Rickey Laurentiis Reclaims Trans Identity Antecedents in “Death of the First Idea” [INTERVIEW]

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. Laurentiis is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, BOMB, and poets.org. A 2018 Whiting Award winner, she lives in New Orleans. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

James: I was so fascinated by your book and I’m really looking forward to talking about your poetry, craft, and your book.

The opening poem, “steal away,” sets a distinct tone:

   Not to the Boy, not even Quite his Body, but to his Boundary,
I said, You’re wrong; fall down. Was all I really wanted, really—
   Even conjured to say. For there are Rites some Holy Chosen Refuses be Explained . . .

The use of capitalization for “Boy,” “Body,” and “Boundary,” the punctuation choices, and the fractured, punchy phrases are all notable. What was your thought process for establishing the voice of this book and the epigraphs you incorporated?

Rickey: “This book was a decade in the making; it’s been about ten years since I debuted my first book. I actually started this very first poem about ten years ago, on the day that Michael Jackson died. I remember this not because it’s related to the poem, but because I was at Cave Canem for I think the first time, and we were on the bus. I was sitting next to Nicole Sealey, and that first line just came to me: ‘Not to the Boy, not even Quite his Body, but to his Boundary…’ This was well before I understood I was trans, well before I transitioned, before everything. It’s a testament to what poems can do. This book looks into the past, but it also sees a future where trans and queer identities can be celebrated and welcomed.

“It was really important to me in some ways to frame the book with this kind of new-age Negro spiritual that’s also sexy and mysterious. I wanted to strike a couple of chords at once. I really believe, since my first book, in not giving a disclaimer, but in telling it all from the beginning—this is what you’re getting into. The epigraphs work in a similar way. I had a thousand and one epigraphs, and it was torture to choose the final four. This book is really thinking about antecedents and thinking about where we can find prototypes or proto-trans ideas in antiquity and into the future. I wanted to have those voices come into the book. That’s what led me to pick the first three, but the last one, which is actually by Jesus of Nazareth—’If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off’—was my homage back to Boy with Thorn. That book that ends with the line, ‘he set the thorn up in his foot and told his foot, walk.’ That poem is a poem of reclamation. At that point in my life, and at the end of that book, it was true. I had come into an embrace of my body and an embrace of myself, but I wasn’t yet done. I still had some more exploration and discovery.

“I was reading the Bible and I read that line, it came to me—oh, it’s perfect. The foot is gone, the thorn is gone, we’re cutting it off, and now we’re going to introduce this new idea, this new idea of me.”

James: The concept of “Death of the First Idea,” a wonderfully compelling title, resonates throughout your collection, particularly in lines from “implications for an arriving mysticism”; you wrote: 

Gods cannot sit equal
Among Man, where Man have fire

I gave them. I have no water
Left. I have no ground

Left. I have no sense, no image.
I have no sex / Left. Idea urges.

How did this concept of the “death of the first idea” inform your creative process and shape your approach to form?

Rickey: “I have a couple of different ways to answer that. I think of this book as kind of mystic, you know, because the title came to me before the book. The title came to me as a fragment on its own, like ten years ago, before a book even existed. ‘Death of the First Idea’ came and I was like, what is that? What could that be about? I jotted it down, and I kind of knew instinctively, I was like, ‘oh, that’s my second book,’ which was really strange because with Boy with Thorn, the very last thing I did was choose a title. It was agony to pick Boy with Thorn. In that book, the last poem is the title poem. In this book, the title came first. So I had to work my way into the title, and that happened both in my poetics on the page, but also in my poetics in real space. I was also thinking about, you know, in that poem that you mentioned, the idea of God. I was thinking about the story of Prometheus and how he gave fire to man. In my poem, I’m sort of like, ‘I’m the one who gave the fire, and now I’m paying the price for it.’ But the price for me is a good one. It’s not a punishment. It’s a boon, you know, because that’s what led to this new person.”

James: “Death of the First Idea” draws from multiple sources, including Egyptian and Greek mythology. The “Tiresiad” series reimagines the classical myth of Tiresias, particularly focusing on his transformation between sexes. For instance, in “Tiresiad: The Punishment of Tiresias, I,” you wrote:

   Trading sex was ne ’er a Woods’s game for Two- Strung snakes,
so when he struck them She right then was Immediately Created a Woman.

and later in “Tiresiad: The Punishment of Tiresias, III” you wrote,

   As soon as that dark Dye dyes its Black color manifestly on her Image,
So soon she is she conceived Manto’s mother, Tiresias is, Omen of a Crone with child.

How did you approach adapting and expanding ancient mythology to build timely connections to our modern world’s perception and treatment of trans people?

Rickey: “I love mythology. I’m secretly a student of comparative religion. I’m always reading different kinds of myths to see their differences but also their commonalities, and there are quite a bit. Tiresias is such an interesting figure because he’s so popular. He lives forever, he’s old, and he’s in so many plays. He pops up, he’s very wise, and he’s very respected. He has this story where part of his wisdom, or part of her wisdom, comes from the seven years that she lived as a woman. In my imagination, I later came to find out that in myth he has maybe two daughters. In my interpretation, he has those daughters while he is a woman. That made the most sense to me. I was like, oh, he gets pregnant, and then no one can argue, even Hera won’t be able to argue that he isn’t a woman.

