jaz papdopoulos is an interdisciplinary writer, educator and video artist. They hold an MFA from the University of British Columbia and are a Lambda Literary Fellow. A self-described emotionalist and avid Anne Carson fan, jaz is interested in media, horticulture, lyricism, nervous systems, anarchism and erotics. Originally from Treaty 1 territory, jaz currently resides on unceded Syilx lands. I Feel That Way Too is their debut poetry collection.
I Feel That Way Too is a stunning work that rips news from the headlines and our social consciousness and pares them down to a sharp blade. These poems remind us that history repeats itself and that we carry collective scars from judicial failure and the harm of the patriarchy.
Interview by Alli Vail
Alli Vail (AV): The beginning is my favourite because of the playing with words and the juxtapositions you offer about asking the right questions and telling the “truth.” What questions did you ask yourself while you were writing “The Rules?”
jaz papadopoulos (jp): While writing “The Rules,” I pulled pretty heavily from the Jian Ghomeshi verdict. The entire twenty-something pages of the court verdict is available online. While reading it, I held an eye to its prescriptions, contradictions, and just unrealistic expectations for the complainants. For example, inconsistencies in how a complainant remembered an event from ten years prior (that also included drinking alcohol) was seen as suspicious. Uncertainty about one’s memory was also seen as suspicious.
To me, remembering new things––or feeling uncertain about one’s memory––about a night a decade prior would be extremely normal. The judge wrote in the verdict, “‘Navigating this sort of proceeding is really quite simple: tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” (line [119]). And yet, nothing about his expectations of the complainants seemed simple or reasonable to me. So, I suppose I asked myself, what are the so-called “simple” rules that this man wanted these women to follow, in order to be believable?
AV: You write about the Jian Gomeshi trial in such a way that I felt I was back reading the headlines and embracing my fury about how it was being covered. Did you work on these poems while it was happening, or after, and how did that impact the creative choices you made?
jp: In 2016 when the Ghomeshi trial was taking place, I was in my undergrad taking courses in Critical Theory. I had just finished clown school, and had just started experimenting with experimental writing as a way of “clowning” language-–interrupting the power dynamics of The Word, and trying to communicate something more visceral/embodied/truthful. This is all fraught but I won’t labour on it, lol. So, yes, inevitably I did a lot of writing about the trial at the time, and some of those pieces did survive all the book’s iterations and make it into the final manuscript. But mostly, the poems were written from 2020-2021.
My writing process is very archival and procedural. I look back at what I’ve written about a topic, I categorize it into themes and images and notice the repetitions. I do a bunch of random research and eventually web all the thoughts back together (ie. lipstick runes lead to lipstick ingredients lead to carmine, which reminds me of Jessica Rabbit, which reminds me of how my second wave feminist mother was very particular about my exposure to media-approved femininity…). The narrative revealed itself to me slowly over time. I’m more of an archeologist than a planner.
AV: There’s a heart-wrenching stanza: “It is impossible for anything shaped as a woman / to be well understood / especially in public.” This feels so true and real to me — do you think we’re getting any better about allowing women to be more than one thing? (I’m also thinking of this in the context of the wringer Kamala Harris is going to go through).
jp: I don’t think we’re getting any better at allowing women––or, people perceived as fitting into the social role of women––to be more than their social category. To be honest, in the current moment of growing fascism, I think we’re getting worse. I adhere to a generally Foucaultian perspective on how power moves in society (also fraught, but let’s continue), which in this case means that the male social category gains its power specifically in its opposition to a female category. Our global era of rising fascism means stricter adherence to power structures. Trad wifes and abortion bans and whatever else all represent a broad push to shove “women” back into a rigid, narrow, subservient identity.
