Daphne DiFazio is a writer, editor, and performer studying poetry in Texas. Find her at daphnedifazio.com.

What is the first transmission you received that altered your understanding of language?

Something that comes to mind is this Paul Celan poem, translated by Michael Hamburger, that I read very passively as a teenager and never stopped thinking about and hope I don’t—“too much of my speaking / heaped up round the little / crystal dressed in the style of your silence.” Something about the “style” of silence, the “too much,” and that collection of Hamburger’s translations of Celan was maybe my first exposure to poems that engaged the metaphysical with extreme attention to the materialism of language. As in like...objects that could hold the feelings of something beyond any communicable form.

With that in mind, I’ve tried hard not to think of silence as an object. Silence as an aspect, in that aspect can describe how we express time in language, compels me more than thinking of speech or words or lines or stanzas as opposed to or even navigating silence in a world of objects. My poems disintegrate in that thinking, language loses its charge, and I have no sense of the time that makes my poems happen. Silence is with speech everywhere, every time… listening requires silence…and silence makes speech meaningful. That’s my current understanding of language.

In what way does transness tune/re-tune the craft choices you make?

Craft feels very playful with the poems I’ve been drafting and editing lately. I write first drafts pretty subconsciously, connect and disconnect from them for a while, then follow certain impulses in revision until I figure out if and how I want them in public.

As far as the public goes…I remain suspicious and antagonistic toward anything that I receive as rules of form. Alongside the playfulness, I think that means there is a lot of rumination and violence in my attention to revision before I commit to certain aesthetic and formal choices…playfulness in the face of dread, lately.

All of that kind of rhymes with my TS experience—like the labor and pleasure of giving so much in a direction we weren’t carried in just to feel something, to communicate.

If your work could transmit beyond this moment, to future readers, or even back to a younger version of yourself, what would you want it to carry?

I’m feeling oceanic about this question <3 ugh …

Something I’d want my work to transmit to anyone, as well as my younger self, is that silence is presence…nothing disappears in it…it’s all moving in there, anyways. And it’s fab to be unproductive because I love you! Let people read whatever they want in silence and if they find that to be stressful—good. That’s where listening starts and you need to do that first…