[Norman Ball]

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.

[Michael Cantor]

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.

[Laura Heidy-Halberstein]

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

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?

[Ed Shacklee]

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.

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

Your mini-essay sucks.

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

[Andrew Frisardi]

Originally Posted by W.F. Lantry

No, I think it's the authoritarianism. The willingness to sort, label, condemn. The sheer self-righteousness.

Look who talks . . .

Thanks,

Andrew

[David Landrum]

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

[Jayne Osborn]

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

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.

[Skip Dewahl]

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!

[Lance Levens]

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