Welmer

I have always loved poetry, especially that which deals with the eternal questions of existence, with longings for answers, and with those experiences that embody truth. However, I have never been a big fan of erotic poetry, and I assume that the same goes for the majority of men. And I can state with some confidence that love poetry is detested by the most men; any grown man found to be engaging in that kind of writing should expect to become an object of ridicule among his peers. Shakespeare captures this ridicule perfectly in the last lines of sonnet 71:

O! if, I say, you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
But let your love even with my life decay;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.

W. Shakespeare

Shakespeare writes a great deal of what could be called love poetry, but it is of an expository nature; that is, Shakespeare explores what love means, measures his own against the objective world, and, ultimately, exposes it for what it is, feeble or great that it might be. His love for his friend, a wistful and pure, yet frank kind of love, is eventually shattered by their competition for the “Dark Lady,” who bewitches the two of them with her easy dealings with deceit — in Shakespeare’s writing there is something indisputably feminine about the dark side of human relations. The feminine in Shakespeare is the master of two domains, as is the masculine, but they only intersect in the middle. One might say that it is the Trinity made whole by the intersection of the yin and the yang, an idea that fascinates me as a Catholic sinophile. But lest I spin off into self-indulgent, tangential interpretations of the matter at hand, I’ll return to the fundamental point: the difference between the feminine and masculine concepts of poetry.

In a quick study of feminist poetry, I have found that the themes of sex and love are far more prevalent than in male poetry, even when the poems are written by lesbians. Not only is love a more prevalent theme, but the sex act itself features prominently in much feminist poetry. For example Maya Angelou, inaugural poet for Bill Clinton (and former prostitute), writes poems filled with erotic imagery:

“Remembrance”

Your hands easy
weight, teasing the bees
hived in my hair, your smile at the
slope of my cheek. On the
occasion, you press
above me, glowing, spouting
readiness, mystery rapes
my reason
When you have withdrawn
your self and the magic, when
only the smell of your
love lingers between
my breasts, then, only
then, can I greedily consume
your presence.

–Maya Angelou

What to make of this poem? As far as I can tell, she is describing oral sex. I may be wrong about the particulars, but there is no doubt she is describing some kind of sex act.

Here is another example, an excerpt from “Men”:

“Men”

When I was young, I used to
Watch behind the curtains
As men walked up and down the street. Wino men, old men.
Young men sharp as mustard.
See them. Men are always
Going somewhere.
They knew I was there. Fifteen
Years old and starving for them.
Under my window, they would pauses,
Their shoulders high like the
Breasts of a young girl,
Jacket tails slapping over
Those behinds,
Men.
One day they hold you in the
Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you
Were the last raw egg in the world. Then
They tighten up. Just a little. The
First squeeze is nice. A quick hug.
Soft into your defenselessness. A little
More. The hurt begins. Wrench out a
Smile that slides around the fear. When the
Air disappears,
Your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly,
Like the head of a kitchen match. Shattered.
It is your juice
That runs down their legs. Staining their shoes.

–Maya Angelou

Again, this is about as close to explicit as one can get and still call it “poetry.”

It would be misleading to suggest that feminist poetry is only about sex, but one thing that can be stated with some certainty is that it is almost always subjective. There is little of the reflection on the truths of the world that characterizes male poetry, but rather everything becomes personal, even when someone or something very remote is the subject of the poem.

The following poem, by feminist poet Jo Shapcott, is about Thetis, mother of Achilles, and takes on a very personal tone:

Thetis

No man frightens me. Watch as I stretch
my limbs for the transformation, I’m laughing
to feel the surge of the other shapes beneath my skin.
It’s like this: here comes the full thrill of my art
as the picture of a variegated
lizard insinuates itself into my mind.
I extend my neck, lengthen fingers, push
down toes to find the form. My back begins
to undulate, the skin to gleam. I think
my soul has slithered with me into this
shape as real as the little, long tongue in my mouth,
as the sun on my back, as the skill in absolute stillness.
My name is Thetis Creatrix and you,
voyeur, if you looked a little closer, would see
the next ripples spread up my bloody tail, to bloom
through my spine as the bark begins to harden
over my trunk. Already I’m so much of the oak
I lean everything towards the black oxygen
in the black air, I process delicious gases
through my personal chemistry, suck moisture
from the earth to a pulse so slow you can’t detect it.
Next tigress. Low tremendous purrs start at the pit
of my stomach, I’m curving through long grass,
all sinew, in a body where tension
is the special joy and where the half-second
before a leap tells it all. Put out a paw
to dab a stone, an ant, a dead lamb. Life,
my life, is all play even up to the moment
when I’m tripped up, thrown down, bound,
raped until I bleed from my eyes,
beaten out of shape and forced to bring forth War.

–Jo Shapcott

Definitely not the prettiest poem out there, but it could have a place in a fantasy video game, or perhaps some extreme form of Japanese anime.

Here is another personal, feminist poem where the poetess, again, plays the part of the victim (excerpt):

Nearly a Valediction

You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I’ve ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.

I don’t want to remember you as that
four o’clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You’ve grown into your skin since then; you’ve grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.

[...]

–Marilyn Hacker

As with the previous poem, we see some violent as well as sexually explicit imagery. Who says that only men fantasize about sex and violence? Isn’t poetry a reflection of our own imagination?

What is ironic about this fixation with victimhood is that it is precisely what feminists rail against as a cultural “imposition” by some patriarchal entity. Yet here we have the last two poets, both educated white women, and the last definitely a lesbian, demonstrating that in their own minds there is a solid connection between sex and violence. Jo Shapcott’s poem even appears to exult in the power that the alleged rape of Thetis bequeaths its victim, who brings forth “War,” but only reluctantly (naturally…).

It is worth noting that the first two feminist poems, written by a black woman, have a much more easy-going attitude toward love and sex. She is not a victim, but an eager participant, and has no apparent regrets.

This leads one to wonder whether there is some cultural origin for what appears to be a Western neurosis about sex. Whatever the case, it is becoming clearer by the day that Western feminism has not been based on reality, but rather on a subjective narrative – often sheer fantasy – that is evidently a common feature of the Western, white female psyche.

Art can be a clear window into the soul of its creator. Whether or not we enjoy the art, we should be grateful to its creators for offering us rich material so that we may better understand.