NER staff reader Maria Pavlenko talks with poet Perry Levitch about anticlimax, approximating transness, and their poem “nobody’s cis at the airport” from issue 45.4.
Maria Pavlenko: Let’s start with unpacking the title. “nobody’s cis at the airport” holds a clever double-meaning—it symbolizes a paradox in the poem. To me, I see this poem as illuminating the trans experience and locating it in a specific situation where cis people can just sort of start to understand what it means to be trans in a cisnormative world. Simultaneously, it functions in a universal way: if nobody’s cis at the airport—a place constantly in flux—then the opposite, everyone is trans, must be true at least for some period of time. Could you speak more on how this poem is offering a focused glimpse into trans experience while also universalizing it? The opening line, “i.e. everyone’s unhappy about how literal / their body is” comes to mind. How permeable can the barrier between transness and cisness become?
Perry Levitch: Thank you for that attentive read of the poem. For me the paradox at the center of writing this poem was also about figuring out how to balance tongue-in-cheek universalizing with the specificity of transness. The airport itself is a space of paradox, too; I’ve always found it very strange. It’s both a place of super-mobility, in that planes are the easiest way to travel the farthest, and a place of super-stagnation, in that the experience of air travel itself (beforehand and during) is characterized by the discomfort of prolonged stillness and waiting. There’s a universal strangeness there on a very physical level that I wanted to take as the starting ground for the poem and then leverage it—to articulate how that internal sensation of strangeness follows bodies around unevenly and ceaselessly. I’m generally more interested in writing poems that look outwards from transness, rather than at transness, or at a trans body, which often leads me to metaphor. I do hope that orientation might momentarily make the barrier between cisness and transness more permeable on an emotional level for a cis reader. At the same time, the non-metaphorical airport is a place of such unique violation for trans people (after the new policies that have made gender markers unamendable, yes, but also always). Keeping the word “trans” itself out of the poem was one of the ways I tried to reckon with that: nobody is cis at the airport, but we aren’t all equally trans there either, or uniformly vulnerable to other types of state violence. I really struggled to balance the metaphor with the material here, and I go back and forth about whether I’m satisfied with this final version.
MP: One of my favorite lines in the poem is “i.e. your body / is one degree above this duffel bag.” This objectification of the body and the dehumanization that comes with it feels implicit to a place as liminal and intense as the airport. I couldn’t help but make the connection between airports (and other places of mass transit) shuttling bodies around versus the more positive notion of the body transporting our consciences and souls around. While transness involves a reckoning with the physical body, doesn’t it invite a reckoning with the soul in a way cisness doesn’t?
PL: I’m such a pessimist about bodies! I have friends, cis and trans, who don’t distinguish between their bodies and their souls/minds/selves, but mine have always felt very separate. How much that is (or isn’t) about transness feels difficult, and maybe misleading, to untangle, but that feeling of alienation draws me to metaphors for embodiment where the self is nested inside some kind of container or lugging something around. That said, I don’t think the affective experience of that body-mind dyad is necessarily predetermined by the fact of its division—there’s a possibility in that configuration for tenderness or spite or boredom or anything else, and room to play around with which component is acting upon the other. This particular poem leans into the less pleasant aspects of that relationship for me, but I’m glad it doesn’t foreclose more affirming directions of thought.
MP: The poem repeats “i.e.” to create a chain, like a perpetual reaching to approximate the trans experience to those who haven’t lived it. I’m fascinated by the perpetual battle writers face with the inadequacy of words, even though it’s all we have. On the flip side, a successful poem is able to pin down the human experience for a brief moment in time and space, as this one does. To you, how does this gap between writing and the struggle to capture experience with words uniquely relate to transpoetics?
PL: That “i.e.” is a formal element that I’ve been exploring a lot recently for exactly that reason—it feels like an enactment of the asymptotic relationship between language and transness. In my opinion, at least, transness isn’t a stable enough experience to be entirely captured by language, nor could it be, without simplifying itself into meaninglessness or neglecting some breadth of materialities (which is why I feel like I’ve been disclaiming so many of my responses in this conversation!). My skepticism about transness’ communicability is matched only by my faith in what poetry can do to language itself. I’m a pessimist about bodies, but I’m very much an optimist about poetry. Transpoetics, for me, involves bringing two ever-moving objects into momentary contact; if they sometimes pass through one another when they touch, or if a gap reopens afterwards, that might be the truest thing that could happen. Fixing the gap wholesale feels impossible, but that doesn’t make life unlivable or language unusable.
MP: All creative writing draws from the well of lived experience, but poetry in particular thrums closest to the surface of one’s skin. Without spoiling too much of the magic, could you talk about the process behind writing this poem? Was there a specific event in an airport that inspired this poem? What did you shed from previous drafts?
PL: I wrote the first draft of this poem at the gate before a flight for work. I hadn’t flown in a handful of years because of the pandemic, so the whole process felt defamiliarized, which might be why I was paying closer attention (and I had recently changed my gender marker). I was thinking about the existing writing/music about being trans at the airport that I admire, including work by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza and Ekko Astral; I think of this poem now as a contribution, and tribute, to that emergent mini-canon. As far as the drafting process, the “i.e.” came later, since I had been looking for a poem to pair with that form. The ending was what shifted the most during the revision process. In the earliest versions, I had an “I” come in at the end, mainly to address some of my own discomfort about the ways the title could be misconstrued. I ultimately decided it worked better to veer harder into anticlimax, stepping back into the corporate slickness of that ironic “welcome!,” an announcement that intrudes into and somewhat tees up the deflation of the ending.
MP: I can’t resist asking: what’s the most bizarre airport experience you’ve ever had? Or the best?
PL: Ha! Like I said, the whole thing is bizarre. I wish more places in my world had moving walkways. Airports always deliver in that respect. The Minneapolis-St Paul airport has a 1.4-mile walking trail through Terminal 1 that I like.
MP: And lastly, I’d love to give you the space to share any additional thoughts you had regarding this poem, your relationship with writing, the field of transpoetics, and/or advice you’d share to young poets.
PL: I want to let the poem speak for itself beyond what we’ve already covered, at least in terms of larger statements about transpoetics, partly because it’s a high-stakes moment (in new ways, at least) to be putting forward conversational thoughts about transness. I feel much more comfortable in either poetry or theory mode, both of which have more room for my impulse towards abstraction and/or qualification. I just started a PhD in English, so I’ve been splitting my time again between creative and scholarly writing. It’s been wonderful to get to experiment with blending those modes and, more than that, to be reading the kind of theory and poetry that make me want to write in every direction at once. I love poetry. I love trans people. And I think poetry loves trans people.
Perry Levitch’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2024, the Southeast Review, the Columbia Review, and others. They are a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. They received an MFA from NYU, where they were poetry editor of Washington Square Review. Currently they’re studying transpoetics as a PhD student at Brown.
Maria Pavlenko joined NER as a reader last May. She’s currently obtaining a master’s degree in English from Penn State while enrolled in the creative writing program there. Though her focus is in fiction, poetry is a love that follows close behind. When she’s not scrambling to get work done, she enjoys analyzing media, dancing with abandon, and riding her red bike up and down PA’s unforgiving hills.
Photo of Perry Levitch courtesy of the author