Clips from Tom Parker’s Positions (1970)
Sex and Poetry - Jeffrey Harrison
(After a friend asked me why
I didn’t write more poems about sex)
For one thing, it’s hard to get away with,
caught as we are red-handed in the Chamber
of Mimesis, one of those kinky rooms
with mirrors all over the walls and ceiling
where we hope to satisfy our unspeakable needs
but get instead an abyss of dwindling reflections.
Also, it’s less like being in bed with a lover
than standing alone in front of a copy machine
xeroxing her panties and bra. Snaps and garters
give way to the block ant tackle of narrative,
which no amount of fumbling will undo.
Now tell me, does that sound like fun to you?
Sometimes, however, while we are looking
elsewhere, the green-gold dust of pollen falls
and begins to settle over everything
like an idea that takes over without out knowing
and adds a glow to whatever we see,
and we find ourselves in the middle of a sentence,
we want to keep going, clause after clause,
as if the sinuosities of syntax were
the suave unfolding of limbs and skin
and language a seduction to which we love
to succumb, feeling the words take shape in our mouths
and tasting them on someone else’s tongue.
* * *
The Gulf Between the Given and the Gift – Heather McHugh
Between the driven and the drift, you’re moved −
whether air, or a cattle prod, does it.
Art, said the naturalist, in heaven. Said the blind:
Long time no touch. The hooker interjected:
Come again. But I, I once more was unable
even to converse. (I could not get the lion
out of my mind, intending to tear a gazelle
from the love of the leap of her life.) There was much
we would catch. There was much we would miss.
There was gone we would have to do twice.
from the anthology Poets of the New Century edited by Roger Weingarten & Richard Higgerson, publisher: David R. Godine
Devolution of the Nude – Lynne McMahon
In Whitman’s day there were the street bathers
spied on by his poem’s spinster, yearning
behind the glass; in Emerson’s day
and Thoreau’s; in the Utopian societies eager
to transmute the dross of Puritanism into the gold
of burnished flesh; in every century or half-
century there have been faddists who know
the six openings of the body must go
unstopped, that the distinction between man
and woman is holy, and the expulsion from
the garden was the garment district’s
first advertisement ploy.
In our day
there are perhaps fewer of these: acid rain
and factory seepage combine to forecast another
ice-age (this time the glacier greens with alloys),
have made stoppering hygenic;
and we’ve discovered in place of the open,
the principle of the closed, the Victorian tenet
that covered is more alluring than bare,
that Shame’s the secret passageway
to Eros. Ant though we may laugh at Marianne
Moore’s remark―“I like the nude,” she said,
handing back Kenneth Clark’s book, “but
in moderation”—it is us
we find
swathed in bedclothes, as if we were asthmatic
invalids under covers, calming ourselves
with penlights and turn-of-the-century novels
whose characters’ cumbersome cloaks
and flannel layers protect them, protect us,
from what is only whispered of: the difficult
birth in the back room, the laying out
of the dead in the parlor, the two occasions
for nakedness that are dreadful
and not for our eyes—
not yet.
* * *
Inspiration– Sherod Santos
Say what we will, at times it seems the rarest
Moments, the most splenetic trills, the most
Ecstatic gestures, are conceived in sloth
And degradation and executed by a great unstaggered
Surge of feeling which bursts forth suddenly
Like a yard given over to day lilies, surprise lilies,
Naked ladies, to the spiked, thumbed, overlooked
Phallus of the yucca plant, to the carmined
Secret of the flowering dogwood’s uninfected petals
Falling around you sunbathing naked in the grass
Like Susanna among the Elders, to the goat-horned
Furl of the climbing fern, to the certain posture
The May apple chooses to display itself, to the heart-
Raking itch of wood lice in the oak, to the coming
Darkness, to the secret balance, to the extreme
And desolate flowering of the night-blooming cereus,
And to all those things, all that loosestrife,
Spiderwort, tickweed and flax, all those hidden
Gothic amplitudes which leave us finally,
Tattooed and senseless, trembling on the stair.
from the anthology New American Poets edited by Jack Myers & Roger Weingarten, publisher: David R. Godine
EVERYONE GETS LIGHTER
Life is lots of presents,
and every single day you get
a big bunch of gifts
under a sparkling pine tree
hung with countless balls of colored lights,
piles of presents wrapped in fancy paper,
the red box with the green ribbon,
and the green box with the red ribbon,
and the blue one with silver,
and the white one with gold.
It’s not
what happens,
it’s how you
handle it.
You are in a water bubble human body,
on a private jet
in seemingly a god world,
a glass of champagne,
and a certain luminosity
and emptiness,
skin of air,
a flat sea of white clouds below
and vast dome of blue sky above,
and your mind is an iron nail in-between.
It’s not
what happens,
it’s how you
handle it.
Dead cat bounce,
catch
the falling knife,
after endless shadow boxing
in your sleep,
fighting in your dreams
and knocking yourself out,
you realize everything is empty,
and appears as miraculous display,
all are in nature
the play of emptiness and clarity.
Everyone
gets
higher
everyone
gets lighter
everyone gets
lighter
everyone gets lighter,
everyone is light.
John Giorno, from Subduing Demons in America: Selected poems 1962-2007, edited by Marcus Boon, publisher: Soft Skull Press
'Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and best
That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crep silently to Rest'
'Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!'
'The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.'
'Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!'
from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translator: Edward FitzGerald, publisher: Richard Lesley & Co Ltd
