KARAN

Kit, thank you for these powerful and thought-provoking sonnets — they’re at once timely and timeless. I’m struck by how you blend the personal and political. “As though we could make anything beautiful if we chose. / As though we could choose what language we’re invoked in.” I’m deeply interested in the intersection of the personal and the political. Let’s begin with the process question. How do you approach writing poems that bridge the intimate and the political? Do you start from personal experience, political events, or somewhere in between? And ultimately, what drives you to write poetry?

KIT

Oh, my goodness, what a huge question. I’m sorry my answer will be very long. 

First, the lines you quote could be seen as about the wish that poetry could undo the colonization of language, but I read them as being about how communities (e.g. trans ones) can create little pockets within which beauty standards and the interpretation of bodies are remapped, but that these little partial utopias are usually ripped away by gentrification or homelessness or state violence or disability/disease. I’ve been particularly moved by Jackie Ess's recent words on the transience of these demi-mondes. That’s probably why those lines are in the subjunctive, why they are preceded by “as though.” 

Second, I think when it comes to the question of writing political poetry, there are both personal and historical sides to it. The historical answer to this question is of course to say that this is largely a post-war anxiety centered around an international order with two superpowers. 

What I mean is that after the Second World War, an intense polarization and anticommunism became dominant in American letters in a way that hadn’t been fully true, say, in the 1930s. That was also true of money in writing, the rise of the workshop was to a certain extent funded by anti-communist forces; people oversimplify and say the CIA, and that's not wholly wrong either. That’s not to say that moving to New York, which has sometimes been said to be the alternative to the MFA, meant being free of that influence. But ideas about how writing has to center the individual experience, be free of didacticism, explore internal struggles or the family saga — those ideas are by and large post-war constructions. Eric Bennett and Alan Wald are worth reading on this.

Another postwar idea that I think you can see ambivalent traces of in my writing is “social poetry” or “poetry of witness,” often in translation, of which Carolyn Forché might be seen as the lead booster. One of the really funky things about this tradition is that you’ll see communists like Neruda or Nâzım Hikmet, liberals like Milosz or Szymborska, monarchists like Akhmatova, skeptical diasporic nationalists like Darwish, all grouped together by translation style and anthologization. It’s a little unhinged as a cultural category but it gave soft leftists and liberals a way to emphasize human rights, artistic sensitivity, and the primacy of the social without being accused of totalitarianism and (for its boosters) in a way that allowed the U.S. government to selectively mobilize the rhetoric. That’s not to say the CIA was behind it, but that after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes percolated through to the US left, you saw these kinds of “soft” politics develop everywhere. I think the backlash to PEN America’s treachery on Palestine has shown the faultlines in what remained of this failing coalition. It’s become clearer that we need to do better than this sanctimonious inaction. 

Rodrigo Toscano, in an effervescent essay for FENCE last year, said that poets need to figure out what geopolitical alignment their poems have. Are they writing as though we lived in a bipolar world order, with the US on one side, the USSR on the other? Are they writing as though we lived in a unipolar world (post-1991), or an emerging multipolar order, with China and the Russian Federation playing major roles? Are they partisans of an order not yet built? I probably want to be the latter. Although, I think maybe in part because I have an older mother who was part of the second generation of the New Left and the New York downtown scene, sometimes I do write as though the Iron Curtain was still up. I’m also metabolizing not only what American poets did after 1991, but also what Russian poets have done and are doing, because I’ve been a translator from that language!

At the same time radical and communist poetry never went away in the United States. I’m intensely influenced, for example, by Etheridge Knight, particularly his prison haikus. I’m also intensely influenced by Diane Di Prima, her Revolutionary Letters. Marilyn Hacker, a radical and the most brilliant of the lesbian formalists, is still writing. June Jordan was writing till 2002. A lot of Wanda Coleman’s work came out post-1991. Stone Butch Blues, a novel that feels like a poem, came out in 1993.  Commune Editions was founded in 1990. I wasn’t even born of course. Wendy Trevino started really cooking after Occupy. Mark Nowak has been on his shit for decades. 

I think after the end of the Cold War, many American poets with integrity, especially white men, seemed to get fascinated by exploring the gross, creepy sexual-addictive underbelly of the new world superpower. So you had people like Joe Wenderoth and Michael Robbins exploring trash and pop culture, maybe to show that all was not well, that we were not well. I was really taken with Alien vs. Predator and Letters to Wendy's during college. My teacher Josh Bell belonged to this space. You had the flarfists and Patricia Lockwood. You also had much more boring people like Kenneth Goldsmith. Fred Moten and Nathaniel Mackey were writing really difficult stuff, they were interested in the complication of interpretation. I think what these poets had in common was a sense of intense alienation but a lack of a political alternative with which to orient oneself. Robbins is an avowed Marxist and I think it’s telling that his most recent collection is much less blackpilled than his earlier work about the relation between language and collectivity, while being much more directly concerned with the odds of surviving our dire political and ecological situation. 

Meanwhile, outside of the university poetry world, slam was getting big, and “the personal is political” was its bread and butter. For a while I think the figures who came out of that world, poets like Danez Smith and Franny Choi, let themselves be moved along by a certain radical liberal politics, which I think Danez at least has repudiated in their recent poem expressing regret over praising Obama. There was a really wonderful exchange on Twitter recently between Smith and the communist poet Darius Simpson. Danez said, rightly, that the moral thing for the United States to do was to put Israel under an arms embargo. And Darius replied, yes, of course, but when you look at the actual history of who the U.S. government embargoes, you have to ask why in the world they would do such a thing — and what kind of threat the Palestinian liberation movement would need to pose in order to make continuing to fund their investment in Israel no longer worth it.  

In recent years you’ve seen writers younger than me like Mohammed el-Kurd, who in English comes out of a certain slammy tradition, and also out of the institutional legacy of Cold War social poetry/cultural diplomacy, synthesizing that with a tradition of Palestinian political writing. My friend Emily Clarke has a bit of this energy too. There’s a synthesis of sorts. Protean magazine is doing a great job. I think or hope, after the failures of 2020, the growing undeniability of global migrant crises, and now the genocide, there can be a sharpening of people’s awareness of geopolitics and of the limits of radical liberalism. We'll see. 

For me all of this is a conversation I overheard as though from another room, and most of it happened before I arrived, and probably I’ve put together the puzzle a little wrong. I found Toscano and Coleman in high school, Robbins and Forché in college. I’m thirty, and there’s so many pieces I know I’m missing. I think one broader point I’m trying to make, though, is that to be political or even radical in writing is not a binary choice, writing emerges out of social worlds, and social worlds have to be organized, and there are millions of ways to write politically, and millions of ways to organize a scene, including into a steady state or into a rebellion. 

And social worlds can disintegrate. Personally speaking, I know some portion of this country’s political establishment would like to isolate and kill trans people (including me) off. A lot of my friends have suffered horrific state violence. I know that we are facing a climate disaster, that we need to respond sanely to migration, that we need to end empire and repair its harms, that the powers that be intend to let a lot of us die off this century, and have plans to actively kill many of us. I don’t know that I think I’m trying to be a political poet so much as I’m writing poems as though I really believed those things were true.

I find I would be betraying myself if I walked away from the people I consider my comrades, and the organizations I see as imperfect but trying to do something about the crises. It feels natural, then, to write poems about the problems my comrades might be facing, to imagine that I’m reading these poems to my comrades over the kitchen table late one night after a rough defeat, poems that don’t only comfort but also analyze. I do sometimes worry that my desire to connect makes me credulous or artless. My writer friend Masha is always making fun of me for the moralistic stick up my ass. 

Most of these poems started as personal stories.

KARAN

Kind of an extension of the first question: everything is political, of course, by way of us being part of certain socio-cultural geo-political contexts, but there’s a risk political poetry runs — the recent Amanda Gorman discourse comes to mind. How do you approach writing about political subjects while maintaining the emotional core of poetry? 

KIT

I mean I think Amanda Gorman is just very cynical! Everyone saying that public poetry is supposed to be different from private poetry, that the cliches of “lyric” are just as pernicious as the cliches of ideology, that she’s coming out of slam and preaching traditions, they’re all correct, but seriously, how cynical do you have to be to stand up and say that empathy emancipates, at a convention where they won’t even let a Palestinian speak? It’s not a poetic question. You have to know where your loyalties lie. I wonder how her old friends feel about her. 

KARAN

You mentioned using “some kind of metrical approach to line and stanza breaks" in all of these poems. I’m particularly intrigued by your use of the sonnet form. How did working within traditional forms like the sonnet help you explore complex themes of consent, political action, and personal identity? Do you find that the constraints of form provide a useful structure for addressing difficult subjects?

KIT

Yeah definitely and I love this question. Kay Ryan said somewhere that she is good at handling subjects that might burn others because she does so with a certain coolness, distance. Part of that is her use of form. I think a sonnet is a little like an algebra problem, you set up the question or the observation at the beginning and then you work out how it can transform or unravel, where it can lead, while satisfying certain invariants or transition laws. It’s a little contraption, you build it and at the end, if you’re lucky, it does something unexpected, it tells you something you didn't know at the start. 

I had an idle thought that the idea of consent had some resonance with the constraining force of voluntary elected form, but in practice I think I mostly experienced the sonnet form as a sober guide through the thickets of triggered thoughts. A way to walk the path in the dark.

KARAN

Kit, I’m in awe of how these sonnets work as a series. Each sonnet feels complete on its own, yet they build on each other to create a larger narrative and thematic arc. Could you walk us through your process of conceptualizing and crafting this as a series? Was it a deliberate choice from the outset, or did it evolve organically as you wrote? How do you feel the series format allowed you to explore themes of consent, political engagement, and personal identity in ways that a single poem might not?

KIT

Thanks Karan! I’m in awe of the openness and attention with which you approach your editorial work. You and Shannan and the rest of the team have built something wonderful here. 

I remember with the first poem, the flies poem, just being interested in seeing whether I could make this story work as a sonnet. I wrote a couple others similarly — the beer bottle sonnet with the dyke named Louise, and then the one about losing desire for a partner — and then I started to get excited about the idea of a sequence. 

I worked on it all fall, and realized that I wanted to “break consent down” as a framework, to show how the ideal of consensual sex is surrounded by all these “nonconsensual” factors, some of which actually precede the full formation of the person who would supposedly give that affirmative consent — who has housing where, who’s policed, who’s dysphoric, who’s traumatized and how, who has an American passport and who doesn’t, who has the freedom to leave, who has a support network and who doesn’t, who has resources and who doesn’t — because actually in a lot of ways I think the idea of sexual consent is really really limited and problematic and that it’s a weak basis for a sexual ethics. I was trying to show what could frustrate the social demand to make a “free” choice. My friend Ariel has written about this so brilliantly in the magazine Pinko. At some point the poetry stopped being a fun game and became a way to exorcize the intense feelings of guilt and mistrust I felt about sex, to find a still vantage point from which to understand the chaos below. 

After the war broke out I went to protests a lot and at first I didn't write about them at all, I couldn't imagine I had anything worthwhile to say. One day when I was working on the Robert K. sonnet, the one about AIDS, I tabbed to my inbox and saw a newsletter there, I think it was from the Boston Review, that gave the 27,000-person number (I later updated it to 30,000, but eventually gave up trying to keep up with the death total). It hit me like a truck, and the poem swerved. Probably more than half of the sonnets were written after I realized the sequence was about Palestine. 

Towards the end of the writing process, as I tried to make it cohere as a sequence, I went through and took notes on each poem, seeing what issues they raised, so I could make them build on each other effectively and see where there were holes. 

KARAN

Your poems often incorporate stark imagery from current events, like in the lines “As I write this / our government has paid for the murder of 30,000 in Gaza.” Is it a concern for you to balance the immediacy of current events with the timelessness often associated with poetry? Do you see your poems as a form of documentation or testimony?

KIT

As I said above, I had a moment when I had written several of the sonnets that don't deal with Palestine, while also attending protests of the genocide, and then glanced at the figure on my phone and it really sank in, that it was that many lives, that, as Wendy Trevino wrote, it was that important. And I just felt like I couldn’t not write about Gaza, even though I didn’t know what I had to say. So I changed course. Maybe that’s being motivated by guilt. I try not to be motivated by guilt, survivor’s or otherwise, but once in a while I am. I think in general I have a pretty deep distrust of my motivations. 

The word for martyr in Arabic is shaheed, which literally means witness, and I think about who Trevino was writing about when she wrote that sentence. She was writing about Aaron Bushnell, who may have been a trans woman like me, who burned “himself” alive to clarify the weight of what's happening. Next to that I’m not sure how these can be testimony, or witness. To what, and before whom, and for what purpose, am I testifying? No genocide in history has been as thoroughly documented in real time as this one. It shows no signs of stopping. 

