Interview with Melian Radu '13

Among the attendees of the first ever Feminist Alumnx Retreat this weekend was Melian Radu ’13, a former English and American Literatures major with a focus in Creative Writing and a Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies and Sociology minor. A recent MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Radu has been featured in Vetch, the first literary journal devoted to poetry by transgender writers. The mission statement of Vetch is to “help bring into the world trans poetry that does not feel the need to translate itself for a cis audience.”

On Friday, Nov. 4, Radu performed in an intimate poetry reading, which included such works as “Premortuary School,” “How Much Google Will You Do, Gull?” and “The Part of the Penal Code Which Applied to Drag Queens Was Section 240.35, Subsection 4.” Her work offers commentary on technology, intimacy and surveillance. She is currently working on her debut manuscript at her new home in L.A.

The Middlebury Campus had the opportunity to speak with Radu on her experiences at the College, the inspiration behind her poetry and her recent publication in Vetch.

 

How did you start writing poetry?

I was interested in writing as long as I could remember, but I figured I could do novels. I wanted to write fantasy novels – I still want to write fantasy novels – but my junior year of high school, I was like, “I want to improve the descriptive writing in my fiction. All the imagery is very bland, and poetry is about cool images, so I’ll write some poems to practice.” And from there I tried poetry and never went back.

The most serious-ish poem I can remember writing that year was inspired by the movie The Brave One with Jodi Foster, which at the time I didn’t have much of a political-ish, theoretical sense of. But now that I look back, it speaks deeper. It’s a vigilante justice sort of movie, where her husband’s long-term partner is mugged and the system fails to do anything about it, so she sort of takes it into her own hands. It’s sort of this somewhat feminist-y, action-y, dark, intense thriller. So I felt compelled, I guess, to write a poem about that and explore sort of what her motivations were.

 

What did you study at Middlebury?

I was an English and American Literatures major with a Creative Writing focus. It’s a very unofficial-ish sort of thing, but it does mean you take some extra creative writing classes and you get to do a creative writing thesis instead of a big long paper – which is why I picked the major, really, initially. It was still a very new thing when I got to Middlebury. My main intellectual pursuits were in my minors, which were Gender Studies and Sociology.

 

How did those two fields of academia intersect with your writing?

The more I got into critical theory and whatnot, the more it kind of came into my poetry. And my undergraduate thesis was about true incidents, mostly, of people attacking or in some way damaging works of art – even though I do have rather a suspicion of poetry. I’ve seen lots of poetry that wants to be political and therefore ends up not being very interesting or poetic.

That’s not the case in a broader sense. I mean, Claudia Rankine is part of the most famous at the moment. You know, incredible books she’s put out in the past few years that just electrified people in the sense of what people can and should be doing in terms of our larger culture and society. But I’ve also seen the other side, where it’s just very hand-fisted, schlocky and not interesting. So I want to avoid that. But I am, of course, drawn to these concerns. So yeah, that thesis, whenever I mention it to people, I guess the contrast was pretty immediate. People were like, “Oh my gosh, someone would blow up the statue or they would splash acid on this famous painting or punch a hole in a Monet? Like, that’s disgusting, how horrible. That’s worse than, like, beating somebody up. They should be in prison for that.” That, to me, is horrifying.

So I guess the concern at the center of it was, of course I like art. I love these classic works. But at the same time, I also, in the end, place a lot of value, more value, I can come right out and say it, on human life. So when I see people being actually in prison for long periods of time or whatnot for these things, it immediately unsettles me. I was interested in exploring that sort of contradiction in those poems. Like, different ways of looking at these incidents.

 

Do you see your poetry as a form of activism?

I don’t know how much of it is known at Middlebury anymore, but I certainly did some things when I was here. I mean, all-gender housing, all-gender restrooms, whatnot. I believe deeply in that kind of work, and I sort of believe deeply in the artistic work that I do. So somehow there’s definitely the overlaps to it, and I’m cool with those. But also for me, I draw some line in the sense of, I want to write poetry that’s interesting and effecting change or affecting a person. But I do have a distrust of people who want to see their poetry as the first and foremost activist thing they do.