“It’s exciting to use myth because I make presumptions that people have Google, so they can go and look it up. The Tiresias poems are very sparse, and they’re scattered through the book. They’re not narratively positioned. I wanted them to be sort of like fragments that came from antiquity. I wanted the rhythm or the motion of them to reflect what I was reading. I was reading Clytemnestra, I was reading Aeschylus, all the philosophers, just for fun. As I was thinking about antecedents of a trans idea or a non-binary or androgynous person, I was also thinking about the poem structurally and the history of the lyric. It became clear to me that I was in the world of proto-poems. I was reading hymns and epics, and these are all the things that are poetry, but they’re also my ancestors in the poem, right? So it became a formal decision to play in that voice or that mode. I was reading Sappho, so I was like, let me try to reinterpret this Tiresias myth, but in my own kind of fresh way. Hopefully, it was successful.”

James: The long poem “Toward a Tall Lyric for Palestine,” constructed with episodic, numbered stanzas, stands out as an intensely personal yet politically charged piece, where you wrote:

   This is my attempt at reportage,
message as it is, my tall ambition & what
I witnessed, what all I’ve been at labor to
say about Power.

For poets trying to navigate complex political narratives combined with personal experience, what are the craft considerations—in terms of voice, narrative stance, and the integration of journalistic observation with poetic lyricism?

Rickey: “It reminds me of something I was reading from Frank Bidart. In one of his interviews he talked about how the poem, while it brings in all these gestures from cinema or art history or what have you—and I do the same with myth—it still hopes to maintain its identity as a poem. I had never felt that tension more clearly than when I decided to incorporate that long poem into the book and also had to figure it out. I’m honored to have gone to Palestine in 2016. I was supposed to have written it then, but it took me… these last ten years, it’s been a journey.

“When I did finally write it, I told myself, ‘Rickey, you are a poet. You probably will write this lyrically, but trust that.’ I was saying, just ride your craft. Trust that during the revisionary process, you will find the form in the draft. That turned out to be mostly true. There are a couple of poems I won’t name that I was hoping I could finagle into a sonnet, but they just didn’t want to. That poem is fragmented in some ways. I wanted it to be like this book is in some ways polished, but in other ways it’s messy. That was actually really hard to affect, to get it to hopefully a nice medium temperature where it’s both kind of wild, you’re in the wilderness, but also inside the forest you walk upon a pyramid or something like that.

“That poem was difficult for me, but it was also illuminating because it made me recall the fact that poems can lie. Or not lie, I shouldn’t say lie. I didn’t lie about anything I saw, but I sort of dramatized myself in that space. I wasn’t weeping or anything like that, but I reminded myself, oh yeah, we have narrative, we have story, we can, for the sake of the poem or the book, turn up this volume a little bit. That poem’s ‘I’ is on Palestine, but it’s ‘I’ is also back on America and thinking about Black America. I like philosophy, and I’m always trying to wrestle with these arguments without actually pushing over into rhetoric, but maintaining poetry and having that intellectual rigor. Hopefully, people will come to that poem with an open heart and open eyes and receive it.”

James: In “Two Seconds the Slave (or, Carnival Baby),” you forge a powerful and painful connection between historical trauma and the contemporary trans experience, woven into a backdrop of New Orleans. You wrote:

   I nearly feel most alien, less- than (as if that be true)
not even Human really, or Heathen, “Unintelligible Beauty,”
   lower than an Animal even: the Dark men shudder,
like to return their very attentions, as if to delete their gaze, can, do
   and unperson me, I feel Two Seconds the Slave—

Getting the balance right in a complex poem like this, interleaving such complex themes of slavery, dual minority status, and trans loneliness, is so hard to do effectively. There is a risk that the message can overshadow the poetry. How did you approach editing and revising this poem to achieve such an impactful balance of themes?

Rickey: “That poem was the one that broke me. As you read it, it returned to me because when you transition, there’s so much you’re excited to anticipate, but there’s so much you can’t expect. The world really, in ways that I can never really write a poem about, in a visceral way, changes. The way that the world related to me was different from the way that it had been. Whether or not it was better or worse, it was just different. One of the ways that it was different was how people engaged my gaze. When seeing me on the street, would they keep eyes with me or would they shudder? Would they look away? And it really is hurtful. It really is hurtful because I’m a human, and you don’t have to do anything other than just wave, maybe smile.

“I never knew that pain. It was like they forgot I had dignity, and I couldn’t have imagined that. The only way I could figure out a way to express that was to bring it back to this historical moment where many persons, Black slaves, were treated less than animals and their dignities were forgotten. I hope the conflation isn’t terribly done, but it seemed important to me to smash all that into one place and hopefully make it beautiful because it is an important reminder to everybody that anybody that you see walking down the street, no matter what’s going on, is a fucking human being, is a person. If you don’t have time, just keep walking. They don’t deserve your shudder as if you are a headless goat, as if you’re a roach. The way to get to that was through Solomon Northup’s story. I remember seeing that film by Steve McQueen and thinking about what it means to be a slave for twelve years in this landscape where you’re supposed to be a slave for your whole life and all your children’s lives. And it dawned on me, ‘Oh, I transitioned. I’m going to be this forever.’ Will I have to negotiate and engage Black men on the street like that? It was, I hate to say it, mostly Black men who returned that gaze.

“It has shifted; it has changed. There is a learning curve, but it still hangs on my heart. So thank you for bringing that up.”

James: The poem “2019,” opens with the gut-punch line:

I could string him back up the tree, Sir, if you’d like.

and continues later with:

The way, say, my black
   Pleasure is named too explicit for a page, but this menace
I put in it is not.

Considering your note that this poem was written in “angry reflection” after a poem celebrating black pleasure was denied publication, how do you, as a poet, deliberately challenge publishing norms and reader expectations?

Rickey: “I think about it now. When I was writing the book, I was like, am I going to tell them what really happened? And I was like, might as well. The place has a whole new president. There are no hard feelings, but I remember that day where I was like, they’re really not going to take this poem. And they said it. It wasn’t a secret. They were like, ‘No, we can’t do this because high school students are going to read this in the morning.’ It wasn’t a pornographic poem, it was just an erotic poem about queerness. I immediately knew, okay, you’re not going to take this poem, but I’m going to write a poem that you’re going to take. It was around the time when Black Lives Matter was sort of percolating, and every day you would go online, and there was just another example of brutality. So there was a lot of anger and ire in the air, and so it came out quickly, in two days.

“I don’t really have a thoughtful response to challenging publishing norms because I just don’t think about publishing that actively. I just write the work, and then I let my agent handle it. But you know, I think it’s important that there are pushbacks against the machine. The machine of publishing can be a little daunting and intimidating. I’m glad to say that it has shifted and changed, and at least they’re paying us. At least the poets are getting paid. I remember when you didn’t get a dollar, and now you can get $50. So you can get something to eat. I wish there was more of a back-and-forth editorial process with poems. A friend of mine who would encourage didacticism in her work and I would go back and forth, but I had that gesture in mind, but I didn’t think ultimately it would win re-reading. Because that’s the thing. They read it once, but what will make them go back and read it again and really sit with it? For me, the answer is always the beauty, the music, the imagery—it’s the stuff of poems that brings people back. Then its content is what can either slap you in the face or tickle you.”

James: After finishing “Death of the First Idea,” I went back and read the “Sometimes Tropic of New Orleans” sequence of poems back-to-back. I really enjoyed doing so, to see the recurring references to herons and Emily Dickinson, the use of parentheticals for inner dialogue, and the setting of New Orleans. What was your thought process for unveiling this series of poems throughout the book rather than as a single long poem?

Rickey: “Those were actually the poems I hoped would become sonnets, but they kind of didn’t. When it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to be able to get them into sonnets—although I will say that I was still actively thinking about voltas, so I was like, can you just have a volta in the poem where it would be in the sonnet? One of the poems kind of ends with all these mini-voltas of the birds changing colors and the flowers and the roses. I wrote them pretty close together, but I kind of write that way. I’ll write a batch of poems quickly, maybe over a couple of days, and then I’ll go back into the world, go to Burger King, get a hamburger, and then I’ll come back and work on something else. What’s exciting for me is to see them both cannibalize each other, to see how they begin to talk with each other but also just eat each other.

“So that’s how I got to the structure and the layout. I am hoping that a reader would go back and do that work and put them together. I wanted it to feel like this book is trans and loud, like ‘I’m trans! I’m transitioning!’ But in another sense, I wanted to take it for granted. Like, I’m just taking a walk, there are roses, and I’m trans. That’s it. So I wanted the poems to sort of disappear into the narrative of the book, and similarly, I wanted the Tiresias poems to do that too, so that they become this sort of spiral that’s accruing.

“The period that I was writing this had its highs and its lows. I had celebrated moments, and then I had moments where I had violence against my person. It just seemed important to me to get some of that quotidian life on the page, and in that space, to explore New Orleans as a backdrop, but also to explore different ways we can talk about poems again, but also about change. This book, if someone just asked me how to describe it quickly, it’s a book on change, and the costs of it, but also the boons, the benefits, and the charm of change.

“I wanted the poems to say, ‘I didn’t know you could do that in a poem.’ In a poem, you can change anything, and guess what? In the world, you can do that within reason. I hope that a reader will come from the book thinking, ‘Well, even if I might personally not understand, even if I personally might not do it, even if I personally don’t agree, quote-unquote, I yet live in an America, I yet live in a Western world that affords such freedoms for personal bodily integrity and also respects what is necessary to a growing thing: change.'”

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast