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Tony Barnstone teaches at Whittier College and is the author of 18 books and a music CD, Tokyo’s Burning: WWII Songs. His books of poetry include Pulp Sonnets; Beast in the Apartment; Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki; The Golem of Los Angeles; Sad Jazz: Sonnets; and Impure. He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese literature and editor of world literature textbooks. Among his awards: the Poets Prize, Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Contest, Pushcart Prize, John Ciardi Prize, Benjamin Saltman Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the California Arts Council. http://www.whittier.edu/academics/english/barnstone
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Hello, and fuck you all.
Let me tell you a story. My brother, currently a well-respected sculptor and professor of architecture who teaches in Australia, was walking by an outdoor café on a Cycladic island when he heard the distinctive rasp of an American accent. Being a sociable fellow, he at once struck up a conversation with the group of Americans who were drinking there. After a while, as often happens with ad-hoc acquaintanceships in Europe, someone remembered to do formal introductions, and my brother introduced himself as Robert Barnstone.
The man he’d been speaking with immediately sat up straighter and said intensely, “You’re Robert Barnstone.”
My brother replied, “Yes, I am.”
The man said, “You’re telling me that you’re Robert Barnstone!”
My brother replied, somewhat uneasily now, “Ye-es.”
The man now leapt to his feet and cried out, “You son of a bitch, you peed on me!”
As it turned out, the man was a friend of my father’s and had come to dinner at our house in Indiana when my brother was about five years old. In the midst of the meal, Rob, who has always been something of a wild man, leapt to the center of the table, dropped his trousers, grabbed his penis and sprayed the guests.
Poetry today often resembles a poorly disciplined child, desperate to be the center of attention. In the past decades I have noticed an outpouring of poetry that shocks and titillates, poetry that explores the darker and kinkier side of language and the psyche. Robert Hass’s marvelous poem “Shame: An Aria,” is a minor epic meditation on the shame that comes from being caught picking one’s nose when the elevator doors open—really an essay in verse on all the grand and grotesque fluids and secretions of the body. Tony Hoagland writes an ode of thanks to the word “Dickhead,” and all that it has given him, and in another poem celebrates the weirdness of a man tasting his own sperm on his girlfriend’s lips when she kisses him after giving him head. The longest poem in Galway Kinnell’s book Imperfect Thirst is a meditation upon the holiness of shit in all its forms and varieties.
This is nothing new, of course. We see it in Anne Sexton and Lucille Clifton writing poems to their uteruses (“patient/as a sock”) and Allen Ginsberg writing an ode to his asshole (“active, eager, receptive to phallus/coke bottle, candle, carrot/banana & fingers—“), and it would be old news to Catullus or Quevedo, Villon or Swift, Berryman or Larkin, and of course Charles Bukowski. Often it has taken the form of female poets making “dick jokes,” as in Kim Addonizio’s hilarious “Penis Blues” (“I would like to order a penis, please,/with dressing on the side./Also, this soup could use a dash of penis”) or Anne Sexton’s “The Fury of Cocks,” which begins:
There they are
drooping over the breakfast plates,
angel-like,
folding in their sad wing,
animal sad,
and only the night before
there they were
playing the banjo.
More serious (but also utilizing phallic shock humor) are many poems by Sharon Olds, such as “Ode to the Penis,” or “The Pope’s Penis” in which she asserts the Pope’s mere humanity and the entwined impulses of sex and religion:
It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat — and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.
Certainly I have been part of this impure trend, particularly in my earlier poetry. I have often been overheard complaining about “polite poetry,” poetry that just sits there on the shelf instead of whanging on the oven with a crowbar. I find myself attracted to Ha Jin’s statement in a poem about witnessing horrors in the Chinese Cultural Revolution: “How could I write about coffee and flowers?” I like unrepressed poetry, poetry that tweaks noses and nipples, poetry that in despite of W.H. Auden, makes something happen. I think this is why I am attracted to William Carlos William’s metaphor that a poem is a “machine made out of words.”
Tony Hoagland gets at this sense of the performative word as a machine that does work in his poem “Dickhead” in which he writes:
...dickhead was a word as dumb
and democratic as a hammer, an object
you could pick up in your hand
and swing,
saying dickhead this and dickhead that,
a song that meant the world
was yours enough at least
to bang on like a garbage can
It is true that impure poetry can be dickhead poetry, the poetry of insult, and there are pleasures to be found in swinging that hammer. Quevedo (the great 16th century poet Don Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas) is the master of such dickhead poetry. Here is his “To a Nose”:
There was a man appended to a nose,
a nose imposing like a towering hill,
a beaker from a half-dead dripping still,
a bent-beard swordfish never in repose.
It was a sundial crooked as a crime,
an elephant, its snout on high, a blur
of nostrils on a scribe and executioner
and Ovid Naso in his nosy prime.
It was a galley's pointed battering ram;
it spread like an Egyptian pyramid
and was twelve tribes of noses of a nation.
It was a noseness grown ad nauseam,
a mask, a Frisian archnose ugly as a squid,
a fried and purple swollen ulceration.
[trans. by Willis Barnstone]
It is easy to dismiss such poetry for being funny, rude, taboo, in-your-face, but at least it makes something happen. That is, what poems say is not the work of poetry, but what they do, and when poems say what they are not supposed to say then they do something exciting. As William Carlos Williams says in an interview: "Let's forget about the burden, the thought the poem might carry; and let's recognize the mechanism that can carry the sense, any sense. Think of Gertrude Stein: to use words as objects out of which you manufacture a little mechanism you call a poem, which has to deliver the goods. That's what poetry must be" (Wagner 69).
I think this is why I admire Robert Hass’ latest books so much. I like in “Forty Something” the plainspoken use of threat:
She says to him, musing, “If you ever leave me,
and marry a younger woman and have another baby,
I’ll put a knife in your heart.” They are in bed,
so she climbs onto his chest, and looks directly
down into his eyes. “You understand? Your heart.”
I like also his use of performative language to jazz up his normal lyrical beauty in ‘Shame: An Aria,” particularly in his great breathing, rhetorical list of the despised fluids and solids of the body:
toenail parings left absently on the bedside table that your lover
the next night notices there, shit streaks in underwear or little, faint,
odorous pee-blossoms of the palest polleny color, the stiffened
small droplets in the sheets of the body’s shuddering late-night loneliness
and self-love, russets of menstrual blood, toejam, earwax,
phlegm, the little dead militias of white corpuscles
we call pus, what are they after all but the twins of the juices
of mortal glory: sap, wine, breast milk, sperm and blood
............
they get taught to us, don’t they,
as boundaries, terrible thresholds, what can be said (or thought, or done)
inside the house but not out, what can be said (or thought, or done)
only by oneself, which must therefore best not be done at all,
so that the core of the self, we learn early, is where shame lives
and where we also learn doubleness, and a certain practical cunning,
and what a theater is, and the ability to lie --
It’s almost Jonathan Swift in his parodic poem describing the lady Celia’s dressing room:
The virtues we must not let pass,
Of Celia’s magnifying glass.
When frightened Strephon cast his eye on’t
It showed visage of a giant.
A glass that can to sight disclose,
The smallest worm in Celia’s nose,
And faithfully direct her nail
To squeeze it out from head to tail;
For catch it nicely by the head,
It must come out alive or dead.
[from “The Lady’s Dressing Room”]
Swift’s poem is also replete with gross-out imagery (climaxing when the man who sneaks into the lady’s dressing room steals away, “Repeating in his amorous fits,/Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”) Swift uses the sort of queasy irony that we find in Quevedo’s deliciously nauseating paean to the asshole:
That your ass has a nether eye is clear,
and your red sun a handful of wet keys;
the pupil of that winking eye looks blear,
squeezing back hot and blackened soggy cheese.
