So I’ve been reading Ana Božičević religiously (which coincidentally means choosing poems randomly from her BOOK! over and over), and trying to do the thing that she does with her language.

The poems I linked to come from EOAGH’s Queering Language issue, and I think there’s something here that might be relevant to the discussion of materiality: if we can queer language, then we most certainly can queer the materiality of our writing.

In her introductory statement for the issue, kari edwards writes:

it is the space one holds, not an essential objectification one is held in, where one is stabilized into things in space, places with borders, bodies with procedures, proper behavior by corporeal containment, compulsory reproductive management, polarizing populations, producing mythological projections, slicing every single living energetic instant into bipolar neurosis for further control of an imagined boundary.

So perhaps it is a destabilization of space, a loosening of the control of imagined boundaries that could be argued as a way of queering language. This is what I mean when I say the thing that she does with her language: I think Ana Božičević writes unstable poems, poems that feel like they go everywhere, do everything, poems that want to just take off and break into multiple pieces at once. She gets frustrated with straight girls:

I want to write a nice long poem for all you straight girls.
Your religion’s rose and glass castles
hold no place for me, I’m out of my princess phase.

And then gets over it:

I’m over it.

She blurs lines between the body and the poem and the poem-as-body:

I can’t even look at myself naked
while I change out of body into the poem.

She talks to her mom:

And after all those centuries, Mom, why do you still worship the boys?

She talks to her dad:

Secretly, I’m a believer. Dad, are you really a believer?

Her poems just go everywhere and do everything all at once, especially when we talk about who the poem is for/to (she addresses “women” in general, a kind of ambiguous “you”), as well as what it’s like to write in ways foreign to her, and in the end she positions herself as “you,” and not, at the same time:

To write in a speech I wasn’t born mouthing
about the ground I wasn’t born sniffing

My face stuffed full of the land and the language of longing

hell yeah. I’ll learn to write just like you,
green stems are growing out of me, I belong everywhere
in you: Hi, I’m you, it’s so filling
when there’s only one of us here.

How do our bodies function in the space of the poem? How do our poems interact with our bodies? How do we interact with each others’ bodies? What makes one body different from another? Can language be something physical that is stuffed into us? And who is this language being stuffed into? These are the sorts of questions that come up for me when I read Ana Božičević’s work, and the things I have been thinking about in writing my own poems addressing the materiality of the composition of the poem.

My main concern in the poem I wrote is to try to play with how my body is interacting with the poem, the way that Ana Božičević writes about her body interacting with the poem.

And what I’m most proud of is that I feel like I’m participating in a queering of language: in the end, I arrive at the possibility that the body/the poem might be located in multiple locations at the same time. The materiality of the poem-as-material and the body are never at rest in a poem, but rather, they are ever-shifting, rearranging around each other and time and space, especially given the multiple drafts that a poem must go through in order to come into being, the multiple readings of the poem that happen physically and mentally.

So to go back to my original idea about the queering of materiality: could it be that to queer materiality, we would need to create a surface without borders? An unconfined space? Do the codices we read about represent this at all? Would it need to be a fluid materiality? What would need to be said?