What I think these poems are is analysis. Thoughts shared between people on the same side. Analysis means breaking-apart. I'm trying to break apart a set of feelings and experiences and ideas about rape, about consent violation, and dig down beneath them to what structures or limits the possibility of consent and limits consent’s usefulness as a way to achieve good relations with each other. 

You could see questions of sexual consent and bodies as “timeless” and the genocide in Gaza as a “current event,” but I don’t think you can really separate the two. I mean, just on the face of it, the October 7th attacks were framed by Israeli authorities as a carnival of rape, although this is heavily disputed. Sexual politics are endemic in this genocide. Just recently there was a big controversy in Israel whether or not it was all right for IDF soldiers to jam hot rods and other objects up the assholes of captured “Hamas militants.” And some in Israel felt this was not in fact, all right, but ultimately the soldiers who did it were not disciplined, in part because far-right protesters, including some members of the Knesset, stormed an IDF base to protest the inquiry. This is of course laying aside the fact that it is the Israeli government who decides who is and is not a “Hamas militant.” Israel sells itself as a space of sexual liberation, but they regularly blackmail queer Palestinians with outing. Of course the fact that this blackmail works is a sign that Palestinian society can be sexually repressive, but this is something that groups like alQaws work to address internally and which pinkwashers clearly don't care about at all. When I was protesting outside the Columbia encampment in May, we came head to head with a large contingent of Christian Zionists who had been bussed in by their pastor, presumably among those far-right evangelicals who believe that Jews need to move to the Holy Land to hasten the Rapture. I was wearing a camisole that day and when I walked past their lines some of them leered at me and said “you couldn’t dress like that in Gaza, sweetie.” 

It's easy to frame the question of “consent,” when it comes to a deeply unpopular military operation like the genocide in Gaza, in terms of the phrase “the consent of the governed,” and in fact in an early draft of this series I did end the AIDS/Robert K. poem asserting, maybe in a gesture of desperate hope, that there was a way to stop consenting to this, that if we got organized we could do more than, in Ilya Kaminsky's defeatist language, be forgiven for “liv[ing] happily during the war.” But Daniel Sarah over at Midnight Sun pointed out that whether or not we can stop consenting, to focus on that was a little hollow or avoidant of reality when horrible nonconsensual things are being done to the people of Gaza’s bodies every day. 

That’s not to say that our own personal histories of violation don’t have a place in understanding this fight; one of the points of this sequence is to show how they do. One of the poems takes place at the Christmas Day protest organized by Within Our Lifetimes in New York City. I remember watching the cops walk alongside us in a way that felt almost intimate, but uncomfortably so, like the flies in the first poem. Later they would arrest several protestors, despite the fact that the protest was not only peaceful but rather boring. When I was a kid, and maybe four feet tall, I ran from the school resource officer, a police officer placed in my school to keep order, because I had been told that if I got in trouble one more time I’d be sent to what was functionally a carceral school for kids with severe behavior problems. He chased me down, put me in a headlock, brought me to the principal’s office terrified, clamped in his arms. I was so small and I couldn’t get out. After that I often fantasized about hurting him, but my mind would always go to the gun on his waist. I say this not because we can’t and don’t overcome the mix of fear and quasi-filial submission cops often provoke in us, but to articulate the feelings in our bodies during these altercations. 

These poems aren’t very concerned with “the consent of the governed,” but particularly in the back half, they are concerned with the building of a collective voice and a collective action. Trust has a lot to do with that. The fear of being controlled or manipulated or forced has a lot to do with that. Letting others decide for themselves has a lot to do with that. Everyone building a political organization now needs to have a good plan for what they’ll do when a prominent member rapes another member. The left has learned this again and again. And the plan can’t just be the phrase “transformative justice” — which frankly very few organizations have the resources to pursue. I don’t think these sonnets answer those tough organizational questions; they’re much more about working back from the phenomenology of consent towards the underpinnings of the individual and then the collective subject, within a world in which very little is consensual. But I hope they emphasize a few things — the danger of attachment to a particular arrangement. The difficulty of confronting what’s really happening. And, actually, the importance of housing in making good responses possible. 

