“The French noun or”, as Toby Fitch explained in a paper in Cordite in 2018, “is two different words with two different Latin origins”. The first is a noun meaning “gold”, from the Latin aurum (with adjective “golden”, as in d’or, en or, doré). The other, from the Latin hora, is a conjunction meaning “now”, “but”, “in fact” or “as it happens” — or more rarely, Fitch notes, “thus” or “therefore”. “The English homonym for or”, he goes on,

is obviously “or,” that infinitely useful word that links alternatives. But we also have “ore”, “awe”, “oar” and “aw”. From Middle English, “or” is a reduced form of the obsolete conjunction other (which superseded Old English oththe).

Of course, “or” is also a suffix in modern English, added to verbs (“director”, “inventor”, “conductor”) to denote a condition, state, or quality and/or “person or thing with agency”. The many lives of this simplest unit of sound lead Fitch to arrive at an obvious conclusion: “Or”, he writes,

isn’t a stable word. It’s a noun (gold), an adjective (golden), and a conjunction (now), and its English homonym is a conjunction that links alternatives, giving the “otherwise” equal billing.

*

Or is a person in Fitch’s Or: An Autobiography. It’s also a mood, a shimmer, a mode of composition — even a colour, like green (from Middle English grene, from Old English grēne, from Proto-West Germanic grōnī, from Proto-Germanic grōniz, from Proto-Indo-European root *ghre– “to grow”). Or is a kind of placeholder, a willing stand-in for endlessly ramifying possibilities that the author does not want to name and thereby foreclose (“Green”, he writes, “can mean all kinds of things”, before quoting Frank O’Hara: “Green things are flowers too”). Think of or like the Argo, or like a homonym, in the sense that it sounds the same as something else but its meaning is only acquired in the instant it appears. Or likes repetition: it occurs and occurs. Indeed, there are countless other words like or in Fitch’s autobiography  (auto, Greek word-forming element from autos, “self, same”, reflexive pronoun of unknown origin), words “in which meaning has ceased to be the watershed … for the flow of revelation” (Walter Benjamin). Or as Fitch writes: “Can you hear that other poem drifting up from the waves?”

*

Or: An Autobiography is Fitch’s seventh book of poems. Thirteenth, if we count his four chapbooks and two editions of collected calligrammes, the latter being the primary form for which his strange, playful, often visually oriented poetics have become known. Other tendencies have emerged as signatures in his nearly twenty years of work, however: a love of wordplay, particularly pun and homonym; a habit for the kind of Antipodean self-parody that is often traced back to Christopher Brennan’s Mallarmean mash-up Musicopoematographoscope (1897) (see Fitch’s riotous, Inner-West-ified “hijacking[s]” of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations in The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau (2016), which is not the only work in his oeuvre to owe Brennan’s example a great deal).

Fitch drifts toward a sampling/composting/re-assembling device in many of his books, a strategy that I would call cento (from Latin centō, from Greek kentrōn, “patchwork”, “a rag’), though I have not actually seen him make use of the word in accounts of his own practice. Still, what else to call Or, miracle of ransacking and patchworking that it is, an assemblage of scraps and leaves and loose matter, an autobiography written almost entirely in someone else’s words?

This is the first trick of Or (there are several): the book’s long central poem, “The Or Tree”, is constructed from rescued fragments of Virginia Woolf’s queer classic Orlando, a copy of which, we learn, was “burned ritualistically” in the poet’s back garden in a grand imitation of a sequence in the novel itself. The result is a remarkable seventy-page assemblage poem arranged in six chapters, although — and here is Or’s second trick — this is really more like two poems in one: unfurling in the footer on each page of “The Or Tree” is an “understorey”, a single long footnote-cum-essay (from the French essai, of course — “to try”, “to test’) on subjects like trees, dreams, mermaids, water, centaurs, orgasms, colour and, above all, sexuality and gender.

What novelty! What queer methods! Fitch has always been something of a maximalist, but Or is particularly awake to the affordances of excess, of crude abundance, of revelling in the pleasures of surface rather than angling for the appearance of depth. Which is perhaps fitting for a book about gender. And, as will come as no surprise to those who have read Orlando, a book about gender is ultimately what Or is. “I’m in the green sheets of our bed with my partner F and our eldest child E”, Fitch’s “understorey” begins. “I’ve been talking with F for some years about identifying, maybe, as non-binary”. This is clearly the occasion of Or, the primary scene of its writing. Asked by his eldest child whether he would “prefer to be classified as “they””, however, the poet is unsure. The idea seems to represent to   him another possible trap, another needless act of classification. “Maybe I’d prefer to be declassified completely”, he considers. “Or reclassified as. . . green, for example”.   

