Bugging the machine
A view from above the bugs, photo credit Chris Fritton.
Bateau Press is a small press / literary journal currently housed at COA under the editorship of Dan Mahoney. Every couple of years, Bateau cycles in a new crop of student editors who read manuscripts, help select publications, design books, sew chapbooks, contact brick and mortar bookstores, run Bateau’s social media accounts, and so forth. In sum, the students are what make running a small press possible at COA. Fern is one of Bateau’s student editors and an early advocate of hunting the bugs. The letterpress covers for this year’s winner were designed and printed by Chris Fritton. To find out more about the press, Jack Giaour, or Chris Fritton, check out the Bateau website here: bateaupress.com
By Fern Paltrow ’24
In late December, I had the privilege and utmost pleasure of sitting down for a Zoom interview with poet and author Jack Giaour to discuss his soon-to-be-published chapbook, hunting the bugs.
hunting the bugs is the winner of the 2023/2024 BOOM Chapbook Competition, held yearly by Bateau Press, the letterpress publisher directed by our very own (& most beloved) COA lecturer [and COA Magazine editor] Dan Mahoney. hunting the bugs is available for purchase at bateaupress.com and select bookstores across the United States as of April 1. All chapbooks are hand sewn, with a cover designed by artist Chris Fritton. Giaour is a powerful emerging voice in the literary realm, and I hope that readers of this interview (and also people who don’t read this interview!) will consider reading his work––I can’t say enough good things about it.
Fern Paltrow '24: First, I want to congratulate you on winning the BOOM Chapbook Competition. We had over 200 submissions, and yours was a standout from the very beginning. I feel really grateful that you submitted to us and trusted Bateau with your work.
Jack Giaour: Oh, thank you so much.
FP: hunting the bugs was one of the first manuscripts I read, and I immediately fell in love. It was a very moving, emotional read, but it was also so funny! I guess, as a place to start, what inspired you to write hunting the bugs, and how long did the process take?
The bug, whether it’s a computer bug or an actual bug or a secret agent bug… It's an unwanted presence, right? It's something that has infested your home or been planted in your intimate space, that you can't get rid of.
JG: I guess the core of that book is “manna,” right? The first sequence poem. I started writing the earliest drafts of what would become that poem over COVID because I was reading a lot about... I laugh at myself a little bit, but I was reading this big book about biochemical warfare in Afghanistan and Vietnam, and that was really dark and disturbing. So I was writing poetry to work through that. But as I started writing and did more reading and investigating and thinking, the poem obviously got away. So it's not about biochemical warfare anymore.
I started thinking lucidly about the relationship between the military and masculinity, and specifically how queer men get caught in the middle. I kept running into stories about people who had joined the US military because they were gay, because they were trans, because they weren't accepted in their home communities, because the military offered the only pathway that they had toward education. But I also found that a lot of queer narratives in the military were not necessarily about people looking for economic or educational opportunities, but for legitimacy. People felt that having a military background secured their masculinity.
Take, for example, Vietnam vets. Things were so fraught and complicated for them, but one thing they didn’t have to worry about was people questioning their manhood. You could be gay under the radar if you were a vet.
I started reading and reading, and I got stuck on that theme.
I'm not a vet. So I was very conscious of that while writing that poem. I didn't want it to appropriate anybody's experience or steal anybody's story. Actually, a lot of the scenes in the poem are scenes from my own life, but obviously not the military scenes. But each character has an anecdote from their personal life, and those all do come from my own personal experience.
I was reading and thinking a lot about the US military. But my first male partner was Israeli. He was a combat vet, had terrible PTSD, had a lot of problems that he inherited from his combat time. He had a very complicated relationship with his sexuality. That relationship didn't last because he went back to Israel, and effectively went back into the closet. He said to me, This was fun and I care about you, but my family and friends can't know about you. He felt that he could not safely be openly gay in Israel, that he would lose his credibility and all of his relationships. That experience ended up being in the poem as well, and was in the back of my head as I was doing all of this reading about other queer experiences in the US military.
Jack Giaour, author of hunting the bugs.
FP: Queer US military history is a subject that is not widely documented, but I imagine there is a long history there.
JG: I was thinking again about this weird relationship between like, Okay, if I join the military, then people won't necessarily know that I'm gay, right? Or, If I join the military, this is a way for me to transition. I found that a lot of trans people had joined the military either as a way to transition or as a way to… If people were having feelings that maybe they were trans-feminine or trans-female, they were thinking, Okay, I'm gonna join the military, and that's gonna make me a man, right?
