Riot Girl

Ed Dorn’s only assignment for his creative writing class at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where the poet Chelsey Minnis was a student in the early 1990s, was to write a “pro-war” poem. Minnis was absent the day her poem was supposed to be workshopped, but Dorn workshopped it anyway. Something about this story suggests a confrontation between mentor and student, poem and reader, presence and absence, agency and subordination. Minnis compares Dorn’s attitude toward poetry to the ferocious defiance of rock-and-roll. It’s hard to imagine a professor giving homework like this in 2019, but Minnis recalls the pro-war assignment as positive and unexpected. It challenged her to create a poem at war with its surroundings, a poem that struggles to free itself from cultural limitations, structures, and responsibilities. That combative approach stuck with her. 

Many readers were introduced to Minnis’s early work by the anthology Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics (2010), edited by Arielle Greenberg and Lara Glenum. They situated Minnis’s poetry alongside that of contemporaries such as Danielle Pafunda, Cathy Park Hong, and Dorothea Lasky as writing that “assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends.” Gurlesque borrows heavily from third-wave feminism in its incorporation of gender performance, sex positivity, and the disjunctive aesthetics of postmodernism. Like her peers in the anthology, Minnis often exaggerates stereotypical gender roles in her work or performs “girlishness” to call attention to misogyny. In my conversations with her, Minnis refers to her poetry as “throwing a fit” or “making a scene.” All her books—Zirconia (2001), Bad Bad (2007), Poemland (2009), and Baby, I Don’t Care (2018)—exhibit a characteristic “unladylike behavior.” Across her work, Minnis’s style is witty, entertaining, and perhaps most difficult to achieve in poetry, completely absorbing. She accomplishes what few poets can: she writes page-turners.

In her first two collections, Zirconia and Bad Bad, which Fence Books recently reissued as a double volume, Minnis’s refusal to conform and her drive to be not just “bad” but “bad bad” surfaces as a kind of subversion reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud, famed to have written Merde a Dieu! (“shit on God”) on the walls of his hometown. Why the animosity? Minnis stands against something in her work but against what exactly? The conformity of the modern world? Perhaps. Late capitalism? Maybe. Could it be that the poetry itself doesn’t know? Probably. One of my favorite Minnis poems, “Anti Vitae,” from Bad Bad, is a humorous, self-reported catalog of failures in the form of a faux CV:

1989

Fail to appear for graduate creative writing workshop. Class discusses poem without me.

Mispronounce “Kant.”

1990

Unimpressive academic performance. Idle.

Lose essay contest.

Fail to get any recommendations from professors to graduate school. All applications rejected.

1991-1992

Mental health questioned.

1993

Accidentally knock over bookcase.

Called “The Most Abrasive Person Ever Met.”

Fail to win prize.

Told poems “lack agency.” Have to ask what “agency” means. Don’t know what “trope” means. Mispronounce “geodesic.”               

[…]       

Poems are called “Disneyesque.” …

1995

Poems rejected by Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, New American Writing, Fine Madness, Black Warrior Review, etc.

Rife with Gen-X antagonism toward the business considerations of poetry, the CV is both a comic indictment of poetry’s prestige economy—the right bylines, the right awards—as well as a meditation on career anxiety. Minnis knows that to not win these prizes and to be rejected by magazines means that she won’t be taken seriously in the poetry establishment and will remain an outsider. However, her disregard ultimately inverts this narrow logic of success. Thwarting value in late capitalism is almost impossible, but Minnis’s dropout aesthetic and mock laziness is, ironically, how she gains cultural capital. “Whenever I read Chelsey Minnis,” the writer Elisa Gabbert tweeted a few years ago, “I'm like, she already WON POETRY, what are we doing?” No prizes necessary.

As important as the Gurlesque aesthetic is to contextualizing Minnis’s poetry, it doesn’t adequately account for her poetic defiance or trickster persona or unique approach to punctuation and syntax. “She is never full, because there is a hole in her,” Joyelle McSweeney writes about Minnis’s poetry. McSweeney, a poet herself, is undoubtedly the best reader of Minnis’s early work. She pushes past Minnis’s self-styled flippancy to interpret the poet’s long lines and signature ellipses as a twinning of lack and overflow. Minnis’s poetry is a hole that overflows, McSweeney argues, as well as a space for negotiating agency and autonomy in a world where erasure is the historical norm for female poets. The dialectic between lack and overflow, structured through the innovative use of ellipses, propels the poems forward while leaving a trail of fragmented linguistic debris that documents, performs, and resists the experience of being negated. Naturally, this trail becomes a site of sexual politics. How can it not? In the 68 prefaces (yes, 68!) that begin Bad Bad, much of this debris is determined by the power dynamics with her mentor Dorn (to whom she dedicated Zirconia). The mentor recurs in various permutations:

(from Preface 5)
You should not fall in love with your mentor, but you should try to punish him with your poems...
 
