Sexual Deviance and Poetry
 

Hello dear reader! Tell me, what led you here?

This line of thinking has been building in me like a repressed hang-nail for awhile and is really not driven by any one poetry thread. For the moment, I'm thinking out loud and may essify at a later date...

I find it a humorous and telling commentary on our sex-drenched age that when someone posts a crappy sex-poem, before anyone (rightfully) excoriates it, they first feel obliged to cite their sex bona fides, somewhere along the lines of:

1. Your poem sucks. That said, I ran a successful escort service in college.

2. Your poem sucks. That said, I roomed with Ron Jeremy when we were struggling actors in the mid-sixties and never blushed once.

3. Your poem sucks. Have I ever mentioned that my great-great Uncle was the Marquis de Sade?

You can beat your wife, you can torture kittens, but for God's sake, you better not have a sexually reticent bone in your body as it is the definition of mortification to be perceived as being one iota awkward about anything sexual. In short (and all bad poetry aside) we've been universally expropriated.

What brave soul will own up to sexual awkwardness? I will be the first. I cringe at the sight of naked bodies, of all hues, of all genders. Yech! For this admission, I expect fan mail from curious people wanting to explore the dark underbelly of withheldness with me. Really, it doesn't hurt. Much.

In her excellent book The Repeal of Reticence, Rochelle Gurstein unblushingly reprises the century-and-a-half long culture war during which the Forces of Exposure thoroughly routed the Forces of Reticence. Linda Lovelace became a freedom of expression issue, as opposed to a shameless hussy--or as I believe Linda Lovelace herself would concede later, a horribly abused and manipulated victim of unscrupulous pornographers. Perhaps our complete comfort with sex will have arrived when we don't feel obliged to 'hasten to add' our complete comfort with sex. In my opinion we're not there yet. Then again, will it constitute a momentous arrival when sex holds all the cachet of lawn furniture?

So, is the pendulum forever broken or will it swing back? By all rights, modesty should be the new sexy. Let's see if reality television allows it a time slot. Until then, I am redoubling my efforts at stamp collecting while awaiting shy inquiries from closet Reticents.

Your mini-essay sucks. That said, I had great-uncle who was arrested for pasting up broadsides on city walls, and accused of public irrelevancy.

Actually, I found it rather amusing and fairly refreshing.

P.S. Hey, Michael, if you've got an extra copy of one of your uncle's broadsides laying around can you send me one?

Norman,

This really needs to be a poem. I was tempted to write "your mini-essay sucks" for the same reason I suspect that Michael was -- so I could add a "that said." However, that said, I haven't seen a lot of crappy poems about sexual deviance, not on the Sphere, anyway, although perhaps that just means I should get out more, or raise my standards.

Ed


PS - That said, I have always been strangely drawn to research papers that discuss insect mating rituals, in particular those of of praying mantises.

It really does. And why do I get the feeling it's shockingly misogynistic? Maybe it's the reactionary tone? The pendulum freely swinging?

No, I think it's the authoritarianism. The willingness to sort, label, condemn. The sheer self-righteousness. Next we'll be hearing about upholding standards, and how things are going to hell in a handbasket. That there used to be a golden time, but now we live in an age of lead, and it's all because of X, where X equals immodesty and Y equals...

Hmm, there's a good question. Why? Is there some point, or is this simply rabid inverted exhibitionism? Is it an overcoat to cloak the narrator in until the schoolgirls walk by? He's awkward, and wants to hide, but wants to come out too? Could a narrator really loathe women, and himself, this much? Why would a reader have sympathy with such an invented character?

Or maybe that's the lesson here. In viewing with abhorrence the anti-hero, in recoiling from his exhibitionism and reviling his abominations, we can thus view ourselves as both modest and abominable, and since we desire to self-justify and, most of all, forgive ourselves, in doing so we forgive and justify the narrator, in a kind of Aristotelian catharsis, and we don't even have to pluck out our own eyes, or marry our mothers.

So maybe you and I are both wrong, Michael. Perhaps this is actually a brilliant essay, and we're the ones who suck. Perhaps it will save us from incest and sexual patricide. Maybe it really is misogyny in the service of male liberation. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Thanks,

Bill

Look who talks . . . ;)

Thanks,

Andrew

My highschool English textbook, which I still have, has "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time," as "Counsel to Girls." This is just one example of Victorian standards that wanted to erase all reference to the body and to the erotic and sexual side we have. I can't believe that kind of attitude was good or can be good again.

also: There is a vast difference between Linda Lovelace-style pornography and geuine art that has intimate relationships as its focus.

dwl

Well, actually, the (deliberately?) titillating title of the thread (howzat for alliteration?), after which I very quickly got bored and wondered how much, if anything, this has to do with poetry.

