking about narratives of—how do I say it, thinking about ways to think
about sexual violence, in ways that are perhaps slightly more capable of dealing with
queer narratives and the sort of narratives we have circulated. So, James Baldwin has this
essay called, “Freaks and the Ideals of American Manhood." But there's this very strange
moment in it, when he's talking about having been raped when he was very young by a
grown up man. And he has the really strange response to it. He's both saying, before this
moment I couldn't conceive of myself as desirable. There's something about this sort of
act of sexual violence which takes a kid, who doesn't experience himself as a subject or
an object of desire—a desiring subject or a desirable object. And it's this moment of
violence that allows him to conceive of himself that way. Which is not a way that one
ever actually wants to talk about sexual violence in the political way, right? But it's a
story that I see over and over again. This idea of violence as productive of a self, in
addition to being destructive of it. I think that a lot of what's going on in that poem is
thinking about how...moments of violence, whether they be identification with
masculinity, which is it's own kind of violence, or whether they be sexual violence, or
whatever, like how those kinds of moments can be inhabited without destroying a self. To
bask in the memory of first nailed me to the dark, right—is thinking about what
experiences of sexual violence have allowed me to know. Without them
becoming....whatever, okay. I'm rambling now. But basically it's that. [laughs]
Avren: Is that also that notion of the origin of violence and the self, and learning about
the whole subject/object dynamic, part of what's going on in "Theory of Motion (3):
Another Middle Class Black Kid Tries to Name It."

Cameron: Yeah. I think that I'm really interested in the toggle between self is subject and
self is object. Especially because I think that so much in our progressive discourse, we
can't imagine being an object, is also being a way of having agency in the world. But I
don't know. It seems to me that if you're talking about a trans narrative, right, it's
precisely by making one's body into an object to be acted by medical intervention or
whatever, like that is kind of making one's self an object.

[guitar music plays and fades]

Faggot Poetics

Yet I was, in peculiar truth, a very lucky boy.

-James Baldwin

In any case, the story begins

with darkness. A classroom.

A broom closet. A bowl of bruised

light held over a city. Or, the story

begins with a child playing

the role of an ashy plum—

how it rises to meet the man’s teeth

or doesn’t. How the skin is broken

or breaks because the body just wants

what it wants: to be a hallway

where men hang their photos

on the wall. Does that make sense?

To want to own the image of the man

but not the man? To bask in that memory

of what first nailed you to the dark?

[guitar music plays and fades]

Avren: In working on your dissertation, and investigating trans masculine identity and
sadness, and how those intertwine, I noticed that that's also very much a theme of this
book. Could you talk about the angles that you're able to get at in regards to this theme,
with your scholarly theses work, and the difference with investigating these themes with
your poetry?

Cameron: The simple answer, is that in my poetry, it's basically investigating those things
through myself, thinking about them in relationship to the narratives that I've constructed
about my own life. And also I think that although this might make me a bad scholar, or
whatever, I think that it's in the writing of the poems, that I can come to a theory of the
world. And then, in scholarship, it's about testing out that theory against what other
people are doing, and what other people are thinking about. I think that in poetry I can
say something about how my self is constructed. And I think that in scholarship, one can
be interested in whether or not that theory of the self is a theme that is repeated, in trans
literature—and one can revise theories based on what you encounter in other people's
work. So I mean, that's basically it, right? An interest in the self versus an interest in
others.

Avren: So what have you found regarding trans masculinity and sadness in the wider
berth of trans lit?

