Ava Hofmann : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I started writing poetry in high school, like 10 years ago, so there’s inevitably going to be a lot of change between where I started and where I began. I grew up in a semi-rural small-town environment in a cult-y family where access to poetry wasn’t all that widespread. My first encounter with anything like experimental poetry was the work of e. e. cummings, which is not really all that experimental (nor am I necessarily still a big fan of his work). I think, at the very least, an interest in “weird shit” has remained from that time.

What has changed the most has been, I guess, the actual content of my work. When I started writing poetry, I was still religious. I wrote a lot of strange poems about god and Christianity, and in general I just tried to have kind of a weird sensibility about faith back then. Partly because I wanted to be artsy or whatever, but also because I was an extremely closeted person who couldn’t really acknowledge the fact that she was really a trans girl. I ended up writing poems about like, Christ’s piss being a holy relic, being erotically beaten up by a genderbent Jesus, or poems where I would just call myself a nun without any kind of accounting for my gender. And I was writing these poems both as a kind of sincere sacrament, but I think also as a place to explore the things I wanted to explore, stuff that was kind of taboo in my conservative environment—like my own transness. My poetry was a pathway out.

Eventually, I had started to write less about Christianity, and more about other stuff I cared about, like communism and history and infrastructure. But when I finally figured out religion wasn’t for me and I came out and started transitioning, what my poetry was really about had to change a lot. It was kind of if the form and the content of ways I had been writing finally clicked; form became an accounting of transness, and my transness became an accounting of form. I could really let loose with weird and visual stuff because I finally had a personal way of being in the world that aligned with it.