10TH ANNUAL (AND FINAL) NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 4 :: AMY GAETA on JILLIAN WEISE

Week one of this year’s Poetry Month series is curated by Ellen Samuels, whose theme is “On Crip Poets and Poetics.” Read her curatorial statement here.

The first time I met Jillian Weise I was gleefully letting my 6-inch snakeskin boots cut my feet as I ate a bag of Skittles for lunch. It’s the 2020 Modern Language Association’s annual conference. We are in Seattle. My feet are bleeding. Bleeding. Hills. Nobody told me there be so many hills. And that the escalators would only work half the time. All I felt was blood and awe. Okay, and minor, okay massive, shock that I was sharing a panel, “Disability & Surveillance” with one of my favorite living poets: The Cyborg Jillian Weise (Cy/Cys). I did not even care if I liked my paper at this point, I just wanted Jillian to think I was smart and cool.

We did our panel. We rocked it. Afterward, I asked Jillian to sign my copy of Cy’s latest book, Cyborg Detective. Cy did, and then said my work was “fucking weird and cool.” I fangirl. Quick goodbyes. End scene.

Eight months later, we began following one another on Twitter. Now, it’s March 2021, and just this month we’ve co-authored a book review, co-headlined a poetry reading, and schemed about 2395479823 new art projects to carry out in the future. Through my friendship and work with Jillian in the past 7 months, I’ve learned more about what poetry can be and what poets can do than I have in my near decade of studying and writing poetry myself. What did Jillian teach me? We can do whatever the fuck we want.

And, that’s why I first gravitated towards Jillian’s work back in 2015. Jillian’s poems are as bold as her personality and politics. Zero sugarcoating, yet endless complexity and ambivalence.

Every poetry mentor gave me the same rules:

Show, don’t tell

Revise, three times

Prose, not poetry

If you spend everyday fighting your body and mind to process who you are, this is not very good advice. Far from a diary, I knew I poems to/for the self could speak to an audience just as well any other poem. And that’s how I found Jillian’s poetry. Not, not because I was looking for fellow disabled poets, but because I needed to know poetry could be a space of confident self-negotiation. I could tell. Publish first drafts. Call an essay a poem. Rules are inaccessible to me.

My neurodivergent and mentally ill self needs poetry to be therapy where, in the psychoanalytic sense, I am working through things. More than the confessionals poets I always admired, Jillian’s poems echoed something emerging on the very page, a sense of mystery amid utter assurance of one’s beliefs and values.

In “What You Need to Know”

You need
to know that I have been reading
your mind and I don’t know who

Colleen is, but maybe tell her
that she really hurt your feelings.
Whatever you do, whatever

she does, whatever comes of us,
just remember to keep eating.

You do need to know this. No matter how many “I don’t knows” or “whatevers” await us, we need to keep feeding ourselves, we need to keep going. For the anxious mind, this is the most difficult of all things: to go on not knowing.

This is poetry that tells you and then shows you that the poet doesn’t know it all either. Being disabled is living in constant uncertainty of every twist and turn of our bodies, or a simple change of mood or national policy.

Safe poetry gets us nowhere we haven’t been within our own bodies, lives, or worlds. Poetry that makes us feel safe is yet another dead end. Comfort is knowing someone else is as vulnerable as you.

Following Jillian’s growth as a poet and artist these past 5 years, and gaining Cy’s friendship, I have come to a critical challenged I faced in my manifold of identities, disabled, queer, and female: How to openly explore my own vulnerabilities and unknown parts without expressing myself as an easy target for abuse.

The ending of Jillian’s “Semi-Semi Dash” communicates this tantamount task:

After he built
the 900-megahertz superconductor, I couldn’t go

to his house anymore because I have all kinds
of metal in my body. I think if you love someone,
you shouldn’t do that, build something like that

This is not a metaphor. Cy does have all kinds of metal in Cy’s body. Normative expressions of love and home do not have space for us. Our disabled bodies did not fit.

Even worse, we might get trapped there. Our literal or metaphorically-metal laced bodies might get trapped within the oppositional magnetic forces of normative love and home.

Jillian’s poems say “my politics are my body, and so aren’t yours.”

Mainstream representations of disability pride or inspiration porn show us as strong and happy. And we are those things, but some days we are also weak and sad and miserable and everything hurts. Not just because we are disabled, but because we are alive. Pain is part of the deal. Cy’s poetry and friendship have helped teach me how to be fierce and bold without losing tenderness or constructing a facade of invulnerability.

Amy Gaeta is not utopian; she is a student of understanding how we survive a world that is killing us on a dying planet, a feminist disability activist and scholar, poet, punk, and Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her academic work specializes in the psychological aspects of human-technology relations under the surveillance state and militarism. In poetry, she explores mental illness, desire, and the impossibility of being human.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/GaetaAmy

Website: https://aegaeta.wixsite.com/website