A lot of the wars that I was reading about were contemporary conflicts. So, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Syria. I started reading about experiences in the US military, but obviously on the other side of those conflicts is the Russian military and the Russian military experience. I found a lot of interesting echoes between American experiences and Russian experiences of the same wars. Reading accounts from both sides felt like reading two sides of the same coin. I'm looking at these two contemporary world powers wreaking havoc over and over again in different parts of the world, and watching Afghanistan and then Syria and now Ukraine get caught in what is essentially an economic conflict. I’m looking at the devastation these wars wreak on the soldiers who are fighting them, and on the citizens of the nations that act as the aggressor or oppressor.
That poem was very, very long and very heavy, and I ended up cutting it down. I think it’s much better that way. The poems around that poem in hunting the bugs come from all over the place. Some of them I wrote the same month that I submitted the chapbook. Some of them were very old poems that I had reworked. But I think they all spoke to things I couldn’t stop thinking about. That’s why I gave it that title. The bug, whether it’s a computer bug or an actual bug or a secret agent bug… It's an unwanted presence, right? It's something that has infested your home or been planted in your intimate space, that you can't get rid of. So there are lots of bugs in that poem, whether it's the KGB, or the mosquito in the poem to Gabriel, or even just intrusive thoughts––there were a lot of things that I was working through that I felt like I couldn't get out of my head.
FP: You do this thing throughout “manna” where you present characters who, on the surface, are cold, emotionless, dangerous individuals, people we’d like to think we have nothing in common with, but you imbue them with humanity, and give them very writerly qualities. Stephen is a particularly striking example of this because you introduce him as someone who visits quite a lot of death on unsuspecting innocents, and suggest that even the people who know him conceive of him as unsentimental and incapable of remorse. But your vision of Stephen is more nuanced; you write him as someone who has a clear literary sensibility and strong sensitivity to beauty, even in the precise moments that he drops bombs from his plane.
One thread I picked up on was this notion that perhaps there is a poet in everyone; perhaps everyone has this little human desire to write their story down, to wield a pen. Was that your intention?
JG: Yes. Kind of. You put it so well, and I would love to say that I was very lucidly doing that, but not necessarily. I had this strong engagement with people who were trying to tell their stories or who were trying to explain or work through what had happened to them, what they had seen, how they had ended up where they ended up. I think a lot of times people end up in positions of power and don't realize how much power they have until they've used it destructively. And then there's this moment of like, Oh my God. How did I get here? How did this happen? How did I become this? And I was definitely interested in that moment.
FP: I feel, with hunting the bugs, that you have done so much to capture the ruins we find ourselves in. I think your manuscript is extremely timely, though I desperately wish that it wasn’t. There are these lines about eggshell cities, you know, on to the next eggshell city, and here we are watching these horrors unfold on our phones, seeing Gaza completely leveled and destroyed; we are bearing witness to the incalculable human suffering and loss that makes the eggshell city a feasible concept. To me the most poignant, heartbreaking lines of your whole manuscript are:
there’s no
story
here
just
old
old
news
What was in your head when you wrote these lines?
I'm exhausted with the media inundation on the one hand, but then also feeling like, okay, if we stop paying attention to this, that doesn't mean that it goes away.
JG: At that point, I was so tired. I had been engaging so deeply. I'd been learning about biochemical warfare and listening to these veteran stories. And then I was trying to get more civilian voices in there, so I was reading refugee accounts and then, while I was writing this manuscript, the US pulled out of Afghanistan, and that created a power vacuum, and the Taliban took over. The Syrian Civil War is ongoing––the US has pulled out of it, but it's still happening. And I think a lot of people don't realize that. So I'm following these wars or these conflicts that are still happening, that don't show up on the news, that are kind of old news, right? I was thinking, God, these conflicts are trendy for a while, and then they go away in the American public eye.
But for the people who live there, they do not go away. In fact, they're still happening with just as much horror and violence and destruction as they were when the media eye was on them. So that creeped me out and saddened me. Russia invaded Ukraine, and all of a sudden we had a brand new conflict all over the news. And so of course that line is about Ukraine. And now we've just had this horrible resurgence of conflict in Israel. A lot of people feel like this is new, right? They haven't been thinking about Israel and Palestine. So now it's a big news story and it feels fresh, like something that happened out of nowhere. But it's not, right? That conflict has always been there. Of course, what happened with Hamas is really horrific. And what we're seeing in Gaza now is unprecedented. But this unprecedented horror did not come out of nowhere. This conflict has been bubbling along, whether the media's been paying attention to it or not.
I'm exhausted with the media inundation on the one hand, but then also feeling like, okay, if we stop paying attention to this, that doesn't mean that it goes away. I’m trying to reconcile the feeling of not wanting to engage with it anymore, but I also feel like I'm responsible to engage with it, if only to just witness it and acknowledge that it's happening.
