ray levy uyeda × Stacy Szymaszek — On queerness, form, and poetry
UNDERTOW Notebook presents a conversation between ray levy uyeda and Stacy Szymaszek, working together through the 2025 Queer|Art Mentorship. In this exchange, queerness and form are treated as co-emergent practices: desire moves beyond the human body into vibration, attention, and interspecies kinship, while poetry is approached as a way of being, a means of moving through language—not simply words on the page. Moving from Pier Paolo Pasolini and Robert Bresson to Octavia Butler and Projective Verse, the pair trace how failure as refusal opens space for other ways of being, and how sustained attention—to communities, to language, to nonhuman companions—builds a daily, queer practice. Along the way they critique the “poetry world’s” urge to commodify morality and productivity, insisting instead on anti-institutional poetics, lineage, and care.
ray levy uyeda × Stacy Szymaszek — On queerness, form, and poetry
RLU: How has writing and form born out your queerness? Was there a (queer) self that you discovered through writing?
SS: My awareness of my queerness and my love of reading and writing all developed simultaneously. It wasn't till I graduated from high school that I felt safe enough to proclaim things about myself. I was able to say that I was gay (this was in 1988) and that I was a poet. They're inseparable. At that young age, I was very much seeking queer artists and movements and communities to help me figure out how to live. I didn't think I had many possibilities in front of me but I was motivated to find a sense of kinship and lineage that is so much a part of my work now. I feel vital relationships with many poets, queer or not, I have encountered on the page, which is part of my queer dailyness and kind of queers all time.
RLU: In The Pasolini Book you articulate to the reader an early memory of declaration. As a young child you said to your mother, “I’m not like other girls.” The emotion of this announcement moves as if through a vein throughout the book, counterposed to your desire to become the “man that you were” while stating plainly: “I didn’t want to be a girl but I didn’t want to be a boy.” I feel that there’s a desire played out in The Pasolini Book that is reflected in the larger body of your work, not only to explore interstitial gender or the movement inherent to trans experience, but to explore life(force) beyond bodies and energy that transcends human corporeality. I’m wondering if you can talk about desire in two parts: 1) Desire for queer bodies leading you to “queer artists and movements and communities to help me figure out how to live,” and 2) Desire to reach through bodily experience onto some other plane. And, if you still have the energy, how does poetry facilitate these desires?
SS: Your question takes me back to something I wrote called "Viva Pasolini!", a prose piece, that was included in the anthology Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant Garde Poetry. “Pasolini and I are kind of a haunted quadruped who hit the earth running. It could be unspeakable and insane, but the experience is integrated into my very ordinary life. We circulate energy. I am suddenly able to be against things." What you say about wanting to "touch the energy that transcends human corporeality" 100% lands with me. Having to describe my gender and my pronouns feels very practical, bureaucratic. It provides some basis for sociality.
However, in poetry, I can present a more deeply felt experience of having a body that uses very different language. Possession. Transmission. I think about how trees growing in the same area of the forest can warn each other via their root systems. I think about how my eyes can tear up when I look at Fiona, one of my cow friends, because I am in the presence of such a special soul. I don't really understand it though. I call this kind of cow a cowplus cow. I know a few. (Did you think I would be able to not talk about cows? Ha!) I've been thinking about queer friendship in the very complicated context of friendship with the dairy cows at the farm where I work. For instance, I don't eat their products, but I may eat yogurt made with the milk from some unknown cows. (And I don’t eat any mammals). Does it make sense, maybe not. But it means that I am consuming less dairy and that I am not participating in a capitalist logic of value with my friends. I could say, well, I groom you in exchange for your milk, but I don't even want the gift economy. I know this is a strange response to your question! I think what I'm responding to most fervently is the desire to create structures outside of what we have all accepted which requires so much generosity and trial and error. That's one of the ways poetry functions for me.
RLU: Your response is a wonderful jumping off point for my next question, which again, may be unwieldy. Apologies! I’m thinking about desire, structure, possibly the architecture of relations. Possibly things that are not as they appear; buildings as walls, doors as rooms, walls as points of departure for liberatory dreams. Language, and poetry, can retool how we see. Maybe I’m talking about the work of imagination. In Famous Hermits, a line of poetry reads, “The poet is a person who makes poems for us. Morally good and useful in perpetuity.”
First, what is morally good about poetry? What is useful about poetry and/or the poet?
Second, in referencing poetry itself, a line in Famous Hermits claims, “Any form that can do this can alter the human body.” I wonder, how does poetry alter the body? (Is there something morally good or useful about altering/amending/editing the human form? Is there something morally good about trans existence? Maybe this refers back to our brief conversation about Projective Verse (“the HEART, by way of BREATH, to the LINE”). I’m angling toward a potential for poetry to originate in some unknown plane, regulate the breath on its exit from the body, and enter another. Can the body be altered through contact with other bodies? Does poetry facilitate that? Can the body be altered through speech?
SS: I like the experience when something presents as impossible and then opens into possibility or change. Oftentimes it's an internal shift, getting out of my own way, but I also pay attention to external circumstances and the exchange between those energies. I have a tattoo that says "this too shall pass" -- something one of my grandmas used to say, which might be from the bible? It seems somehow relevant here as we retool and tinker toward liberation.
That line in Famous Hermits was leveled as a critique. That book as well as The Pasolini Book contain critiques of not poetry but poetry world and kind of a manifesto on uselessness. For context, I had recently left my Director position at The Poetry Project and was working through burnout in the desert. Poetry world (capitalism) wants to commodify us as makers of a reliable product poem that recognizes itself as moral and useful. It uses its own morality to be recognized and rewarded as successful (and controlled) by poetry world. It's a system where I only find life outside of it.
I like your last three questions and I think experientially yes but scientifically I don't know how to talk in depth about it. On the cellular and physical level I think life impacts life, like plants growing toward the sunlight. And poetry, speech, song, sound, are all in the sonic realm which can have a huge positive or negative impact on the body. So, I just skimmed this study that found that acoustic waves, even those in the audible range, can alter cellular behavior. Vocal vibrations literally move through tissues! The line I wrote about altering the human body was vibing with this kind of inquiry. Really our bodies shouldn't be as mysterious as they are to us. It's really a function of capitalism to alienate us from our own care, from what we know we know.
RLU: That’s beautiful, how you say, life impacts life. Reminds me of Octavia Butler, “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” Nothing is constant; a quality of aliveness is slippage. An unending turning. Which also runs parallel to what Anne Waldman has said about poetry, that it is a “living event.” What you were describing before is the poetry world’s ability or even proclivity to incarcerate poetics and channelize theme, form, genre, and more. Does poetry, as a living event, have the power to push back against encasing? Does it? And if poetry is a living event, and life impacts life, how does poetry impact you? This last part goes toward something that we may have already talked about, but I wanted to tie these together, if that’s ok!
SS: I think poets have to push back against this encasing. It’s not enough to question the institutions that claim to support them. Poets must become actively anti-institutional and be willing to sacrifice some of our access to those forms of power. Especially now in our current Zionist and fascist climate. To truly receive the power of living poetry, we have to reject the power structures that seek to define and contain it. Otherwise, what is it all for? Accolades—tenure, book deals, awards—and ego. The same small circle of gatekeepers continue to make decisions, often rewarding obedience, flattery, and self-congratulation over risk and truth. It’s a tremendous amount of energy poured into ego, not living poetry.
As for poetry’s impact on me, I keep turning over that word, because poetry doesn’t feel separate from me. It doesn’t arrive from the outside to do something to me. It’s more like a current or a tone I live inside of, on the best of days. So maybe it's less about impact, and more about alignment—poetry helps me to see and listen and be curious when much of life under capitalism lures us in other directions. Capitalism loves misalignment and alienation.
RLU: Yes. And I think that misalignment and alienation is distinct from imperfection. Settler-capitalism and our political economy that runs on extraction would teach us that we must aspire to perfection and/or wholeness through various consumption of goods, calving non-productive emotions and psychologies, and assimilating “difference.” Hetero-patriarchy argues there is a final form (marriage, house (settler dreams), and children (productive and “right” use of essentialized bodies) that is morally sound.
But I’m curious about your poetry’s engagement with failure—failing at womanhood/gender, failure at hyperproductivity, failure even to keep one’s mouth shut against ills of the poetry world. That last one I say because in disinvested arts spaces I feel like there’s an undercurrent of “we should just be happy to be here.” There’s suggestions or references in your poetry to the flawed living somewhere close to the divine, which reminds me of what Rabbi Menachem Mendel says, "there is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” Brokenness, or being split open, teaches us how to live. It makes me wonder if (capitalist) conceptions of wholeness are antithetical to beingness. It makes me wonder if queer failure can teach us about queer futurity. If failure keeps us moving toward that space called the future.
Maybe there isn’t enough space here for a larger discussion of queerness and ontology, but I’m wondering how you think about all this. What it brings up for you.
SS: I really like that quote. It makes me think about Bresson’s long takes of the donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar, a film that’s come up for me a few times this week. It’s almost unbearable to watch, but I love it for breaking me just enough to “teach me how to live,” as you say. His donkey meets human kindness and cruelty, and ultimately gets caught in crossfire and dies. I think it's a story about living without the illusion of control. I also realize I probably need to write about this more!
I was recently in a work meeting where executive management repeatedly invoked the phrase “this will make people whole” when discussing benefit changes. The phrase really creeped me out—a capitalist-reparative idiom disguised as wellness discourse, or more precisely, a manifestation of capitalist wellness itself. And I work at a nonprofit. I think you're right that capitalist “wholeness” is antithetical to beingness. Capitalism’s wholeness is a closed, circular system: nothing enters that hasn’t been commodified, and nothing leaves without serving the reproduction of capital. Being needs porousness and permeability.
For me, “failure” has become an important form of refusal that opens that loop. I am refusing to perform the very roles that capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and settler-colonialism rely on to sustain themselves. This failure is an opening where other ways of being and other knowledge have an entryway. I know things I know thanks to refusal, and it can feel alienating at times, because it puts one at odds, but more often quite grounding. No regrets!
I think queer failure teaches us that beingness is always provisional, shifting, and in-process, never “complete” in the capitalist sense. That incompleteness is the condition of futurity. Wholeness, if we reclaim the word, might be something more like integration with change itself—being whole because we are part of a living flux, not because we have arrived anywhere. And just thinking of civil rights, we never really arrive at being seen as fully human in the eyes of the law.
Poetry, for me, lives in the flux. It asks me only to be present to the movement. Maybe that’s why I keep thinking of Balthazar: a life moved by forces beyond his control, still fully inside the stream of living, which is sometimes really horrible!
RLU: Alright, I’ve asked you so many questions. This email exchange has energized me immensely over the past many months. I love the formality that email can offer—the venue is ripe for the long-form and personal and demands full sentences. As opposed to a call or text or Zoom, email seems to me a place (indeed, a place) where we can be properly contemplative. Which seems like a decent onramp for my final question for you, about attention. Perhaps that’s the quality I’m attuned to in regard to this months-long email exchange—that we have offered each other our attention.
In a previous interview for Lit Hub you referenced one of my favorite Simone Weil quotes — that attention is the purest form of generosity we have. Attention, something like prayer. The prefix is Latin, meaning “to” or “toward.” I like the mental image of walking toward someone as I give them my attention. That, in offering my listening ear or nonjudgmental gaze, I approach them. To attend is to close the distance between subjects. Not to reconcile or pacify, but to make proximate.
So this last question is more about life. You’re starting a new Master’s program. You’re publishing your next collection. You have a job. And a partner! How do you attend to self amid and within and as part of the commitments of your life? How do you stay proximate to yourself?
SS: Great question, and one I’ve recognized as especially important right now, heading into a new Master’s program in a hybrid field (Anthrozoology). Something has to go in order to make room. I have the image of getting into a full bathtub and water spilling over! For me, this is going to mean letting go of certain aspects of the poetry hustle—giving readings, constantly putting myself out there, writing blurbs and letters of recommendation. I don’t have the drive for it anymore, and that feels less like a loss than a kind of earned relief. I’ve published eight books with two coming out in the next year, plus a manuscript that doesn't have a publisher; the books always fall where they may, with or without my will. I also feel like I've written enough! So I feel great about taking a hiatus from writing books, as I have known it, to study animals. I’ve always been more interested in process over product, in the act of writing itself as a form of living attention. That's really all it is for me.
Alongside the commitments you mention, I also work out every day, not as a project of discipline, but as a way of staying in dialogue with myself, and to ward off certain genetic tendencies that my middle-aged body wants to express.
And yes, true, and I like that you recognize this, sustained relational intimacy requires care, intentionality, communication, and a willingness to keep learning about yourself. You can’t be lazy about it, not if you want something reciprocal and alive. For a long time, I was married to my job. Now I am wed to my actual human partner, who reciprocates my love and care. That exchange of attention makes it possible for me to give more generously elsewhere, including back to myself.
Job, of course, wants to consume us, wants to be totalizing. I’m pretty boundaried with mine. I always think of the title of the Kathy Weeks book, The Problem With Work. It is a problem for me. What keeps me grounded are my nonhuman relationships, especially with the cows (at the farm where I work). Sharing space with them restores me to myself. Their presence pulls me out of abstraction and into proximity with life and death as it is.
So attending to myself means noticing where my attention leaks away into hustle, into overwork, and rerouting it toward what sustains me: the daily practices of study, movement, love, and interspecies connection.
I've really enjoyed our email correspondence too!
New from Krupskaya Books, Stacy Szymaszek’s Essay (2025) is now available
—a luminous meditation on queer life, labor, and interspecies companion
ray levy uyeda is a poet from the Bay Area. They are a 2025 Queer | Art fellow. ray is at work on their first manuscript, AGAINST INFINITY.
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of eight books of poetry including Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017, A Year From Today (2018), The Pasolini Book (2022), and Famous Hermits (2023). A new book, Essay (Krupskaya Books, 2025), has just been published. They live in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley. Szymaszek is the Development Director for a non-profit farm where they are also a volunteer cow groomer. They run a small roving bookshop called Bos Books that focuses on literature about animals, biodiversity, farming, and more. They enjoy swimming, drawing, thrifting/book-scouting, and traveling. Szymaszek is in a Masters program in Anthrozoology where they study the relationship between humans and animals with a focus on livestock welfare and farming.