levelheaded: from statues with interior arms

“A non-articulable gender is articulating itself,” j/j hastain’s poem begins, and while this may sound obscure at first read, it couldn’t be more precise in introducing what the poem is about to do. Hastain leads us through a powerful attempt to explain, define, and articulate a gender that is so unique and complex that in the final analysis it is non-articulable. The attempt, however, is overwhelmingly moving.

This gender begins with an “interior arm.” As an instinct, we tend to think of an arm as physical, an organ. So facing it here as an articulation of gender, we try to think of it perhaps as an abstraction of a sexual organ. But that is not where this image leads to. Instead, it takes an internal course, an “inward trajectory,” dissolving into an even more abstract and shapeless group of elements, an array of rays, and soon also “[l]iquid light” and mass. The arm is doing exactly what the poem is set to do: it is explaining the speaker’s gender through abstract image and motion, because it is non-articulable in a conventional way. It isn’t male or female. It is internal and cannot be communicated without a process of learning. Like the light or the mass, one has to “lean,” step out of straight-forwardness, “in order to learn.” At this point, learning is our choice. The poem invites us gently. It will soon accelerate and demand with forceful, explicit expression that we pay attention.

In the second stanza, the speaker, still not an “I,” adds a social dimension to the experiment. We are introduced to a “population where tears are prized.” This characterization hardly holds true to our society. Instead, the population is a representation of what the speaker wishes it to be. When tears are prized (read: vulnerability is appreciated), when they’re “a way of staring” (perhaps when things are examined with emotions, not just dry logic), there and then we may reach an eventual “we” that has the capacity to carry this elusive gender, this existence that defies articulation. The speaker clarifies the goal is not obscurity or illusion, but rather “false-less-ness.” Liquid will turn into glass. Wounds will still hurt but they’ll be tangible.

At this point, if you are still with Hastain (and with this essay!), you can be trusted. You have an image to hold on to, and as we may have wished and expected, it is about to become specific, explicit, and on the way—personal. “I” comes into play. We are taken into the speaker’s dream. The dream cannot be more sexually explicit. Gender is unraveled with words we know (and feel comfortable or uncomfortable with) used as if in attempt to give us what we want, though in the undercurrent the speaker knows these words will fall short. You might feel a bit taken aback by the erotic explicitness of clit, dick, and rubbing. But here again, things aren’t quite as shocking when you take another look, and the poem makes sense:

There’s an “I” and a “you” in the dream. The sex of “you” is thickening—growing stronger, perhaps braver or tougher—physicality corresponds with metaphor. A transformation is taking place. Perhaps a new gender materializes. An internal arm is now external. “Here,” the speaker says, “I knew algae’s feeling about the sea.” This is a key image: an alga is both a plant and an animal—a dual form of life. The sea is its natural habitat, life-giving but silent. “You” wanted a name—it is the gender that wants to be named. A line earlier we had a clit that questionably (literally, with a question mark) was transforming into a dick and left us puzzled if not estranged. But a name for this gender, or an understanding of its nature, didn’t come out of this occurrence. And so, a line later, things become more artful, more transcendent. Bodies are covered with “exquisite emissions” (You decide what they are. Funny or not, they’re unnamed). The speaker remembers and reflects, and the images play with liquid and mass, like tears and glass. The “lisping compotes,” the water “flavored with pine,” say as much as can be said. Naming organs won’t do. Saying “he” or “she” won’t be false-less. This gender calls for the absoluteness of our tolerance, open-mindedness, creativity, inspiration. Kind of like poetry, eh?

-The Editors

levelheaded: poet’s comments

“I appreciate the understanding that is articulated here by the editors re: “from statues with interior arms”—in vulnerable but also virago pieces like this (the softness and the sharpness) how best (most ethically) to articulate an impossible gender? By impossible I mean a gender that has no historicized model/s to support it. How to bring the data of an inward emitting form/being to a public space (a poem published, is a public space, even if the body [and its gender/s] it is describing are private)?

I note with gratitude, the social analysis that the editors took on when considering how the private body examining, moving into the social, has social repercussions. I would say that social is different even than public and private (referenced above)—so how to approach gender and variances in the context of a society that generally prefers clear delineations over celebrations of complexity? I mean clear cutting the forests of the wild ecologies of our forms for the sake of having our bodies—our identities, be something no longer challenging. There ARE alternates to illusion or obscurity. These alternates can be embodied, but to embody them takes ferocious devotion to the vigilante! Oh the gorgeous multiplicities—the gritty genres of motley…

What a great second to last paragraph where the editors emphasize that if you are still here with the poem and the editors’ essay, then you can be trusted. That is such a beautiful articulation of staying power—and what is more important (when torquing the typical) than staying (with presence and poise) long enough to let that torque really perform itself on/over us?”

j/j hastain  julia_loveintention[at]hotmail[dot]com