FP: It's interesting to me that you were talking about literal news, because when I read those lines, it made me think about history repeating itself, and how we seem unable to learn. We just keep repeating the same mistakes, with grave, cascading consequences. In a similar vein, my favorite poem in the whole series is “the water.” The closing lines of this poem also landed really hard for me:
that his eye pain and watery eyes
belong on a different kind of chart
that these words
answer a different kind
of question
a question that no one is asking
It made me think of politically engineered silences and gaps.
JG: So much in that poem, or in that book, but that poem specifically, is thinking about power dynamics. Who gets to decide what? Here’s this person who on the one hand is some kind of survivor in this conflict but who's dependent on foreign aid, who speaks a language that's not his native language. But how much is that aid actually helping? Why does that aid have to be there in the first place? How complicit is the nation that's sending the aid? How complicit is the nation that's sending the most aid? How complicit is the nation involved in the conflict in the first place? So yeah, you're absolutely right. But none of these poems are riddles. I'm okay with people bringing their own meaning to the poems. It's okay for my words to carry your meaning, right? Once it's in the hands of a reader, now those poems are the reader's poems. I'm letting them go into the world.
Sewing some books, photo credit Ben Troutman '24.
FP: How is hunting the bugs rooted in queer and trans literary histories? How does your work seek to carry forth those legacies?
JG: I think on the one hand we have a lot of queer people in what we would consider our canon. But we also have a lot of queer people that get bounced out of that canon. And a lot of in-between. With my book specifically, one of the writers that I really engaged with was Virginia Woolf, who is not American, but British, but who definitely had some queer tendencies. One of her most beautiful books is Jacob’s Room. She was dealing with the after-effects of World War I and challenging the narrative of the soldier as hero, but without demonizing the soldier. The entire novel is the life of Jacob, who's a pretty normal person, and then gets killed in World War I, and that's kind of it. That's the whole book. I think the point that she was trying to get at is that soldiers are people, and we're sending normal people in droves to be slaughtered, over what? What is being accomplished with this?
I was thinking a lot about Virginia Woolf as a queer writer who, like me, is not a vet and never went to war herself, but was surrounded by people who were affected by these conflicts. She refused to engage with it in a way that the rest of the literary world seemed to expect.
Also, Nightboat Books has two anthologies of trans poets and poetics: Troubling the Line and We Want It All. Those anthologies are incredible. I, as a trans writer, am constantly looking for other trans voices. And we are hard to find, especially historically. Unfortunately, sometimes that's intentional. Before the more recent queer liberation and Stonewall and all of this, I think a lot of trans people intentionally flew under the radar; they didn’t want to be seen as trans.
Finding trans people in the historical and the literary record in particular can be frustrating. So having these anthologies of contemporary trans writers was great. But what I was really taking from those anthologies was the way that trans writers write about the body. And so in hunting the bugs I was trying to insert the physicality of the speaker into the narrative. The speaker's body is an important part of the poem, of every poem, or is something that should be considered in the poem. Whether it's the body as a sexual presence, a potential corpse, or the physical encasing of our soul, right? In “why i can’t get out of bed,” you have a narrator that's contemplating killing themself. But a big part of the suicidal ideation is about your body and potentially wanting to be released from it, right?
A third queer source of inspiration is an anthology called Out of the Blue that was published in San Francisco in the '90s. It’s an anthology of queer Russian poets that starts in the early 19th century and goes all the way up to the '90s when the anthology was published. It was engaging with mostly gay male narratives. There are some lesbian poets in that anthology but it's mostly gay men. But I was engaging with them from this different perspective, right? From a Russian perspective and a Russian historical context. I was trying to escape an American-centric queer poetics. I wanted to engage with a more international queer poetics that moves outside of Anglo-America.
FP: The book certainly points in that direction. Anything else you would like to add before we close?
JG: I'm glad that the book is where it is. It feels like it's in good hands. And it feels like it's growing, right? Having a cover, and paper samples, it's... I don't know, it's very exciting to see it become a physical thing, not just a strange hallucination that I've had in my head for a while.
coming down boylston street (boston pride 2023)
tonight forget how time rebuilds experience tonight just decompose
and let the blackout envelope you
no matter the transmission from mind to telephone screen the signal’s always shit
the boy on netflix clutches the man with the x-ray eyes once i fell in love with a cop and he loved me back
the snake chokes on the mouse most hunts are unsuccessful and what i mean by that is
life in the underworld is not what you think it is
it’s the sun that gives the shadows their shapes and what i mean by that is
his love for me did not stop my cop from being a fascist
so tonight turn off the lights tonight trade underwater for an autumn forest
just stand there and stare into the canopy
listen from the bottoms of your feet to the sighing of the leaves
that once would sway overhead for miles and miles in every direction
your eyes may water but never again let them run
the time to cry has passed
—Jack Giaour from hunting the bugs, Bateau Press 2024
