RLU: We shared some correspondence before this call, wherein you provided a couple of links to your work. In 2012, you premiered  a n e m o n e  in Pleasure Rebel in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city you lived in for over a decade. In your reflections on the performance, you wrote, “I wasn’t sure if I and my work quite belonged.” Perhaps it’s because I’ve read seven Percival Everett novels this year, or maybe it’s because Noemi Press was gracious and mailed me a copy of Mess And Mess And, but I’m curious about what it means to be queer. What queerness means. What a queer aesthetic might signify about its maker, if there is any relationship between queerness’ assertion that a self can be (un)made and poetry’s root word meaning “to make.” Where are you at with queerness these days?


GC: What does queerness mean? I don't know. Back in the beginning of the 2000s, Nastalie Bogira, the founder and curator of Pleasure Rebel, said that queerness is a moving target. Queerness can be a lot of different things that may or may not only have to do with sexuality or sexual orientation. There are a lot of people who are gay, there are a lot of people who engage in what we might call homosocial or homosexual behavior. There's a lot of blur. Non-gay people can have queer aesthetics. I'm queer, although I generally don't say I'm queer.  I would say I'm on a queer spectrum. There’s nuance there. 


My sexuality is expansive and also mysterious, and frankly, has been the site and source of a lot of humiliation and pain. I'm not a person who has had really great experiences with sex, sexuality, and romance. It's hard. I feel bad saying it like that because I do have an ex-partner who's more public through these books, and I don't want to sound churlish or ungrateful for the very positive experiences that I had at times in our romantic relationship. But generally speaking, that has not been a positive realm of my life, and because I have been so steeped and socialized and schooled and trained in Blackness , and especially a kind of post-Black arts Blackness , I guess my training was like: if you don't have anything nice to say about a thing, don't say it. Or if you're not there with a positive image of a thing, then you're not the one to be the standard bearer for it. Maybe it's a process of moving through whatever internalized homophobia I'm still dealing with. More likely, it has to do generationally with how much my relationship, specifically to gayness, came through very close relationships with gay men. The way that they were doing gayness is different from the way that I do or understand queerness. Especially my own.


There are a lot of things that play into it: the impact of AIDS on my generation, but also this idea that maybe AIDS narratives belonged, on some level, to gay men. There’s something within me around gender and gayness, where I was like, I guess that doesn't have anything to do with me. In the meantime, I was doing all this other stuff that, aesthetically and then in terms of my desires, didn't seem very accounted for. This is a long paragraph-answer I'm giving you, but I'm going to come back to the specific question: Where are you at with queerness? Queerness is a moving target, and so am I. 


In the meantime, I was always with queer people. I was always reading queer books. I was always thinking about queer lineages. If you are a poet, you're indebted to queer poets, whether you are queer or not. If you are a visual artist in the United States, whether you yourself are queer, you are indebted to queer lineages. That's also a complicated and interesting thing, especially if you're interested in experimentation, pushing against more traditional notions of craft, whatever those are. In the United States, if you are a U.S. poet, you're dealing with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, and they were queer. You're dealing with Langston Hughes; he was queer. For me it’s also about a kind of heritage and an archival understanding, holistic understanding of the creative practices that I'm engaged in, and who those people are, and the way that they moved and didn't move. Although their understanding of their own sexuality and how that related to their work is not the same as maybe what some people’s today would be, or maybe what some people today would have wanted their relationships to those things to have been. 


I identify as a black feminist poet performance artist because I was formed deliberately in those aesthetic traditions. Queerness, of course, is all wrapped up in those traditions too. You're talking about June Jordan. You're talking about Audre Lorde. It's the articulation around it. Poetry is so much about how a self is made or unmade, that a poem is in some ways a body of self, and it's also how a body is made and unmade. That idea of making and unmaking a body is very aligned with how I understand something around queerness. I would also say I'm not a good expert on queerness. I think I have probably more insight into something like queer poetics than I probably would about queerness itself.


RLU: In exploring and troubling the notion of a ‘queer aesthetic,’ I’ve begun to position this project as an invective against the stasis of ‘queer poetry.’ I’m over the assertion that anything is and I’m preferencing what something does. I think your poem CAKES exemplifies how a queer poetry aesthetic might threaten the order of poetry, might make a mess of convention, might move us to touch the veil of ‘order’ in our lived lives. In journaling initial ideas for questions I wrote: “Disorder! Taking to the streets! The after hours kinky punk rave in the streets of san francisco getting stormed by riot police! Too much noise in all the wrong places! Too much! Too much! Not enough!” I found I had scribbled this quote from the déjà vu: “How brave am I really? How wild and cool? How queer? How much messiness can I abide?” We’re talking about or hinting at rules, laws, negation, and abjection. Could you talk about what conventions you admit into your poetry, writing the imperfect, messy, or disordered? Could you talk about abiding messiness?


