Trans-ing Disability Poetry at the Confluence PETRA KUPPERS Abstract This essay offers a poetics of trans-ing at the confluence of disability culture and trans cultural expression, indigenous naming of the land and performance trance. It discusses work by genderqueer poet Eli Clare and by Anishinaabe poet Margaret Noodin before analyzing the process of a translatory videopoem collaboration between Denise Leto and Petra Kuppers. One difference is not the same as another, but between experimental poetics, assemblage, and occupied land, we sound in the waters. Keywords embodied poetry, videopoem, translation, disability, indigeneity, trans-ing I n this essay, I summon a poetics of trans-ing, at the confluence of disability culture and trans cultural expression, indigenous naming of the land and performance trance. I am staying with the movement politics of “trans”— transitioning, transforming, trans-oceanic journeys, states of fluidity — of time and space intersecting and passing through bodies and cultures. This essay’s journey is willfully neither natural nor consciously articulated in a narrow poli- tics. It’s artful, leaning, allied, and loving, and tries to chart its way on foreign terrain with respect and with appropriate uncertainty. In his poetry collection The Marrow’s Telling, Eli Clare writes in the poem “And Yet” (all Clare quotes in this essay are from this poem): “And yet, had I been given a choice, they would have demanded clay or granite, salt water or fresh, as if the confluence could never be home.” In the imagination of Clare’s poem, trans-ing materializes a complicated and implicated other to clay and granite, a place in motion, the pressured space in between. Like other trans poets Clare refuses to narrate a revelatory dramatic clean change, there is none of the “purity and denial of mixture that recur in many transsexual autobiographical narratives” (Stone 1996: 226). His writing is of and from a body in motion: TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 1, Number 4 * November 2014 605 DOI 10.1215/23289252-2815120 ª 2014 Duke University Press TSQ Published by Duke University Press