Episode 106: S. Yarberry with V Conaty

Dear Listener,

By the time you’re reading this, many of us will have just returned from holiday travels, or will be embarking upon more travels for the upcoming holiday to see family, friends, and loved ones. I myself enjoyed a trip to Pennsylvania and my time with family last month, but after coming home, I recognized how tired I was. For many of us, myself included, time spent with loved ones surfaces mixed feelings: our love is tempered by frustration and disappointment, even if the latter never fully cancels out the former. For many, private feelings follow public fractures. I don’t stop being trans because I’m with people who love and accept me for who I am. Even in private, I can’t forget that, and in public, being seen as a trans person is increasingly dangerous. Difference remains. In other words, one can feel loved and seen by their family, and it can expose vulnerabilities.

The complexity and frequent ambivalence of relating to others that’s inherent in the experience of loving, of seeing and being seen, is a pervasive theme in the poems of S. Yarberry. So is a tenuous and inquisitive relationship to the public and private. Even such joys are fraught with an awareness of inequality. Such is the beautiful ambivalence one feels when one, as S. puts it, “just happens to be a trans” at this time when many American states are rolling back our rights and attempting to erase us from public life, and when the public discourse around these policies emboldens vigilantes to threaten our safe spaces as occurred last month in Colorado Springs.

(Since I wrote this at the beginning of the month, Texas’s Attorney General Ken Paxton has requested data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles including names of trans people who have changed their gender marker on their licenses, an attempt to create a registry of trans people. For more information about the policies keeping me up at night even while I’m sleeping on an air mattress at my sister’s with a cat purring on either side, or now in Puerto Rico enjoying the sun with my partner’s family, follow activist Erin Reed on social media and subscribe to her Substack for weekly updates on trans rights.)

In this episode, I had the unabashed joy of sitting down with poet and scholar S. Yarberry and “talking about trans shit” and talking about everything but. We discussed their debut collection A Boy in the City, William Blake, writing from historical models, the monologue as a form, eros, the love poem, public and private space, finding a space for queerness, domesticity, cities, the Midwest, and the ambivalence embedded in queer and trans desire.

S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. They currently serve as the Poetry Editor of The Spectacle and run a small magazine called Tyger Quarterly. S. has their MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is now a PhD candidate in literature at Northwestern University where they study twenty and twenty-first century receptions of William Blake. Their first book of poems, A Boy in the City, is out now from Deep Vellum. 

LISTEN TO EPISODE 106 HERE!

‎For this episode, all patrons will receive access to an mp3 of S. reading from their novella-in-progress The Balloon Factory and a couple of their favorite generative writing exercises.

Some members of the Commonplace Book Club will receive:

• CAConrad's Amanda Paradise

• The Odyssey

• The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake

• Sanuel Delany's TIMES SQUARE RED, TIMES SQUARE BLUE

• Maggie Nelson's ON FREEDOM

• S Yarberry's A BOY IN THE CITY

Thanks to Deep Vellum, Wave, W. W. Norton, US Press, New York University Press, and Graywolf, for donating books!

For this episode, Commonplace’s charitable partner will donate $250 to the PO Box Collective, chosen by S. Yarberry.

From their website: “PO BOX is a creative collective & intergenerational social practice center dedicated to building Rogers Park community through radical art making, mutual aid & programming.”

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The Places We Love: As I mentioned last month, we’re adding additional content to these newsletters to help our listeners get to know the team a bit better and for fun. S has shared with us some of their favorite things about Chicago, where they live and works, so we thought we’d give you all some little glimpses into our favorite cities.

S’S GUIDE TO CHICAGO

• Gerber/Hart Library and Archives

• Movies at The Music Box Theatre

• Spend the day at Morse Beach and marvel at the prairie rehabilitation!

• Check out a reading or community event at the PO Box Collective

• Grab a beer and play some pool at Cunneen's (cash only!)

Christine and I wanted to get in on the fun, so here’s a window into our respective hometowns, Los Angeles and Birmingham:

• Christine’s Los Angeles

• V’s Birmingham

If you love these city guides and want more non-episode content from Commonplace, consider signing up for our Patreon! Patrons pledging $10 or higher will also automatically become members of the Commonplace Book Club. In the upcoming year, we will be experimenting with expanding our newsletters with additional content—recipes, book recommendations, places to submit, etc.—in advance of rebranding our newsletter with additional non-episode content and moving to a tip-based subscription model. Patrons will continue to get access to additional content related to each episode. All current newsletter subscribers will remain subscribed for the rest of the year and we will continue to announce new episodes on social media and via e-blast.

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Up-and-Coming: In the coming months look out for additional conversations with Claire Schwartz and Chase Berggrun, Eileen Myles, Jorie Graham, and more.

Join the discussion on social media! What can you compare the experience of reading and writing poetry to? You can Tweet at us, DM us on Instagram, talk to us on Speakpipe, or even just reply to this email.

As always, thank you for listening and for your continued support.

Love and solidarity,

Valentine & the Commonplace Team