These pieces act both separately and in conjunction under a title of “A Performance of Ghosts & Concessions for You, My Sins” in which I, an academic by training, and poet in praxis, yield the stories of my patriline by blood, by force and body. All these pieces are screen-captures, aside from the last three poems (“I have an appointment” and “My Body”) which runs 400 words total.
This set of pieces give the reader a crash course to the self-de(con)struction I experienced as a trans-disabled person in Fall 2021. The purpose of their presence was not only as an outlet for my rage, but a way of getting to know my inspirations and directions as a man without present men. ‘Men’ in these pieces are defined individually by name and broadly by institution and often move fluidly in interpretation; there cannot be and will not be a single treatise to that identity in my work – and that’s what these pieces stand for.
Though all of these are poems, they fall under visual art as they play with the visual space poetry occupies as an art, literary and academic medium. In an academic setting, these pieces hold no value, instead to be revised and taken a part for analysis and digestibility. That is hence why both “DRAFT 3”, “Figure 2.” and “My Body” have two different revisions – reflecting the process and result of cutting an experience down for clarity and reach that is often required for publishing in both written arenas of academic research and poetic submissions.
My intent with this series is to expose the liminality occupied by the poet as a medium – a medium for analysis, discovery, and deconstruction of one masculine identity. It is to expose the incomprehensibility of this embodiment – the mystery of never knowing how, what and who to embody. These works, like my body and lineage are ephemeral: always changing and breaking for your mirrors.
In brief, my work has to do with:
(a) the ephemeral masculine figure and poetic speaker
(b) the breakage of written mediums through revision
This series not only reveals the reader these (missing) theoretical relationships but draws a curtain on who and what you’re looking at and for in those relationships, a form of protection and harm.
As an up and coming graduate student in a Gender Studies Masters program, I have presented at two regional conferences on trans- and disabled kinship networks in literature and singular communities. Further, I have an upcoming publication in Women & Therapy’s special issue on “Feminist Therapy with Transgender, Non-Binary, and Gender-Expansive People.” These publications comprise of diverse discussions within frayed kinship and intersections between disabled, displaced, and trans- identities within liminality.
-- Glik/G Koffink
Glik/G Koffink (xe/xem/xyr) is a first-year M.A. student in Oregon State University’s Gender Studies program. Xur care work centers around trans-, disabled and neurodivergent (ND) kinship networks in the liminal spaces of harm, rage and grief. In the present, xe designs and holds workshops for the creation of accessible 'survival zines' for xyr extended kin network with the goal of off-line publication.