Interview with Max Wolf Valerio
Miriam Atkin interviews poet and memoirist Max Wolf Valerio, who emerged as an artist in San Francisco during the 70s and 80s. Of his punk poetry performances from that period, his friend Kevin Killian writes: “It was like some container of doom had found the nearest mic and was going to start to make demands, to radiate, to detonate, then move on.” In 2006, Seal Press published The Testosterone Files, Valerio’s psychological and spiritual account of gender transition. The Criminal: The Invisibility of Parallel Forces, a collection of his poems from the 80s and 90s, was published by EOAGH in 2019.
Max Wolf Valerio
Miriam Atkin: I want to begin by delving right into your work and then let a picture of your life, your person, emerge from that.
I’m drawn to the consistent openness to danger in your writing, in its themes and ideas as well as in the formal risks it takes. In The Criminal, your 2019 poetry collection, I find lines like this: “I have twisted my hair into a sword atop my head and played / shuffleboard with fingers of tyrants” (34). And in Testosterone Files (2006): “I live my life inside an ongoing paradox. Ambiguity and peril” (3). This kind of transcendent hurtling into other realms, beyond safety and reason — is that where you like language to take you?
Max Wolf Valerio: Art has to have a sense of pleasure and danger, of stretching limitations and perceptions.
I do enjoy mischief — and humor. Language has to be nimble and carry us into areas of contradiction, where the absurd is abundant. I like visceral writing, where the senses are engaged yet ideas are manifest in the text. So yes, from the beginning I set out to write poetry as a going beyond. A hurtling into chaos where reason is liberated from the confines of a strictly narrative trace:
Siamese twins
joined at the waist
with a rush in your guts poke
around in sour milk as
Elk come
into the picture
fine-tune them
on the screen floating
antlers above the brush dipping
necks down to drink a flurry of
Balinese apostrophes
flapping curtains
hotels glare red yellow and
blue lights sweet green
drinks
wobbling
elbows and grease paint
stale beer and coughing
cigarettes glide
through dressing rooms barbers conceal
and highlight ritual
the squeaking
carts of
laughing people squealed
still through a tinted windshield
with the heat up
alone in a hotel room balding —
(“The Attack of the Cartoon Penitentes,” The Criminal, 76)
It is a romantic vision, yet also one that foregrounds insight, clarity — clear seeing and knowing. I began thinking about poetry this way early on and was influenced by surrealism and montage, various experimental forms of writing that dissolved or restructured language and form. I also write for the ear, which is likely a Beat influence. There’s a performative aspect to a lot of my work that I trace directly to them. As a teen I read Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. I was enraptured by that free-associative barrage of imagery, the prophetic cadence — like an Old Testament prophet — that Ginsberg created in “Howl” or “Kaddish.” That sense of a world being written, of lives being announced in all their chaos, hurtling toward the edge of knowing in dreams and waking... I wanted that wild life attempting rapture. The Beats loved jazz and you can hear jazz rhythms, sloping and meandering mournful or joyful horns. They were very aware of the performative aspect of poetry. I learned to read my work out loud as part of the creation process. I do the same with my prose. I was never and am not a “spoken word” poet, but I am aware of music inside the work. The process does begin with consciousness however, and in that sense I’m a visionary poet, a kind of metaphysical poet or maybe I’m a quantum consciousness poet.
The lines you quoted earlier are from the poem “I” which was written when I was 23 and, of course, on a typewriter. That was a while ago, pre writing on computers! I was experimenting with the idea of self as various, as many. I play off of Rimbaud’s idea of “I is another.” This was pre-transition. Most of The Criminal was written pre-transition and almost a third was written shortly after I began transition, up to about eight years after. I’ve got a backlog of poetry to get out into the world, I’ve been terrible at managing the careerist aspects of being a poet.
MA: Well, as much as I’d like to see more of your work in the world, and more people reading it, it’s probably the case that your avoidance of the careerist aspects has created a shield around what I love in your work — you’ve managed to escape the self-policing that seems required by the market more and more these days. I’m grateful that you’re willing to venture into places of chaos, and even violence.
Speaking of surrealism, when I read you I think of Bataille’s aesthetic/philosophical investment in a kind of transcendent destructiveness — the “luminous violence of the sun.” I do think that art is the place to explore the meaning of violence, the ways in which it’s built into our bodies. Because where else do we have the chance to collectively figure out what it is and why?
I’m drawn to an image from Testosterone Files: the Ed "Big Daddy" Roth monster figurine that you had as a child and which seems to function in the book as a kind of totem figure for your transition. Here’s an excerpt —
Looking into the maniac figure of the monster [...] I begin to see with a vivid eye the resonant details composing his small, explosive visage. I see all at once, with a hook of recognition and joy, his primal, anarchic male qualities: his long, bloodshot eyes bulging out, the haphazard tongue hanging down in a sneer or a defiant leer, his wild racing in an oblong car with big wheels, oblivious to danger, cranked on adrenaline, smashing with an affront of force and willfulness—the sheer adventure of virility. The long stick shift hammed up into his tiny hands like a kamikaze erection! He is a messenger.
There’s a hideousness to it, a Goya-like grotesquerie as well as a Bataillean magnetism toward death. The next chapter in the book starts with a recollection of your mother’s fascination for Miss America and her vision of you as a future beauty queen. How has the play between beauty and beastliness figured into your life and work?
MV: I think I’ve always been drawn to the tension between male and female energies, that binary that eludes the circumference of reason because the distance can be so vast between the two — yet also so dynamic and intimate and vital. Unlike what’s in vogue in current trans activist circles where gender expression appears to be on the way to nullification and nonbinary identities seem to be ascendent — I’ve always enjoyed the extremes of gender expression. And that includes the bodily expression of gender, the magnetism of biological sex, gender expressed, encased and lived through the body. In the body... Yes, binary sex roles are sexy and while androgny can also be sexy, I generally am more magnetized by extremes. That Big Daddy Roth character is emblematic of a particular kind of masculine energy, that risk taking — that sense of adventure and love of danger. That fun! I really did love drawing monsters as a kid, particularly ones with their eyeballs shooting out. I was a punk also and there’s that chaos and excess and noise, that wildness and the sense of violence pulsing just underneath the surface.
Bataille was an early influence, that sensibility of looking into evil, excess, a mystical apprehension of language — also Burroughs with his intense engagement with the taboo, the outsider, drugs, and hallucination. I was also a feminist in my early twenties and a bit beyond. However, obviously I did not simply read feminist writers. Feminism was part of being a lesbian pre-transition and coming out in the mid-70s in a university. That’s what one encountered for better or worse, second-wave lesbian feminism. So, I had a dialogue with feminism going on early in my work, and I set up various experiments to see what would happen. I didn’t use third person gendered pronouns in many poems, and I was busy vacating the “I” and coming at the poem as though it were a camera lens or a tape recorder, a perspective continuously experiencing. I never identified the “watcher” but shared the “watching”. I was writing the poem as a continuous present. Of course, there were moments when a “she” or “he” would intrude. In an early phase, I kept “he” out and tried to impose “she” everywhere. That was my heavy feminist phase! Hey, I tried!
I have always had women as love objects, as objects of desire, and so I did write for them and to them sometimes. And being a second-wave into third-wave feminist and immersed in a kind of female suprematism, I tried to be female in some poems, to experience my body as female even, but it never felt comfortable. Once I transitioned, I started placing more male pronouns into my work and allowing myself to fully identify, to make the perspective of maleness my “I”. I had to get comfortable again with my male self, the male self I had sloughed off in my effort to adjust to having a female body. It wasn’t that hard! That new comfort also gave me a self in a sense, in the work. Even so, I still usually write poems from the perspective of that disembodied and always experiencing watcher, that place of process—that camera. In any event, while I was immersed in a feminist world, I always had a relationship to the world of literature/poetry/writing that was also outside feminism and that likely saved me. Punk rock, industrial culture, Tibetan Buddhism, Beat, and avant-garde poetries... all of these saved my imagination from didactic forms of political art.
MA: This idea of being both immersed in gender and at its edges seems so fruitful as an impetus for art-making. It’s what poets do with the vestment of language: that fertile alienation that arises from inhabiting some faculty very intensely, both living it and expressing it from many different angles. It’s very different from the decisive stance and decisive form of representation that’s necessary for activist work, or artwork that aims to articulate a particular politics. And of course today there’s a huge pressure to be that way. My sense is that your life and creative history have been driven by an ongoing quest for new forms of freedom. That combo of punk, Buddhism, and the avant-garde that you stepped into (I can’t help but also think of the late John Giorno here) strikes me as a magnificent freedom cocktail. But all these communal subcultural preserves of experimentation and wildness — avant garde art, queer and kink culture, outsider fashion — feel deeply endangered. Any viscerally powerful cultural materials that are born at the fringes will be grabbed by the online hive and subjected to its codes of conduct so quickly. As an artist whose work has for so long been motivated by the chaos, the excess and the noise, have you been able to find that in contemporary culture? What are the human spaces that energize you to create these days?
