"Everything is worse now":

Chloë Proctor Interrogates JD Howse

Chloë Proctor: Hi JD. First of all, how dare you?, under whose jurisdiction?, and what gives you the right? But also, as a longtime reader of your work I have enjoyed many brushes with iterations of Noises Again over the years. I’m interested in this body of work as an active document of your practice; in ways it might have changed its shape over time, crossed paths with other projects of yours or appeared to you in other guises over the years.   

JD Howse: it's good to be able to talk with you about this project because you were there when I started working on it and you're one of the few people who have seen if not all then the vast majority of it. I've self-published a number of pamphlets, extracts, collections, and prints from the work over the years and the Romeo and Juliet aspect was published as a collection by Briony Hughes’ Osmosis Press, but there's hundreds of pages that have never progressed beyond collages on sheets of paper, and pages that were published in those extracts that haven't made it into this final publication which I view as a complete version of the project. 

Noises Again started the day of the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016 when I made a collage trying to process my grief. I think at the time I felt quite uneasy about the prevalent neoliberal idea that gay rights had been ‘won’ in the wake of marriage equality passing in the US and U.K. I think Pulse was a rude awakening for a lot of people that homophobia was still alive and well, but if you were paying any sort of attention to the news that wouldn't have been something you had needed to be made aware of. The idea of gay rights being acceptable in society was only ever a veneer, one that has steadily degraded over the last decade, particularly in regards to life becoming progressively more and more unsafe for transgender people. 

I started thinking about queer history not as a linear march from repression to acceptance, but a history of individual people and actions that had been repressed, erased, misrepresented, and misunderstood with waves of varying intensity. The Susan Howe quote of poetry lifting from the dark side of history became particularly resonant with the project; I actually think you bought me The Europe of Trusts for my 22nd birthday... As for how the project has changed over time, at a certain point I had to reckon with the inherent instability of the project. I could have kept on forever throwing scraps into the aether, and maybe that would have been a more true expression of melding form and subject, but ultimately I came to accept that the work was political and had something to say; there is no point in that being the case if it does not resolve and say what it is saying. It's been 10 years since Pulse and thus 10 years of Noises Again, so I wanted to set down a finished edition of the work, albeit one that argues with its finality, and show how my exploration of gay history has been impacted by my own living through gay history. Everything is worse now! If you are gay or trans you either know that or you are in denial. It feels kinda shit to have called it, but I guess in a way what started as an exploration of history has turned into a documentation of that decline. 

CP: I love that sense of urgency in the recognition of the political value of the work. It really positions the text in the world as it is now, depressing as that might be. I think with long form, extended inquiries like this, there is the feeling that the text can - and maybe should - constantly be activated, involuted. The text remains Open (in a Lyn Hejinian sense). But, at some point, the reader needs to be allowed in. I wonder if you’ve had any - have dared to have any - dreams of how Noises Again might find new modes of exploring its subject, now that you’ve “called it”? I know that’s a terribly quaint question, forgive me, but I guess I’m asking, do you think the inquiry continues in its readership?

JDH: I suppose part of the project is that I'm pointing to the gaps. I never tell a full story but there are countless references to people and events throughout the text, and they're moments that I found records of and considered interesting or important enough to want to fold into the fragments of what I was doing. People can follow those breadcrumb trails and find something more academic or journalistic or biographical that, as much as possible, tells the full story, and that pointing to onward research is a large part of what I wanted the text to do when I started it. But equally the text is not just its sources; in that Hejinian way of the text remaining open I hope there's enough there thematically that people can follow the threads of texture, sensuality, violence, fragmentation, romance, tragedy, erotica, the body, absence, neuroqueerness, erasure, etc etc and find something in the text that forces them to think in a new way. That's why I read poetry, to interact with ways of understanding I could not otherwise conceptualise. 

CP: “To interact with ways of understanding I could not otherwise conceptualise”: that's so beautiful and so prescient in the way you've used fragmentation throughout. You mentioned the “inherent instability” of Noises Again and I think cut-up or fragmentary methods really lend themselves to a specific instability of “sense”: to “make sense of” the text you have to interact with the cross sections, the absences, and the uncanny ways in which the words themselves have been “lifted” (from articles, Shakespeare, pornography etc). It's painterly, (readers of your Just Meat Not God will recognise that in your craft) and there's something in the visual dissection of text that gets at the horror of homophobia, here, in ways that maybe a straightforward lyric poetics wouldn't. Do you think there's something in the undoing or distortion of traditional sense-making/understanding that changes our engagement with an idea?