*

Woolf’s Orlando is a great lover of green, a fact that is not lost in Fitch’s reassembling of the story of her 300-year life (in which time she plays courtier to Queen Elizabeth, serves as ambassador to Constantinople for King Charles II, dallies with the great poets of the eighteenth century (Pope, Addison, Swift), marries a sailor named Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, squanders the better part of her ancestral fortune on furnishing her ridiculous mansion, and burns her entire literary oeuvre with the exception of a long single poem, “The Oak Tree”, which for the remainder of her life she keeps hidden on her person, folded discreetly within her breast). She is also a great master of de- and re-classification, being born a man, and waking one morning — at roughly one hundred, though bear in mind she only ever ages thirty-six years — to find herself a woman.

And who among us has not awoken to the shock of finding oneself a woman! Indeed, to have a gender at all is such a strange state of affairs to which to wake. Orlando, at least, adjusts with ease to her new circumstances: she is hardly surprised, and relatively unchanged, except for the slow adjustments of mood and sensibility brought about by her altered clothing, from which trouble she finds relief by changing on occasion into breeches and philandering about the city of London as a man. (Orlando, by the way, likes the company of men and women both.) “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm”, observes the novel’s narrator. “We may make them take the mould of arm of breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking”.

This is surely the most ancient of truths; the speaker of Or’s understorey is likewise attuned to its wisdom. “Just once before I turned 16”, he confesses, “with a hot summer underway and my hair at peak opulence, I dressed as an older woman, sweating in makeup and a flowery full-length dress”. Those duped by the trick are horrified, but the speaker doesn’t mind. “Well, obviously”, he sighs. “I’m a centaur”. Which leads him to wonder: “Should one’s trousers be worn on the front legs or the back?”

The genius of Or is the way such moments of queer trickery are enacted at the level of form, not through any cheap appeal to genre hybridity (I’m thinking of the liberatory claims commonly made by a certain cross-breed of memoir, theory, and criticism that has grown wildly marketable in recent years) but by displacing the kinds of ontological privilege that shore up the ideology of gender itself. “The Or Tree” is a sort of copy, of course — an imitation, a false thing. But here we might think of the fear Or’s speaker unleashes when he successfully imitates an older woman in his flowery dress (the audience is the Liberal-voting parents of various school friends), or, as the poet himself certainly has, of Judith Butler’s commentaries on drag: writing about Brennan’s Musicopoematographoscope in the same paper in Cordite where he considered the etymologies of “or”, Fitch used Butler’s famous edict on drag (“In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structures of gender itself”) to propose that Brennan’s parodic imitation/mistranslation of Mallarmé has a similarly destabilising ability to “reveal the imitative structure of language itself, and by extension, its ability to queer” (this requires us to “think of translation as drag — of the poet pretending to be another, of how a translation is ostensibly one language system imitating another”). Consider the opening passage of “The Or Tree”, for instance, which, while it shimmers all over with the characteristic intensity of Woolf’s language, has the notable claim to being very strange and beautiful in its own right:

The general reader of Or needn’t compare this passage with Orlando to feel the queer effect of its revisions (indeed, they probably needn’t have read the novel at all), but the exercise is interesting. Fitch has recovered fragments of up to five words here, the longest being the phrase traversing the second and third line, which he lifts from a sentence on page one that has also supplied him with the fragment “fields of asphodel’: “Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers”. His final four lines are similarly closely adapted from the novel, being taken from a description of Orlando’s eyes on page three as “like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them”. But “butterfly wings” and “deciphering” are each housed in totally different sentences on page two. Likewise “leopard” and “northern mists”, “eyes” and “came out”, “the wind itself” and “face”, and so on (as for “cocks”, sadly the word makes no appearance in the novel — this seems to have been recovered from a mention of “peacocks in the garden” on page one). Notice also how Fitch’s line repeatedly acts to both undermine and multiply his meaning, to secure a reading and then trouble it, to produce several ways of hearing the poem but privilege no single one. “For no-doubt sex in fields”, for instance, is modified by the addition of a preposition in the next line, “of asphodel”, similar to “Eyes came out / of the northern mists”. “Wearing leopard” is easily heard as referring to either the “northern mists” or the “eyes”. “Or would / steal way from mother and the cocks” is a resolved clause that seems to offer an especially secure meaning — is our speaker not in flight from the phallic order, in search of a different organising term? — until “grinned at them” makes that reading provisional, an accident of time or space, which notably does not mean it is not real.     

An unlikely point of reference that developed as I read such passages as this in Or was Slavoj Žižek’s infamous tirade (quoted in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a text that was sampled at length by Fitch in Where Only the Sky Had Hung Before (2019) and is an important influence, I suspect, on Or) against the transgender subject in his 2007 book Violence: responding to the Transgender Rights Bill that was passed in New York City in 2002 — pursuant to which, he rightly notes, “to chose [sic] one’s gender […] is one of the inalienable human rights” — Žižek warns that “the ultimate Difference, the “transcendental” difference that grounds the very human identity, thus turns into something open to manipulation’. “‘Masturbathon” is the ideal form of the sex activity of this trans-gendered subject”, he goes on, since “it is love, the encounter of the Two, which “transubstantiates” the idiotic masturbatory enjoyment into an event proper”.