Cameron: Oh, I don't know. That trans men are very sad. [both laugh] I think that my—
trying to put language to what it means to have been a girl, and then not, and then
experiencing that as a kind of mourning, or whatever, is a very common theme in trans
masculine discourse. And I think that because until recently, it's been very hard for trans
masculine people to talk about their relationship to girlhood—there's a lot of trying to
figure out actually, how to talk about sexual violence, how to talk about identifying with
masculinity, even if masculinity was a thing that hurt us when we were young. And so,
there's a lot of these sort of tangles. But, I guess I should say, that the dissertation isn't so
much about what one can find in the literature, and it's rather sort of trying to open a
space in trans theory and discourse, to actually talk about bad feelings as something other
than imposition of the medical system. I think that in a lot of early trans discourse—
which has shaped what is possible to say—at least in the field of trans studies, there was
this sense that in order for trans people to emerge as authoritative subjects of knowledge,
in order for trans people to be able to produce knowledge about trans people, there had to
be a kind of disavowal of any relationship between trans and other mental illnesses. Like
a thing that psychologists said, and still say all the time, is that there is a high incidence
of comorbidity…trans people tend to be more depressed, more anxious etc., etc. And
whether or not that's true—I don't think that's necessarily true. But I do think that the sort
of early attempt to say any relationship between trans and other forms of mental illness, is
only an imposition of the medical system, is one, a really ableist thing to say because it's
sort of based on the idea that in order to be producers of knowledge, we have to be quote,
unquote, sane; according to sort of dominant notion of what sanity is. And also it makes it
difficult to interpret a lot of the work that actually has been made by trans people, that are
sort of inflected by things that look like anxiety, depression, borderline personality, these
things. And so, I think that the main work of the dissertation is to be like, "Hey, isn't it
weird that in the beginning we had to disarticulate these things?" And what would happen
if rather than forming a field working against the bad feelings that tend to travel with
trans, we got with them. So each chapter tries to think with a bad feeling and see how that
might change some of the debates in and around trans studies. So yeah, it's a project that's
less about figuring out what there is. And it's more about figuring out how we might think
differently. Does that make sense?

Avren: Totally. This is sort of I guess a lighter question—

Cameron: Yeah, no. Go for it.

Avren: I have a hard time often figuring out when to keep reading a theory, and when to
take the things I've read about from theory, and how to write about the personal, after
having read so much of that. How have you found that balance in your work as both a
scholar and a poet?

Cameron: I think that there's a way in which we approach theory as somehow

communicating truth [laughs]. That perhaps poetry or fiction doesn't? But I think that—
so I grew up a child of an academic. And so I think that I have a different relationship to
scholarship that a lot of people do—because I learned very early on, that especially
cultural studies and literary criticism—all of it's intensely personal. All of it's motivated
by an author's obsessions with x, y, or z. And, I think that for better or worse, I've always
read theory as actually not that different than poetry. As an author collecting together
things in their life; they might be memories, or they might be books that they've found
themselves particularly attached to, or there might be the kind of cultural objects that
surround them. But right? It's all about collecting the things in your life and arranging
them such that it makes a kind of sense. And so I think that for me, one of the major
differences between theory and poetry, is that, theory, you just have to be more rigorous
about recognizing that what you're doing is collecting other people into the thing that
you're then producing, as opposed to poetry. And sometimes you're doing that, and
sometimes you're not [laughs]. It's all just interpretation.

Avren: That's helpful. I always feel like I have to catch up with everybody, I think—

Cameron: In terms of—

Avren: In terms of—yeah. In terms of reading theory. I didn't grow up in a household of

academics at all. And I didn't actually come out as trans, until I was in my early twenties.
And so I feel like I missed out on all of the theory that everyone's talking about. So, I'm
often trying to read, just to catch up, just to be able to understand what other poets are
talking about.

Cameron: The secret is, is that everybody's doing that though [laughs].

Avren: Okay good [laughter]. That's really, actually helpful. I haven't read Foucault. I
don't know—
Cameron: Yeah, that's fine. A lot of people who cite Foucault, actually haven't read
Foucault, you know? I think that in order to be somebody who has read Foucault, one has
to devote one's life to doing that.

Avren: Yeah.

Cameron: I think that's everybody's feeling—is that you're just trying to catch up to
everyone else.

Avren: You say about theory in the essay, "On the Theory of Motion," that you've begun
to suspect theory as less movement towards truth, and more movement through a series
of puns.

Cameron: Mm hmm.

Avren: Is this in regards to…what you were talking about in the sense that it's a very
personal movement through theory, and your personal attachment to things? And/or is it
an investigation into how theorists use language?

Cameron: Oh it's both. So I think that it's both a kind of thinking about theory as theories
of personal attachments—and also literary critics love puns. I mean one of the reasons
one becomes a literary critic is because you love language. And so I think that there's a
way in which—you know how in a poem, sometimes truth or meaning comes out words,
when you put them together don't actually communicate sense. But because they resonate
with each other in a particular way, it creates some kind of meaning. I think literary
critics do the same sort of thing. If words line up in such a way as to make a joke, or as to
accidentally cite each other based on their etymology, it creates a kind of truth value, or a
kind of sense for literary critics, that is actually nonsense—maybe. You know? But it's
the same in poetry, right? If words line up in a particular way, having to do with
definition or sound, or whatever, then it creates a kind of sense. And I think there's a way
in which literary criticism disavows that aspect of itself, the poetics of it. I don't know. I
find it delightful.

Avren: Do you have any aspirations for what trans poetry and trans literature could do to
continue our conversation in the wider world of literature? Is there something you'd like
to see trans poets doing more?

Cameron: No, not necessarily. I think that the things I would like to see trans poetry
doing, are the things that it's already doing. For the longest time, trans literature—and
everybody says this, right? For the longest time, trans literature was mostly
autobiography, right? And it was like, one had to continually produce this narrative that
was like "I exist, I exist!" And I think that what's so exciting about trans poetry, is that
because of all the qualities of poetry, these different ways of making sense, the playing
with language—it's really a way of playing with language so that the fact that one exists
as a trans person actually warps the language one might use. I mean, one of the most
basic things one can say is that the sort of growth of trans culture, has come with a kind
of incredible growth of language, to talk about gender. I mean at least in English, right,
it's hard to exist as a person who is not an M or an F, because there isn't sufficient
language for that. And so, that I think that what poetry can do, and what a lot of what
trans poets are doing is, being like--but "hey, I can play with the language, and I
can...make myself in this language." And so, that's cool. And I'm sure it will keep doing
that.

Avren: And in that way, it's addressing what you've talked about before as a public
silence. And, directly challenging that silence around names of trans people, words we
used to describe ourselves, and finding that place within art, where we can name
ourselves.

Cameron. Yeah.

[pop rock music plays and fades]

Theory of Motion (3): Another Middle Class Black Kid Tries to Name It

I used to dream about a woman trapped inside

a burning house. That isn't how she went—

my grandmother. Instead, her city moved

inside her like a drunk man's fist.

All I know about my father’s mother are these holes

in her, the holes she left. My father, pulled over

to the side of the road, crying a song

through the radio. I think her grief moved

into my father when he was born & into his daughters

when we were born & I’m sure someone’s tried

to tell you the blues is only music, but the radio

the radio.

//

Once, my teacher bought me a cheeseburger & asked

how come the other black kids weren't more like me.

Once, the girl pinned me to the wall until I called myself

(or her) nigga & all week I wore her fingers as a bruise.

Once, I watched my teacher tell that other brown girl

her language was too beautiful to belong to her.
Those years, I wore cargo shorts through the winter,
books in each pocket, little hallways full of words
that weren’t our own.

//

Is there a word for a child talking to himself

or no one? I’ve said ghost

but I do have skin & a father, after all. Hands

after all, dirt colored & not buried in the dirt.

Sure, I’ve been opened the way girls are opened.

Sure, I’ve gone missing in the dark.

Sure, I’ve looked at my sister & seen a woman

caught in flames. But we have pills for that.

We have money for the pills for that.

//

Please—

what’s the word for being born of sorrow

that isn’t yours? For having a family?

For belonging nowhere? Not even

your body. Especially not there.

[keyboard music plays and fades]

Avren: Do you have any poets that you feel the listeners and I should check out?

Cameron: Can we be more specific?

Avren: Yes. So, are there any poets currently that are moving you, or that you feel
inspired by, that you feel your work is in conversation with?

Cameron: Recently, I've been reading...I always mess up the pronunciation of her name,
Aracelis Girmay? Gearmay? She's great. She has two books. Maybe three. One is called,
Kingdom Animalia, and one is The Black Maria, which just came out, and was just
gorgeous—in which if one is interested in books about haunting, totally, totally that book.
I've also been reading Ari Banias' forthcoming book called Another, which I think is a
fantastic book. But yeah, I don't know. So I think, for me, most of the poets who inspire
me the most, are the the ones who are my friends, or who are in this kind of generation. I
don't know. It's just been really, really cool to watch this group of people succeed. So
like, Danez Smith, Franny Choi, Sam Sax, Justin Philip Reed, Fatimah Asghar, Aziza
Barnes, the list goes on and on…Hanif Abdurraqib. These are just a handful of people
who I think are working in this time and place, and doing really great important work.

Avren: That was excellent. Thank you for taking the time to chat with me.

Cameron: Yeah, of course. Thank you for wanting to talk.

[bass music plays]

Avren: All right, that is the show for this month. As always, thanks to the various authors
and books that were shouted out, will be posted in the show notes. Please spread the word
about this show. I know that the world of trans and gender variant poetry is tiny, but both
a larger following and ITunes reviews are always needed to continually sustain this
program. If you have any feedback or questions, you can contact me at
wavesbreakingshow@gmail.com or on Twitter @mxavren. I'm your host Avren Keating.

Transcripts are by Amir Rabiyah. And this is the sound of Waves Breaking.