Tanner Menard is a multi-dimensional artist, embodying the realms of poetry, composition, and Kundalini Yoga. As the visionary behind UBU University, Tanner orchestrates an online coaching milieu fostering artistic creativity and human evolution. With a rich tapestry of eleven experimental music albums, a chapbook, and an impending contrapuntal visual and sound poetry project, ‘the poet’, Tanner's artistic lineage is both diverse and prolific. Currently immersed in a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he is also an avid explorer of cultural futurism, previously serving the Atakapa Ishak Nation as a tribal council member.
Interview conducted by HFR Intern Nikolai Ryan
Nikolai Ryan: Feel free to answer this in whatever way you see fit and are comfortable with—in regards to gender, how would you describe yourself?
Tanner Menard: First, I'd like to extend my gratitude for this opportunity to speak with you and the audience, and for the interest you've shown in my work by republishing it in a digital format. At the time when I penned the poems you are now republishing, I was using they/them pronouns. However, these days, I don’t dwell on gender much. My connection to spirituality has always been profound, and through a major awakening, I began to identify with a sense of infinity rather than with physical attributes.
NR: How do you engage with the idea of gender in your life, e.g., in your personal expression, in your relations with others, in your writing and other creative pursuits?
TM: In recent times, my engagement with the concept of gender has evolved to transcend physical attributes and conventional understandings. This transformation is largely inspired by the profound scientific discoveries made in 2022, where physicists, awarded the Nobel Prize, demonstrated the fluid nature of local reality through quantum mechanics. Their work revealed that particles do not possess definite properties until observed or measured, challenging the very fabric of local realism and suggesting that the universe is “real” only when observed.
This groundbreaking revelation has propelled me to envision consciousness as a realm independent of physical variables, thereby rendering conventional notions about bodies, including gender, as irrelevant to my understanding of being. As such, my personal expression, interactions with others, and creative endeavors now venture beyond the physical and delve into an interdimensional exploration of infinite vastness. The essence of this exploration is to foster a deeper understanding that transcends the physicality of gender and embarks on a journey towards an expansive, boundless comprehension of existence that encompasses creative and relational interactions.
NR: How does your identity impact your writing, whether it’s explicitly about identity or otherwise?
TM: I don’t engage with the idea of identity or with an identity other than the real being that is beyond the idea of mind. This is to say, to glitch academic jargon, I am ontology.
NR: What do you think are the most important things we can be doing as writers and readers to amplify TGNC voices of all intersections?
TM: Be kind, acknowledge our own faults before seeing faults in others, avoid extremes and meditate.
2 Poems by Tanner Menard
orginally published in Issue 65
