Readers are invited to experience memory, music, and multiplicity through the expansive poems that make up TRANZ by Spencer Williams. A 2024 title from Four Way Books, the collection explores what it means to exist inside a body exhausted and inundated by constant analysis and application of gender norms. With a beginning contextualized by “sex dream about jesus” after Cameron Awkward-Rich and the words of Sasha Geffen (“A body is not a prologue, and its story can be written at will.”), these poems push relentlessly at boundaries of gender, sexuality, thought, and relationships until they burst, break, or become something entirely new. TRANZ considers the opportunities poetry represents through lines like “in a poem i can leave the body / anywhere” and “in a poem i can say kill / all men / and mean anything.” In the poem “i say i am tranz and” the speaker asks: “isn’t it funny how the absence / of a man still swallows the room?” With her precise voice, Williams guides readers into the space made by this absence, allowing us to build an understanding of what it means to exist with abandon, despite the confines of the world. 

 

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Grace Gaynor: In your 2024 interview with Fran Hoepfner, you talk about being drawn to writing in lower-case. Could you say more about the relationship between the lower-case ‘i’ and writing about living as a marginalized person?

Spencer Williams: I think my use of “i” began as a stylistic choice for how it resembles online or informal communication. But, as I began to use lower-case more and more, the choice took on new resonances: what does it mean to move through the world in a minor way? If I’m expected to be loud and proud about my marginalized identity in a country that is loud and proud about hating it, what would it mean to shirk that responsibility and expectation, and perform smallness? I also think the lower case “i” enables a departure from the self, in a way—the “i” does not necessarily represent the fullness that “I” might, so when I write myself through “i” I’m only marking a miniscule part of the whole—there’s a me that alludes the container of “i” that makes writing about trauma somehow easier, less pressurized. Does this make sense?

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GG: I love the way the poems in TRANZ take on a variety of formats. For example, “laramie” is segmented by slashes while white space is carved out of poems like “ode to panic.” Further, “at least he’s happy” is made up of two relatively contained blocks of text, while “this night too will end,” an address to Laura Jane Grace, sprawls across full pages. What is your process for choosing containers for your poems? Do formats come naturally or with experimentation?

SW: Mostly through experimentation—and also through reading! Sometimes, if I like a visual style that someone else has used, I’ll try it on. Other times, the content of the poem dictates the form. For “this night too will end,” I noticed early on that the traditional stanza form wasn’t capturing the chaos of the content well enough, so I scrapped it entirely and tried to “fling” the words on the page instead. For “laramie,” I wanted a more compact form, something that felt to me like being stuck in a car with your parents with no room to sprawl out.

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GG: I’m captivated by the strength of matter-of-fact titles like “if ur gonna be transphobic at least be funny” and “one dose of anxiety meds later” in TRANZ, what does your titling process look like? Is it similar for most of your poems?
 

SW: I find the titling process really annoying, actually! I find that I’m terrible at it, and so sometimes my titles arrive as the most literal interpretations of the poems they accompany. However, I always hope that the poems complicate their titles in return. When I was getting my MFA, a professor said to not effectively title a poem—meaning, to open a new dimension in the poem–was a wasted opportunity. And so I’ve tried to carry that with me in my titling process, even when I feel overwhelmed by it. What can the title give the reader that the poem cannot? I would say I’m successful in giving the reader something to think about title-wise 30% of the time, though this might be generous.

 

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GG: A line that sticks with me from “god is a suspect male musician” is “like how every christian rock song sounds a little gay.” I love the fact that you’ve put this phenomenon into words. In TRANZ, mentions of artists like Kelly Clarkson, One Direction, Bruce Springsteen, Ashlee Simpson, Against Me!, and Britney Spears provide more context for the ways music and popular culture can be used to indicate or shape identity. Does the involvement of music in this book speak to the necessity of performance (gendered or otherwise) in our culture? Is there any music you’re currently listening to that is influencing your writing?

SW: I think of this book as a minor time capsule, and so the music choices throughout point back to the taste of my younger self (though I do dip back into all of these artists on occasion!). However, I think music definitely speaks to a kind of performative aspect in the poems—I wanted many poems to feel like little contained punk songs—two minutes tops, no fat, just rage, and then silence. Quick bursts of feeling. Ashlee Simpson’s I Am Me album feels, to me, infinitely replayable, though the culture might disagree. But I also view that record as a stepping stone toward actual punk music, which is so young Spencer—wanting the catharsis of punk without the uncleanliness or self-reflexivity. I wanted the book to waver between two modes that were inspired by my music taste as a teen. I wanted pop sheen and I wanted punk rock, sometimes in the same poem. Not sure I accomplished this, but that’s what I was thinking about music-wise.

Currently, I listen to a lot of instrumental music while writing—I find music with words to be a bit distracting. I’ve been plugged into a lot of Kaki King and techno music because it kind of fades in the background a bit. Dabrye’s One/Three album has been in rotation quite a bit. Same with Plastikman’s Musik.

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GG: Your chapbook, Alien Pink, came out in 2017. How have you changed as a writer since then? How have you stayed the same? What would TRANZ and Alien Pink say in a conversation with one another?

SW: In between Alien Pink and TRANZ, I got an MFA. I think, as much as people like to joke about MFAs, what it gave me was a community I didn’t have prior that I could check in with about new work, or conceptual ideas. I think I’ve become more confident in my line breaks. I still have some ticks I’m trying to iron out, but Alien Pink Spencer really was me dipping my toes into poetry, and TRANZ was me trying to dive into the deep end. Alien Pink was also written at the beginning of my transition, whereas TRANZ had some distance and perspective that felt a little less “life or death.”

 

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