GC: I loved writing CAKES so much, in part because it was so formally constrained. There's something enticing for me in a traditional relationship to form, but I also love pushing against convention, or abiding, inviting, and reveling in messiness. For example, the opening of the déjà vu is one of my favorite things that I've written—with the numbers and the repetition. It shifts and becomes something else, the numbers expand as a kind of annotation, and then that blows up into something like an exploded text. I love experimentation, but I worry in my own work that I'm too controlled and that the writing is too…


It’s difficult for me to write something that doesn't align with the music I hear in my head, and that can become singsong-y. My prose can sometimes feel a little too melodic in the way that a poet’s prose can feel dense. It's rare for me to have a throwaway line, or it's rare for my language in prose to be casual, unless it's in the performance text, which often brings in something like notebook writing. It's that kind of writing that maybe brings in a certain kind of messiness that then explodes or expands the parameters of the poetic field, in terms of the field of the page or the field of the project. 


It allows me to loosen the fuck up. The poet me loves that spare, dense language. I just love the white space on the page a little bit, that juicy drop of image. At the same time, I'm verbose and garrulous and love language, too. There are different registers and kinds of language that I'm interested in bringing together. I’m always trying to have the whole be larger than the sum of the parts. These varying approaches to opening up are about trying to play with and be with the excess, the excess of experience beyond language. 


As a person who works in language and loves language, I'm also aware that language cannot actually fully cover the whole of our experience. I was really moved when you said taking gender and sexuality studies classes in undergrad allowed you to learn how to articulate yourself and engage in this process of naming or unnaming. For me, queerness is even more about unnaming than naming. The emphasis on using the right name, the right language, the right terminology, can sometimes feel like it's trying to pin down something that innately is not about being pinned down, and that can feel tricky. It can feel as if there's a way that I'm doing this wrong. That I'm not going to be able to live up to how I'm supposed to be. Or that I’m using the wrong words to describe myself, my life, my work, my friends, my relationships. I don't mean specifically the word queer, it's the idea that the words would cover what's happening. That's really what I'm trying to say.


The messiness, for me, is in repetition or by playing a little with redundancy; it's against  efficiency of language, it’s about telling the same thing in more than one way. I definitely do that in Swallow the Fish. I do that in In and Out of Place. There's a little of that in the déjà vu and in the piece that I wrote about Wanda Coleman: it's like a reverse so that the language goes in these different sections and it flips. But inside of those sections, there’s the slipperiness of the word ‘fag.’ One of my friends was like, I don't understand what the controversy is here.


Given the arts institution that I was dealing with, and knowing how something could take on its own life on Instagram or Twitter, I wanted to be careful of bringing in the wrong word because an audience might not trust me to be the right person using that word. I was so trained to be a good girl and to say the right thing that messiness is, in some ways, an aspiration. I also have a Virgo Moon which wants me to be organized. 


RLU: What it calls to mind for me is that meaning conferred by a word or by language is so dependent on the context in which it's offered, and so for someone to be upset about the word fag, they would potentially not read your body or your existence as the correct context for saying this word. They could critique that institution—the small press—as the incorrect context for bringing this word into the public ear or into the shared ear. As you're talking about these different ways of bringing in a messy writing, a kind of writing lifted from one’s journal verus the writing that’s edited with the public in mind, it seems to me part of that is also about shifting the context in which you see your own writing. Is something more transmuted and pruned? Is something arriving more directly from your stomach or your heart?


GC: It's about vulnerability. It's about audacity. It's about performativity. It's about the ear, but also who you anticipate overhearing you. That's where I feel live performance has been really good for me as a poet, because there's an immediacy in terms of how language works. There are these people in this room. This thing right now. I can feel the energy of something in the room and use my language in real time to either shut something down, open something up, offer a detour, or play with the tonal qualities of the voice. It's really about tone.


What you just said, though, I think is really wise. I mean, the idea that there are people who have questions about language and will make determinations on whether or not that language is appropriate based on what they surmise around a person or an institution. I feel more on board with that as a procedure when you're talking about an institution because you can research the history of an institution. But I do think that there's a lot of assumptions about people. This idea of who are you to be saying this about queerness? There can be an assumption. Who are you to say this about gender? Who are you to say this about gayness? Like, you don't actually know who is gay. You don't actually know who is queer. You don't actually know who's trans. 


I've noticed that it can shut things down. I've seen that in the workshop. There was a student who shared with me privately that they were on kind of a trans journey, but when they read something in class, a very vocal, very out, sort of self-identified queer person was like, Why are you writing this? That person was not yet ready to articulate all that for a whole host of reasons, some of which had to do with their parents who were paying their tuition. I was also like, Wait a second, is that the most important question about this work in this room? For this person, it was because anything that they would have to say about the work depended on who wrote it. 


RLU: There's the element of an out queer person keeping closed the gates for someone else and being a judge of what their art should contain, as well as an implied critique that they do not embody a life that their art is allegedly supposed to represent. I interviewed Carl Phillips for this project, and he shared that one of the reasons he didn't sink further into the Black (literary) arts world—which also mirrored some feedback that he received from readers—was because his work was often judged as not Black enough. People would come up to him at readings and ask why he didn’t write Black poetry. It begs the question of what even is Black poetry, and what compels someone to say that? I think the flip side of someone like your student saying, Who are you to write this? is when people say, Why aren't you writing this thing that you're supposed to be writing?


GC: Within those questions—Why aren't you writing this? Who are you to write this?—is such a desire for control, and a desire for a straight line between identity and art, and I just don't think it works like that. I think that we're too idiosyncratic for that. Carl Phillips knows this, you know this, and I know this, but of course, Carl Phillips is a black poet. And actually, I would say, if you look historically at black aesthetics, Carl Phillips' poems—they are black poems. To deny that is to give in to a very narrow understanding of what black aesthetics are and maybe a very narrow understanding of queer aesthetics.


But again, who am I to be able to say that? Because I'm not a person sitting here with a lovely wife. There are a lot of queer ways of being that I don't live right now. In my classroom, it's a different situation because I feel strongly that individuals should be mindful and ask, Why are you writing about this? If you're doing anything around representation, what are you basing those representations on? I think ethics are really important. I don't think it should be a free-for-all, but I also don’t think there needs to be an energy of surveillance and policing.


RLU: And I think those are much more interesting questions to offer someone in workshop. What images are they working with? Are they working with real people? Are they working with stereotypes? Are they working from their own experience, or are they working from a kind of observation that's this long? What's the intimacy of the subjects in the piece? Are the subjects in the piece entitled to their own subjectivity? What are the valences of different questions that have the potential to propel the art versus those that stop someone from engaging with their own art.


GC: Yeah, for sure. How does a person get set up to be an expert on art or an expert on a certain realm of art? Those are important questions.


RLU: So much of your work has explored love, sexuality, belonging and place. I read through what I could of the syllabus at the denouement of the déjà vu (thank you, Coffee House Press!) and found my way to Ntozake Shange’s lost in language and sound, in which she wrote of her appetite for the choreo poem, “I realized that I wrote differently and more forcefully after (dance) class. That the movement propelled the language.” Not only a method of precipitating an articulated English language, she describes movement as “how we remember what cannot be said.” 


You list Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past in the syllabus, and for me, the scholar’s inclusion brought to mind Christina Sharpe’s contemplations of the wake, the ordinaryness of the marking that foregrounds a racialized experience in the “U.S.,” and pastness as a position. Of the a n e m o n e performance, you reflected, “Perhaps they think I’m responding to someone else’s desire, but it’s actually an attempt to withstand my own desire, to keep desiring myself.” So, to go back to the beginning of this “question,” I’m curious about the body (your body?) as the place where love, sexuality, and belonging take place. How does your body hold your own sense of time, how does one (do you) belong to the self?


GC: That's such a great question. Thank you for that. I feel so alive in my body when I perform. Performance has been such a gift for me in terms of claiming, reveling, enjoying, using my body—that was a wonderful shift for me when I first started making performance art. It wasn't about what my body looked like; it was being in my body and what my body was doing, or what I could make my body do. There was something around that for me that was also deeply related to poetry. 


Logistically, some of it was about moving from a traditional poetry reading through and toward something that was like a spoken word slam, but that wasn’t quite right either. It was looking for a way to be the poem in the world, and searching or seeking for an experience of sexuality and desire that would also be moving the poem through the world. I wanted a space or a site where my full body could be present as opposed to feeling like I'm on defense or waiting for a shoe to drop.


The site of performance or the experience of performance helps remind me of this full gift that we each are given—this thing that we're in, which can cause a lot of problems. I mean, I have notes. Whoever designed us, I'm like, God, I have a few notes. But it's also something more for me as an artist and writer—writing for me is also reading, and it's also noticing what happens in my body when I read a certain text. What's coming up for you? What becomes tense? What becomes loose? When performance became a central element to my writing practice, the quality was different. Maybe it was the pulsing of desire—desire in language, desiring language, and desiring the body. One of the things that I think about in terms of my own creative trajectory is moving from a notion of figures of speech to a notion of figures of the body, and what that shift did in terms of the composition of performance. That was my making of poetry.


There's something else, and that something else I think is at the heart of the question you're asking me. Like, how do you exist in something that is simultaneously psychic and spiritual, ancestral, aesthetic, intuitive, creative, but is also biological and has sexual attraction and needs?


I think a lot about the size of my body. For a long time, not so much anymore which is great, but for a long time, I would walk into certain performance art spaces and be the only not thin person,  What that felt like to be in those spaces, well the expectation was that maybe we would just check our bodies at the door, that we would pretend it was something different. In the poetry world, people needed to prove their intellectuality sometimes, especially female-assigned people, so it was like I needed to show that I'm smart. I didn't want to have poems about my body. Or, if I wrote about having a female or femme body, then all of a sudden I'm a ‘female poet,’ whatever the fuck that is. It’s always a practice of performance, how to be in your body, and that's actually not automatic, at least for me. I think for many people it can feel dangerous to be in your body in some moments, you know. Being in the body can be a moving target too. 


RLU: The epigraph of (ghost gestures) is a quote by Toni Morrison’s from The Source of Self-Regard, “[My work] must centralize and animate information discredited by the West…information held by discredited people, information dismissed as ‘lore’ or ‘gossip’ or ‘magic’ or ‘sentiment.’” Later in (ghost gestures), the poem chews on what is there and not there, what is present and erased, what is palimpsest, desecrated, and inscribed. I want to pull on this thread, of where information comes from, or how, in the déjà vu, we come to know what we know. You list Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” in the syllabus, so it seems that desire might function as epistemology. Especially given your career as an educator working within the academy, what do you see as the role of poetry and art crediting, centering, or prioritizing ‘marginal’ knowledge?


GC: I think poetry and art can push back against the rational and open up another kind of space for alternate ways of understanding and receiving work. What we need more of are critical conversations, real conversations about work, but that hasn't been modeled very well. I just started reading Kazim Ali’s book about Lucille Clifton. Many people talk about the feeling that Clifton’s work elicits, but they don't necessarily talk about the craft. It's interesting to consider the possibility of a critical response that could engage both emotional response and the formal properties of a text or poem.


But to answer your question of what the role of poetry and art might look like for crediting, centering, and prioritizing marginalized knowledge, I think of these as places where that kind of knowledge resides. These modes of expression give space for different kinds of knowledge and actually derive from marginalized knowledges, and so in that way, poetry and art model  alternate forms of thinking, being, knowing. 


RLU: To end, I want to start at the beginning (maybe this is queer or Black time?). You remark in the déjà vu that the inflection point in your life, after a health crisis, after having achieved career ambitions before the age of 30, “that it was time to show up to my deepest callings.” It’s been a couple of decades since that call made itself undeniable. What has changed in your life, what has opened to you by attending to these callings? 


GC: It's an incredible thing to have your dreams come true. It was my dream to be a poet and a writer and an artist, and I am one. That is astonishing to me because not everybody who professes to do those things or says that they want to do those things would say that they are. For me, being a writer, artist, and poet is not about publishing a book. That's not about being a professor. That's not about having a degree. You don't need to have any of those things to definitely be those things. You know what I mean? 


It isn't about a kind of career achievement. It's really about the extent to which I have been able to center those things in my life, prioritize them, and connect with other people around them. I wrote Swallow the Fish and I wrote another book, and then I wrote another one, and another. It was like, okay, wait a minute. Now I'm off the grid. Now I'm in some space that I didn't even anticipate. So what does it mean to show up in the deepest calling of that? What does it mean to have another kind of listening? And how does that relate? I do think, for me, that does relate to queerness, and that does relate to plumbing that aspect of myself in a deeper, more full way. That likely means showing up in the vulnerability of true intimacy with other people. 


It requires a kind of audacity of listening, and especially when you get to a certain level, you’ve  got to keep listening. That’s where I think I am. I don't think I'm anywhere near the depth of my own calling, or talent, or capacity, or vision, or contribution to the world. There's so much more. It takes a lot of effort and energy, and I think that I have to listen and trust.


RLU: I love those words together, the audacity of listening.


GC: The audacity of listening to your own deepest calling. 


RLU: I think the work of an artist or poet is also to remain somewhat childlike, somewhat open. And if you're not open, you can't listen. You can't take in. The ear is literally an opening into self. Also, there are so many ways to listen. Listening is a mode of engagement, of becoming closer, of keying into what is around.


GC: I like keying into what's around a lot. I just finished facilitating this three session workshop on ritual poetics for at Lewis Place. The third session was on wandering—that idea of keying into what's around you. And I’ve been thinking of Sarah Jane Cervanek’s book for a while. What happens when we consider wandering as a ritual practice, or wandering as a practice that can help us understand or become prepared for ritual? A way for us to be open to the unexpected, and a movement that you do that isn't necessarily with a huge aim in mind, but also isn't completely aimless. What is that indeterminate space between aimed and aimlessness? There's something about poetry in there, and there's something maybe about queerness in there, too.


RLU: And what is a huge aim if not audacious?


GC: That's it.