Boxing Day: Time and Contradiction in Transgender Poetry

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This research project will examine recent work from transgender poets, including Oliver Baez Bendorf and Samuel Ace, and critically evaluate, through close reading, how they present the contradictions inherent in transgender lives and bodies, how they make sense of their embodiment and complicate it, and how they situate the trans body in and through time. The creative component, 'Boxing Day' is a full length collection of prose poetry addressing the experience of gender transition in an Irish context. 'Boxing Day' explores themes of dissociation and anxiety and details the impact that indefinitely waiting for healthcare has on mental health. Critical ComponentTrans poetry is a medium through which a new language of gender identity can emerge (Ladin 637), and a locus for trans writers to reclaim agency over how their gender is 'read' textually (Merrydew 29). Poets Jos Charles, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, and Oliver Baez Bendorf have each released two collections since 2015, the so-called year of trans visibility. Samuel Ace has been publishing since the early 90s and has been anthologized in Troubling the Line (2013) and We Want It All (2020). His early prose poetry was recently compiled and republished as Meet Me There (2019). Through close reading and analysis of these poets' recent collections, this research will explore how they negotiate bodily and linguistic contradictions in their work and navigate contradictory narratives of self, in which gender, embodiment, name, pronoun, and tense may be misaligned. Trans experiences are required to be legible and regularized if trans people are to be granted access to the medical establishment. Yet to live as a trans subject is to inhabit contradiction; to exhibit a marked incongruence between internal gender and external embodiment. Trans people may also exemplify visible temporal contradictions by rapidly aging following hormonal replacement therapy. The tempo of a marginal, queer life inherently confuses or disrupts the conventional flow of time; queer lives do not progress the same way as other lives, and may experience time distortions or delay (Halberstam 89). Queer or trans time is often "halted", past and future tenses are blurred, simultaneously distant and present (Israeli-Nevo 38). Tempo, patterning, and repetition relate to both temporality and poetry; through text, poets can construct a body and bodily timeline that is complex, multiple, that is not legible, the way the state requires the trans body to appear. Poetry allows trans people to make sense of their embodiment, and to complicate it. Drawing on combined critical methodologies from literary studies and queer theory, through close reading I will examine how variations of poetic form, and language, from the intelligible to the obscure, might represent the contractions of trans embodiment, and evaluate how trans poets situate the body in and through time. Beginning with an overview, chapter 1 will survey the themes apparent in recent trans poetry; subsequent chapters will focus on specific authors, examining their work and use of form, including Baez Bendorf's inclination towards rule-bound forms, and Samuel Ace's use of prose poetry. In openly hostile environments, contradictory gendered presentation may incite violence; in the poetic imaginary, the poet has agency over where to place contradictions. This research will explore how seemingly incongruous ideas may inhabit a text; how 'pluralistic, even contradictory identities' (Dickon 31) can be expressed and coexist within the same poem. Creative Component'Boxing Day' will explore the experience of waiting for an assessment, alongside themes of isolation and embodiment. The poems will be arranged sequentially, covering the span of 3 years.