I mean, I see ways in which it’s worked, and I guess it relates to my own work a lot, but there was a particular discussion a few years ago of drone poetics. Like, we have this dislike of this uprising drone usage, drone warfare, so we’re gonna write these poems in the sense of, we’re gonna look back at the state, we’re gonna surveil them. Our poems will be like little drones watching over the government or something. I don’t know, you can hear my skepticism – like, are these poems gonna be read to people in the government? Are they gonna suddenly be like, “President Obama’s gonna realize what terrible thing drones are and stop using them to bomb small children”? I doubt it.

The people who write these poems probably do other things as well, but I guess I would be skeptical of anyone who thought that was the first and foremost way we’re gonna have impact. As one tool in a toolbox, great, I guess that’s the bottom line of it. But I like concrete action for sure. I like very much that I was able to write poems that said interesting, cool things while I was at Middlebury, and I also did other things that would have concrete effects.

 

Your work will be featured in the newest issue of Vetch. Can you speak more on nature of this publication?

It’s the first publication primarily of trans-authored poetry, at least on an ongoing basis. [The editors] are very much interested in the idea of what is it like to write poetry from a trans perspective. Every issue seems to have a great theme they bring up to anyone who’s submitting, with a broader concern that’s also rooted in a trans experience. This new one that’s coming out, they gave us “ekphrasis” – literal Greek – which is looking at something, describing something, in the oldest classical sense. The perfect ekphrasis sense is, you look at a statue, describe it in words, and then someone who saw those words would have the exact same experience as the person who looked at the statue. Now, that perfect description is kind of tough to pull off, but it’s the idea of work that responds to something that you see.

A lot of my own thesis was ekphrasis in terms of reacting to the work as I was seeing it, to a photo that was being damaged, or reacting to the site of somebody damaging it. So that was the theme of the issue, but they made it like, “We think transness is often involving rewriting one's experience in a certain sense. How can you rewrite as you also reinterpret something you see visually?”

 

What inspires your poetry?

What I do like about Vetch in their mission is a way to engage a trans identity in a way that is not totalizing. It’s not all about that. It is nice to be able to expand outward. Like, yes, we’re trans, we’re writing from that experience, but also there’s a lot more than that going on. It’s very rare for me to write a poem anymore that is about my gender dysphoria or something, but certainly it’s in there. I mean, I do write a lot about sex and nudes and whatnot. So it’s really shot through with a lot of queer sexuality. But technology is really the driving force.

 

What is one piece of advice you would give to an aspiring poet?

This may be overly prescriptive, but I know it worked well for me and I’ve given it to a lot of people: to very aggressively pursue change or avoid sameness in their writing. Very much my Middlebury writing career was gradually trying a new thing in every poem. If the last two poems were first person, this one's gonna be third person. I haven’t written a formal one in a while, so I'm gonna do a villanelle [a 19-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains]. This one’s from my own perspective about my life, but now I'm gonna do a persona poem from somebody else's poem.

Avoid getting caught up in a “this is my style” if you want to develop a voice. That’s a concern that people have and I very much had at one point – and did I really develop a voice? I don’t know. I guess people say, “That sounds like you, that’s unique, so that’s a voice” – but what is, anyway?

 

What would you say to anyone interested in your work?

That they should feel free to jump at the chance to critique it. ’Cause it is very much in constant flux, and I am always more than ready to have somebody say, like, “No. Not working. On any number of levels.” Which can be creative or, like, “No, I think the way that you engage with surveillance is overly informed by this particular idea you have that is inaccurate. ’Cause there are other aspects to how technology shapes people’s lives in ways you’re not considering.” Because poetry is very much informed by one’s perspective and mine has those limitations. I’m always interested in exploring and plugging holes in, but also expanding in different ways.

 

PEER REVIEW