Transmuting as Witness: A Conversation with Subhaga Crystal Bacon — August 30, 2024
Subhaga Crystal Bacon is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry. Her latest book, Transitory (BOA Editions, 2023), is the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Finalist, and was listed in the Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 50 Books of 2023.
Transitory exists within the realms of political witness/protest, elegy, and epistolary poetry, and chronicles the brutal murders of forty-six trans and gender non-conforming people in the US and Puerto Rico in the year 2020. By no means is it an easy read, and yet, the necessity of this work can’t be understated.
Kelly Gray: So happy to meet here, in this way. Your collection is striking not only for the deft writing but also as an act of witness. Transitory strikes me as being akin to the work of making a documentary film, but it’s different from documentary work in the sense that you are not objective. Rather, you have let the murder of trans people—specifically forty-six murders in the year 2020—plus your rage and sorrow, move through the work to reach, devastate, and impel the reader.
Your collection starts with a Carolyn Forché quote, “Poetry of witness…doesn’t mean to write about political matters, it means to write out of having been…incised or even wounded by something that happened in the world.” This quote hails from her interview within Prismatics: Larry Levis and Contemporary American Poetry. Can you tell me more about your poetry lineage and what it means to you to mark your book with Forché and Levis?
Subhaga Crystal Bacon: Larry was the second poet/teacher to validate my work, after Stephen Dunn, who was my first serious teacher and who steered me to an MFA where I met Larry. It was love at first sight. Larry was such a deeply intelligent, thoughtful, and insightful teacher who encouraged me not to scare myself off from challenging material in my work. Forche’s work was read widely among my Warren Wilson cohort. Her poem “The Colonel” took what we thought of then as poetry of protest to a whole new level. I both read the book Prismatics and watched the film about Larry, A Late Style of Fire, where I discovered that they had known each other. Her words struck a chord with me about the importance of writing about what marks us.
My lineage is eclectic: Bishop, Hopkins, Sexton, Stafford, Levis, Voigt, O’Hara. I have to feel the poems I read, or I’m not really able to engage.
Gray: A few themes course through this collection, made strong by different tools of craft and form. In certain poems you are directly communicating with the dead or family members who became harbingers of harm and, in some cases, with the perpetrator. Disbelief, rage, and desire for justice take up space as you work towards documenting each trans life lost. You communicate not only with the dead but the spaces they no longer take up. “I’m here, not just counting, but incanting.” Your voice, as well as your personal history, peek through what feels like an insurmountable amount of carnage. How did this collection take shape, not only the counting and documenting, but the poems that address your life as a white elder within the trans community?
Bacon: That’s a crucial question for me. My ongoing awakening as a poet brought me face to face with the need to document, to write about the world of humans in a way that I hadn’t previously. I’ve been largely a nature poet for the last decade although in a blurb for my second book, Blue Hunger, Stephen Dunn said that I was also a human nature poet, which I loved. The trifecta of the pandemic, lockdown, and the upheaval that followed the murder of George Floyd unmoored me. As an elder person, George Floyd’s murder resonated with/against a backdrop of years of attention to race in America. There’s a way in which I was more devastated because of the ongoingness of violence against Black lives by the police. Part of my grieving process took me out into the beloved landscape where I live to grieve, and from that I wrote an elegy for Floyd that was the first time I’d addressed protest directly.
The result of that poem, which was nominated for Best of the Net, was an invitation into a workshop on writing poems of social protest in forms led by my friend the poet Cindy Williams-Gutierrez. Her first assignment was to pick a topic of social protest and write either an abecedarian or an acrostic. I have to say that I felt guided to the topic of the murders of trans people. I wrote the poem “Justice: An Acrostic,” which catalogued the twenty-one trans lives lost to murder from January 1 to July 4. As soon as I’d finished it, I knew that I would have to write a poem for each lost life that year.
Gray:These poems hold the elegy close, not only for the lament but the way that solace turns towards speculative celebration. Yes, these poems are about murders, but they are celebrations of trans lives, celebrations that are overdue for many of these people. You speak tenderly of their personal history alongside their hopes and dreams and the mysteries of their own identity. How did learning about their lives impact your own life?
Bacon: The process of writing those individual elegies opened a period of self-investigation. How did I identify? What was my gender? My pronouns? In the years it took for Transitory to come together, find a publisher, and go into print, I underwent a transformation in which I recognized my own transness. I have never identified as female. Growing up and coming out when I did, there was very little language for who I was in myself. Reading young trans poets, K. Iver, Eli Shipley, torrin a greathouse, Miller Oberman, and so many others opened doors for me to understand myself, to know myself as a non-binary, trans masculine person. I came to understand that transness is not a duality: m to f, f to m. There’s a spectrum where we can place ourselves within it.
Gray: It struck me that your disbelief at each murder was based in your faith in humanity, and that your disbelief is a part of your hope. I know that in addition to being a poet, you are also a spiritual teacher. I don’t think all poets are spiritual guides, but it’s not a bad aspiration to have. For you, what came first, poetry or spiritual teachings?
Bacon: Thank you for this. Poetry came first. I have always been a seeker. I have found life very difficult at times, and like many people like me, I eventually sought out some relief from the world’s non-Judeo-Christian spiritual traditions. It started when I was fifty, leaving a relationship, and feeling like I was pretty lost. I went back to yoga, which I had studied as an undergrad, and yoga led me to Hindu bhakti traditions, singing kirtan, and celebrating the love for all forms of God. Each investigation took me in a new direction: the Indian saint Amma, who gave me my name, then Vipassana meditation, Insight meditation, and finally the communities of non-dual awakening. I landed in the work called Waking Down in Mutuality founded by Saniel Bonder, which is a tantric path in which practitioners awaken to the true and total nature, “warts and all.” The awakening process broke down my own dualistic ways of seeing the world with the realization that there’s nothing that’s not God. My capacity increased, my trust in Being, my allowing what was while also feeling it deeply. These are ways of being that helped me to write the book.
Gray: In “John Scott/Scottlyn Kelly DeVore, 51, Augusta, GA, March 12,” you ask of the murderer “How can he atone / for the body of this gender-fluid man he murdered?” In other poems, you grapple with or simply document the motivations of the perpetrator. It seems a great generosity to even have questions left of their humanity, and yet you name it, leaving the reader to hold the systemic problem of vulnerability for trans people. Was this intentional, and if so, why and how did you get there?
Bacon: Systemic is the key word here. We live in a world of woundedness and deep damage. Sexual abuse and other forms of early trauma. Violence bred of ignorance, limitation, and generational patterns. Homophobia is, to me, a complex of fears derived from stringent ideas about gender which dominate ideas about attraction. The fact of trans panic defenses, which until recently were universally accepted, illustrates this. A cis-gender identified man sexually attracted to a feminine presenting person who is trans touches on the complexity of identity and sexual expression. Why does that result in violence—in murder—often horribly violent murders and disfigurations? I don’t know.
Gray:It is hard to imagine how one could be filled with such explosive violence. In your research, did you find commonalities between the murderers?
Bacon: My sense is that those who lash out in violence are all too often wounded themselves. It doesn’t make their actions any less devastating, but it frames them in an understanding that such behaviors are the result of deep cultural ills that all too often harm the feminine in all its varied forms.
To extend this a little further, just look at the trans panic manifesting on the conservative right. We’re talking about a tiny percentage of Americans (or people in general). Why do they fear us to the extent that they do? Certainly, their rhetoric is, to a large degree, responsible for anti-trans violence. It IS anti-trans violence. And it wounds us all.
Gray: There is a non-human character in this collection which is social media. You use language found on victim’s social media pages, which feels like potent clues to their authentic selves, often in stark contrast to how the world held them in life and death. Can you speak more to this?
Bacon: As I gathered information about the people I was elegizing, I searched for them on social media outlets. Most of them have pages with photos and posts that document their trans lives, and that helped me to get to know them better, to see how they presented themselves, who they responded to and how. It brought them more fully to life for me. In some cases, I also found disturbing posts blaming them for their fates, and in one case a mother who completely erased her child’s transition to trans feminine.
