“What am I to myself / that must be remembered, / insisted upon / so often?” These lines from Robert Creeley’s “The Rain” first resonated with me at an age when (strange to say) I was, in the eyes of the world, a teenage girl. At the time, like the frog anatomy I had to learn for AP Biology or the road rules we were made to recite in Driver’s Ed, the rules of who I might become seemed circumscribed by who I’d been. There were no models around me—whether live or literary—for how a girl could come to be a man.
There’s a certain luxury in being unimaginable: a richness to the texture of the counterfactuals that those who dare to think outside the lines of traditional gender invent. Thus, “I trusted the metaphor,” writes MARS in “The BOI Rushes To”—metaphor being, etymologically speaking, a carrying over from one state or place to another. And: “A good line,” writes Kit Eginton in “Theodolite, “tries not to swerve and fails.” The beauty of works that refuse to insist on received norms of genre or gender stems from that flagrant, joyful, generative failure. In “The Robert Poems,” S. Yarberry eschews a customary focus on William Blake in order to picture the poet’s brother—who, like the poem’s speaker, shimmers between official and unwritten histories. In Trace Peterson’s “Queer Poem,” feelings, acts, and prepositions jostle as if threatening to unseat one another. These works affirm a truth one finds in gender and genre both: if established conventions don’t fit, the resonance of a rule may strike most true when breaking it.
These works energize me with their recklessness, their restlessness, their rage and camp, their need to know, their ecstasies, their dark nights of the soul. They cast back a kaleidoscopic prism of gendered experience, from “difficulties” (Mike Dowley) to post-coital “chill” (Zefyr Lisowski) to “desire fugue” (Susan Nordmark). At a time of increased visibility of—and violence against—gender-variance, and in an age whose social fault-lines are ever more deeply entrenched, the works in this Mixtape refuse to pick a side. They dare to remember, as in Creeley’s lines, yet disdain to insist on a stable identity or a single voice.
My goal in curating this issue has been to assemble a range of gender and genre perspectives that invites any reader but panders to none—a chorus that sings authentically by making a drag show of authenticity. I am grateful to Michigan Quarterly Review’s Editor-in-Chief, Khaled Mattawa, for giving me that chance; to Poetry Editor Katie Willingham for her suggestions; and—most of all—to H. R. Webster for her invaluable support throughout the process. Sincere thanks to my fellow Assistant Editors at MQR: Joumana Altallal, Bryan Byrdlong, Annesha Mitha, and Logan Lane, for their bright ideas an humor. And, to our contributors: thank you for being a part of this “impossible” community. Over this isolating and apocalyptic summer, the chance to share space with your visions has been a pleasure and an honor.
– Michael M. Weinstein, Guest Editor