MV: It is astounding and alarming to realize that many forms of outsider culture, avant-garde experimentation, and extreme cultures are wilting. Subverted and absorbed by a bland kind of social work aesthetic where they are viewed primarily as representative of “inclusion and diversity.” That’s a taming and a negation of the darkest and most profound elements of art. Susan Sontag said: “The artist goes to the frontiers of consciousness (which is often dangerous to the artist as a person, as a social being) and then makes trophies of his experience...” (Styles of Radical Will). I like this idea of bringing back the poems as “trophies” of my experience. This is an entirely foreign idea now. As you say correctly “the online hive” is alert to any gesture of rebellion not easily assimilated into the language of identity politics or social justice.
I think we have to connect with imagination, go back to the vital roots of art, of poetry, to an engagement with the imagination, with perception, with beauty and energy. We have to be defiant toward these new forms of conformity and alert to how they dissipate creativity by making it acceptable and finally — bland. I don’t have any magic solutions and your question has me feeling a bit of despair. I spend a lot of time alone these days. I think it’s all about smelling the bullshit and not letting yourself do the easiest thing.
I have read a lot of Soviet dissident literature and I find it really instructive and terrifying all at the same time. Vladimir Bukovsky’s To Build a Castle about his time locked up as a political prisoner for organizing a poetry reading when he was 19, he spent twelve years imprisoned for that simple gesture. That is tyranny. We are not at the gulag stage of course, but many poets feel caged in by the pressure of that hive. I think we need to remember that this is not the first time that writers and artists were terrorized into conformity. Each time is a bit different of course. We don’t have the threat of a labor camp but we do have the threat of losing a day job, a publisher, a reviewer, an agent, or a writing gig. I often feel forced to “say the words,” to nod along with whatever political project is currently popular. I have written poems, particularly when younger, that had overt political content — but I knew early on that I was driven to create difficult landscapes of language that are not easily assimilated by any particular political tendency. So, as a result of this persistent skepticism, I don’t really think I have sustaining communities now. I’ve been kind of thrown back on myself in a big way these days. I go to events here and there and can glean inspiration but really, it’s not about grand or defining movements in poetry or music now but about dredging it up alone and possibly sharing it with a few people. There’s a kind of void out there. You can hear it, like a hissing void in space. Maybe that’s the answer — to enter that and see what is alive in those places. I think we have to learn techniques. I do see some hope. I think other poets are getting tired of this constriction of possibility as well and are searching.
MA: The solitary wanderings — “dredging it up alone” — creates for me an image of you as an alien observer. This is something I also gleaned from the poems in The Criminal. And so I wonder if your idea of going out and listening to the void has perhaps been part of your process for a long time. The poems in Criminal feel very much like impressions, and they exceed the neatness, the enclosure, of narrative forms, because the observing mind doesn’t seem like it’s built on time-space. The external world and the internal psyche are all fragmented into bits or flashes. The structure of that book brings up a lot of questions for me; the fact that it was written over the course of 20 or so years. It really feels like a document of unfolding time and perception. You mentioned your inability to manage the professional requirements of being a writer. As far as I see it, in the MFA-influenced contemporary poetry world, it’s all about the project. You have to articulate an abstract of what you’re working on and a vision of what’s coming next. Your work needs to be rounded off in advance, whether by specifying a cultural identity or living out some theoretical premise. The sprawling nature of The Criminal, and its preference for seeing over saying, for experiencing over announcing, suggests to me that your investment in poetry is fundamentally resistant to those requirements. Is this a good characterization of your approach? Is poetry for you something like an archive of impressions? a kind of existential research? Or do you set out with a question or aesthetic postulation in mind?
MV: Yes, there is a resistance in the poems to anything solidifying, to anything that anchors them too entirely in a personality, a place, a mood. My poems were informed early on by a visionary tradition that emphasized the poet as seer, as receptor and antennae. I wanted my poems to be sites of transformation, for the process of consciousness as perceiving, being, creating, extant on the page and alive. I wanted readers to engage with the poems and not be directed too much by my own narrative impulses. I don’t find my feelings or “story” interesting enough to sustain a poem. We experience the world in such a fragmented and expansive way, and I wanted my writing to reflect that. So I created a fragmentation in the work in order to bring the reader into direct contact with consciousness as process, as ongoing. My Buddhist studies with Chogyam Trungpa in the 70s initiated me into the idea of the ground being pulled out from under my feet, that uncertainty and living quality, that electric quality that awareness has. I first encountered Chogyam Trungpa at Naropa when I went to study poetry in their summer sessions. Living in Boulder and going to CU in the seventies, I was aware of his presence and began to go to Vajradhatu to meditate when I was 19. His ideas about awakened mind and awareness, as I understood them, were electrifying. “A Lampshade Blown up of pro portio Mexican Tactics” is a poem I wrote that works with these ideas:
staccato centipede white human
papyrus eyestrain the cryptic hourglass
shatters snare/snare
snare drums
laughing at
a high-pitched comedic
accent stabbing
grins grinning
out
of top hats
adolescence the magician created and threw
up into the air
with a ringing burst of joy blue
icicles lush
JETS
I deliberately set out in the late 70s and into the 80s to not allow the poems to stay grounded in any one place. If they began to tell a story, I would stop and shift and break that thread. I wanted disjunctive images and ideas to be present in the same space. Again, that feeling of having the ground pulled out, where everything is uncertain yet living and immediate. I wanted that sense of immediacy, of the continuous present in the work. A collision of worlds or dimensions through language. I was impatient and wanted the work to keep moving. I would immerse the reader in a world, a moment, but I would not offer closure. There are endings, but often the poems end on a twist, a lance of mischief. I enjoy pulling and tugging at people’s senses and sense of decorum — puncturing worldviews... nothing is settled, it’s always moving and fragmentation is continual.
MA: I love that your writing has prompted me to think of identity as a poetics: for instance, how the question of whether people “get” who you are — what you are — ahead of knowing you deeply and extensively is also a poetic question because it’s about story. I feel like the continuous transformation, the uncertainty, and the groundlessness of your poetry is in some sense an embrace of illegibility, both in terms of personal identity and poetic strategy. Your writing eschews the recognizable linguistic signals and constructions that might grant the reader a feeling of familiarity and access, and this parallels your uneasy relationship to the prefab cultural signifiers (regarding ethnicity, race, gender etc.) that are supposed to help us to “get” another person. This brings me to a question I’ve been wondering about: I read The Criminal and The Testosterone Files alongside each other, and it is definitely the case that the memoir is informing the way I read your poems. The personal concerns and impulses that play out in your biography help me pick up on related meanings and formal inclinations in your poetry. My reading of The Criminal would undoubtedly be different if I didn’t have your biography in mind. What do you think about this? Is it necessary for a reader to know about your ethnic and cultural background, the scenes and subcultures you’ve participated in, and, perhaps most significantly, your gender transition, in order to experience the fullness of what your poems contain?
MV: No, I don’t think a reader needs to know any of that. It is possible that my own disavowal of any easy or simple naming of self in the work has to do with my own intrinsic ambiguity, though there is also a militancy to it that is beyond ambiguity. I mean, I am militantly refusing easy closure in most of the poems, I am stridently and strongly communicating a refusal to comply with a comforting closure or unifying narrative. I was definitely gesturing toward fragmentation, toward a vision that was vital and alive yet refusing simple definition. The memoir is mainly about my first five to six years of transition, though I do work back through my life to provide context. No doubt the memoir can provide insight into the work, that’s certainly true! I am a kind of shape-shifter and I’ve had a wide range of experiences. I do believe that the poems are ultimately larger than my day-to-day life; but it was fun to write about my actual life in the memoir. It was a completely different experience than writing poems, yet I took into it the same ideas about ambiguity, peril, risk — humor. I wanted to write the transition, my “sex change” as an adventure and not as a victim narrative. The Testosterone Files is also about certain themes like biological sex and sexual politics, how some aspects of what I thought I knew about the world shifted. The experience of changing sex through the hormones, through my lived experience in the world as a new man, was like walking into a tornado. I wanted, like in the poems, to show various aspects of the experience simultaneously and not settle for something easy or comforting.
Identity is deeper than what we know as “identity politics.” What is it really? Who are we finally? What are we? Yes we are our sex/gender, our race/ethnicity, our nationality, our age but — there’s more that’s hidden or possibly just our own. Just our own set of perceptions or experiences. The possibilities of poetic language have allowed me to explore this:
each one a fear a fire a forced
entry—
to live with all your
punch-drunk senses
calling at the darkened shapes and
the way the mood alters
your blood
with a hood—
(“The Gates”)
I’m ultimately a champion of the individual, that lonely glimpse. I guess who we really are finally is an eternal question and I certainly don’t have any authoritative answers but I’m searching and uncovering new aspects to life and myself all the time. The questioning is the joy and the movement and process. As an artist I hope to destabilize certainties. Although certainty can also be a meaningful juncture, a place of rest and joy. I also enjoy play, and isn’t it all about play, mischief, provocation, and living at that edge?