Episode 80 Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll

 

Stephanie Burt reads ‘Poly Beach House’ by Tonee Mae Moll and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.

https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/80_Poly_Beach_House_by_Tonee_Mae_Moll_read_by_Stephanie_Burt.mp3 This poem is from:

Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall

Available from:

 

Super Gay Poems is available from:

The publisher: Harvard University Press

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK | US

 

Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll

a thin film floats over the weekend

an unerotic tension of sucked stomachs
and bathroom breaks snuck in while
the rest stroll on the boardwalks

and one of us allows her ache for tasting
every­ thing to overwhelm the ever-­ present
whisper of the end of the season

and one of us says nothing as she slips
out to watch the sun rise
over an ocean that loathes us

and one of us says ­ they’re scared
the undine inside ­ won’t be seen
before the moon collides with the sea

and all of us feel it. ­ After a swim
I carve εσχατος in the sand and my body
wishes I had the time to cover up my bad

tattoos—O apocalypse, we just want
a summer. When ­ wasn’t The End
hiding ­ behind the sun?

 

Interview transcript

Mark: Stephanie, welcome to the show.

Stephanie: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

Mark: Well, I’m very happy you’re here. And just as a note to the listener, if you’re a regular…

Stephanie: [Sings]

Mark: If you are a regular…

Stephanie: That was a note to the listener!

Mark: [Laughter] – Oh, very good! – regular listener to the show, you will notice we’re starting slightly differently to usual, because normally my first question is to the poet who wrote the poem, where did the poem come from? But today I’m very pleased to welcome Stephanie Burt, who is an esteemed poet, but she’s also here today in her capacity as an editor.

So this poem is from an anthology called Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall. Now, if you follow contemporary poetry, particularly in the US, then Stephanie will need no introduction to you, but if you are relatively new to poetry, then she is a poet and critic and the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. She has published several poetry collections, the latest of which is We Are Mermaids. She has a book about Taylor Swift coming in the fall, aka the autumn. And for me personally, she’s also been an inspiring guide to the contemporary US poetry scene. So for all of those reasons, I am delighted to welcome you to the show today, Stephanie.

Stephanie: Thank you. I like being here. Thank you for having me.

Mark: So before we home in on this particular poem that you’ve read, could you give us a little bit of an introduction to the new anthology, Super Gay Poems, and just tell us what you’re trying to achieve with this book.

Stephanie: So a lot has happened in the lives and the cultures and the possibilities for what we now call LGBTQ+ people since the late 60s, since the Stonewall uprising in 1969, which is a convenient marking point, it’s a well-publicised inflexion point for the visibility and literally the pride of queer people, especially in the rich Anglophone countries from which the majority of poetry in English is still coming. And like any major change in what’s available in a large group of people’s lives, that change gets reflected and considered and refined and reshaped by poets and in putting together a sort of big box of, it was originally going to be 30, but it turned out to be 50, and then 51, we can pretend it’s 50, but maybe like round numbers.

Mark: Fifty-ish.

Stephanie: Fifty-one poems from all over the English speaking world, or, at least many parts of it that reflect many ways of being queer, many kinds of queer joy and queer grief and queer friendship and queer eroticism and queer child care and queer elder care. I hoped to put together at once a book of poems I really like that have a lot of internal variety, that are fun to read and rewarding to read and rewarding to reread and reread, and a collection of ways to see queer lives, queer means of flourishing and recovering and continuing and being ourselves, which also means learning our history, and in some cases, commemorating our dead. And these are poems that do all of those things.

And this book, if I did it right, connects several generations of queer poets. It connects, thematically and emotionally, several different ways of writing. It offers ways to put into memorable language many different ways of living in the world, some of which seems specifically queer, and some of which are just interesting ways of living, engaging ways of living that happen to include queer people, right?

And together, it’s all super gay. It’s also international, which is a different fish from the last time I wrote a book with a structure, and that book was entirely American. This book is extremely not entirely American.

Mark: So it’s a very ambitious book in its scope and in its variety. And zooming in on the poem that you’ve read for us today, ‘Poly Beach House’ by…

Stephanie: Zoom! We zoomed in, sorry, zoom, we zoomed in.

Mark: We zoomed in… by Tonee Mae Moll, what attracted you to this poem? What do you think it brings to the book?

Stephanie: I mean, I love it. I love the affect. I love the ambivalence. I love the way that it combines the erotic potential of, ‘Let’s get our whole polycule together in a beach house and see who wants to go to bed with whom’, and the less often described and quite interesting, at least to me, aspects of: what do you do the next morning? What do you do with day three or day five of your holiday? What is it like to make a life with multiple adults, all of whom have their own daily wishes and needs and sort of velleities?