I think any “female” public figure goes through this, from Harris to Hilary Clinton to Tonya Harding (the “You’re Wrong About” podcast has many episodes of maligned women). In the case of Harris, I do worry that all the discourse about her identity––being a woman, being Black, being mixed-race––ultimately distracts from her politics, which I see as very violent and in line with fascist agendas. But ultimately that still maintains the truth of “It is impossible for anything shaped as a woman / to be well understood / especially in public.”
We want her to be good because her identity represents something (hope, maternal care, anti-racism, etc), but this is a distraction from the truth of her. She is a former prosecutor, she’s anti-sex work, she promotes tough border politics and unequivocal support of Israel. However, we should be able to judge her by her politics and not her gender identity, which, as you allude to, I don’t think we do.
A post-script here: All of this felt difficult and annoying to write about because it’s dealing with gender in such a binary way. I am genderqueer and generally opposed to binary thinking, but when I’m trying to write about power dynamics that occur in large-scale binaries…agh it’s frustrating. I tried to highlight the failure of binaries here by using the language “anything shaped as a woman,” because it’s not really about whether someone is actually a woman, but whether they’re placed into that social category.
AV: Barbie makes an appearance in a few poems as such a strong metaphor and stand-in. I’m curious — did you write these before or after the movie came out and what was the impact of that for you?
jp: The Barbie movie really threw a wrench in my plans. lol. Barbie is a huge figure in my life, and I write about and think about her a lot. The initial manuscript was written pre-movie, but Barbie’s cultural significance wildly changed through and after the film; I had to re-write most of her appearances, because the poems no longer meant what I intended them to mean. I credit the “Blame it on Barbie” episode of American Hysteria for guiding me to a more well-researched and rigorous understanding of her!
AV: Can you tell us more about the “stay-calm-industrial-complex” which appears in page 75 and you credit to podcaster Michael Hobbes (who is great). What resonated about this phrase for you?
jp: This is a great question. I guess we talk about “industrial complexes” all the time, but I’ve never considered a specific definition of the term…just an embodied vibe. Reflecting on this now, I guess I wanted to refer to all the ways we’re told not to have feelings, and how that stoicism benefits and is enforced by societal power structures.
I think a lot about how for humans to be good workers under capitalism, we basically need to be separated from our bodies and our feelings. No one wants to work all day; many of us just half-dissociate as the time passes. Bosses tell us to leave our personal lives at home. You aren’t supposed to be angry or sad, but how can we survive this world we’re in and never have feelings?! Capitalism, imperialism, and oppression in general need us to “stay calm and carry on,” and I felt like that also translates to sexual assault trials and their proceedings––emotionality is undesirable, so to be taken seriously, one must be calm (but not too calm), participate in bureaucracy, and altogether maintain a demeanor that is palatable to those in charge in any given situation.
AV: You describe the ways in which women change themselves to fit on page 69 in such a visceral and physical way that it pushes readers into reliving those moments — I flashed back to being a teen and ripping out eyebrows in the mirror, sure thinner brows would “fix” everything. It’s a stunning piece. What did you draw on to create such a powerful and poetic moment?
jp: What I think is powerful in writing is specificity and viscerality. I want to give voice to body-memory––my body remembers this, does my story evoke a memory in your body? It’s not so much about the literal surface level of what happened (ie. eyebrow plucking, though of course many of us relate to that specific thing), but the way the eyebrow plucking represents a certain rejection and erasure of the body (something almost everyone can relate to in the gut, even if not the brow).
I often use feelings wheels to get at the heart of what I’m trying to communicate––I’ll go line by line and ask myself to find the most precise emotion possible to associate with the line, and then rework the text until it’s very emotionally-precise. I’m also just a person raised by a parent who was very interested in somatics. My mom is an occupational therapist, and she was always guiding and supporting me to observe and understand the intricate inner world of my vagal system, my vestibular system, how my body informed my thoughts and vice versa. I’m grateful for that.
jaz papadopoulos appears in Edge Effect: Poetry of Transgression and Transformation on Oct. 18 at 7:30 p.m.