Tell me the truth about love...

Photo by Suzi Corker for Apples & Snakes

So today sees my entry in a series of blog posts on the Apples and Snakes website concerning Public Address: The Soapbox Tour. I've used it to highlight something which people who've been following this blog for a while will know has been much on my mind lately: the idea that performance poetry was once something often mentioned in the same context as performance art and now, well - it isn't. I want to try and bridge that gap, to see how far you can add performance art elements to spoken word gigs until they become...something else.

There are various ways in which I'm doing that. Some involve me handcuffing myself to microphone stands, or stripping, while reading certain poems. And the piece I'm doing for Public Address, which Apples and Snakes describe as a 'fierce but fun poetry/live-art crossover' involves something else again. And it's something I need your help with.

Regular followers of this blog will know that one of the topics that has been obsessing me for the better part of the past year is the mercurial nature of romantic love. How do we define it? What behaviours constitute it? How well do these match up with the idealised version of said emotion which dominates our culture? What, with apologies to 90s one-hit-wonder Haddaway, is love? 

It turns out to be kind of hard to define. And that's why I'm asking you, readers, to define it for me, and to define it operationally. I don't want definitions of love in terms of feelings or vague abstractions: when you've been in a loving relationship, what has your partner done to show they loved you? 

And on the flipside of that, when you've been in a relationship that's gone terribly, terribly wrong - what did your partner do that proved it wasn't love? 

I've been asking people to provide answers to those two questions for months now. I'm using the answers I've got so far in the piece I've prepared for Public Address, 'Shotgun Wedding'. But I need more. And I want you to give me those answers.

The Public Address ensemble, plus guests: l-r Henry Raby, Justin Coe, Jasmine Gardosi, AJ McKenna, Shagufta K, Helen Seymour, Ingrid McLaren and Keisha Thompson. Photo by Suzi Corker for Apples and Snakes.

There's a twist, though: I don't want you to tell me which question you're answering. 

I'm asking for you to give me your answers via Twitter (my handle there is @AnathemaJane) using the hashtag #becauseyou... I want your answers to be concrete, to be specific, and - ideally - to be provocative. But I don't want you to tell me whether they're acts of love or acts of violence - the audiences on the Public Address tour will be deciding the answer to that. 

To get you going, here are a few submissions we've already had. Which side do you think these fall?

#becauseyou said you would sing at my funeral

#becauseyou say you love me in your sleep

#becauseyou taught me self-mutilation doesn't always need a knife

#becauseyou squeeze my shoulders

#becauseyou got me strawberries and nothing that I asked for

You get the idea, I hope. I'll be asking for submissions every day between now and the end of the tour. The answers will be randomised and will form part of the final piece. I'll also be tweeting a random reason from the list every day, and asking what you think. 

So please, spill it - how did you know it was/wasn't love? Because...

Pattern; Recognition

(Content note: this post is a sequel of sorts to an earlier post concerning an incident of sexual assault, and as such discusses the same topic.)

I've been rereading Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? recently. Regular readers of this blog will be aware of how important reading Bechdel's previous graphic memoir, Fun Home, was to my decision to come out as transgender. While I love both books, I admit the later memoir is not as effective as the first, not as immediately gripping. However it has, in its own way, led to another revelation.

Are You My Mother? suffers from a sort of Difficult Second Album Syndrome: quite a lot of the book is devoted to Bechdel trying to work out how to write the book, and this means it isn't as immediately gripping as Fun Home. Bechdel spends a lot of her time in this book visiting various therapists trying to solve the problems caused by her upbringing, and trying to fit in a lot of material about a particular (long-dead) psychoanalyst who fascinates her, Donald Winnicott. Fun Home handled its allusions - to Proust and Joyce mainly - with a lightness of touch that seems to elude its sequel. Yes, there are long digressions on Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time, but these are mere dressing to the book's main concern, Bechdel's reconciliation with her father. In the later book, a lot of the Winnicott stuff, the therapy stuff, seems to overwhelm the text. We are denied the same immediacy in witnessing Bechdel's relationship to her mother.

On my most recent pass through the book, however, it occurred to me that this is only a problem if you assume that Bechdel's mother is who the book is about. Taken on its own merits, and not judged by the standard of Fun Home, it quickly becomes clear that the plot of this book is Bechdel trying to work out the plot of the book. Are You My Mother? is a book about a woman trying to write a book called Are You My Mother?, that being the book you, the reader, now hold in your hand. It isn't quite metatextual game-playing on an Italo Calvino level, but it was enough to really lift the book for me, and give it a feeling of, well, yes, jouissance et plaisir et tout le jazz. It felt a little like striking the right note on a tuning fork and finally working out exactly what key the instrument ought to be tuned in (does music work like that, exactly? I'm a massive musical bluffer. But you know what I mean).

And it was this notion of finding the right key which led me to my own somewhat meta-textual revelation: almost everything I've written this year has actually, on some level, been about the experience I wrote about recently on this blog, of being sexually assaulted by another woman in my early twenties. Almost every word I've written and, indeed, the words I've had others write on me.

The Duke of Burgundy sequence is obviously heavily influenced by my attempts to work through that event, as is the odd, thematically linked series of poems about how fucking terrifying I find the concept of romantic love (quick update: I no longer find love quite so terrifying, but this is because - as part of the piece I've prepared for Public Address: The Soapbox Tour [which, you'll be entirely unsurprised to hear, was also heavily influenced by what I experienced in 2002] - I've had to interrogate my thoughts about romantic love very heavily. The conclusions I came to, which involve the idea of emotional and libidinal cathexis which Bechdel explores in Are You My Mother?, as well as my own interpretation of the concept of Relationship Anarchy, will be dealt with in another post).

My review of Peter Strickland's film was, it seems obvious now, massively influenced by me reliving that event: in fact, it seems pretty clear at this distance that both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness as a review is the fact that I wrote it in the aftermath of feeling full-on triggered by the moment in the film where Cynthia violates Evelyn without her consent. Incidentally, this is why I have very little time for the line of right-wing bullshit which maintains that because of trigger warnings we will create a generation of people unable to appreciate the Great Masterworks of the Literary and Artistic Canon: I believe The Duke of Burgundy is an incredible cinematic achievement, and it triggered the living shit out of me the first time I saw it. The two aren't mutually-exclusive propositions.

I mean, I liked it enough to get the safeword from the film tattooed on my arm. The safeword that is, crucially, ignored during the very scene that triggered me the first time, the scene in which Evelyn essentially tells Cynthia to stop and she...doesn't. At this point, I don't think either of us need to page Dr Freud to see the significance of that piece of body art.

"If only we could all just say 'pinastri' to end our torments..."

And so on, through everything else I've written since this Spring (well, maybe not everything - my Magic Mike XXL review doesn't seem to have bore any traces of the crime, which is probably why it was the thing I've enjoyed writing most so far this year). Candour, which was written after a creepy online encounter with a woman who reminded me far too much of the woman who raped me; Clarkson, which starts out as a poem about the quondam Top Gear host but very quickly becomes an anguished rant about consent and rape culture; Hell, even my post-election rant ('Morality is what we do in the dark. What we do when no-one's watching.') is probably coloured by my decidedly untranquil recollection of that experience.

Admitting what that experience was has been difficult, but I can see now that it was where a Hell of a lot of my work this year was leading. And that realisation is the tuning fork sounding, the sudden revelation of the key I need to tune to. I'm not quite sure what I do with this artistically yet but I can now see that doing something with it artistically is what I'm trying to do. And bits of that will feed into Public Address, and it will massively inform what I do with my Howl of the Bantee follow-up show, Feeling Helpless Safely - which is, it's now dazzlingly obvious, a show which is all about consent, in terms of text, structure, and staging - and it'll probably be a major part of the slightly weird thing I'm working on that might just be a novel, and for all I know it's something I'm going to be addressing in my work for quite some fucking time...

...but I'm addressing it. That's what this story's about.

Upcoming Performance Dates

Your periodic reminder of where I'm performing in the next three months!

12th September: Queer'Say at RichMix, London, 8pm

17th September: The Stanza, Chillingham Arms, Heaton, Newcastle, 7pm (this is a benefit gig for refugee aid. All performers are donating their proceeds from the door split to support refugees in Calais. Do come, do buy tickets, do donate for the free books from Borderline Books, do chuck money in the bucket).

18th September: Trans*Figurations 2, Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, London

14th October: Public Address: The Soapbox Tour at Alphabetti Theatre, Newcastle, 7:30pm

17th October: Public Address: The Soapbox Tour at The House, Plymouth University, 8pm (part of the Plymouth International Book Festival)

25th October: Public Address: The Soapbox Tour at Bloomsbury Theatre, London, 7pm (part of the Bloomsbury Festival)

26th October: Public Address: The Soapbox Tour at Nuffield Theatre, Southampton, 7:30pm (part of SO:To Speak)

29th October: Transdimensional Space Goats, Manchester

13th November: Public Address: The Soapbox Tour at Hexagon Theatre, Birmingham, 7pm

19th November: Stand Up Tragedy Presents...a double bill of What About the Men? Mansplaining Masculinity by Dave Pickering and (oh yes) Howl of the Bantee by AJ McKenna. Dogstar, Brixton 19th November.

Yes, folks, Howl of the Bantee is coming to London...

Not just a bad experience

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The Negotiable Inch

I think, if I saw you were stood between me
and the only exit from this room, I'd stand,
as some are said to freeze when under fire:
I wouldn't fight, but

not through fear of injury alone.
I'd not resist because there is, within me,
something which finds bliss in being beaten, which
I will not let you

take from me. If the one negotiable inch
of what passes in the space we occupy
is the choice I make to struggle or submit,
that choice I take

that future lovers, future scenes of feeling
helpless safely, remain unpoisoned by this
memory's bleed. Take what you want, and call it victory:
I win by choosing when I choose to yield.

