[Catherine Tufariello]

Sea de Sade

unmoored from the mother ship of culture
- Camille Paglia

wallow in Sadean sadomasochistic chthonian nature
- Mary Rose Kasraie on Sexual Personae

Marquise, dear darling bitch of decadence,
enough about your love for ancient Rome.
Let’s reminisce about our close events.
You chased me, caught me, slayed me, brought me home,
proud master hunter in pursuit of prey.
Fainting I followed, wide-eyed, silent, high
on scotch and cigarettes. Quick came the day
you dumped me with a strangely sweet goodbye.
“Come here and sit,” you said, “upon my lap.”
“Oh, I’m too big,” I moaned, “so tall, so big.
I can’t.” Was I so big? Well, no. Tap-tap,
you tapped, and so I sat, a sinking brig,
unmoored from the mother ship of culture, drunk
on masochism, and by a sadist sunk.

[Catherine Tufariello]

This sonnet boasts the great initial advantage of an attention-getting title. Despite this, if I were not obliged by the honor of Distinguished Guest-ship to read it all the way through, the epigraphs might have stopped me cold. Camille Paglia is a popular (or at any rate well known) figure, at least in the States, but that brief phrase extracted out of context from her book is not particularly illuminating. The second epigraph is an even more cryptic quotation from somebody’s review of Paglia’s book. Yikes! That the final couplet of the sonnet alludes to both of these italicized fragments, indicating that they’re a key to understanding it, I found most unfair. Nevertheless, this poem held my interest even as it frustrated me. The subject matter is risky, and I respect a poet willing to take risks (really take them, I mean, not just write poems that get praised for taking risks in blurbs). So I’m going to describe my experience in reading, rereading, and trying to make sense of this poem.

On a first read I assumed for a moment that the “Marquise” being addressed was the Marquis de Sade. But no, the title is feminine—a marquise (besides being a kind of ring) is the wife of a marquis. So is this de Sade’s actual wife? I know nothing about her but would imagine her to have been a long-suffering sort of person, rather than a sadist herself. So it’s possible but seems dubious. Whoever she is, she loves ancient Rome and likes to carry on about it, when the narrator (let’s call him or her N) would rather be talking about their relationship or perhaps sitting on her lap.

Then we have a truly marvelous line, one worth the price of admission: “You chased me, caught me, slayed me, brought me home.” Chased and slayed linked by assonance and caught and brought by rhyme—wonderful! The Marquise is a master hunter and N is her prey, felled and carried back to the hunter’s den. “Fainting I followed….” With this allusion the hunting language is given a specific context. We’re in the world of Wyatt:

Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

The allusion reverses the roles of N and M: it’s N who is the hunter, the Marquise the prey. But like the hunter in Wyatt’s sonnet, N is a pursuer in thrall to the one pursued. S/he is wide-eyed, dumbstruck, intoxicated. And then s/he is dumped, rejected, with a contemporary equivalent of Noli me tangere. Even the Marquise’s goodbye, however—the breakup speech, I’m guessing?—is “strangely sweet,” a phrase that would be perfectly at home in a Renaissance sonnet. And then we get that bit of dialogue: M. tells N. to sit on her lap, with the air of authority a mother would use with a child. N. is too big to be treated so, s/he protests, but complies in the end (being the masochist after all). There’s something very authentic about the dialogue; it’s funny, erotic, and tender all at once. N. sits down like “a sinking brig”---a brig being a ship and also a jail. This relationship threw N in the brig, and s/he rather liked being there.

Then the closing couplet takes us back to those blasted epigraphs, and throws an inversion on top of that. I don’t get what it means to be “unmoored from the mother ship of culture,” or what that has to do with N. and M., and I don’t particularly want to read Paglia to find out. I also don’t like having masochism and sadist show up explicitly in the final line.

So… who is the Marquise? Perhaps Camille Paglia herself? (I’d prefer not, but Sexual Personae does have “decadence” in the subtitle.) Is this relationship really over, or is it still going on? And finally, since the gender of sonnet narrators and characters has been a running theme of this bake-off, is N a man or a woman? Could easily be either, and the ambiguity is a strength of the poem, though something about the reversal of roles makes me think this might be a lesbian relationship. I’m keen to hear what you all think.

[Rick Mullin]

I think Catherine covers most of the problems I have with this one. I disagree with her about some of the things she likes, however. The title turned me off before the epigraphs did. The M. de S. is an automatic push-button for a positive anticipatory response to sophisticated kink and high-end titillation. The button is almost broken it's been pushed so many times.