Too bad mentors are like dogs but they aren’t as smart as the dogs...
 
I loved my mentor...because of his ugliness…
 
(from Preface 22)
You should never fall in love with your mentor just because of his belt buckle…
 
(from Preface 28)
I only liked my mentor because of my own talent…
I wanted to kiss his hand but it is wrong to kiss someone’s hand…
 
(from Preface 29)
It is undisciplined to fall in love with your mentor…
 
I loved my mentor because I could not please him…
 
(from Preface 40)
It is easy to fall in love with your mentor because he is like a crippled tiger…
And then to feel an awful happiness like a broken bed…

Revision reigns in preface after preface. These conflicted negotiations indicate a speaker unable to settle on a totalizing, stable, or harmonious understanding of the male figure under consideration. Does she love her mentor? Hate him? Does she want to sleep with him? Was he ever really her mentor? Is he a dog? A god? The self generates power from its own splintering, and each preface gains momentum from the one that came before and the one that comes after. Further complicating matters, the mentor (or tormenter?) is intimately linked with the value of real poetry.

In much of her work, Minnis’s favorite subject is poetry itself. “I am a poet so I can say things,” she writes in Preface 20; “I will tell you what is poetry,” she writes in Preface 21 (we never find out). In Preface 38, she declares, “I am not writing poetry to uphold a tradition,” and in Preface 40, she confesses, “I am lucky to be such a failure…in poetry.” One minute, she would “rather have a Gucci bag than a poem,” and in the next, she wishes “to be a great poet” but doesn’t “wish to be high level,” thus delineating the difference between Poetry and poetry. This vaudevillian posturing has a melancholy side, too, as in “Clown.” The poem’s speaker confronts the world, but all her “knives are made out of rubber.” The clown enjoys “hitting people on the head with a foam club,” an image of anger transformed into a slapstick circus moment. All this is gendered female. How do we know the speaker is a clown? Because she “constantly [feels] alone in a dressing room,” a makeshift confessional booth in which she declares, “I don’t want to be a clown but I’m sure to be one. My mother was a clown.”

This allusion to maternal lineage is revealing. In our email correspondence, Minnis tells me that when she was seven years old, her mother committed suicide. Because of this, she explains, she sees the past through the lens of that trauma, which she likens to a “funhouse mirror.” As she writes in Zirconia, “It is torture…for my mother…….that I am now luscious………..and she is dead.” This line is a form of protest. No, no, no, she is not like her mother after all; she will not only live but also live lusciously. How does one begin to piece together the world after such a primal shock? What psychic distortions emerge when life is “covered with a drizzling grief”? Trauma-induced surrealist imagery comprises Zirconia’s landscape: “hazel waves of the ocean and the hot creamy lemon grasses of the moon.” It’s a world where light is reflected by and refracted through the unreal, the fake diamond dominates vision, and the “upward waterfall” flows through trapdoors and trash. “Shockwave” is a snapshot of this world:

......................................................struck by translucent lightning...........
..............................................................................................or........
..................kneeling in milk near frayed wire..............................................
................................................................an icing white force...............
........bursts from your brow....................................................................
........................................................................splits and rustles............
...........................and tumbles down your face..........................................
..................and pours over...................................................................
............................................your right eye..........................................
......................................................and ripples down............................

The speaker is struck as she kneels in a quasi-religious pose. Mother’s milk is the center of the world, but it’s simultaneously dangerous (“near frayed wire”) and a sugary fake (“an icing white force”). The material world is where the poet will survive and where she will define herself in protest, yet the luscious world of furs and other “high quality clothes” offers provisional comfort. The poem “Fur” cascades from its opening lines:

....I’m ready to plunge into furs.............and reject the standards of my past
......which allowed no warm furs to enclose.................................................
................................................................me and no fur linings..............
..................................................................or strips of fur......................
.....................................on bare skin......................................................
...................................................................................................................
............................................and I could not bury my face in anything soft
................as I used to correlate a bad conscience with the...........................
..................................................................repetitive circular hand caress of
...a soothing material....such as fur.........as I have seen it happen before......
....................when someone doesn’t say anything for 7–9 seconds...............
................................................and you observe the cycles.......................
........of their hand through the fur............................................................
..................or they..............wrap a fur strap around their fists..........until...
.....the sphere of musing bursts..............and they say........nothing to you...

The poem seems to wrap itself in furs even as the speaker is cognizant that the furs are a “faux solace.” The warmth and protection of the material world never becomes the longed-for maternal warmth; the material world is soothing only until the “sphere of musing bursts,” the ellipses scattering as readers skid along their valences and complex linguistic rush.

Minnis’s skilled use of ellipses manipulates poetic time and blank space as well as readers’ expectations. It’s as though her poems are simultaneously long and short, maximalist and minimalist. The ellipses signify long lines, but if they were removed, readers would encounter only terse, enigmatic lyrics, almost Sappho-like in their poignancy. The ellipses also create a sense that Minnis’s language replicates thought, a relentless and fractured succession of unexpected, uncanny, or sometimes wonderfully unhinged poetic utterances. For example, in “Man Thing,” from Bad Bad, an entire page with the ellipses removed would read “to want you like a souvenir / and that’s all I can use of it / you are to be / used like a sentiment.” But the formatting of the lines on the page, separated by vast rows of ellipses, creates the sensation of a poem that unfolds in real time. This is the quality that makes Minnis’s books so difficult to put down; she leaves readers wanting more.

“I don’t think I write poetry and increasingly, I make statements,” Dorn once said, “and if they have the ring of poetry that’s alright and I don’t mind and people can call it poetry if they want.” This assertion could apply to Minnis’s new book, Baby, I Don’t Care, in which the ellipses that mark her earlier books disappear in favor of a technique of juxtaposition. The book is a long collision of lines that sound a lot like chatter from 1940s film noir. Even the characters are genre tropes. There’s the gold digger: “First of all, do you have any money?” The femme fatale: “Now let me introduce you to a hungry tigress, me.” The brat: “I’m just a dirty little shoplifter.” The seductress: “I’m a woman in a sequined gown in a dark cave.” The “fun” girl: “I’m wearing high heels by the pool so that makes everything OK.” The “fun” girl’s ominous flipside: “there could be a lot of smashed vases in our future.” Paradise has a price, the text suggests, and to achieve “the good life,” these tramps, gold diggers, and femme fatales negotiate with the men in their lives who hold power. As in film noir, the psychological underpinnings of the text are a function of sexism and dread. The reality is that all of this isn’t very fun. These women are in constant danger of being silenced, slapped, or erased; they are never taken seriously. They are too drunk, too stupid, too conniving. Yet their failure is also their mode of survival. “Shall I go or wait long enough to get my face slapped?” asks one of the women in the book, who confesses in the next line that “it won’t be a new sensation.”

Minnis doesn’t consider herself a political poet; however, given the current political climate in the United States and elsewhere, she brings up in our conversations the dubious timing of publishing a book titled Baby, I Don’t Care. “I actually wrote and submitted Baby, I Don’t Care before the election, which is no excuse for not seeing it coming, but I truly didn’t intend to put out a book so wildly inappropriate to the moment,” she tells me. “I wrote it because I was interested in classic movies and especially pre-code movies about women, chorus girls, gold diggers, etc. I had the privilege to write that book whereas obviously other people are out here fighting for their lives and their rights.”

The title inevitably recalls June 21, 2018, the “let them eat cake” moment of our time, when Melania Trump set off for a children’s detention camp on the US-Mexico border wearing an Army green Zara jacket with “I really don’t care. Do U?” printed across the back in white graffiti font. Still, there is something prescient about this convergence of poetic and political utterances with radically opposite intentions: Minnis’s liberal, ironic subversion versus Trump’s fascist, literal subversion (conveyed as a fashion statement, no less). It’s as though Minnis’s newest work is accidentally political, just as her early work was accidentally feminist. When I ask if she considers her poetry feminist, she says that she would like to think so but “doesn’t know if she deserves it.” Minnis’s speakers—alternately sarcastic, indifferent, and gnomic—trouble conventional gender roles and male-female dichotomies. In her new poems, however, the gender performance is much glossier and more cinematic, with a rapid-fire sheen to the lines: “I like to go swimming after cocktails! / Then I put on some sunglasses and write a poem.” In her earlier work, the punctuation and syntax worked to slow down readers; Baby, I Don’t Care zooms from one irreverent statement to the next and never looks back. 

When I ask Minnis if she reads poetry now, she says “not really.” (She was scolded as a child for reading too much and still remembers reading paperbacks of Jaws and Anna Karenina that she found in the garage.) Instead of reading poetry, she watches movies, takes acting classes, and works on a screenplay. She refers to herself as anachronistic, a housewife “without kids.” She doesn’t seem to be part of any current poetry scene either, certainly not online. When I asked Gabbert if I could quote her tweet in this essay, Elisa replied, “Sure. I think Chelsey lives around here, but I’m not sure. I think she keeps to herself?” It turns out they live 30 minutes from each other. All this is to say that like many of our best poets, Minnis is a poet of radical defiance and individuality who resists easy categorization—and she’s a bit of a loner too. Even though she doesn’t fit neatly into any one poetry scene or school, her influence is broad. Izzy Casey, poetry editor of the Iowa Review, tells me that reading Minnis taught her “the truth is composed of conflicting ideas and that the vulnerability of the subject lies somewhere between its humor and grief.” One can see traces of Minnis in the poets Patricia Lockwood and Hera Lindsay Bird; the musician John Darnielle has cited her; and Amy Key, who recently interviewed Minnis for the Poetry Society, calls Minnis one of the few poets with a true cult following in the United Kingdom. How does Minnis respond to news of her international fandom? “Once you disappoint everyone,” she says, “then hopefully you can start over.”