[CHRISblog] Ely Shipley With Flowers

For all sensitive, rebellious-types

Happy Sunday Part II! It’s me again! Did you have a good week since last time we talked? I sure hope so! If you didn’t, this post will hopefully turn things around for you!

This week I interview a dear friend of mine, Ely Shipley. Our friendship goes way back to early in our transitions, when we lived in Los Angeles at the same time for a brief few years.  Since then we’ve kept in touch, visiting each other wherever we’ve been living at various times. Back in 2003, Ely agreed to star in my first Super 8 film, Road Rash, and has since gone on to achieve success, not onstage or onscreen but as a fine young poet. His first book of poetry, Boy With Flowers, met with great acclaim right out the gate and won many a prestigious literary award: Barrow Street Press book prize in 2007, Thom Gunn Award in 2009, and Lambda Literary Award finalist. If you’re a sensitive, rebellious-type, or an FTM, or an FTM-appreciating individual, this book should be on your shelf. This is what he had to say…

Chris Vargas: Hi Ely, do you remember how we met?

Ely Shipley: It has something to do with Livejournal and how we kept showing up to the same queer-ish events in Echo Park, Los Angeles.  It’s all jumbled now, but the very first time I recognized you outside of LJ was under a disco ball.  We were dancing at The Echo, though with our separate groups of friends. I remember you in a beautiful red shirt and weaving into the fabric of the 80s music.  Somehow, later, we officially met.  Maybe we went to a show—Le Tigre at the Glass House in Pomona?  But what persists with clarity is adventure in LA: waking up one morning to you throwing pebbles at my tree house-like apartment window, or the time we paddled around the fountain and the lotus leaves in boats on the Echo Park Lake, and so on. It’s a lovely foggy memory of many meetings.

CV: What do you do for a living, where do you live, what do you do for fun?

ES: I write poems and teach literature, especially poetry, and writing at Baruch College-CUNY.  I live in Brooklyn, though like you, I’m a So Cal native.  I’m also a bit of a homebody and a nerd. I like hanging out at home with my partner, reading, writing, walking my wonderful Italian Greyhound, going out to eat, and going to see good films, especially independent, foreign, or documentary ones.  I love the arts— museums, ballet, that sort of thing. I also love meeting up with friends to make music and conversation, going on hikes, road trips, and traveling to new places.  I’m new to NY, so I’m having fun discovering this strange and overwhelming city.

CV: When did you come out as queer? And, when did you come out as transgender?

ES: That is a long story!  And probably a clichéd one.  “I always knew I was different,” and so on.  I hope that cliché doesn’t lose its power though.  As a kid, I understood myself for a long time as “a different kind of boy.”  I realized this in kindergarten when I was asked to move out from the boys’ line and into the girls’.  This happened repeatedly.  I got into lots of fights all through grade school.  My parents tell me that I was extroverted until I began school.  From kindergarten on I was a loner.

Two Peas in A Pod

In junior high school, everyday—and I am absolutely not exaggerating—everyday, sometimes several times a day, I got asked whether I was a boy or a girl.  This was difficult for me.  Apparently, I was very androgynous, though I had long hair.  I had no idea I was a lesbian or FTM or any of that.  I didn’t have the language or access then.  I just knew I was not normal.  Luckily, my parents were not shy in expressing their love for me, and, for the most part, encouraged my independence.  This translated, for me, into identifying very strongly, not only as a loner, but as a rebel.  I read Beat poetry, rode skateboards (and this was before it was cool; it was the era of the slogan “Skateboarding Is Not A Crime”).  I listened to metal, played the guitar, wrote angry lyrics, and so on.  I really embraced (and still do) that presentation.

Nonetheless, from junior high on my parents and I got into it a lot over my appearance.  They suspected I was queer long before I did, and tried to get me to look, to be, more feminine.  I didn’t dare tell them what I was experiencing at school.  I had this recurring nightmare of being carted off to an insane asylum.  I feared that if my parents knew how intense my male identification was they’d intervene in some way.  Up until around the time I was 17, I’d fantasize each night before going to sleep that I was a boy.  I’d replay my whole lived day in a boy form.  I never told a single person about this (though it’s something I use now as a source of creativity).  All of this pressure from the outside to conform resulted in intense depression and a lot of fighting.  Though I also fantasized about running away, it never got to that point.  As I said, while that experience was difficult for me at the time, I feel very fortunate that my parents and I endured our differences.

Toward the end of high school I developed an excruciating crush on a friend of mine.  I’d had a boyfriend for several years who I thought I really loved, but this feeling for this girl was like nothing I had imagined being possible.  It shattered me.  I went off to a hippy, artsy college (the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands), where I fit in a little better.  I studied creative writing, literature, and women’s studies, got involved with the campus Feminist Coalition and LGBT club, and identified as a dyke until I came to terms with being trans when I was in my early 20s, though I didn’t “come out” as such to others until I was 25.

Lambda Literary reading photo credit: Selena Simmons-Duffin

The acceptance of my initial queerness from my family was a gradual one, but I think that by the time I figured out I was trans this made the most sense to them.  Sometime while I was away at college, my dad heard an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, after she’d come out, and her mom; he also read DeGeneres’ mom’s book too.  This helped him a lot with my initial queerness, I think.  At some point in graduate school, just before I told my parents I was trans, I brought home Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, which I was finally reading (I’d tried in college, but just wasn’t ready—it was too hard for me; I had some sort of psychological block, I’m sure now).  My dad’s a big reader, so he devoured it immediately.  My mom’s not at all, but he asked her to take a look.  I remember coming home that summer one afternoon and not being able to find her anywhere in the house.  When I finally did she was in her room halfway through the book.  She said, “I just started reading it this morning and I can’t put it down!”  By dinner she’d finished it.  This, I think, laid a sort of groundwork for my parents to understand me.  I suspect they liked the book so much because they could see something of my own experiences represented in Jess, the protagonist.