Of course its lashes stiffened like a thorn
have the moist duty to conceal the eye,
and every time it feels like pushing corn
it blinks against the yellow lumps of pie.
Will your fart have a better roar than ones
by the disheveled poor Mallorca whore?
I'm not about to try it, I admit.
Your piss is piss and yes, your shit is shit.
That is the only truth, the rest a bore,
and now I feel an urge to purge my buns.
[“That Your Ass Has a Nether Eye Is Clear” trans. by Willis Barnstone]
However, Hass explores toejam, earwax, snot and phlegm not to gross us out but to challenge our notions of what is gross and what has grace. “Shame, an Aria” uses the interest of excavating the taboo imagery of the forbidden liquids of the body as a way to grab the reader’s attention in service of a serious poem about our notions of beauty and shame and how they harm our ability to love ourselves.
Similarly, Lucille Clifton’s many “impure” poems are not presented for gross-out effect, but instead to celebrate big hips, her uterus, her naked breasts. Here is her “Homage to My Hips”:
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!
And here is “if i stand in my window…”
if i stand in my window
naked in my own house
and press my breasts
against my windowpane
like black birds pushing against glass
because i am somebody
in a New Thing
and if the man come to stop me
in my own house
naked in my own window
saying i have offended him
i have offended his
Gods
let him watch my black body
push against my own glass
let him discover self
let him run naked through the streets
crying
praying in tongues
In contrast with Swift’s misogynist humor at the expense of Celia, whose beauty is revealed to be an exterior put on for the male lover, Clifton’s poems celebrate the black body and the actual female body. They are in keeping with the push in 70s social justice movements for women to look at themselves naked in the mirror and come to love their real bodies and not media images of women, to see themselves not as seen through the male and white perspective. These poems are magical spells that send men spinning “like a top” or running naked in the street, weeping and “praying in tongues.” And if they are magical and if they have power, that power comes not only from their Whitmanian exuberance as they sing the self but also from the way they find emotional and social energy in their impure poetics of the flesh.
When I was just starting out as a poet, I explicitly set out to write poetry that would create an involuntary reaction in the reader. These poems might be sexual in nature; sometimes they were designed to disgust or shock. I called them “meat” poems, because they were designed to trigger the meat of the body like Pavlov’s bell. My solution to the problem of capturing audience attention was to write poems directed at the instincts, not towards the rational brain. In retrospect, I can see that like the advertising industry, I was attempting a form of “subliminal seduction” of the audience, based on an esthetic approximation of techniques of psychological suggestion.
Early advertising manuals often were written by psychologists who described the mechanics of such psychological suggestion: attaching products through metaphor, metonymy, and simile to objects of psychological desire, or seeking to manipulate consumer hypochondria by inventing fake diseases that advertisers claimed their products could cure. In the advertising jargon of the modernist era, subliminal seduction ads are meant to appeal to the "short-circuit" of the mind, to the unconscious, as compared with the "long-circuit" of the rational mind.
In a sense, then, “meat poetry” might be mimetic of an America in which the real is itself a textual simulation, filled with posters, signs, billboards, traffic signals, logos, labels, instructions, and price tags, all of them ordering us around, seducing us, jumping up and down for attention, making wisecracks. As Steven Connor writes, “Once the real has been rendered into discourse, there is no longer any gap to be leapt between text and world" (Connor 127). We can see this intersection quite explicitly in the mutual interest shown by poets and advertisers. Long before Pop Art, poets such as William Carlos Williams and Matthew Josephson were putting advertisements into their poems, and at the same time advertisers set out to imitate the modern feel of early twentieth century poetry.
Such poets sought to demonstrate that in poetry as in advertising one can make an appeal to the short-circuit. Thus, Tony Hoagland’s poem “Carnal Knowledge” speaks of how “the faint flavor of your own/penis” on your girlfriend’s lips “...was an idea so charged//it scorched the fragile circuits/of your eighteen-year-old/imagination.” Certainly the poem is meant to scorch a few circuits in the readers as well, and the use of the second person is less to thinly disguise the poem’s autobiography than it is to accost the reader, to put the (presumably male) reader in the situation of tasting his own penis and short-circuiting.
As we learned from advertising, we can also learn something from the form of narrative that has largely replaced poetry in the reading public, fiction. In my fiction writing workshops, I tell my students, “Don’t write nice stories about happy and well-adjusted people. Politeness is the polished surface underneath which we are bleeding, horny, irate and laughing hysterically. Find out where it hurts, and keep your finger on the bruise.” Keep your finger on the bruise, as Philip Larkin does in his portrait of the dysfunctional family in “This Be the Verse” (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”), or as he does when writing of the sorrows of growing old in a life emotionally bound by priestly restrictions:
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise ….
I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest.
[from “High Windows”]
Keep your finger on the bruise like Nicanor Parra, the great Chilean writer of “anti-poems,” writing a subtle poem about political oppression that consist entirely of a nutty set of commands and prohibitions:
Warnings
No praying allowed, no sneezing.
No spitting, eulogizing, kneeling
Worshipping, howling, expectorating.
No sleeping permitted in this precinct
No inoculating, talking, excommunicating
Harmonizing, escaping, catching.
Running is absolutely forbidden.
No smoking. No fucking.
[Trans. by Miller Williams]
Although some of the power of impure poetry come from its willingness to confront the taboo, at its best it uses techniques of confrontation and active language to rub your face in the goo of that subject matter. So in Galway Kinnell’s “Holy Shit,” the subject matter grabs our attention and creates a queasy reaction, but it’s his use of the set-up and punch line of a joke that makes the poem act:
...last night
you took what you liked from a carrot,
today you give back the rest.
At the poem’s end (after a scholarly and heartfelt exploration of shit from Martin Luther to e.e. cummings and of our rejection of our own bodies through the centuries) the trick of the poem is to make the grotesque ending feel sad and resonate with pathos:
Let us remember this is our home
and that we have become, we mad ones, its keepers.
Let us sit bent forward slightly, and be opened a moment,
as earth’s holy matter passes through us.
Similarly, Robert Pinsky in “Impossible to Tell,” a long meditative tribute to his dead jokester friend Eliott, nests a 51-line long joke about a rabbi asked to bring a dead Chinese man back to life again. After trying prayers in every language, nothing. After circumcising the corpse, nothing. Bathing it, nothing. Praying some more, dancing and chanting secret blessings from the Kabala, still nothing. Until, at last,
the wee
Rabbi, still panting, like a startled boxer,
Looks at the dead one, then up at all those watching,
A kind of Mel Brooks gesture, “Hoo boy!” he says,
“Now that’s what I call really dead.”
The poem questions what it is we get from humor, all in the service of questioning what we get from life, and what it means to live, and what mystery, impossible to tell, separates the living from the dead.
As I see it, poetry still has something to learn from lowly forms of communication, such as the joke, the insult, and the advertisement. We can make our audiences laugh, flinch, flush with fear and desire. We can learn from cookbooks how to order our audiences around. We can engage our audiences by making them promises, by commanding them, by insulting them, by betraying their expectations, and creating sudden shifts in tone and diction. Certainly, I can see that the danger of such a technique is that it can degenerate into mere shock-value, into sensationalism on the level of Reality TV. On the other hand, as I see it, we are entering into an unspoken contract with the reader when we write. We are making a promise that, in the words of Nicanor Parra, our poetry will be an “improvement upon the blank page.” We are promising that we will make a kind of music in the brief period of time during which the readers turn their eyes away from the world and are captured in the sequence of words arranged upon the page like a musical score.
Japanese Zen masters often carry a staff or a stick with which to beat meditators. The idea is that the shock of being hit might break the meditator out of expectations and preconceptions, and knock him or her into enlightenment. Impure poetry is such a stick.
Works Cited
Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Wagner, Linda. Interviews with William Carlos Williams: "Speaking Straight Ahead." NY: New Directions, 1976.
Let me tell you a story. My brother, currently a well-respected sculptor and professor of architecture who teaches in Australia, was walking by an outdoor café on a Cycladic island when he heard the distinctive rasp of an American accent. Being a sociable fellow, he at once struck up a conversation with the group of Americans who were drinking there. After a while, as often happens with ad-hoc acquaintanceships in Europe, someone remembered to do formal introductions, and my brother introduced himself as Robert Barnstone.
The man he’d been speaking with immediately sat up straighter and said intensely, “You’re Robert Barnstone.”
My brother replied, “Yes, I am.”
The man said, “You’re telling me that you’re Robert Barnstone!”
My brother replied, somewhat uneasily now, “Ye-es.”
The man now leapt to his feet and cried out, “You son of a bitch, you peed on me!”
As it turned out, the man was a friend of my father’s and had come to dinner at our house in Indiana when my brother was about five years old. In the midst of the meal, Rob, who has always been something of a wild man, leapt to the center of the table, dropped his trousers, grabbed his penis and sprayed the guests.
Poetry today often resembles a poorly disciplined child, desperate to be the center of attention. In the past decades I have noticed an outpouring of poetry that shocks and titillates, poetry that explores the darker and kinkier side of language and the psyche. Robert Hass’s marvelous poem “Shame: An Aria,” is a minor epic meditation on the shame that comes from being caught picking one’s nose when the elevator doors open—really an essay in verse on all the grand and grotesque fluids and secretions of the body. Tony Hoagland writes an ode of thanks to the word “Dickhead,” and all that it has given him, and in another poem celebrates the weirdness of a man tasting his own sperm on his girlfriend’s lips when she kisses him after giving him head. The longest poem in Galway Kinnell’s book Imperfect Thirst is a meditation upon the holiness of shit in all its forms and varieties.
This is nothing new, of course. We see it in Anne Sexton and Lucille Clifton writing poems to their uteruses (“patient/as a sock”) and Allen Ginsberg writing an ode to his asshole (“active, eager, receptive to phallus/coke bottle, candle, carrot/banana & fingers—“), and it would be old news to Catullus or Quevedo, Villon or Swift, Berryman or Larkin, and of course Charles Bukowski. Often it has taken the form of female poets making “dick jokes,” as in Kim Addonizio’s hilarious “Penis Blues” (“I would like to order a penis, please,/with dressing on the side./Also, this soup could use a dash of penis”) or Anne Sexton’s “The Fury of Cocks,” which begins:
There they are
drooping over the breakfast plates,
angel-like,
folding in their sad wing,
animal sad,
and only the night before
there they were
playing the banjo.
More serious (but also utilizing phallic shock humor) are many poems by Sharon Olds, such as “Ode to the Penis,” or “The Pope’s Penis” in which she asserts the Pope’s mere humanity and the entwined impulses of sex and religion:
It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat — and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.
Certainly I have been part of this impure trend, particularly in my earlier poetry. I have often been overheard complaining about “polite poetry,” poetry that just sits there on the shelf instead of whanging on the oven with a crowbar. I find myself attracted to Ha Jin’s statement in a poem about witnessing horrors in the Chinese Cultural Revolution: “How could I write about coffee and flowers?” I like unrepressed poetry, poetry that tweaks noses and nipples, poetry that in despite of W.H. Auden, makes something happen. I think this is why I am attracted to William Carlos William’s metaphor that a poem is a “machine made out of words.”
Tony Hoagland gets at this sense of the performative word as a machine that does work in his poem “Dickhead” in which he writes:
...dickhead was a word as dumb
and democratic as a hammer, an object
you could pick up in your hand
and swing,
saying dickhead this and dickhead that,
a song that meant the world
was yours enough at least
to bang on like a garbage can
It is true that impure poetry can be dickhead poetry, the poetry of insult, and there are pleasures to be found in swinging that hammer. Quevedo (the great 16th century poet Don Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas) is the master of such dickhead poetry. Here is his “To a Nose”:
There was a man appended to a nose,
a nose imposing like a towering hill,
a beaker from a half-dead dripping still,
a bent-beard swordfish never in repose.
It was a sundial crooked as a crime,
an elephant, its snout on high, a blur
of nostrils on a scribe and executioner
and Ovid Naso in his nosy prime.
It was a galley's pointed battering ram;
it spread like an Egyptian pyramid
and was twelve tribes of noses of a nation.
It was a noseness grown ad nauseam,
a mask, a Frisian archnose ugly as a squid,
a fried and purple swollen ulceration.
[trans. by Willis Barnstone]
It is easy to dismiss such poetry for being funny, rude, taboo, in-your-face, but at least it makes something happen. That is, what poems say is not the work of poetry, but what they do, and when poems say what they are not supposed to say then they do something exciting. As William Carlos Williams says in an interview: "Let's forget about the burden, the thought the poem might carry; and let's recognize the mechanism that can carry the sense, any sense. Think of Gertrude Stein: to use words as objects out of which you manufacture a little mechanism you call a poem, which has to deliver the goods. That's what poetry must be" (Wagner 69).
I think this is why I admire Robert Hass’ latest books so much. I like in “Forty Something” the plainspoken use of threat:
She says to him, musing, “If you ever leave me,
and marry a younger woman and have another baby,
I’ll put a knife in your heart.” They are in bed,
so she climbs onto his chest, and looks directly
down into his eyes. “You understand? Your heart.”
I like also his use of performative language to jazz up his normal lyrical beauty in ‘Shame: An Aria,” particularly in his great breathing, rhetorical list of the despised fluids and solids of the body:
toenail parings left absently on the bedside table that your lover
the next night notices there, shit streaks in underwear or little, faint,
odorous pee-blossoms of the palest polleny color, the stiffened
small droplets in the sheets of the body’s shuddering late-night loneliness
and self-love, russets of menstrual blood, toejam, earwax,
phlegm, the little dead militias of white corpuscles
we call pus, what are they after all but the twins of the juices
of mortal glory: sap, wine, breast milk, sperm and blood
............
they get taught to us, don’t they,
as boundaries, terrible thresholds, what can be said (or thought, or done)
inside the house but not out, what can be said (or thought, or done)
only by oneself, which must therefore best not be done at all,
so that the core of the self, we learn early, is where shame lives
and where we also learn doubleness, and a certain practical cunning,
and what a theater is, and the ability to lie --
It’s almost Jonathan Swift in his parodic poem describing the lady Celia’s dressing room:
The virtues we must not let pass,
Of Celia’s magnifying glass.
When frightened Strephon cast his eye on’t
It showed visage of a giant.
A glass that can to sight disclose,
The smallest worm in Celia’s nose,
And faithfully direct her nail
To squeeze it out from head to tail;
For catch it nicely by the head,
It must come out alive or dead.
[from “The Lady’s Dressing Room”]
Swift’s poem is also replete with gross-out imagery (climaxing when the man who sneaks into the lady’s dressing room steals away, “Repeating in his amorous fits,/Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”) Swift uses the sort of queasy irony that we find in Quevedo’s deliciously nauseating paean to the asshole:
That your ass has a nether eye is clear,
and your red sun a handful of wet keys;
the pupil of that winking eye looks blear,
squeezing back hot and blackened soggy cheese.
Of course its lashes stiffened like a thorn
have the moist duty to conceal the eye,
and every time it feels like pushing corn
it blinks against the yellow lumps of pie.
Will your fart have a better roar than ones
by the disheveled poor Mallorca whore?
I'm not about to try it, I admit.
Your piss is piss and yes, your shit is shit.
That is the only truth, the rest a bore,
and now I feel an urge to purge my buns.
[“That Your Ass Has a Nether Eye Is Clear” trans. by Willis Barnstone]
However, Hass explores toejam, earwax, snot and phlegm not to gross us out but to challenge our notions of what is gross and what has grace. “Shame, an Aria” uses the interest of excavating the taboo imagery of the forbidden liquids of the body as a way to grab the reader’s attention in service of a serious poem about our notions of beauty and shame and how they harm our ability to love ourselves.
Similarly, Lucille Clifton’s many “impure” poems are not presented for gross-out effect, but instead to celebrate big hips, her uterus, her naked breasts. Here is her “Homage to My Hips”:
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!
And here is “if i stand in my window…”
if i stand in my window
naked in my own house
and press my breasts
against my windowpane
like black birds pushing against glass
because i am somebody
in a New Thing
and if the man come to stop me
in my own house
naked in my own window
saying i have offended him
i have offended his
Gods
let him watch my black body
push against my own glass
let him discover self
let him run naked through the streets
crying
praying in tongues
In contrast with Swift’s misogynist humor at the expense of Celia, whose beauty is revealed to be an exterior put on for the male lover, Clifton’s poems celebrate the black body and the actual female body. They are in keeping with the push in 70s social justice movements for women to look at themselves naked in the mirror and come to love their real bodies and not media images of women, to see themselves not as seen through the male and white perspective. These poems are magical spells that send men spinning “like a top” or running naked in the street, weeping and “praying in tongues.” And if they are magical and if they have power, that power comes not only from their Whitmanian exuberance as they sing the self but also from the way they find emotional and social energy in their impure poetics of the flesh.
When I was just starting out as a poet, I explicitly set out to write poetry that would create an involuntary reaction in the reader. These poems might be sexual in nature; sometimes they were designed to disgust or shock. I called them “meat” poems, because they were designed to trigger the meat of the body like Pavlov’s bell. My solution to the problem of capturing audience attention was to write poems directed at the instincts, not towards the rational brain. In retrospect, I can see that like the advertising industry, I was attempting a form of “subliminal seduction” of the audience, based on an esthetic approximation of techniques of psychological suggestion.
Early advertising manuals often were written by psychologists who described the mechanics of such psychological suggestion: attaching products through metaphor, metonymy, and simile to objects of psychological desire, or seeking to manipulate consumer hypochondria by inventing fake diseases that advertisers claimed their products could cure. In the advertising jargon of the modernist era, subliminal seduction ads are meant to appeal to the "short-circuit" of the mind, to the unconscious, as compared with the "long-circuit" of the rational mind.
In a sense, then, “meat poetry” might be mimetic of an America in which the real is itself a textual simulation, filled with posters, signs, billboards, traffic signals, logos, labels, instructions, and price tags, all of them ordering us around, seducing us, jumping up and down for attention, making wisecracks. As Steven Connor writes, “Once the real has been rendered into discourse, there is no longer any gap to be leapt between text and world" (Connor 127). We can see this intersection quite explicitly in the mutual interest shown by poets and advertisers. Long before Pop Art, poets such as William Carlos Williams and Matthew Josephson were putting advertisements into their poems, and at the same time advertisers set out to imitate the modern feel of early twentieth century poetry.
Such poets sought to demonstrate that in poetry as in advertising one can make an appeal to the short-circuit. Thus, Tony Hoagland’s poem “Carnal Knowledge” speaks of how “the faint flavor of your own/penis” on your girlfriend’s lips “...was an idea so charged//it scorched the fragile circuits/of your eighteen-year-old/imagination.” Certainly the poem is meant to scorch a few circuits in the readers as well, and the use of the second person is less to thinly disguise the poem’s autobiography than it is to accost the reader, to put the (presumably male) reader in the situation of tasting his own penis and short-circuiting.
As we learned from advertising, we can also learn something from the form of narrative that has largely replaced poetry in the reading public, fiction. In my fiction writing workshops, I tell my students, “Don’t write nice stories about happy and well-adjusted people. Politeness is the polished surface underneath which we are bleeding, horny, irate and laughing hysterically. Find out where it hurts, and keep your finger on the bruise.” Keep your finger on the bruise, as Philip Larkin does in his portrait of the dysfunctional family in “This Be the Verse” (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”), or as he does when writing of the sorrows of growing old in a life emotionally bound by priestly restrictions:
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise ….
I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest.
[from “High Windows”]
Keep your finger on the bruise like Nicanor Parra, the great Chilean writer of “anti-poems,” writing a subtle poem about political oppression that consist entirely of a nutty set of commands and prohibitions:
Warnings
No praying allowed, no sneezing.
No spitting, eulogizing, kneeling
Worshipping, howling, expectorating.
No sleeping permitted in this precinct
No inoculating, talking, excommunicating
Harmonizing, escaping, catching.
Running is absolutely forbidden.
No smoking. No fucking.
[Trans. by Miller Williams]
Although some of the power of impure poetry come from its willingness to confront the taboo, at its best it uses techniques of confrontation and active language to rub your face in the goo of that subject matter. So in Galway Kinnell’s “Holy Shit,” the subject matter grabs our attention and creates a queasy reaction, but it’s his use of the set-up and punch line of a joke that makes the poem act:
...last night
you took what you liked from a carrot,
today you give back the rest.
At the poem’s end (after a scholarly and heartfelt exploration of shit from Martin Luther to e.e. cummings and of our rejection of our own bodies through the centuries) the trick of the poem is to make the grotesque ending feel sad and resonate with pathos:
Let us remember this is our home
and that we have become, we mad ones, its keepers.
Let us sit bent forward slightly, and be opened a moment,
as earth’s holy matter passes through us.
Similarly, Robert Pinsky in “Impossible to Tell,” a long meditative tribute to his dead jokester friend Eliott, nests a 51-line long joke about a rabbi asked to bring a dead Chinese man back to life again. After trying prayers in every language, nothing. After circumcising the corpse, nothing. Bathing it, nothing. Praying some more, dancing and chanting secret blessings from the Kabala, still nothing. Until, at last,
the wee
Rabbi, still panting, like a startled boxer,
Looks at the dead one, then up at all those watching,
A kind of Mel Brooks gesture, “Hoo boy!” he says,
“Now that’s what I call really dead.”
The poem questions what it is we get from humor, all in the service of questioning what we get from life, and what it means to live, and what mystery, impossible to tell, separates the living from the dead.
As I see it, poetry still has something to learn from lowly forms of communication, such as the joke, the insult, and the advertisement. We can make our audiences laugh, flinch, flush with fear and desire. We can learn from cookbooks how to order our audiences around. We can engage our audiences by making them promises, by commanding them, by insulting them, by betraying their expectations, and creating sudden shifts in tone and diction. Certainly, I can see that the danger of such a technique is that it can degenerate into mere shock-value, into sensationalism on the level of Reality TV. On the other hand, as I see it, we are entering into an unspoken contract with the reader when we write. We are making a promise that, in the words of Nicanor Parra, our poetry will be an “improvement upon the blank page.” We are promising that we will make a kind of music in the brief period of time during which the readers turn their eyes away from the world and are captured in the sequence of words arranged upon the page like a musical score.
Japanese Zen masters often carry a staff or a stick with which to beat meditators. The idea is that the shock of being hit might break the meditator out of expectations and preconceptions, and knock him or her into enlightenment. Impure poetry is such a stick.
Works Cited
Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Wagner, Linda. Interviews with William Carlos Williams: "Speaking Straight Ahead." NY: New Directions, 1976.