Idiotic or not, “masturbatory enjoyment” seems to me like a fair description of the act of writing poetry, or at least the kind of poetry that Fitch has long been interested in writing. Žižek’s worry, like the common transphobe’s, is that the transgender subject threatens to manipulate a supposedly timeless economy of meaning — “the ultimate difference, the “transcendental” difference that grounds the very human identity”. (“These are the voices that pass for radical in our times”, replies Nelson.) But that’s the very thing: economies of meaning are open to manipulation, since they are always already dreamt up, invented, able to be constructed from a pile of sticks or leaves or the burnt remains of a Vintage classic. It is for this reason that Fitch’s sampling project in Or brings to mind the poet and scholar Susan Stewart’s remarkable writing, in her study On Longing, on the meanings of the souvenir versus the collection: while the souvenir is marked by “a nostalgia of origin and presence”, Stewart suggests — its function being to validate the authenticity of its originating context — the function of the collection is “not the restoration of a context of origin but the creation of a new context”.

The collection presents a hermetic world: to have a collection is to have both the minimum and the complete number of elements necessary for an autonomous world––a world which is both full and singular.

Thus do Or’s collected fragments aim less to stage their separation from a lost imaginary whole than to create the new conditions for their own validation (masturbatory enjoyment). Thus do they trouble or collapse the boundary between imitative and real, copy and original, the synthetic language-games of the queer subject and the “event proper” which the transphobe mourns. As for “transubstantiation”, take your pick from the moments in the book where something beautiful or wondrous occurs, presuming this — although who fucking knows — to be Žižek’s meaning.

My own favourite might be the following, where Fitch uses the calligramme to show us the entirely unremarkable miracle that is words doing what we want them to do, or of something tender and ridiculous being made because someone willed it to be made and the result — “manifestly untruthful” — having as good a claim as any upon the real:

*

One of the funnier things about the conservative angst around queer-friendly pronoun usage (which unfortunately can come from all sides of politics — consider Norman Finkelstein’s “Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you”) is that any attempt to bind language permanently to biological sex will misunderstand not only the nature of gender but the nature of language itself. Words mean what we decide they mean, and acquire more stable meanings through repeated use. Would that this were not a radical thesis but an exceedingly obvious historical fact.

Fitch is well-placed to remind us of this absolute contingency, materialist poet that he is — as in, here is how little fixed value your words carry. Here, see, is a poem in which a word’s use-value is its ability to mimic the shape of a dragonfly’s wing. But he is also well-placed to consider the other side of these liberatory antics, which is that contingency is a charge that cuts both ways. Putting aside for a moment the commonsense political — even moral — imperative to call me what I wish to be called, because I have asked you, and because to do so costs your life and language nothing, it is not actually easy to say what is at stake ontologically when you call me “they”, when you call me “him”, when you call me “her”. Do these words change something? Do they confer a certain permission on something? Do they honour something that was already there?

While we can and should acknowledge the anxiety at the heart of all identification — “Any fixed claim on realness”, writes Nelson in The Argonauts, paraphrasing Lacan, “especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis” — these are likely to remain private and somewhat mysterious matters, matters for the soul, the unconscious, the individual person. Fitch, for his part, never quite resolves the question of whether he would “prefer to be classified as “they’”, though he deals with the matter of pronouns in a passage nearing the end of Or’s “understorey”, a passage that ends, exquisitely, with a kind of disappointment:

Butler writes that “Styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self”, whereas acknowledging our multiple selves or hybrid styles might do away with such illusions, or at least encourage the growth of exploratory roots, renegade branches. And so, if you want to call me they, if you want to describe me as non-binary, or just girly, or if you’d rather call me he (I’m told I look manly in certain lights), I don’t mind––I won’t straiten your language. (‘My business is circumference––” Dickinson). And, in any event, or on whatever side this needs to go, “Knowing someone’s gender doesn’t always tell you much at all about who they are” (Kit Heyam).

Yes, this is the biggest secret of all about gender: while it is doubtless easier to say so when one feels more or less at ease in the identity they’re assigned, some days — even many days — it hardly seems to matter. The real conceit of Woolf’s Orlando is that having a gender is no cure for the altogether stranger affliction of having a self: “What then? Who then?” Orlando ponders near the end of her 300 years. “Thirty-six; in a motor car; a woman. Yes, but a million other things as well”. This kind of equalising can be used to diminish the “inalienable human right” to free gender expression, particularly from inside the left (“fuck/you”). It can also be used to redistribute the pathologies that are so ceaselessly heaped upon the trans or queerly gendered subject in service of the recognition that all of us, sons of Adam, are a little bit ashamed, ejected, disappointed, and confused. “Or turned hot, cold, / longed to hurl, to toss / with the beech trees and oaks”, goes one poem in “The Or Tree”. Another, “The river wrecked the person, / whatever name or sex”.

The final trick of Or is that in the end it stages something utterly universal: the search for a momentary recognition of ourselves in language, the maybe-hopeless pursuit of those “very exceptional circumstances” in which something half-truthful might be said, the unending attempt to build something that feels real with the limited resources one has. This is a very old, a very sacred enterprise. We might call it poetry.