That said, I roomed with Ron Jeremy when we were struggling actors in the mid-sixties and never blushed once.

Jesus Christ, what a Hoover holocaust!

Norman,

Sexual deviance and reticence are different subjects, so I'm going to address the latter. I agree with you that reticence is in short supply; only I would rather use "reserve" or some other word that doesn't imply "fear," as reticence sometimes does. Reserve suggests to me that there is a force the poet has access to which he/she has yet to unleash. It also suggests thought. The poet considered his diction carefully. Elliot is like that. One senses he weighed a number of vocabulary items before he committed himself.

I see the decline of reserve connected closely to the rise of free verse. Reserve fit the metric poet like a glove. The constraint of feeling his way along the accentual topography went a long way towards keeping his more exuberant or downright formless feelings in check.

Lance

Dear Norman,
   I think that if you look, you'll see similar proffering of bona fides whenever there is something that makes people uncomfortable about criticizing. You'll find them now on a thread for a ballad on the Metrical board.
   Sometimes it is the writer who put others on the defensive and demands to know that some imaginary objectivity is in place; sometimes it comes from the others themselves.
   It seems to me the same sorts of discussions happen in the larger world when charged subjects are involved. It may be unfortunate, though you have told the world about an aspect of your sexual responses as if it were pertinent. Maybe it is. Maybe certain discomforts are eased in this way. I do think you are, though, too narrow in coming to your grand conclusion and may have squandered your confession of discomfort.

Best,
Marcia

Lance,

Is "I knew a girl from Nantucket" free verse?

John

It's pre-emptive, Norman. The author of a sexually explicit poem often accuses negative critics of being prudes, so the critic needs to establish his or her credentials for ribaldry in order to have standing to say the poem is horrible.

At least some of these discomforts are avoided if the poet writes "Content warning" in the subject line, which establishes that one reads with some understanding of what one will meet.

Lance wrote: "I see the decline of reserve connected closely to the rise of free verse. Reserve fit the metric poet like a glove. The constraint of feeling his way along the accentual topography went a long way towards keeping his more exuberant or downright formless feelings in check."

Ever read Rochester?? :) This is a rather dubious conflation . . . "Dirty" ditties (in meter, no less) have a long and distinguished history, among them dozens by, e.g., Robert Burns. You might also check out Ed McCurdy's splendid recordings of ribald songs from the Renaissance, "When Knighthood Was in Flower."

Rochester, yes--especially "Saint James Park" and "A Satire on Charles II." But also Martial, Catallus, Dante, Chaucer.

dwl

Not to mention Benny Hill.

I think Norman is in part referring to a thread - can't remember which now - where I mentioned, "that said" (I don't think I really said that!) Rochester is my great great great (don't know the exact accumulation of greatness) grandfather. What can I say? It's just...true! I love knowing that he's behind me, or front of me, in some way! I think he's great!

By the way, I want to come back as a bonobo.

Cally

Cally, that's an excellent choice for reincarnation! Many years ago I saw a TV program about the bonobo chimps and their sexual practices. After watching the film, I just had to have a cigarette and glass of wine.

Richard

Be careful what you wish for, Cally. Bonobos don't weep.

Frankly, I love sexually deviant poetry, from limericks to Catullus.
That said, I was a virgin until marriage at age 22.

A lark for me, either as a bird or a noun.

To get back to Norman's post, I'm still not sure what the term 'sexual deviance' is meant to encompass. I can't recall the last time I saw a poem about incest or pedophilia anywhere, let alone on the Sphere, so I'm assuming the definition is broader, but how broad?

My own take is that sex of whatever stripe, despite its attractions, is a red herring. I may not be sure how deviance is defined in this context, but I have a very clear personal sense of what a 'crappy' poem is, and that's the word that stuck out in the original comment, for me. Definitions vary, but bad writing is one of the few taboos everyone here would agree on; and however we as individuals respond to a bad poem, I don't think that should change very much, whether it has its knickers on or not.

Ed

Of course they don't. Why would they?

What a great post
 

Oops - I meant to send a PM and somehow posted it publicly.

As long as I'm here, what the heck. I was writing to Bill Lantry to tell him how much I liked his post. I also mentioned that I'd made an observation vaguely similar to Norman's "That said" bit on page 2 of my little essay in SCR 12, "On Poetry and Perversion":

"Not because they’re puritanical, mind you — they’re oh so emphatic about that..."

http://shitcreek.auszine.com/issue12...nd-perversion/

In other words, Norman and I observed something similar. I see a critic defensively denying that he's puritanical, and I think, "He protests too much; he has a problem, and can't give the poem a fair reading." Norman sees the same thing and thinks the critic is being needlessly apologetic about his attitude. Either way the critic is being less than honest.

Right On Rose!
 

Never mind.

