9/25/2024

Time, Tits, and Talking

As I hurtle towards my self-imposed deadline for my second book, I find myself in that uncomfortable overcast forever-afternoon where excitement about the work I’ve done is hard to come by. I’ve been writing my tit poems since last November, since my fateful trip to the Asian Art Musuem  I’ve written forty-one poems about my breasts in an ekphrastic tradition. Forty-one postcards to the molten country of my bubbling, volcanic body. Xoxo, wish you were here. It’s been a time-consuming and emotionally exhausting journey and I’m not even sure we’re finished writing them. My only comfort in this arduous journey is my devotion to the numerology. Thirty-six views. No matter how many poems my hands compel me to write, they will percolate into a set number. Save me, thirty-six. Save me.

When I feel stalled out on a project I try to reinvigorate my enthusiasm by performing and publishing. I find myself clawing desperately at the “real boy” feeling of seeing tit poems in print, or speaking them into a crowd. This craving led me to giving a lecture on my poems, on ekphrasis, on the nature of my work, to a small room of interested people a couple of weeks ago. 

It was part of a local Atlanta organization called the Chit Chat Club, which gathers artists across disciplines to give presentations about topics they’re passionate about. My night included a playwright who spoke about Marvel Comics and theme park rights, a puppeteer who spoke about marionettes, a theatre manager who spoke about jiu jitsu, and me, speaking about my tits. 

Thankfully it was everything I wanted it to be. I want to finish my book. I want to add my name to the list of poets who transcribed their obsession on the walls of their heart and their pages. I want to be done and on to the next. I am ready for my views to be visible to more than just me.

You can read a transcript of my talk below. 

Yours with an open mouth,

-B

It was the third day of Thanksgiving break, which is, as anyone who's spent time around family knows, the day where you've finally exhausted all small talk and have two choices: leave the house and do something or kill each other. 

My sister suggested the Seattle Asian Art Museum. I'd never been and love art museums more than my family, so I agreed. There, at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, was where my family would occupy themselves for an afternoon and I would occupy myself for the better part of the last year and a half. 

Hello. I'm Billie Sainwood. I'm a writer and poet here in Atlanta and today I'm going to talk to you about ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is a form of poetry rooted in describing a work of art in great detail. But, because I'm a poet, because I'm insufferable and, because I, like any insufferable poet, see metaphors everywhere, we'll be talking about ekphrasis more abstractly. Now, back to my Thanksgiving.

At the Seattle Asian Art Museum they were hosting an exhibit featuring the art of Hokusai, in conversation with Henri Riviere. Hokusai's ukiyo-e woodblock prints evidently moved Riviere to the extent that the French artist ended up making his own tools to imitate this master of the form. Hokusai's greatest work, The Great Wave Off of Kanagawa, comes from his collection "36 Views of Mount Fuji," depicting the iconic mountain at various degrees of scale and at different vantage points. It's essentially a love letter and tribute to the majesty of Japan told through the lens of its snow-capped crown.

Riviere's contribution to the museum culminated in a book of the artist's own love letter: 36 Views of the Eiffel Tower. However, despite his reverence for the legendary artist, Riviere was not content to simply imitate. His project not only jumped around in perspective, but also in time. Two artist, talking across continents, across years, across cultural landmarks without ever exchanging a word.

And me, desperately trying to avoid my family in an art museum and staggered by the beauty of these perspectives. I knew I wanted to write about them. About the feeling I got seeing the great wave, about seeing Riviere's four squat starts to one of the greatest icons of Europe, But I was lost in how. What ekphrastic could honor these titans?

And then I saw it. Same museum. The final piece of the puzzle. Dark and Sweet by Pinaree Sanpitak. This abstract work by a Thai artist showed me a simple and beautiful window into her obsession: breasts. Her entire artistic career is charted along the curve of breasts. Through painting, through sculpture, throughout her life, there are more breasts. New breasts. All shapes and sizes. In the dark mirror of Dark and Sweet, it all came to me. Views of perspective. Views of time. Tits.

Like Hokusai, like Riviere, I would honor the homeland of my body by writing it down its changes, its views, through the lens of my tits through transition. These would be the icons.

When people ask me what I'm working on. I tell them I am writing a book about my tits. Because through obsessions, we find greater and more beautiful truths. Riviere showed us Paris through the tower. Hokusai showed us Japan through Mt. Fuji. I am showing the joy of my transition through my tits.

Tits, when pressed against the chest of my girlfriend some years after her top surgery

Tits, 3 months into HRT running down stairs 

Tits, at age eleven, at summer camp, during "Come on Eileen." 

Since last November my life has been all tits, all the time. It's become an obsession. Rest assured, my mother is thrilled and not at all mortified by my inspirations. But don't worry, mom. I'm not just writing about my tits. I am taking part in a great literary tradition.

This alchemy of obsession and secret truths is not new to poetry. Maggie Nelson's Bluets is as much about longing and remembrance as it is about the poet's love affair with the color blue. Lauren Elkin's No. 91/92 is about Paris and the fragility of people after tragedy than it is about people on the bus. We are all hurling hooks at the rafts that drift by us in the endless ocean of nothing.

This is what I mean by a greater ekphrasis. This is what I want you all to take with you:

Look. Connect. Obsess. Throw your hooks and pull yourself closer to the things that tell you about yourself. Allow yourself to be swept up in great works of art but don't limit yourselves to merely describing them. Bring them inside. Take them with you and talk to them. Find your mountains, your color blues, your Eiffel Towers, and your tits and connect them. If you write, write about them. If you paint, paint them. 

If you simply live, live with them. Breathe in the world around you in exhaustive detail and find all the pieces of yourself that flaked off into the night while you were dreaming. You have left your skin, your spit, your air in everything. Find it again. 

Talk about your tits, metaphorically speaking. Talk about the changes in your body, in your life, that fill you with joy and terror. Let obsession, art, and Thanksgiving trips where a museum is the only thing between you and a fight with your family become occasions for song. 

Ekphrasticize the world around you. Study it. Scribble it. Speak it. Sing it. 

Open your arms to the world, and you will always be shocked by what you can hold, by what will hold you.

“While Crying”

A symphony in time with the brandished wand
the red cheeks, the staccato’d singultus
and h-h-h-h-h-h.

The nervous birds of my shoulders in formation
With the loping, turbulent glide and pitch
of my chest.

To cry, with breasts, is to heave.

It is to sob.
It is to fly in formation with a legacy
of noble hysterics.

It is to spit in the face of stoics
with the same lips as Andromache
Who heaved when she saw her husband 
When the spirit returned to her breast.*

It is to cry with a body that suffers
the violent rapture of the mind in the beloved object.**

It is to cry a cry that is
Just sobbing. Deep shoulder-heaving sobs***

It is to cry with other women.
Heavy.
Surrounded.

It is to heave with a salted ocean.
It is to cry with weight.

It is to fill the very air
With feathers
With wet wind
and a chorus of song.

*Homer The Iliad 
**Jacques Despars Commentary on Avicenna
***Ryka Aoki “Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies”