Changing Contexts, Changing Meanings, and Poems

I am a huge fan of Danika’s reviews of lesbian books over at her blog, Lesbrary. I have been sending her copies of books published by Sinister Wisdom and delighting in her reviews of those books and her thoughts on lesbians book in general. I was pleased when she liked Sisterhood and somewhat crestfallen by her assessment of Handmade Love. Given my appreciation for Danika’s work, though, I take seriously her assessment of cissexism.

I don’t want to argue with her, nor defend myself. I absolutely understand her reading of the book and of the particular poems. I appreciate her critical apparatus that mobilizes her critique of these poems. What I do want to do is ask a few questions.

How do we as writers account for changing values and evolving analyses when our work, once published, becomes static, fixed in time?

I have seen other writers approach this by editing their work in future iterations based on feedback and critical engagement. This seems reasonable and like an important and viable response, but it still means that for some period of time, books are out there in the world circulating with the errors of an earlier age, even the reasonable words of an earlier age that have become errors through time and changing ideas, norms, and mores. Words that once were commonly used, acceptable, even in some cases desirable and preferable, become in our one short lifetime a slur or frowned on or not quite correct. How do we as writers recognize that fact and still keep on writing when we know that the words we commit to paper may change in short order? Not carry our intentions, our affections, our truths, and our passions out into the world?

Those are the questions that have been plaguing me since reading Danika’s review. How do I write today when I cannot know how people will read and think and speak in ten years let alone twenty, thirty, or forty years? I cannot dwell on those questions; to dwell is risk not writing. This seems to me the struggle: to write something that will capture meanings well into the future. Every poem cannot be a success, however. Sometimes we fail, in the moment and in a future that was unimaginable in one past.

I am thrilled about how the political contexts in which we think about and understand transgender have changed in the past decade and a half. I am thrilled about how much these meanings matter in all kinds of literary works. Those convictions combined with the commitment to write, to discover, even knowing that it may not be right and it may not last, bring me each day to the blank page. Criticism stings, but the balm is the pleasure of new, unimagined futures that reconfigure words, meanings, and politics and the delight of being a witness to it all.

Filed under: lesbian, personal writing, progressive activism Tagged: poetry, reviews, writing life