JDH: It’s a difficult question to answer, because I think in a lot of ways I’m ambivalent to an audience’s engagement with an idea knowing that there’s a degree to which I cannot be in control of it. I think this comes from the experience of having autism, and knowing that no matter how hard you try you are always cut off; I can never fully understand another person and there’s no way for me to fully explain myself, and that leaks conceptually into my writing in a lot of different ways. I resonate so much with Hejinian’s idea of an open text because beyond the closed text being dull I also view it as a fool’s errand because inherently different readers bring different things to the table. I’m not entirely sure I would use ‘horror’ in relation to homophobia in the text, for example, but that is completely valid for you to say. For me the homophobia in the text is more quotidian than the word horror suggests… This is part of what I mean when I say the text has a sensory or textural element to it. I think it’s felt as much as it is understood, which links back to your point of the work being painterly. Aside from the obvious fact that the poetry is arranged visually on the page, and the fact that my line drawings are a major aspect of the book, the pages are painterly in that the fragments of text are applied physically to the page in the same way paint is applied physically to a canvas. 

CP: That's an interesting distinction. I suppose I felt horror in the scale of the source material but also in this constant conflict. You have the characters from Romeo and Juliet listing atrocities, the appearance of which is unemotional on the page, while the lovers' words are omitted. I get the feeling that the lovers are constantly trying to exert themselves - their sexual and romantic autonomy - on this textual battleground. Is this something you were thinking about? I'm reminded of your line, “Conflict is the original meaning”. 

JDH: It was very early on in the project’s creation that I started calling it a ‘tragedy,’ which at first was more to do with side-stepping questions of what I was doing ‘was’ exactly and letting it exist on its own terms. It was only after that was established that I started drawing in elements from Shakespeare; the first name of the work was The Changeling after Middleton’s revenge tragedy. The subtitle ‘this is a dagger’ is a corruption from MacBeth while the final title ‘Noises Again’ is a stage direction from Romeo and Juliet. I have a lot to say about how renaissance and early english writing informs my work, but I will spare you from too much of an infodump about that here!

Romeo and Juliet penetrates popular culture in an incredibly unique way; it’s a shorthand for romance, for love, and then when people are confronted with what the play actually is, it’s about cycles of revenge, and purposeless violence, and the corruption of innocence. Your phrase ‘textural battleground’ is really interesting to me because I do think Romeo and Juliet is an incredibly brutal text that almost works as an early work of genre-play. Shakespeare sets up the first act of the play very similarly to how he establishes the conflicts and misunderstandings of his comic romances, but then instead of finding clever ways to resolve them he twists the knife and everything descends into violence and tragedy. 

I liked that twisting, that subversion, and wanted to pay attention to it. The play opens with Romeo and Juliet having their dialogue completely absent, and as the play goes along they find their voices, but I don’t think what they have to say offers any kind of revelation or closure given the found-text extracts from articles about hate crimes continue unabated. They do not rise above the torrent of violence being uttered by the other characters, all they can do is attempt to make sense of it until the whole thing falls apart. I like the idea of silence as being meaningful; is the blank space beside Romeo and Juliet’s names something that has been erased or something that has not been said? I like the idea of taking a play script, something that is meant to be linear and tell a set story, and instead choose to play into the way a script is an impetus for performance, something inert that must be brought to life… Ultimately I think playing with Romeo and Juliet as a text was a way for me to lure in an expectation of a text that was about romance, and subvert that into a text about violence, oppression, and the conflict between queer people and the people in society who want us dead. How do we make sense in the face of that? I don’t think I have the answer, but equally I don’t think that dull platitudes like ‘it gets better’ and ‘love wins’ hold any greater meaning in the face of the sheer force of oppression that we must navigate. I’m making it all sound quite bleak, and maybe it is. There’s dicks in the book too! So that’s something! 

CP: There are! Let's talk about those. So, Romeo and Juliet runs like a spine through the book, but the vast majority of it is taken up with visual poems, taking the form of collages of cut up text. These painterly pieces are spliced through with your line drawings of bodies in acts of sex. You say “love wins” (and other platitudes) aren't an adequate revelation, but I can't help but feel that love, or at least sex, is winning in these pieces. You could say that the fight continues between the source text and the lovers here: there's a violence in the cut-up form, but aguably a weightier abrasion in the depictions of fucking, the simplicity of the line drawings, the rawness of them… It  all  builds this palimpsest/palimptext of… of what? Smut and grief? It's thrilling. What was your thought process in curating an interaction between these elements? 

JDH: I think smut and grief is a good way to phrase it in brief. I don’t like to think of the images in the text as performing a singular function so it’s hard to collect my thoughts here without imposing anything on them. I have a lot of reservations about how sex-negative quote unquote “activism” can be around queerness and gay rights. Because this is what they hate us for, right? Like, at the base level, they hate us because of who we’re fucking. In the late 2000s, when I was a teenager, there was a sex negative form of respectability politics around gay rights where it was all about marriage, 2.5 kids, house in the suburbs, we’re just like you. But that rhetoric feels very exclusionary to me, it diminishes anyone who cannot or does not want to exist within that societal structure. Since the pandemic I’ve seen a lot of incredibly sex negative discourse online from people younger than me, this weird kind of queer morality culture that has come from the panopticon of social media… I think there’s an important message to be conveyed about queer history, where we came from, and how we have been viewed by society. In Britain, the earliest records of gay people existing come from court records, reports of crimes, the buggery act, etc, and I draw from those sources, often in scans of the original manuscripts, in this book. I think it’s necessary to line up those things with images of gay sex and really push the point in people’s faces; even before the social identity of being gay, queer, trans, etc, existed they already hated us for who we are and what we do. That’s not going anywhere without a fight. 

The rawness of the images comes from how they were made; I draw very quickly from reference images taken from pornography, anatomical guides, beefcake magazines, and gay sex guides, and compose directly onto trancing paper so I can glue text to both the over and underside and create a sense of texture and depth in the work once it has been scanned and re-printed. I suppose the first half of this explanation makes them seem like the images are meant to be combative or abrasive in some way, but I like how lyrical and fluid they can seem just as much. I like the sense of anonymity they suggest, the way the figures blur into each other and the faces are either barely-there outlines or completely absent. None of the text in this book was written by me, so including elements that I have drawn by hand alongside the very physical process of me placing the text on the page is a way of me impressing my authorship and my voice upon the page. The most overtly palimpsest section of the text, occurring between acts iii and iv, is also the most personal to me. It’s a sequence where I’ve hand-written text messages I received from a guy I was hooking up with written over the top of a book by a psychoanalyst about fairy tales, which have had lines from the texts of two homoerotic novels from the 1800s placed over the top of them. I don’t think gay sex can be meaningfully extracted from understandings of gay life, history, and politics. 

At times the images can be tender, at times violent, at times deeply sad, at times they feel like they’re disintegrating and a viewer must work to discern the figures from a tangle of lines. There’s complexity there, just like sex itself. I think in a lot of ways my writing as a whole explores the gaps between the physical and conceptual body, the absence between what is understood and what is expressed, the way we exist in both a physical and mental world, with the two being so driven by each other but unable to actually make contact. Al Anderson once said my writing makes him consider a poetics of hopelessness, but I think perhaps loneliness is more what I’m interested in exploring. It’s a kind of hauntology that grasps desperately at ontology and comes back only with inadequacy and further questions. Perhaps that is also why I am so fascinated by things like form and structure, but willing to break them for my own ends, or why my work acquires these almost baroque motifs that reoccur so much I lose the ability to explain their significance. Again, it’s very driven by neurodivergence. 

CP: You are clearly pulling from a wide range of influences and interests. Renaissance literature, baroque motifs… and Susan Howe is ever present in the cut-up sections of the book. Can you expand on some of your poetic influences?

Susan Howe is a huge influence on me, not just visually in the way she works with scraps of cut up text in her visual poetry, but also in the way she approaches research and archive work, though possibly I am more of a maximalist than Howe. In this book I’m drawing from hundreds and hundreds of sources where she tends to keep hers quite paired back and focused. The other biggest influence on the book is the work of Laura Grace Ford, and particularly her Savage Messiah project. I think that comes across visually, but also in the way she’s working with hauntology as a framework for her creative practice, the sense of things being lost as they’re being recorded. Obviously I’d be remiss if I claimed not to be influenced by gay poets who’ve come before me, though I think the way their influence comes across in this text is slightly esoteric. 

Hannah Weiner’s idea of trans-space communication, and making the page ‘perform’ the voices upon it was something I thought about a lot when I started the project; a sort of seance collective-memory. Redell Olsen speaks a lot about the texture of language, an idea that is hugely influential in this work. That sense of texture carries over into the references to music throughout the text, particularly the music of Burial and Grouper, and the way they work with hauntology. Speaking of which, Derrida and Fisher really inform the way I approach my work, its simultaneous sense of being and un-being, the idea of there being both more and less than what’s on the page… Then finally tragedies are a huge influence on me, both renaissance revenge plays and the work of greek playwrights like Aeschylus, which I’m focusing on for a current project. At their best, these tragedies make the very language itself violent, even when not explicitly depicting violence, which is an idea this project draws upon, and follows over from my debut collection, where that idea was used in lyric verse. 