Now, they volunteer anecdotes: “remember when you were little and all you wanted for your birthday was ‘mens’?” (which is what I called action figures); “remember when you wanted to wear a ‘suit’ instead of a dress to your aunt’s wedding when you were only 4 years old?”  So, in short, we’ve come a long way.  I have this theory that it’s actually easier for them now because I pass in a way that I was absolutely not able to before.  Often people read me as a queerish guy, but it’s clear that I’m a guy, whereas before, I was totally androgynous, or, for a while, clearly a dyke.  My partner is a cisgender female, so for the most part, and for better or worse, we pass.

CV: What was the first poem you ever wrote, or the oldest poem you wrote that you can remember? Are you proud of it? When did you know you wanted to be a poet?

ES: This is a great question because it’s something I never think about; it has forced me to search.  Before I wrote “poems,” I wrote lyrics.  In fact, I have this horrible story about the junior high school counselor calling my mom to tell her he was worried about me because of the violence in my songs.  She thought he was crazy, but I felt really betrayed; I had shared the lyrics with a teacher I liked (and had a crush on, though I didn’t understand it as that at the time).  In retrospect, I see that she had a legal obligation to tell someone, but I was and am a fairly gentle person.  The violence in the lyrics reflected what was happening to me from the outside in on an emotional level, and, as I said earlier, with regularity.  To me this whole occurrence illuminated a larger trend of being and feeling misunderstood, misread, and ultimately invisible.

Nonetheless, I had, and am still possessed by, a desire to express, articulate to the best of my ability, and transcend the limits of language.  I don’t know that I could trace a starting point.  I was definitely interested in songs and poems, as well as the identity of a poet as a kind of rebel.  Poetry is weirdly thought of as being high brow, and most people are afraid to read it because it’s too “difficult.”  It’s an art that all cultures in all times have had.  But it’s also the art of the outcast.  There’s no fame or fortune.  And so, it is an art, I believe, of devotion.  I do it to figure things out, to discover, and honestly, I can’t resist.  It’s my way of paying attention.

I wrote my first “poem” in my first poetry class, which I took with my first poetry teacher, Ralph Angel. I don’t remember anything of the poem except the final image of a sky and a bird in flight reflected in a dying person’s eyes.  The bird flew across one sky in one eye, then another sky in the other eye.  There was some juxtaposition, or rhyming imagery between the eye lashes and the bird’s wings or feathers.  The exact words and form are lost now.  I’ll leave that up to you to interpret!

CV: You have become such an acclaimed young poet, my dear friend. But it’s true poets have a romantic outsider status. When strangers, who don’t know your work, ask what you do— do you tell them that you’re a poet?

ES: I think being a poet is pretty freakish, honestly.  I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but it does become an issue out in the “normal” social world.  In fact, when I was on the horrible academic job market a couple of years ago, I asked one of my advisors if he thought I wouldn’t get a job because I’m trans.  He said, “it’s not that you’re trans, Ely; it’s that you’re a poet!”

I get uncomfortable if I tell someone I’m a poet.  I find that it makes others uncomfortable too.  There are a lot of stereotypes surrounding the capital-P poet.  But I’m working on being more out about it.  It seems easier to say in NYC.  I was only very recently a PhD student.  This seemed like an easier answer, though I’m certainly deluding myself.  Did you see that great Simpson’s episode that makes fun of grad students?  Anyhow, if I don’t have the energy or security of being out as a poet I just say I teach.  But like I said, I’ve a new determination to be out, loud, and proud about being a poet.

CV: Who are some of your favorite writers?

ES: That’s too hard to answer, but some of the more established, living folks I’m reading right now are Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Carole Maso, Henri Cole, Jane Miller, D.A. Powell, Brenda Hillman, and Harryette Mullen.  These are the ones that first spring to mind.  I tend to sample lots of different writers, mostly poets.

CV: Walk me through a brief description of your writing process. How do you decide the content of your poems, how long does it take to make them?

ES: My process has changed a lot over the years.  Right now, it’s very much in flux.  I’m writing poems as well as nonfiction, and mostly combining these efforts into what’s being called the lyric essay, or hybrid forms.  Since I’m a hybrid form myself this seems apt: gender crosser to genre crosser!  This is innovative territory for me; it’s exciting and liberating.  I’m thinking of the Zen Buddhist concept of beginner’s mind (shoshin).

photo credit: Cole Krawitz

As for content, I never consciously decide or will it.  I typically record thoughts, imaginings, dreams, or free-write and try to pay attention to what’s emerging—images, sounds, patterns in syntax, and then make connections, or productive disconnections.  Almost always it begins with sound—a tone, a certain sequence of words that make a distinct sound, a music.  I might even begin with a resonant image, like the one I described earlier from my first poem.  The line is an essential consideration—I try to let the lines unfold in a way that honors the intention of the breath.  I’m sure this all sounds vague, but if you know the poet Robert Creeley, then you’ll know what I’m talking about: “form is never more than an extension of content,” or Charles Olsen’s “Projective Verse”: the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.”

I find this to be a hard question no matter how often it’s asked; I’m never satisfied with my answer.  Something magical happens that’s beyond description.  If you’ve ever danced and let the music completely take you over, that’s, I think, something like what I try to work from.  Lately, I find that giving myself a restraint, or putting my self outside of my comfort zone, is a way to access that energy, to see things in a new or different way.  Typically, I feel fairly uncomfortable already, so it’s a matter of writing my self into another space—literally transforming my state-of-mind, my presence, my attention, my way of being.  I see writing as a practice, and, yes, something like prayer.  Sometimes I am able to see something miraculous happening.