by Jamie
Everybody is good at something. If you believe Sophie, it’s safe to assume that I am good in bed (as is she). If you’ve read this blog, then you can tell that I am (and she is) pretty good at stringing words together. From my earliest days I’ve heard a certain music in the way words rub together, and I’ve learned to make a little of that music myself. Inevitably I was drawn to poetry, the most musical form of language. And over the years, the occasional poem about sex has turned my head. In the spirit of Sophie’s recent post about BPM, this seems like the perfect time and place to talk about poetry and sex in the same bated breath.
As a kid in school, I enjoyed a steady diet of literary high-water marks. (So did you, whether you remember it or not.) In spite of the best efforts of public-school censors, a few of the poems I have recalled for the purposes of this essay were found in our classroom textbooks. In this as in many things literary, Shakespeare is preeminent. While cementing a new style of writing sonnets (named after him), he managed to speak of love and lust while veiling his sentiments in a way that placated the censors of both his day and ours. (Some have made the argument that he was actually writing about friendship, not love or lust, but I choose to disagree.) I could post an example or two here, but I can already tell how freaking long this post is going to be, so I will leave it to you to delve (starting here, if you wish) to your heart’s content.
Second to Shakespeare in the textbook annals were the Cavalier poets. These writers were courtiers, the social elite, trying to outwit and outcharm one another under British king Charles I’s appraising eye. When not filling the royal coffers or mustering for war, they were in some dark palace side room trying to talk the petticoats off their female counterparts. Poetry was a primary tool in the seduction toolkit. The Cavaliers strove to create the impression that they had quickly tossed off a few lines in the carriage on the way to court, but secretly they were up late into the night, sweating out their lines by candlelight. The general theme, still a staple of high-school dates and pop songs, can be summarized thus: life is short, I want you, let’s have sex. The Cavaliers penned many notable examples of these sentiments, but among my favorites is Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” which has given us these immortal lines: “The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace.”
Desire is one of the things that makes us human. When written well, a good poem reminds us of this connection – transcending time, culture, and fashion. I like being reminded.
the modern age
It is a great gift to meet somebody who saves you from yourself. For me that was John, the cool older brother of a high-school classmate. John introduced me to U2, REM, Ultravox, King Crimson, and other bands just breaking out at the time. We both liked poetry, and when I showed him my fledgling writing efforts – a cringeworthy combination of textbook classics, Tolkien-inspired anachronism, and Sunday-school symbolism I’m glad no longer exists in any form – he swallowed his horror and nudged me encouragingly down a better path. I can’t think of anyone else, including teachers, who has had a greater impact on me, and I’m grateful to him.
John’s greatest gift to me was a paperback anthology titled Contemporary American Poets, which opened my eyes to the idea that poetry was a living, breathing form of expression and not an ancient relic. The poem he specifically wanted me to read was James Dickey’s “Cherrylog Road,” a recounting of the youthful speaker’s first love affair set in an auto salvage yard. John wanted me to understand that love and lust could be symbolized by blazing heat, rusting metal, and sprung seats rather than the stale, wayward tropes I was trying to bend to my will. Bit by bit, over time, I continue to learn that lesson. But another poem from that anthology, Tom Clark’s “Sonnet,” burned itself like a firework permanently onto the retina of my psyche. I quote it below in full:
The orgasm completely
Takes the woman out of her
Self in a wave of ecstasy
That spreads through all of her body.
Her nervous, vascular and muscular
Systems participate in the act.
The muscles of the pelvis contract
And discharge a plug of mucus from the cervix
While the muscular sucking motions of the cervix
Facilitate the incoming of the semen.
At the same time the constrictions of the pelvic
Muscles prevent the loss of semen. The discharge
Makes the acid vaginal lubricant
Alkaline, so as not to destroy the spermatozoa.
I love this poem for so many reasons. First, it taught me that poetry could be profound yet sound like something you might hear on the bus. Second, pouring this sterile medical language into the shapely vase of poetic love is a brilliant pun. Third, in true sonnet fashion, the poem transcends the pun by lifting the biological response to a higher level. (My recent post about power explains why that matters to me.)
In college and afterward I continued exploring my personal poetic frontier. I found an excellent mentor, who assigned worthwhile reading material including the Morrow Anthology of Younger Poets, which includes the Diane Ackerman poem “A Fine, a Private Place.” This poem electrified me, describing an underwater sexual encounter worthy of the most elegant niche porn. Ackerman coopts the Cavalier mindset by naming her poem after Marvell’s famous line. She describes an exotic and yet universally recognizable sexual experience; you don’t have to be wearing a scuba tank to know what the speaker is feeling. This poem was a threshold leading here, to this blog, where writing about sex was a possibility and a goal for me. Weirdly, I can’t find a link to the text of the poem, but you can hear the poet reading her work here.
Other poets turned my head. Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds, representing two feminist generations, combined social commentary with skillful, sometimes skeptical, always unflinching depictions of sex. Their work was a good reminder that not everybody enjoys a happy sexual existence. In graduate school I was fortunate enough to attend a reading by Robert Bly, who suffuses his writing with an appreciation for the natural beauty found in Minnesota, his birthplace. One of my favorites is “Ferns,” which includes the loveliest depiction of labia (if not current trends in pubic-hair styling) I have ever seen:
It was among ferns I learned about eternity.
Below your belly there is a curly place.
Through you I learned to love the ferns on that bank,
And the curve the deer’s foot leaves in sand.
Although it is in some ways challenging to embrace Anne Sexton, she is another favorite. The challenge comes from the fact that she could not conquer and eventually succumbed to her self-destructive tendencies. Also, her sexuality often was woven into a tapestry of exploitation and abuse. Still, there are a few unblemished gems, including this one:
Us
I was wrapped in black
fur and white fur and
you undid me and then
you placed me in gold light
and then you crowned me,
while snow fell outside
the door in diagonal darts.
While a ten-inch snow
came down like stars
in small calcium fragments,
we were in our own bodies
(that room that will bury us)
and you were in my body
(that room that will outlive us)
and at first I rubbed your
feet dry with a towel
because I was your slave
and then you called me princess.
Princess!
Oh then
I stood up in my gold skin
and I beat down the psalms
and I beat down the clothes
and you undid the bridle
and you undid the reins
and I undid the buttons,
the bones, the confusions,
the New England postcards,
the January ten o’clock night,
and we rose up like wheat,
acre after acre of gold,
and we harvested,
we harvested.
As with Clark and Ackerman, I like this poem for numerous reasons. First, in a nod to the visual style known as concrete poetry, Sexton has (deliberately, I think) created the shape of a phallus on the page. Second, the short lines and repetitive, increasingly staccato language connote the rhythm of the sex act. Third, her imagery expresses at numerous levels the transcendent nature of sexual intimacy. And finally, in a turn back to the love of music that Sophie and I share, the Peter Gabriel album So contains an homage to Anne Sexton titled “Mercy Street,” taken from her poem “45 Mercy Street.” Gabriel’s followup album to So is titled Us. I love a good tie-in.
moving forward
Jamie Stayhouse is a pseudonym, as you surely know. I like to say it is not my real name, but it is a real name. I can say this because Jamie Stayhouse is a published poet whose work appeared some years ago in a now-defunct adult online publication.
In the last decade or two I have been able to write poems that I can reread months or years after the fact without cringing. I have figured out that I need to have a clear audience to do my best work – even, or perhaps especially, an audience of one. This approach lends itself well to the Cavalier mindset. By and large, my efforts to celebrate and encourage sexual intimacy have been well received. That said, the poem published in cleansheets.com was not written to any specific would-be lover. Call it a remedial exercise, an early attempt that encouraged my more recent efforts.
Sonnet: Sex on the Beach
Someday my wave will breach your sandcastle walls
and my sunlight will shimmer your dunes
and I will walk in the soft seaweed along your shore
and taste your salt breeze
and tease pearls from your parted shell
Like a ravenous sea flower, you will open
and pleasure will lift and suspend you
like the gust under an expectant gull
and you will grip my tiller
and guide me home
When our summer squall finally fades
and all footprints but ours are washed away
then together we will surge and ascend and dally
ceaseless as the tide
It’s fascinating to reread my poem after writing this post. Like Clark, I enjoy playing with the sonnet form. Like Ackerman and Bly, I can find inspiration in nature’s beauty. Like Sexton, I use line length and repeated words to create a rhythm. Clearly I have borrowed from my betters – without being consciously aware at the time that I was paying them that homage.
This blog is a sort of seduction, a sexual prose poem. Sophie and I want to talk you into literary bed. We want you to taste our sweat and feel our rhythm and hear our pulse race as you read. We want you to feel as we feel – that somehow, we’ve managed to reinvent the sex act. Based on the feedback so far, it seems to be working. May we all enjoy unprecedented heights of pleasure in the days and posts to come.
amaranthine border 