One down-to-earth thought on the question of timeliness vs. timelessness — these poems were mostly finished by March. They’re only just getting published now. That’s how American poetry publishing works, unfortunately. Since then the movement has changed a ton. The encampments came and went, and this summer almost everyone has been in retreat. The situation in the region has changed too. There’s been tremendous emotional shifts. The things I have to say now about Gaza, I’m saying in work I don’t have anywhere to publish yet. When Wendy wrote the Aaron Bushnell poem I quoted above, she dropped it on her Twitter, and I would have liked to have been able to do that too, but she has an established following and I don’t. This magazine’s “uncurated works” policy is hugely helpful with this, by the way, and I hope it will become the norm. In Russia, all the good poets just post their poems to Facebook! It’s a small thing, because poetry won't do much either way, but I do wish I could get things out there faster. If I didn’t believe good poems can be useful in a fight, I wouldn’t care. What happened before March was so devastating, and what has happened since March has been differently devastating. It’s hard to keep going, but we have to. I would like these poems to help with that, but I doubt that they will. 

KARAN

There’s a palpable sense of grief running through these poems, both personal and collective. In one sense, all poetry is about loss — of innocence, time, places, people, love, beauty, joy — even as it tries to capture these. Does poetry serve as a way to process this grief, or is it more about channeling it into action? I’ll allow myself to be silly and ask this: does poetry bring you joy or ease your pain?

KIT

There’s so much grief in them, yeah. It’s been a rough few years. Poetry brings a lot of joy into my life. It’s usually the joy of solving a puzzle or learning something new, often both at once. And the joy of watching someone else connect with what you’ve written. Poetry is joyful when it takes you out of yourself. I envy how completely mathematicians get to have that. I’m a very unreliable person, I’m glad I let myself be involved in politics anyway and I’m glad sometimes to flake out  and write a poem instead. 

The question of processing grief vs. channeling into action is the question of the political utility of catharsis, and I could talk about it for days, but I won’t. I get frustrated when writers like Ilya Kaminsky, who is doing almost a pastiche of Forché’s “poetry of witness,” go viral for poems like “We Lived Happily During the War” that I think fundamentally work to disavow one’s feelings of guilt by identifying with one’s complicity, instead of letting go of them and moving into active solidarity. My mom always used to say that guilt is a useless emotion. Deaf Republic is a more complicated book than that first poem suggests, but the politics are still broken. I don’t know that Kaminsky is cynical. For Kaminsky, I think the guilt is survivor’s guilt, which is a response to grief. 

Brecht is good on catharsis, though I tend to think that we need to process our grief, not just channel it straight back into analysis and alienation. You can do both. The most brilliant thing written on this recently is probably Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s “Notes on Craft.” 

KARAN

There's a school of poetry that believes a poem or a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see yourself moving in a particular direction with your poetry?

KIT

This is a cool framework. I started writing poems, probably like most people, to capture certain things before I lose them. I think my poems are a little brainy but they have a lot of heart. 

I’m not sure what a poetry genuinely of the body would be—maybe someone like Aram Saroyan, I feel like “lighght” is a pretty corporeal poem, you have to say it aloud to get the metaphor. I’d love to be that in touch with my body, but sadly that road is booby-trapped. Not sure I have the funding to demine the region. One time I wrote a five-line Facebook comment explaining the structure of a fear I had, which triggered a friend so badly they threw up. I guess it would be cool to be able to write poems with that effect on purpose, but to what end? You could also just literally punch people in the gut. 

My poems have been getting more abstract lately. I wish they were meaner, funnier, and more sexual.

KARAN

As both a poet and a political organizer, how do you see the relationship between your writing and your activism? Do you find that one informs the other, and if so, how?

KIT

I write worse poems when I’m not organizing! Sometimes organizing shows me things that I realize I ought to write poems about. Sometimes it just keeps me grounded. I’m a pretty flaky organizer, actually, but better in than out. 

KARAN

What is some of the best writing or writing-adjacent advice you’ve received, whether during your formal education or through your experiences as an organizer and activist? 

KIT

I like what Trevino wrote in “Revolutionary Letter”:

tl;dr: you don’t need or want
the people who you know
aren’t “with you” to be
with you. really, you don’t

Apart from that, re: sonnets, I like what Bernadette Mayer said — write the first twelve lines of the sonnet first, then come back two days later to write the couplet. I also like what the rapper Rakim did when writing a sixteen-bar verse: number 1-16 (or in the case of sonnets, 1-14) down the side of the page, skipping a line or two each time. Then treat writing the verse like a sudoku puzzle. It keeps your eye on how much space remains to say what needs to be said.