Cat Fitzpatrick On Writing Transsexuals Into Iambic Pentameter

Although Plato's Symposium is best remembered as a Socratic dialogue, it was also, at its core, a story about a dinner party. In Athens, symposia consisted of a lavish banquet followed by a lot of drinking, during which time the guests would deliver speeches. Like many dinner parties, the Symposium is famously crashed by a drunken guy (Alcibiades) who derails the conversation but is, at least, quite entertaining.

Although Plato's symposiasts are rather queer, at least in the Grecian way, none of them are trans. Luckily, poet and Littlepuss Press editor Cat Fitzpatrick offers a very trans symposium in her new book, The Dinner Party , whose title poem concerns a riotous debate about love amongst a gaggle of transsexuals supping on Vichyssoise and vegan cassoulet. After the soup comes out, Camille declares: "I want a partner that I know and like,/With whom I share the deepest truth of me..."/"Oh look,” Adonis crows, 'we do agree!/The only difference is you’re such a dyke." Before long, the night devolves into debauchery, leaving the host to tidy up, take her beloved dog out to pee, and pass out in the wee hours of the morning.

Although a rhyming transsexual remake of a Socratic dialogue might seem a surprising combination, The Dinner Party is right at home in Fitzpatrick's body of work. She has a gift for telling contemporary stories in archaic forms. She has described her last novel, The Call-Out —a comedy of manners told in rhyming verse—as Eugene Onegin fan fiction. The delight that courses through her verse is palpable on the page. Titular poem "The Dinner Party," which is written in iambic pentameter, has rhymes that simply make you smile: "cuck" and "fuck," or "soup" and "poop." And yet the dinner guests' debate reaches moments of real ecstasy and grief in their quest to articulate what love means to them. All the book's poems orbit around love in its various forms, including "Baby Book," a heart-wrenching series on trying to make a baby as a queer and trans couple, and "Uxorious Sonnets," love poems about loving your wife so much that even smelling her shit makes you want to weep.