Candour

Because I have you blocked, you will not learn

I bought thigh-highs today: replacing the ones my toes ruined

the night I took a trans man’s strap-on in my mouth

while he sucked off his husband.

I imagine, stalker, you would like to know that, as you would like to hear

about my Sportsheets order: how long it is, what colour, whether

it is silicone or latex, who – so far – has got to use it on me.

These names you’ll never know: because, for one,

I don’t like list poems and, for two, I don’t name names, no, never

 – even yours will go unspoken. There are limits to my moxie.

And besides which – I have blocked you,

so you will never read about my date,

Google the venue, admire the menu, imagine

me eating, imagine you sitting

across from me watching – oh, you may imagine,

but I will starve your fantasy of context. 

A verboten! sign, a little strip of formtext

will tell you you are added to my blocklist,

a victory – but pixel-thin and pointless

because in reading it, you know that you have made

me truly – unerotically – afraid. 

Public Address III

Most of my news lately has been about my show, but I have something different to share now, so I'm sharing it here: I'm going to be one of the poets working on Apples and Snakes' Public Address 3 tour!

As the name suggests, there have been two previous Public Address tours - the first, in 2010, was on the theme of 'Home', the second had a more wide-ranging brief, and this third iteration of the franchise sees the poets involved - me, Jasmine Gardosi, Shagufta K Iqbal, Justin Coe, Joshua Judson, Helen Seymour, and Henry Raby - taking the word 'soapbox' as our theme. The whole thing is being directed by the amazing Hannah Silva, who is just one of the most brilliant, experimental, innovative spoken word performers working right now. I'm absolutely delighted to be working with all of these people, it's going to be great.

So, given all that, what am I planning to get on my soapbox about? Well, one thing I'm not going to be doing is ranting. After spending so much time working on Howl of the Bantee I'm pretty much ranted out, and the result of the recent election has made me doubt how effective the angry ranting thing is anyway. I'll be honest, I had hoped that the references to David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and the whole pestilent Tory junta merrily ruining this country, which crop up in the course of my Edinburgh show, could be laughed off with a triumphalist 'well, we don't have to deal with them anymore, ho ho'. Instead, they sound like the lamentations of the defeated. My kingdom for a Nordic Welfare Model. 

And partly I'm wondering if it isn't time in my career to stop asking only rhetorical questions anyway. Increasingly I want to write and perform work which leaves questions hanging, which lets the audience make their own minds up. Or not. Yeah yeah yeah, negative capability, all that jazz. But Keats had a point, y'know? 

None of which exactly answers the question of what I want to write, but in the spirit of asking rather than answering questions, I'm not going to tell you outright. Rather, here are a few hints. First, there's Dean Spade's work on the Romance Myth. If you've been following my recent poems on here, particularly those that precede and include the Duke Sequence (aka 'talk about the other things'), you'll know I'm obsessed with the idea that there is a hidden violence inherent in the notion of romantic love we're sold by our culture. I was turned on to Spade's concept by reading this takedown of trans romcom Boy Meets Girl which Tom Leger shared on Facebook, and I think Spade has a good line on the problems inherent in the concept. This is probably also something which is going to play into the show I want to do after Howl..., which I'm provisionally calling Feeling Helpless Safely (or possibly Feeling Helpless, Safely, I'm not sure whether or not it needs the comma), but I have an idea of how these questions of love and violence might be dramatised which I think, if I can bring it off, will be a really good thing to explore for this project. 

Second, some pretty pictures. First, here's Hedwig Gorski, New Orleans poet credited by Wikipedia with having coined the term 'performance poetry':

As Gorski's Wikipedia entry makes clear, she theorised performance poetry as a practice 'distinct within and parallel to...spoken word, slam, poetry readings, performed poetry and performance art' (italics mine). It's interesting to think that performance poetry and performance art were once seen as parallel practices. These days, if you asked people to picture a performance artist and a performance poet you'd get wildly divergent images, I think. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? Could it be a factor in the concern that slam-format poetry is ossifying into a formulaic template? What would a performance poetics that was more in dialogue with performance art look like? And speaking of performance art...

Here's a shot from Marina Abramovic's Rhythm 0, which I think is one of the most flat-out ballsy pieces of performance art ever created. Basically, Abramovic stood in front of an audience who were presented with a table of 72 objects, which they were allowed to use on her as desired. The objects included a rose, a feather, perfume, bread, wine...and scissors. And a scalpel. And a loaded gun. It started out mildly; by the end Abramovic had been stripped, slashed, and had the gun pointed at her head with her own finger being worked around the trigger. 

As Abramovic herself put it 'In theatre, blood is ketchup. In performance, everything's real.' So what is it we do as poets? Theatre, or performance? And what would a spoken word show look like that engaged with issues of real risk in a similar way to Rhythm 0? Would that even be a spoken word show? And how does all this relate to the idea of love as violence?

These are not questions I intend to answer. But I do intend to ask them.