CP: I’d love to know what you’re seeking or searching for in your source texts. While you may be more maximalist than Howe in your archival selections, is there something specific you look for when you decide what, and what not, to use? 

JDH: A lot of the text is taken from old non-fiction books about gay issues, from the 70s-90s, which I bought second hand. I go to Gays the Word and Housmans a lot and they both have extensive used books sections. I would read through them adding tags on interesting pages and then photocopy them in the office. I also spent a lot of time on the internet just following things down rabbit holes and screenshotting interesting text then printing it off. There’s lots of different sections in the text, so what I was looking for and how I isolated what ended up on the page really varied. Sometimes it’s quite instinctual, just taking a pair of scissors to a page and then rifling through the results to see if anything caught my eye. In the sections that draw from The Anatomy of Melancholy and Teleny it was much more considered and I was cutting out specific lines I wanted to use. I enjoy working with a processual creative process rather than a procedural one. Obviously I really enjoy elements of chance and randomness, but I want to be the author of my work and to be considered in where I’m spatially placing something on a page or the order in which I’m arranging text. Really what I’m searching for in a source text is what I feel I need to be there. It’s like a string of associations in a line of thought; text that seems to leap between different things I’m already considering stand out to me and so I isolate them and try to find some way to use them in the text. 

CP: I'm enjoying that image of you weaving phrases/sentences/stanzas together as such a tangible process; the hand of the author really touching the words. As a gay man interacting with and adding your own voice to your history, did this process alter your connection with it in some way?

JDH: I think it’s incredibly important to know your own history and I get very worried when people aren’t learning it, especially when we as queer people aren’t told about our past in school and need to learn it for ourselves. The AIDS Crisis is so important for young gay people to know about because its ramifications are still being felt today; just because PrEP exists now doesn’t mean that we aren’t still continually impacted by it. I think there’s a troubling sense of not understanding where our identities and our culture comes from, and with that comes a lack of understanding how fragile it is and how easily we can slip back into being persecuted, which is to say nothing of the countries around the world where homosexuality is still illegal and it’s not possible to live openly as a trans person. I think what this project did in getting me right into the weeds of it, was realising how little I knew and how important it was to educate myself. It also created this sense of pride in me, knowing how much gay and trans people have achieved and under what circumstances, it creates this sense of lineage and continuity which I think we as a community are good at talking the talk about but quite bad at actually doing the work and engaging with the culture that got us to where we are today. Honestly I don’t know if I’ve come away from this project with any great revelation or any sense of a conclusion, any core pearl of wisdom I want to impart. But maybe that in itself is the core of it; the sense that so much has been lost and it is impossible to understand the full scope of it, and so that process of education must be ongoing, and something I must always be engaged with. 

Things are worse now than when I started this project, and that feels awful but it needs to be reckoned with. Rights are hard won and easily lost; you need only look at how quickly abortion rights have taken a barbaric backslide in the US to see that. The UK government is slowly rolling back protections for transgender people, and the media is spreading dangerous rhetoric and outright lies about them that is causing an already vulnerable minority to face even more hardships. Any gay person who sees what is happening to trans people and doesn’t think they’re next is horrifically misguided. I am mortified by the rampant transphobia in our society, the rampant racism, rampant xenophobia, rampant misogyny, and that is before I even start to discuss the way I have felt my own personal experiences of ableism, homophobia, and classism worsen in the last decade. Ultimately what this project has taught me is that history is happening, right now, to all of us. We cannot be passive. We need to be alert, we need solidarity between all marginalised groups, and above all we need to be aware of where we have come from and how quickly we can be sent back there. There is no time for in-fighting and turning on each other. We need to get our shit together and construct a coherent, active opposition to fascism before it is too late. There’s a lot of rhetoric going on currently along the lines of ‘we have always been here’ which is a nice sentiment, but it sours when you have an awareness of what we have been forced through in the past by a society that does not accept and actively criminalises our queerness. Gay people were murdered en masse in the holocaust, and were allowed to die en masse during the AIDS crisis. We simply cannot allow ourselves to give them enough rope, because they will hang us without hesitation. They always have. 

CP: Thank you, JD, for those impassioned and important words, both here and in Noises Again. 

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