Hey, I’m just passing this along:
Here’s the first thing I saw when I went there: “I tear the colostomy bag out of my ass and run with abject abandon screaming / at the nurses of the emergency room as flat as tires of polythene / and fluttering down the row of offices and into the hospital waiting room.” Maybe this gets better. I’ve mentioned Genet before, and there are other people who aim at what you might call disgusting or pornographic with a very serious and useful intent. And there’s something to be said for the obscene, in that it’s literally what is normally behind the curtain or off-stage in our work.
But coming from mine and Meg’s attempts at writing the erotic, and noticing how many of you all bailed(?) on that project, I wonder which is more obscene in the strict sense, the erotic or the disgusting? I think it would be very easy for me to sit down and write something disgusting. My partner claims I’m quite capable of being casually disgusting in some of my personal habits, snorting snot back up my nose being high on that list. But I found trying to put my own sensual, erotic nature into words to be so discomfiting that I fled into particularly coy series of poems.
Does this hold true for you as well?
Are there erotic poems that you do like? I like Stein’s Lifting Belly, but it’s not exactly explicit, aside from some heavy-breathing mimetic effects. I have taught a poem by Sharon Olds, “The Connoisseuse of Slugs,” that I don’t like but which I think is a good example of more explicit erotism. The poem is an extended analogy between a slug’s antennae and the emergence of the glans of the penis from the prepuce (I am basking in and cowering behind medical Latin). Here’s the end of the analogy, after some alarming lines with salt in them:
There’s a breath-basedness to these lines that gets on my nerves a bit, but that last enjambment is nice. I think I like that turn because it goes with something else I like about the poem, in a purely self-serving way: it’s nice to read such a cosy appreciation of an erection. After all, erections embarrassed me throughout third and fourth grade by popping up for no good reason at all, which is probably true for most men reading this. So it’s nice to have the little fellow welcomed into the room cordially. And that brings me back to my initial discomfort with erotism. Oh well. Thank me for sharing.
(So, does it surprise you too to know the volume this poem is in, The Living and the Dead, is dedicated to George and Mary Oppen? If I were to type the whole poem (sorry), you might see some objectivist tendency in the attention, but the form of her poems is pretty boringly, consistently four or five stresses per line with very little of the excitement, tensions, or minimalism of Oppen’s form.)
Hello All,
Death Metal Poetry <http://death-metal-poetry.com> is a new online poetry journal(sorely needed, I know) based out of Athens, Georgia. DMP<http://death-metal-poetry.com>is now (and always) seeking submissions of poems and anything else you decide to send. Recently published poets are Noah Cicero, Daniel Spinks, and Ian Davisson. Submission guidelines can be found at http://death-metal-poetry.com. Response to submissions will be alarmingly quick.
Cheers,
Ryan Downey
Here’s the first thing I saw when I went there: “I tear the colostomy bag out of my ass and run with abject abandon screaming / at the nurses of the emergency room as flat as tires of polythene / and fluttering down the row of offices and into the hospital waiting room.” Maybe this gets better. I’ve mentioned Genet before, and there are other people who aim at what you might call disgusting or pornographic with a very serious and useful intent. And there’s something to be said for the obscene, in that it’s literally what is normally behind the curtain or off-stage in our work.
But coming from mine and Meg’s attempts at writing the erotic, and noticing how many of you all bailed(?) on that project, I wonder which is more obscene in the strict sense, the erotic or the disgusting? I think it would be very easy for me to sit down and write something disgusting. My partner claims I’m quite capable of being casually disgusting in some of my personal habits, snorting snot back up my nose being high on that list. But I found trying to put my own sensual, erotic nature into words to be so discomfiting that I fled into particularly coy series of poems.
Does this hold true for you as well?
Are there erotic poems that you do like? I like Stein’s Lifting Belly, but it’s not exactly explicit, aside from some heavy-breathing mimetic effects. I have taught a poem by Sharon Olds, “The Connoisseuse of Slugs,” that I don’t like but which I think is a good example of more explicit erotism. The poem is an extended analogy between a slug’s antennae and the emergence of the glans of the penis from the prepuce (I am basking in and cowering behind medical Latin). Here’s the end of the analogy, after some alarming lines with salt in them:
[. . .] Years later,
when I saw a naked man,
I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
mystery reenacted, the slow
elegant being coming out of hiding and
gleaming in the dark air, eager and so
trusting you could weep.
