RLU: What (queer) self has been discovered through poetry? Is there a language of queerness that poetry offers/translates/transmutes?


NKB: I think that queerness and poetry both have an important thing in common, which is that there is a mode of investigation. Being present with someone and a good poem, what they have in common is not having an expectation. There’s a sense of surprise. For me, a good poem doesn’t tell me what to do. I won’t remember much from a poem that does. I was also thinking about this on the bike ride over; especially living in the Bay Area, I don’t actually know what it means to be queer. Anyone could go and get some tattoos. Anyone can download an app. I think that living here places me in that mode of investigation, because there are many different ways of being, and people are constantly wrestling with different labels or conventions of description.


I feel with many queer people we’re not telling each other where to go, either in life or in conversation. I guess the word ‘expansiveness’ or the word ‘questioning’ are stereotypically used to refer to queerness, but I feel that's because that’s partly what it is to be queer; the state of not knowing. If you knew, then it would be boring. Maybe that's why things that like queerness and something being interesting are connected to each other. I'm obsessed with this feeling of something being interesting, and if something isn’t interesting I have no interest in it. 


I saw Ghayath Almadhoun at Tamarack. I was just thinking about queerness and how it's so easily commodified. Are you queer if you just have sex with someone of the same gender once? What does that even mean? That’s also not that interesting. He has this poem that starts in one place and ends in a totally different place. But this poet seems really straight. He was reading a lot of poems about women's bodies and this typical lover figure who misses his ex, but this poem feels very queer to me—strange—in the original sense of the word.


RLU: Can I hear you read it? 


NKB: It’s called How I Became. 


“Her grief fell from the balcony and broke into pieces. So she needed a new grief. When I went with her to the market, the prices were unreal, so I advised her to buy a used grief. We found one in excellent condition, although it was a bit thick, as the vendor told us, it belonged to a young poet who had killed himself the previous summer. She liked this grief, so we decided to take it. We argued with the vendor over the price, and he said he'd give us an angst dating from the sixties as a free gift if we bought the grief. We agreed, and I was happy with this unexpected angst. She sensed this and said, it's yours. I took it and put it in my bag, and we went off in the evening. I remembered it and took it out of the bag and examined it closely. It was high quality and in excellent condition. Despite half a century of use, the vendor must have been unaware of its value. Otherwise he wouldn't have given it to us in exchange for buying a young poet's low quality grief. The thing that pleased me most about it was that it was existentialist angst, meticulously crafted and containing details of extraordinary subtlety and beauty, unless it belonged to an intellectual with encyclopedic knowledge or a former prisoner. I began to use it and insomnia became my constant companion. I became an enthusiastic supporter of peace negotiations and stopped visiting relatives. There were increasing numbers of memoirs in my bookshelves, and I no longer voiced my opinion, except on rare occasions, human beings became more precious to me than nations, and I began to feel a general ennui. But what I noticed most was that I had become a poet.”


NKB: I really gravitate toward poems that have rhythm and short lines. I feel like I've been reading more of this kind of stuff lately. It's just a great poem by a straight man. So I'm just like, What is this? The word ‘queer’ is used as a label to sell things, so I don't know what it means anymore. Maybe I just feel detached from it in my personal life so I’m abstracting it out. 


RLU: I see people identifying as queer because they queer (as a verb) their sense of and meaning-making of cisheteronormative relations and orientations. Though simply engaging in that process—does that mean one is ‘queer’? To me, that may flatten the word. The point of queer is not to achieve an identity, but to live-through a life. There's a dynamism that must be maintained with queerness, whatever that is, otherwise, it becomes stagnant and flat. To me, that feels antithetical of what we're being as queer subjects asked to do, which is to remake political systems. I feel queerness is inextricably linked with politics and the minute we begin to think that we've solved queerness, we've failed.


NKB: Maybe. And at the same time, identity arises because you're in a room and you realize, I look the same as everybody, so then we do have a shared identity. 


I connected with an older lesbian who’s lived in San Francisco for decades. She’s become kind of a mentor and we've hung out a few times. We went to the Bay Area Lesbian Archives together and she was just living through all these documents and pictures. She had stories about all of them; she knew someone or dated someone or had a crush on someone. She was saying that at the time, being queer was an inherently political thing. And now she feels like it isn't, which I understand, because back then, it seemed like queer people were meeting each other at radical bookstores or protests, or they were meeting by these organizations to push for what they needed to survive. And now lots of people have the privilege of not doing that in regards to their gender-sexual expression. But I was pushing back against it because—and this was September 2023, which was right before this wave of Palestine protests started—I remember telling her about how when I go to events or am in politicized places it feels like everyone is queer, like it's almost the other way around. It's not that ‘we're all queer, and we're doing the political thing,’ it's like the people at the political action are all (gender) queer. This isn’t a coincidence, there’s something here. I think that’s really strong in the Bay Area, that connection. It’s like its own language, which I think can be a barrier to other people. 


But I should answer your question about coming to poetry. (Pulls out June Jordan’s Poetry for the People) I didn't know about this book until this past year, but this is June Jordan's blueprint for the class. I've been interested in poetry since childhood, but my relationship with it, up until this class, was reading it between class periods. I don’t remember ever reading it in school. I took this class with Aya de León at UC Berkeley in 2018 and I'm so glad I did because I was never in a class that even used a word like colonialism. I was in this bubble; I was a physics major. I mostly grew up in Alameda, which is like the midwest of the Bay Area. I guess what I wanted to say was that poetry is something I do with other people. 


RLU: Talk to me about June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. What is the program? How did it transform you or your poetics? Did it offer a guide as to what poetry can or should do in all of its multiplicities?


NKB: There's just so many things that Jordan was doing at that time that were really revolutionary. The program sounded like something that hadn't been done before, even hearing Fred Moten talk last month about other modes of school, it reminds me that she was subverting what a university was. I wish everyone could have this experience. That class was the first time I was really writing poems. I feel a special connection to it and to people who also went through the program. Another special thing about it is that anyone can get this book, though it is hard to find copies. It's called a blueprint because she wants people to spread it; there isn't a possession over it. The blueprint belongs to the students to go teach other people.


RLU: You’re a co creator and co host of Tritone, a poetry reading series hosted at Tamarack in Oakland. How did Tritone come into being? Can you talk a bit about space-making for poetry and how, if at all, Poetry for the People informed Tritone?


NKB: I was invited by poet Sophia Dahlin to read with Kazim Ali at Woolsey House, which has been hosting readings for about 15 years. I went up to this person—Kevin—who I had seen at readings once or twice and we started talking about how we wanted there to be more poetry readings in the Bay. Sophia connected me and Kevin with Zêdan. The three of us created Tritone. 


A tritone is this note interval that back in the day was thought to have the devil in it because it sounded discordant. Centuries ago, people thought it was this satanic chord. Especially in the tradition of church music this chord is off limits. I feel like a lot of our readings feel like that because we'll just bring random people together to read. There will be different genres of poetry and there isn’t a harmonic or cohesive theme. 


I think the readings have done something similar for me as this series does for you, which is that it's a point of connection. I have tried to step away from Tritone several times and I haven't because the value of being in a physical space with people listening to poetry, and even greater than that, the value of the people that come to the readings is great. Who else is choosing to set aside two hours on a Friday night to listen to something that may or may not be good? I think that the series is really made up of the people who attend.


RLU:  Can we talk about your poetry? There are very strong sexual and kink images in your poems, thinking about Abecedarian, “My blood embalms your tongue.” Or, Ghazal: A Letter, “I still fear khalehs’ shame if I confessed to you/Things I have done on my knees in bare daylight.” How do you see (your) or the body of queer poetry engaging with tension, power, risk, and innuendo? What does sex do for the poem? What self is explored through sex? 


NKB: Form is necessary for me to write a poem that doesn’t suck. Your question was making me connect that poetic form with the other form that you’re asking about in kink or in life, in our bodies. I really appreciated you bringing those two things together.


The only poems I've successfully written to the end are ones where I have a form constraining me. The form could be something like June Jordan’s set of rules or it could be something more constrained like a ghazal. I haven't thought more deeply about what that says about real life.


RLU: I don't know if this is reaching. But there seems to be a pretty good analog in that the constraint of form generates a freedom within the bounds to play. I think there's something similar happening with kink; you're able to release into tension. That can be a relief.


NKB:  That's exactly it. Actually, as you started to talk, I was making the same connection. My goal is not to feel a certain way. I don't want someone else to expect me to feel a certain way. The goal is tension that you're creating between you two.


I taught my first workshop at a friend’s event at a community farm for Lunar New Year. I was basing it off of June Jordan’s rules that I learned in class. I set the scene by reading a poem out loud and then set a bunch of different poems on the grass. Everybody took a poem and I told them to go read it out loud to themselves somewhere. I feel like that helps you become embodied and put your mind in a space of rhythm and sound. Then I gave them a set of rules that I feel like was really constrained. I had a rule about the length of lines and about assonance and I was constricting the language, the meter and like other parts of the shape of the poem. 


I think that doing that allows your mind to fall into that state that you described. I don’t know what the right word is for that state of mind: it’s not thinking, it’s not really relaxation, and it’s not being present. It feels like you’re riding something. There’s a certain kind of state at the intersection of all those things that having a constraint places me at. I guess that’s why people invented forms in the first place—and because they’re beautiful. And because they’re familiar. If we’re coming at it with this sense of familiarity then we can explore how the poem is tensioning that familiar form and that’s, I think, where a lot of the beauty comes from. 


RLU: In previous conversations we’ve spoken about queer association with, use or rejection of, and relationship to (one’s/the) body. The poem Men Like Me refers amply to body hair, as does Daylight Savings. Or even, relationship to the body being narrowed or a rhetorical corollary to the bodies we come from, our actual relation. Family. Biofamily. Within queerness there is often a pushing away from one’s relation to body (biofamilly) for another, needed, true, relation to body (alterity, queerness). 


I feel that your poems explore these themes or wander into terrain of how to balance propulsion in both directions, to and away from biofamily simultaneously. To bring this question up to what we were previously speaking about, there’s almost a tension to or away from familiarity (familial within that word) or making the unfamiliar familiar with queerness, or defamiliarizing the family. I wonder if that sparks anything for you.


NKB: I'm thinking about Men Like Me, which is something I really feel embarrassed about now. That was a poem that I wrote in this class. I do like the poem as a kind of like a punky slam poem—it’s fun and I like the rhythm in it. It changed meaning to me a couple of years after this class. I had written it in at a time when my relationship to my mom completely changed. In that period we went on a walk and I finally told her about changing my name. I feel like the act of sharing something personal with her, which is not something that I'm used to doing with family, brought us closer together and allowed me to come at our relationship as an adult who’s a different person rather than as someone who’s a child whose parent is constraining their life in either necessary or inevitable ways.


I was able to admit myself—my queer self—to her and she went with it. It’s totally changed our relationship. It goes beyond all of my friendships in some ways, because most are just de facto queer, most of my relationships are queer relationships. I am indebted to my queerness for my current relationship with my mom. I'm indebted to relationships with all my other friends, but that's just because of who we are. It's not something we have to reveal or negotiate together. I remember editing this poem a little at that time and perceiving it differently, because now I think that everything I write is kind of about my mom, in a way. She's always there, either explicitly by name, or maybe it’s just me, that I just know that she's there.