I take it the Marquise is Paglia, another poetic question I consider asked and answered.

"You chased me, caught me, slayed me, brought me home," is my least favorite line. Far too neat.

For me the highpoint is:

“Oh, I’m too big,” I moaned, “so tall, so big.
I can’t.” Was I so big? Well, no.

The ending, dutifully referring to the epigraphs, is a letdown.

This one,...I dunno.

RM

[David Rosenthal]

I am not the target audience for this -- don't care much for Paglia or de Sade. I am not sure what is intended by the first quote, repeated in L13. S/M is about as unmoored from our culture as baseball. S without M might be another thing, but N the M-ist here is clearly a consenting interlocutor. Anyway, some nice sonics and turns of phrase, but it doesn't do much else for me I'm afraid.

David R.

[Dmitri Semenov]

This line is good:

You chased me, caught me, slayed me, brought me home,

and it seems to be the only sincere line in the poem.
The rest is decorations.
The image "I sat, a sinking brig," is also good.

At the end, one has to ask
what
"unmoored from the mother ship of culture,"
has to do with anything above?

[Petra Norr]

What a silly little thing this is. I adore it. It has a great voice. The opening line tickles me because the phrase "dear darling bitch" sounds so decadent in itself. I originally thought it WAS the real Marquise who was being addressed, until the scotch and cigarettes turned up, and what a wonderful turn that was when they did -- suddenly the sonnet felt modern and Berryman-like. The most inane part is the bit about sitting on the lap, the dialogue that accompanies it and the tap-tapping -- it's so inane that it got a huge smile out of me. I love the closing lines, and I think that "by a sadist sunk" is one of the few times I've really liked an outright inversion. I don't know enough about Paglia's writing to interpret the poem against that background. But someone suggested the Marquise is her. That could explain why the male Marquise is being called a bitch, which is more female. Then again, I think I've heard gay men call each other bitch for some reason or other; it rings a bell anyway.
PS: I just started to read Catherine's comment and discovered that "Marquise" is female; I thought the spelling was a little strange, but not knowing French I didn't pick up on it.

[R. Nemo Hill]

I actually like the rather unorthodox use of the epigraphs here, especially as the title gives me some idea as to how such references are to be used. This is a sea of Sade, after all, a dark body of water upon which the reader is set adrift with little more than these referential bits to hang on to. As such I think the truncated nature of the epigraphs succeeds in confounding the expectations of clarity that such preambles usually engender, functioning rather as bits of flotsam on the waves that carry reader and writer through the poem.

I do think it more than a bit naive to posit that S/M is somehow a part of mainstream culture, and that its 'bark' (as well as its bite) are not a bit unmoored from the so-called mother ship--Sadean cliches & fashions notwithstanding. Indeed I think the whole topic tends to work on the psyche in ways that remain for many unacknowledged: buttons get pushed unconsciously and then the effects get explained after the fact. On such a sea, where more conventional buoys and rafts are unavailable, all the M has to rely on here are the feelings engendered by S and, in retrospect, these bits of after-the-fact academic discourse provided by the epigraphs.

I am not at all sure that I need to agree with the poem, that it's viewpoint need be my own. At first I questioned the sunk with which it ends. Yet for those lost at sea, unmoored from the main streams of culture, sinking can be viewed not as a final but as a continual chthonian state. And an erotic one as well. It is the sea-ruled style of discourse that I find most satsifying here for it does not insist on my drawing any shore-bound conclusions.

My main concrete nit is narrative in nature: please spice up the volta temporally with a brief verb mood change.

“Come here and sit,” you'd said, “upon my lap.”
“Oh, I’m too big,” I'd moaned, “so tall, so big.
I can’t.”

I love the scotch and cigarettes and the strangely sweet goodbye.

On the other hand I think our close events would read less awkwardly and with more immediate punch as up-close events

Untidy, challenging, and painfully mesmerizing.

My hunch is that women may like it more than men. With the exception of the master hunter the masculine seems pretty much absent, and even that brought to mind Artemis.

Nemo

[Tim Murphy]

A very funny man addressing his imaginery dominatrix. Perhaps Alicia, who insisted on the staff title moderatrix, can elucidate it further; but I think it's smart as a whip, ouch. The epigraphs contribute nothing for me.

[Quincy Lehr]

Isn't the past tense of "to slay," "slew"?

[Gail White]

Call me naive, but even after Catherine's best efforts at interpretation, I have no idea what this poem is about. (The Marquise in Dangerous Liaisions? Did she love ancient Rome?) Beautifully written, I admit.
Should we also ask that a poem make sense on at least a second reading?