Rose,

No matter the cause of your return, it's good to see your name on my screen again!

Thanks,

Bill

I tend to think that poets whose relations to both the sex act and, well, mind-altering substances (and I include the legal ones here) aren't a bit... well... complex tend to be boring, indeed rubbish poets. Not always, but usually. I'm not actually advocating any particular behavior, mind you, but I am, I suppose, enough of a Romantic to think that artists should be, at least to some degree, misfits and f%#k-ups and deviants.

Quincy

What on earth is sexual deviance? If it means what it ought to mean then two of the greatest poets in the last hundred and fifty years, Hopkins and Emily Dickinson were both sexually deviant, just like the Pope. Unless some of you know under-the-counter stuff about Gerard and Emily the Great.

These days I suppose Marlowe would get more stick for his tobacco than his boies.

Well, both were essentially celibate, which is pretty f%&ked-up, in my opinion, at least.

Inserting 'deviance' into the thread title was an afterthought that came to me immediately on the heels of not giving much forethought to all that transpired beneath it. However as no placebo thread was erected, we can only speculate on how much more prurient interest this misnomer drew. My thinking is maybe gobs more. Poetry had little to do with it either. It was more a quirky behavioral observation on poetry forum commentary relating to posted poems with sexual content.

Lance lays bare one of my own suspicions: "I see the decline of reserve connected closely to the rise of free verse."

The free verse credo of 'letting it all hang out' without formal inhibition or stricture can easily devolve into gratuitous over-exposure. Whereas form prohibits certain trespasses and thus retains a reticent element.

Roger said the whole thing funnier and in fewer words too, always a bonus:

"It's pre-emptive, Norman. The author of a sexually explicit poem often accuses negative critics of being prudes, so the critic needs to establish his or her credentials for ribaldry in order to have standing to say the poem is horrible."

Rose offers a far more developed and compelling read here:

http://shitcreek.auszine.com/issue12...nd-perversion/

The best fun comes from discussing sex in a manner that has one appearing to be dragged kicking and screaming towards it. Horrible poetry with explicit sexual content offers a gargantuan playing field upon which sexual teeth can be pulled with all the pain of a good feign.

I started publishing forthrightly gay poetry in 1975. However, I do not write about sex, and I dislike it when other poets do. Old fuddyduddy.

That's odd, Tim. I just assumed that all of your hunting poems were about sex.

Oh, so that's what a feeney is!

Nemo

This thread has many twists, but the mention of Emily reminded me of something I've often thought.

Reticence is the circuitous way to full disclosure, hence the most erotic route of all.

Emily knew. “tell it slant…success in circuit lies" – this is how to touch people, how to provoke the physical arousal she describes in that famous letter:

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way".

That’s no virgin comment! That’s living holy in the body.

Cally

Not even a kiss, Timmy?

Mary, we've had our differences in recent months, but this had me in stitches.

Reserve and reticence can result from so many different causes that they are hard to read accurately. They can come from emotional coldness, from prudishness, from shyness, from timidity, from privacy, from secretiveness, from hauteur, from humility, and so on. Their relationship to sex is complicated. I find banter to be very sexy, for instance, but indirectness is part of its essence. Like Cally, I find Dickinson's poetry to be very passionate, almost painfully so, but I think it is the extreme restraint that her writing observes that makes the emotion more piercing. On the other hand, I also like Catullus, Martial, Sharon Olds, and other writers who are direct and even graphic in their language. Is one allowed only to like one approach and not the other?

Susan

Let's see, I like (legal) ouzo and (legal) red wine. And ginger ale. I like the word reticence because it gently embraces my name. I distinctly favor the fair gender and I could never be celibate, but I don't think genuine celibacy (male or female) has to be creepy. Am I deviant enough? Not by half, I bet. But I get published now and then by all sorts of people, some of whom live here. (Eeek.)

Where did I go wrong? Should I try for something hauteur?
Send replies to Standard_Deviant@lol.com.

Well, I have to keep Good Catholic Girl syndrome (not just reticence, shame!) in check for the sake of the work. Be reticent in "real life," if it suits your temperament, but remember that it's the poet's job to illuminate the human predicament -- and what is the human predicament if not enfleshment? But no doubt I repeat myself from earlier threads.

And there's lot's of erotic and juicy metrical poetry. Aren't we all looking forward to Hot Sonnets?

That sounds a bit deviant right there.

Doesn't true craft engender reticence and encourage subtlety and perhaps result in beauty no matter what the subject matter? And craft and intelligence can be as present in Free Verse as in Formal. It's the cancerous profusion of bad Free Verse that's harming poetry just as the florid growth of out-worn sentiment and empty form did a century ago. It is obviousness, not sex, that is the enemy of art and culture (as proved by Bill's mini-essay).