it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.
That night I looked Stephanie [Burt] up online and started reading more about her work...I kept encountering a striking factoid...: she__ often cited as the most influential poetry critic of her generation. And she__ openly trans. This is not the world I was taught I would grow into when I was a young trans child -- the one where transgender people are heard, are brilliant, are influential, are even the best. At anything. Being trans, I__ learned subliminally, was supposed to keep you from being that -- even if you loved your trans self, and even if some other trans people and a few allies did too, the world at large would keep your potential tamped down." - from "Surface Difficulty: An Adventure in Reading Trans Poetry," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014
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That night I looked Stephanie [Burt] up online and started reading more about her work...I kept encountering a striking factoid...: she__ often cited as the most influential poetry critic of her generation. And she__ openly trans. This is not the world I was taught I would grow into when I was a young trans child -- the one where transgender people are heard, are brilliant, are influential, are even the best. At anything. Being trans, I__ learned subliminally, was supposed to keep you from being that -- even if you loved your trans self, and even if some other trans people and a few allies did too, the world at large would keep your potential tamped down." - from "Surface Difficulty: An Adventure in Reading Trans Poetry," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014
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What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about.
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A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.
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I sometimes think if I did not write I would be a madwoman. Now I am a sane woman with a lot of mad pages.