I also love the way that it handles the multiplicitous feeling of impending apocalypse that many of us have had over the past 10 or 15 years, which is not limited to queer people, but which at least some queer people and some trans people feel in a notable way, which is, what do we do with the sense that we might be at the end? What do we do with the way we want to go on with our lives together, maybe need to go on with our lives together, maybe should go on with our lives together?

Taking a stroll on the beach with someone we’re into, making toast, watching the sunrise, going on holiday, coming home, doing our jobs. But then it can feel like our world is ending, or the whole world is ending. The sea will swallow the sand, the sea will swallow your city, the sea will swallow your state. The political end of things like the rule of law may swallow you personally. How do you represent in a way that is not balanced, but comprehensible and available and even sociable and conversational? How do you balance the feeling that everything is going to end, maybe soon, with our wish to maintain our friendships and our romances in our daily life?

Which, let’s be honest, there is a temptation to throw away everything and walk into the sea if you are terrified of the apocalypse. And there’s a temptation to try to be Superman or Jean Grey or some other superhero with absolutely unlimited power and try to hold back the apocalypse yourself.

And the truth is, even if you have powers, even if you have social and intellectual and financial power, you probably don’t have Superman-level power, or Jean Grey-level power. If you don’t know who Jean Grey is, she’s from the X-Men, and there are other podcasts for that. And if you do what you can to, try and help your friends and try to make your microclimate and your workplace and your conurbation a better place to be, good for you, but you still need a holiday. You still want to maintain your friendships and your romances. And you’re not going to be able to hold back the apocalypse by yourself.

And I love the way that this poem hauntingly, dejectedly even, presents those mixed feelings about the idea that everything is maybe going to be over soon, but you still have your romances and your friendships and your loves and your life. There are a couple of other things I love about it, if I can go on. Shall I?

Mark: Yeah, please do.

Stephanie: Okay. So it’s also a poem that has some really lovely free verse tercets. It is a poem that has one line at the beginning, ‘A thin film floats over the weekend,’ which is a complete independent clause. It could be a sentence if you want it to be, and then a bunch of unrhymed tercets. The rest of the poem comes in three-line units, three or four pieces of free verse. So it’s maybe a little bit… When you have tercets, it’s always a little bit of an allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedy, which comes in three-line units and is about a guided tour from hell all the way to heaven. It is the reverse. It’s the upside-down version of a number of famous poems, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ about trying to face a coming apocalypse. Shelley’s poem ends, ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’

Mark: I know. Wonderful. Actually, I did Shelley’s Triumph of Life on the podcast as a way of talking about terza rima before, because he was just amazing at that. And again, that’s another apocalyptic poem.

Stephanie: Yes. Yeah. And I think, yeah, this is an apocalyptic poem, but it’s also an ironic apocalyptic poem that treats the apocalypse as just another day. When wasn’t it an apocalypse, right?

Mark: Yeah. It’s got a wonderful, like you say, mixed tone, mixed feelings, mixed perspectives from the setup of ‘Poly Beach House.’ And you think, ‘Okay, great, weekend away. Romantic, erotic implications of that.’ And then, we’re in the prosaic reality of sucked stomachs and bathroom breaks. And then this extraordinary ending.

Stephanie: Yeah. There’s a lot of things I wanted to sort of highlight about the poem before we even get back to the ending, one of which is that it’s also a regional poem. Tonee Mae Moll grew up in Reno, Nevada, and then served in a number of different places in the US military in the early 2000s, and has written a memoir about that, which is described in Super Gay Poems, but has made her adult life after her military service in greater Washington, D.C., in D.C., and Maryland and Delaware.

And this is almost certainly set in the beaches and resorts of the Atlantic coast in Maryland and Delaware. And my guess is it’s at Rehoboth Beach, which if you think about Brighton, if you’re in Britain, it’s not quite Brighton, but it is a nightclub, nightlife-friendly, queer-positive space where you can take in the Atlantic and go for a swim. And it’s also that entire shoreline is quite threatened by global climate change and sea level rise.

So the humming, I mean, it’s already here, the present catastrophe of sea level rise is not abstract the way it would be in, I don’t know, Denver, perhaps. It’s visible. So it is a poem that is both a regional poem and a poem about sea level rise and climate change. And it’s also, of course, a poem about the practicalities of a polyamorous life. And polyamory, which, if you haven’t encountered the word, it just means having or being open to having multiple committed or long-term or regular romantic and sexual partners.

It is a bit different in most of its meanings from being a swinger or having an open marriage, which means that you’ve got one partner, and maybe you take somebody else to bed, and it is different from just sleeping with lots of people and staying connected to no more than one of them, which is also fine if that’s something you want to do. That doesn’t appeal to me.

What has turned out, for me, and this is a bit personal, the poem spoke to me personally in a way that some of the other poems I love that didn’t go into Super Gay Poems did not speak to me personally. The poem is a bit personal to me because I’m from the Washington, D.C., area, and I am personally familiar with the delights and the emotional rewards and the practical, often comedic difficulties of having and, keeping and being really loyal to multiple romantic partners.

And one of the running jokes, if you move in poly communities, is that your most important romantic partner is Google Calendar. You’ve probably heard that before. If not, you will. And the practicalities and the emotional reward and the friendships and solidarity that comes out of being part of a polycule, which is a term you can probably guess what it means, and especially out of being in the kind of polycule where you do things with and you hang out with your metamors – a metamor is your partner’s partner, your girlfriend’s boyfriend or your girlfriend’s girlfriend or whatever. That’s a metamor. Not all of us want to be or get to be friends with our metamors, but I think it’s better if you can, and that’s the kind of situation that’s here.

And there’s so much companionship and so much feeling in the mostly unerotic, as Moll says, sense of community in this beach house, where you go out of the beach house, and the sun is rising. And as we move through the poem, we go from the practicalities of living with and waking up next to your loved ones, and from the sociability of this kind of party scene, like something in Frank O’Hara, to the temporary solitudes that have always been associated with lyric poetry.

And as we get those solitudes, one per stanza in the second and third and fourth stanzas, we watch the sunrise, which is supposed to be romantic and welcoming, and then the sense that the world hates us. And I love ‘All the things over an ocean that loathes us’ can mean. It can mean sea level rise is going to be destroyed. Rehoboth Beach eventually. It can mean the sea has reason to resent humanity for polluting it and killing marine life, or endangering marine life. It can also mean that being queer, and especially at this moment, being trans, means regarding your own social group and your own community as a defence against a larger world that’s trying to kill us. A lot of us feel that way.

And then that last stanza about how one of us feels, ‘one of us says they’re scared / the undine inside won’t be seen’. If you don’t know, an undine is a water spirit, a spirit associated with a body of water in a way that a dryad, for example, might be associated with a tree. And so an undine can be regarded as akin to, or can be regarded as a kind of mermaid. Part human and girl or woman and part water creature. It is a very familiar and common – and I’ve written about it elsewhere and elsewhere in Super Gay Poems – trope where trans girls and trans women identify or over-identify with mermaids.

In fact, that’s the basis of the leading, ‘Let’s help trans people charity’ in the UK, right, Mermaids. They do a lot of good work, Mermaids gender. That’s not a coincidence. That’s not just because somebody saw The Little Mermaid Disney movie and liked it. For a number of reasons, there’s a very strong cross-generational identification that appears to arise spontaneously in separate populations between trans femmes and mermaids. And someone who says they’re ‘scared / the undine inside won’t be seen / before the moon collides with the sea’, that may seem bizarre or hard to interpret or idiosyncratic in the way that, for example, a lot of Dylan Thomas is idiosyncratic.

And honestly, Tonee Moll at her best has some things in common with Dylan Thomas, not least the interest in water. But if you’re used to seeing mermaids and thinking trans girls, and you know what it looks like to see the moon over the ocean, that is a fairly transparent line. One of us is afraid that she won’t get to live visibly in public as herself before the end of the world or the end of her world. And the end of the world or the end of her world could mean sea level rise destroys our city or destroys civilisation, or it could mean the end of her life because we all have finite lifetimes. Or it could mean a kind of social and political apocalypse, which seems closer now for Americans, especially those in and near Washington, D.C., than it would have, let’s say, 10 years ago. So that’s a thing.

So there’s this fear of being erased or destroyed or crushed along with all of us at the beach, along with the sociability and the mixed feelings that come from going on a vacation with your polycule and waking up feeling like you might have cling film over your mouth because you have morning breath. ‘Poly’, of course, can refer to polymers and plastics. It’s such a good pun. And then we get to the end. Shall I go on?

Mark: Yes, because it’s quite an ending, isn’t it?

Stephanie: I know. It’s okay to go in the ocean. We are mermaids. Tonee Moll or her sort of avatar goes for a swim and just delightfully carves in the sand, writes in the sand, where it will not last, where it will be erased, a Greek word that means the end or the end of everything. Eschatology is the study of the end times or the end of the world. And the word εσχατος / eschatos, which sometimes appears in English as eschaton, which is just another form of the same Greek word, has particular associations with the Christian apocalypse, as in the Book of Revelation.

So carving eschatos in the sand is an extraordinarily, I almost want to say, satirical gesture. You are inviting the end to itself be erased, but you’re also showing that you can’t stop thinking about the apocalypse in the way that the most famous writer of things on sand in English, Edmund Spenser, in his sonnet sequence ‘Amoretti,’ says that he can’t stop writing his beloved’s name in the sand.