There’s a breath-basedness to these lines that gets on my nerves a bit, but that last enjambment is nice. I think I like that turn because it goes with something else I like about the poem, in a purely self-serving way: it’s nice to read such a cosy appreciation of an erection. After all, erections embarrassed me throughout third and fourth grade by popping up for no good reason at all, which is probably true for most men reading this. So it’s nice to have the little fellow welcomed into the room cordially. And that brings me back to my initial discomfort with erotism. Oh well. Thank me for sharing.
(So, does it surprise you too to know the volume this poem is in, The Living and the Dead, is dedicated to George and Mary Oppen? If I were to type the whole poem (sorry), you might see some objectivist tendency in the attention, but the form of her poems is pretty boringly, consistently four or five stresses per line with very little of the excitement, tensions, or minimalism of Oppen’s form.)
3 comments:
JPC,
Thank you for reposting the call for submissions. I would hope that any readers of this blog (and yourself) might give the poem by Ian a fair reading. That is, I hope you would read more than the first stanza. That said, I understand that an unnerving or ill-received first line/stanza is enough to turn many people away. There are many poems in the world and we don't always finish the ones that don't strike us right. I don't take issue with the dismissal of the grotesque in poetry. Everyone chooses their own aesthetic. I do take issue with a overall judgment of a piece based on an excerpt. This is too often the way we work. The poem to me seems to move away from the grotesque and becomes a different animal altogether by the final stanza. It is not my poem to defend though and even if it were it would be impossible. I will say that I am not a fan of overly grotesque poems that aim to shock and do nothing more. I do believe in the value of the grotesque in writing though. It can represent in more accurate terms our intentions sometimes. That is to say, nature is nice and sentimentalism is nice, and the little details of everyday life are nice, and so on but the grotesque in its rawness better illustrates our process of shaping and constructing thoughts in an arbitrary language that is constantly being deconstructed. Absurdity mirrors reality oftentimes. We have "sick" thoughts that live side by side with our gentle "normal" thoughts and we are not wrong for this. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed by the base nature of words that we assign to things in our institutionalized society that we draw on other lexicons. I am not making as much sense with these comments as I would like but I assure you I am trying. Also, the idea of feeling discomfited by writing the erotic can serve as a reason some might do so. It is this ingrained self-consciousness that we have about our bodies and our gender roles and so forth that stop us from being honest to ourselves in our writing and in our everyday lives. I have tired myself out. I apologize for the lack of adequate grammar in this comment. It is a blog comment and I think faster than I type.
I forgot to address your line "I hope this gets better". I would say I hope it did for anyone who finished the piece but I don't know how to gauge better. There is no honest way I can hope a poem is good or bad or gets better or worse as it progresses. I can say "I hope this poem forgoes this aesthetic that I reject/don't value and begins to adhere to my views on poetry at some point". To hope for this is to wish for us to all write the same though I think. If we could honestly call writing better or worse than we would have reached a point where we would no longer be creative writers. I believe we might be called technical writers at that point (and our wallets would be fatter for it!) but we don't really want that. Again, This is less a defense than it is a brainstorming session for me. I take your post more as a brainstorming session for you than as an attack.
I have no idea what the point is aside from exciting those who are used to the language style and, I suppose in some ways, those who are not. I have friends in hard core bands who love to speak using this style, but they do it because it is funny to them and can rarely finish a sentence of dialog without laughing at what they had just said.
But to each their own, as always. If it speaks to people, which it seems to, then let it speak to them. I seriously doubt it is meant for anyone into extremes just as comics are probably not pushed toward a market base older than anyone who is middle aged.
And yes, I do have problems being open about erotic issues, which is where the poetry comes in... I have written a couple before and oddly enough neither poem started off trying to be on the subject of sex at all. In the end it is all meh.
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