Gray: I was so moved to find erasure, as a form, in this work. Can you tell me about your relationship to erasure and blackout poetry and where you see it being used as a tool of resistance within the world of poetics?
Bacon: As someone who’s become more and more a documentary poet, I find erasure and blackout poems as well as found poems to be very useful in responding to texts. Writing Transitory, I came across potent documents that seemed to lend themselves well to erasure. “Selena Angelique Vasquez, 31 & Layla Pelaez Sanchez, 21, Humacao, Puerto Rico, April 21: An Erasure” erased an FBI affidavit. By erasing much of the text, I was able to highlight the brutality and premeditation of the crime as well as the knee-jerk trans panic of the perpetrators. There are erasures from a GoFundMe appeal and two news articles. There’s a way in which the erasures created a bit of space for me and for the reader. To see what remains when we erase the bulk of a piece of writing is in itself a kind of drafting process where we sometimes just write in prose and then extract the poem. Erasures are like that for me.
Nicole Sealey’s book length erasure of the Ferguson Report is a classic example of this. I have found that poets of all ages enjoy repurposing non-literary texts to uncover messages hidden in the originals. torrin a. greathouse’s “burning haibun,” is another rebellious form that erases the poet’s own words, a kind of burning down or distilling to reveal key ideas woven into the original.
Gray: This collection is many remarkable things, but it is not a light read. In fact, it is incredibly difficult. Did this concern you when you went out looking for a publisher or in thinking about your readers? How much does it matter these days, when the world is not palatable, that your work be palatable?
Bacon: Once I realized that I was going to write a poem for each trans person murdered that year, I knew it would become a collection. I said to my partner, “Nobody’s going to want to read this!” Fortunately, I was wrong. There were many rejections along the way, which as usual spawned deeper revision. One publisher wrote that they’d never get it past their legal team. BOA was not put off, for which I will always be grateful. I have a strong urge for the truth. It’s a combination of nature and nurture. I’m a 1 on the Enneagram, the “Reformer,” motivated by the need to live rightly and driven by a longing for a true, just, and moral world. Also, my mother’s favorite saying was that lies have short legs. We were always expected to tell the truth.
I am drawn to the “down:” woundedness, grief, loss, living with the paradox that we’re both finite and infinite, which can be a rough ride. I’m attracted to poetry that dwells there. I’m not interested in what’s palatable but what’s true, what looks at pain with deep feeling and doesn’t flinch. I think the world deserves this. Diane Seuss, who is my greatest contemporary muse, just presented a prompt on the Academy page in which she instructs us to “Aim for an unexpected crossroads of emotion.” That’s the place I’m always trying to get. Love and pain, love and fear, love, and death.
Gray: Lastly, I want to know your thoughts on the relationship between yourself, the page, and the possibility of transmuting rage and grief through poetry. With the continuation of trans and gender-fluid people being murdered globally simply for existing, with the life expectancy of a trans person hovering at thirty-five, were you able to transmute your rage and grief? If you did, at what cost to you, the poet? Maybe the question to ask is, would you recommend this process to someone else? What do you want your readers and literary community to know about bearing witness through poetry?
Bacon: I live in a place of non-separateness. I also believe in “the movement of Being.” When we are attuned, we can allow ourselves to be led by the field of consciousness. The place where everything is unfolding. I wrote above that “there’s nothing that’s not God.” And this is what I mean. If we suspend our need to pass judgement on everything and instead let it be what it is while responding to it with the fullness of our being: heart, mind, and belly, then we can be of service.
Writing the poems in the collection was extremely challenging. Long summer days cooped up in my dark study during fire season, when I would come out at dinner time and metaphorically collapse into my partner’s arms. I haven’t worked so hard on poems since my MFA. And the content was just so horrible and often so foreign to me as an elder white person. But it was essential to me, and I guess to everyone who read the book, to bear witness. To let myself be incised by it, as Forche says, and it’s become my fight to fight. I’ll never be able to close the door on the unfathomable injustice and just plain meanness and hatred that’s being dished out on trans folx. I hope the book shows that it’s important and also worthwhile to one’s art. Look. Feel. Write. That’s our job.