And then by the end, we get a turn from the reader and the self, the people we might assume that this poem addresses, to the apocalypse itself. ‘Oh, apocalypse, we just want a summer.’ And again, it’s Shelley. And, ‘The trumpet of a prophecy! Oh Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ But Shelley actually rather thinks that he has the authority to speak to the forces of nature because he’s Shelley and he’s full of himself, as wonderful as he is.

Tonee Moll has some modern doubts. ‘I just wanted a summer.’ It’s like that punk song from the 80s, ‘I only wanted a Pepsi.’ And the wonderful polyvalent end where Moll actually capitalises ‘The End’, ‘When wasn’t The End / hiding behind the sun?’ It reminds us that it always feels like the end of the world. It has felt like the end of the world many, many times. We have survived and lived through so many emergencies. Maybe we’ll get through this one too. And there’s always going to be another eclipse, and there’s always going to be a night that follows day.

Oh, so we’ve just heard from her via email. And it turns out, and this appears to be new, that Tonee Mae, although there is a space in it, is the complete first name, and she should be referred to where possible as Tonee Mae, rather than Mae being the middle name.

Mark: Right. I’m wondering if eschatos, it’s a wonderful idea, writing a word in the sand. And to me, I was thinking, is this a bit of uplift, the fact that it’s a word from a dead language that has survived?

Stephanie: Yes, it absolutely is.

Mark: And Tonee Mae is writing. She’s a writer. I mean, isn’t our ambition that our words will live? And is there a flicker of hope there that eschatos has survived?

Stephanie: There absolutely is a flicker of hope there. And I want to say that the hope comes not so much from the fact that classical Greek is a dead language. People don’t speak the kind of Greek that you learn to, read Sappho or Plato anymore. Because, of course, modern Greek is very alive, and it’s not that different. We know that classical Greek is intended because of the diacritics. But it’s not that, it’s just that the concept of the eschaton has survived a change almost from one civilisation to the next.

And something of poetry and poetics and culture and experience and erotic attachment and friendship, the poem suggests, will survive this apocalyptic moment, just as it has survived prior apocalyptic moments.

Mark: Thank you, Stephanie, for a really eye-opening take on an eye-opening poem. I mean, it’s one that you can read at first and think, ‘Okay, I think I’ve got what I’ve got from that.’ But like all good poems, when you go back, there’s layer upon layer in it, and you’ve really done a wonderful job, as you always do, of showing us the extra layers within this poem. So thank you so much, Stephanie.

Stephanie: Thank you. And I’m so glad I was able to include this poem, and I’m so glad that you let me talk both about the representation of kinds of persons in Super Gay Poems, right? I really wanted something about queer poly relationships and about the variety of kinds of attitudes and feelings because poems are not … if they’re worth rereading, they’re not just representations of their demographics, they’re representations of ways of living in the world and feeling and using language. Thank you so much for having me.

Mark: It’s a pleasure. And with such a terrific and I think well-timed anthology, Stephanie, that’s Super Gay Poems from Harvard University Press. So let’s have a listen once more to Tonee Mae Moll’s poem, ‘Poly Beach House’, and I, for one, will be hearing new things in it this time around.

 

Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll

a thin film floats over the weekend

an unerotic tension of sucked stomachs
and bathroom breaks snuck in while
the rest stroll on the boardwalks

and one of us allows her ache for tasting
every­ thing to overwhelm the ever-­ present
whisper of the end of the season

and one of us says nothing as she slips
out to watch the sun rise
over an ocean that loathes us

and one of us says ­ they’re scared
the undine inside ­ won’t be seen
before the moon collides with the sea

and all of us feel it. ­ After a swim
I carve εσχατος in the sand and my body
wishes I had the time to cover up my bad

tattoos—O apocalypse, we just want
a summer. When ­ wasn’t The End
hiding ­ behind the sun?

 

Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall

‘Poly Beach House’ is from Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall edited by Stephanie Burt, published by Harvard University Press.

Available from:

Super Gay Poems is available from:

The publisher: Harvard University Press

Amazon: UK | US
Bookshop.org: UK | US

 

Tonee Mae Moll

Dr Tonee Mae Moll is a queer and trans writer and educator in Baltimore. Her debut memoir, Out of Step, won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award, and was featured that year on the American Library Association’s annual list of notable LGBTQ+ books. Her latest poetry collection, You Cannot Save Here, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Tonee Mae holds a PhD in English from Morgan State University and an MFA in creative writing and publishing art from University of Baltimore. Her scholarly work explores feminist pedagogies and epistemologies, poetry, and punk. She is a Gemini.

 

Stephanie Burt

Stephanie Burt is Donald and Catherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. She writes, co-writes, and assembles books of poems and literary criticism, as well as writing about pop music, comic books, nonrealist fiction, mermaids, and queer joy: she’s here to talk about Super Gay Poems, out now from Harvard University Press. Her book about Taylor Swift will appear in October. The most recent book of her own poems is We Are Mermaids.

 

A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

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