Here are excerpts from three poems from feti(sh)ame. Please note that in gay culture "boy" refers to a man.
Rosebud
At Babylon
I fingered a Thai regular.
He had English enough
to tell me his dreams.
And if you know how a Thai boy
can make you remember years from that moment
even the faint rising music of his voice...
Uncut
When the clean-shaven one
with the black Porsche asked me
not to clean it
I understood the poetry
in his appetite...
moan
why haven't i ever
needed you
black porno
with your slim,
veined do-ragged trade,
too rough and tatted tough
to moan or make any sound
like it hurts good or bad...
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Reading Richard Pryor's autobiography this week, and I'm relishing the part where he says that all his life he'd been told by the elder black men in his hometown neighborhood not to "kiss the pussy," that if he ever did, he'd regret where it led the ladies, and that he'd rebelled first chance he got, and that he'd become addicted to giving women head as an adult, and he never looked back... to those outmoded sickly-seen-as-subservient prejudices of black masculinity that hadn't worked out for so many "brothers." Also, I've been reading a monograph by the artist Terence Koh, reading about a piece that he did called "God," in which he was the ultimate "power bottom," something that I will allow you to google baroquely, and then discuss tipsily with me. And then, I smiled when I discovered that you were uncut (or at least had the projective abilities to write from that place) and that redemptive feeling warmed me again as I was not the only person in the world, again. Once, at one of those collective toliets reserved for multiple elementary school boys to piss in, 1980 perhaps... I was singled out as the odd one out... "what happened to yours Jody?" "Nothing," I winced, "What happened to YOURS?!?" Oh the humanity. I was so confused.
ReplyDeleteJody, I <3 u so much. And, as usual, I want to steal your poetry ("google baroquely")--and will. This is not the rosebud I hoped for http://www.asianpunkboy.com/rosebud.html but I want to know more about Koh. I'd heard of him before but now he matters more.
ReplyDeletel,k~
I'm surprised no one else commented on your fetish poems at JS. Writing about sexuality is brave, it's truly 'Dangerous Writing' (which Tom Spanbauer trademarked—I've studied with him). I too write sexual poems that I don't read very often, and they don't publish easily. I admire people who tackle the difficult. In our repressive society/culture sex is not an easy topic to explore. We're schizophrenic about it. I didn't 'get' all the fetish pieces you read, but what I got was pure earth, gritty and honest.
ReplyDeleteTonight I read at the Ginsberg Birthday party at Hugo House, I chose to focus on sexuality & read 3 of my sexual poems written in response to his work. I read excerpts from his interview for Playboy, published in Spontaneous Mind. A quote Allen says in talking about the erotic verse in his poem of the anal slave-master sexual-drama fantasy, "When I get to a barrier of shame like the one I felt when writing this poem. I know it's the sign of a good poem, because I'm entering new public territory. I write for private amusement and for the golden ears of friends who'll understand and forgive everything from the point of view of "Nothing human is foreign to me," but it's fearsome to make private reality public."
Playboy then asks him if he is saying that his poetry is an exorcism of shame? Allen replies that it is, "An exorcism of fear. Shame is just one aspect of fear."
I love his book of interviews, and know that there is so much more to write about in gay sex than what is out there. At the last AWP I went to the talk Reginald Shepherd sponsored on gay men's writing. It's not fresh in my mind, but it was enlightening as to how many more stories there are to tell and how quiet it is; and the sense of how much has been lost because of AIDS and how that has increased the aspects of shame. We've lost much. I've worked in AIDS for the past 18 years, have a chapbook of writing about these losses. We've lost brilliant, creative souls to this epidemic, many words have been stifled & killed. So when I heard you reading I wanted to cheer you on and I know Reginald would as well. Keep writing.
Julene,
ReplyDeleteThanks again for being the only JS audience member to say something about those poems. The quotes from Spanbauer and Ginsberg are exhilarating and familiar.
HIV/AIDS has amplified shame. I've seen it played out variously. It was singed into my consciousness when Wilbert Gilmore, a jock in my 7th grade life science class, responded to the question, "Does anyone know what AIDS is?" (It was 1984.) Wilbert said, "It's the disease fags get." His words pushed me even farther into the margins. Writing about sexuality, fear and shame has helped me to understand the margins and encouraged me to work to bring people there--not bring the margins center. That's an important distinction.
k~
Agreed, the center is a closed trapped place. The outsider has traditionally been the shamans or tricksters who were able to bridge to other worlds and bring back information from the external. I studied with Audre Lorde for my undergraduate in NYC, she was known as Sister Outsider and she always spoke eloquently about politics. J
ReplyDeleteperipherus_max said: And then, I smiled when I discovered that you were uncut (or at least had the projective abilities to write from that place) and that redemptive feeling warmed me again as I was not the only person in the world, again. Once, at one of those collective toliets reserved for multiple elementary school boys to piss in, 1980 perhaps... I was singled out as the odd one out... "what happened to yours Jody?" "Nothing," I winced, "What happened to YOURS?!?" Oh the humanity. I was so confused.
ReplyDeleteThis is such a touching reaction to your brave, brave poems and this is precisely why you need to keep writing them. People need to be reminded that they're not alone and that is healing.Once you show this readiness to talk about these things (such as being uncut), it encourages someone share that part of them, thus erasing the shame.
Though we may be sitting in the dark in some areas of our life, its important to remember that same dark we think we are sitting alone in is bigger and more full of fellow bodies than we know.
"Uncut" was inspired by an interview with a Japanese guy.
ReplyDeleteThere are bodies all around us trying to right themselves. I agree, Samantha, so many people sitting alone in the dark. Though the cause of death is still unconfirmed, look at David Carradine--naked and alone in a closet with a noose.