Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh

This week’s poem, “from 237 More Reasons to Have Sex,” is a collaboration between Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh.  We don’t publish long poems often, but we had more space in our double-size Tenth Anniversary Issue (Winter 2008).  Even so, because the original is chapbook size we asked Denise and Sandy to excerpt from the poem.  For this post I’ve excerpted even further, including just enough from the Barrow Street version to give you a feel for the original.

from 237 More Reasons to Have Sex

“Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but
now I found that there should be some added…”
—Cindy Meston, co-author of “Why Humans Have Sex,” Archives
of Sexual Behavior (Volume 36, Number 4, August 2007)

5. My vibrator was in the repair shop.
18. You were blocking the way to the refrigerator.\
20. You were my mayonnaise.
27. Because we’d put all our clothes in the washing machine.
42. Nin Andrews told me, “It always makes the corn
grow faster,” and I wanted to get into your Farmer’s
Almanac.
43. And I into your bales of hay.
44. I had a thing for Christian Bale in Velvet
Underground and The Prestige.
46. I’d just slurped my Moon Pie.
53. I had just seen Cicciolina in the Italian film
Monica: Il Vulcano di Piacere, and I was about to
erupt.
55. I was Bert the Cop in the remake of It’s a
Wonderful Life. After I see you float by I tell
George Bailey I’m going home “to see what the
wife is up to.”
59. I had these new grappling hooks I wanted to try
out.
62. I pretended you were Tom Cruise playing air
guitar in Risky Business.
63. I pretended I was Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s
couch.
64. I pretended I was the couch.
68. I felt nasty, guilty of appropriation, and sex made
me feel likable again.
71. As Karl Marx declared: “I’m the worst I ever had.”
82. It was because I liked to wink at our TV camera en
passant.
87. I’ve always had a thing for good boys in letter
sweaters.
88. I’ve always had a thing for letter carriers in blue
sweaters.
89. I was watching The Postman Always Rings Twice
on DVD when I heard the doorbell.
90. It was only me, but we enjoyed the serendipity, and
I gave you the ring I found in the Post Toasties box.
91. The palm reader foretold it all—the ring that
smelled like sugar, the chiming doorbell.
92. It was Tuesday and she knew we always did it on
Tuesday, and she liked to watch us from behind the
potted palm.
94. She found it more exciting as a simulcast.
109. There was an hour to go before curfew.
113. You promised me we could name our first
daughter Chastity, just like Sonny and Cher had.
123. Then you said, “Everything is about sex except sex,
which is actually about power and money,” making
me feel richly powerful.
127. Eating those apples, I felt young again.
142. I always got excited thinking of myself as Saint
Monica, who, as a young girl, was given in
marriage to a bad-tempered, adulterous pagan
named Patricius.
143. I think of you that way, too. Or at least I’d like to
get into the habit (if you know what I mean).
148. I also liked to play the other Monica—chubby
Monica of Beret-Humiliation, Hussy Monica,
Monica the Duped.
150. Sure I was a money-grubber, a gold-digger, but that
didn’t mean I didn’t love you.
176. Nin Andrews said, “We were cultivating one
another,” but I was cultivating Catholic guilt.
179. I was invested in making the right impression.
182. To celebrate the one-dollar win on the two-dollar
lottery ticket.
183. To celebrate our third place winner Sparky at the
track.
187. To celebrate the calibration between your orgasm
and mine.
188. To calibrate the leverage between your wants and
my abilities.
191. To conduct ourselves in a disrespectful manner.
193. I was going on intuition.
197. I was from the Kingdom of the Damaged.
198. I lived in a little shack just down the hill from you.
199. You were from the Kingdom of the Damaged.
200. Half way between the Kingdom of the Damaged
and the Hamlet of the Deranged.
201. You were as irresistible and complicated as a great
poem.
202. You were like a shimmering flower of eyes, hair
and petals.
211. I was wearing my new saddle shoes—and your
wingtips were all polished.
220. Still we sailed onward, navigating via bi-polarity.
225. How I longed to alphabetize your file cabinets.
231. “Ah, Monica!” gushed the ever-ardent Stanislav
Shmigegi. “I’ve found you at last!”
232. But was it too late? We weren’t as ferocious, even
though you were kind, ignoring my love handles.
233. And I admit: I’d changed, too. Same mask and
tightrope, one overshoe and my bicycle wheels on
backwards.
235. And then we remembered: that little place next to
the vibrator repair shop in line 5.

-- Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh

I like the poem’s inventiveness, its brio and its spirit of play, all of which depend to some extent on its extravagant length.  Taking off from the absurd pedantic epigraph, the poem rolls on, generating itself from line to line and seeming as inexhaustible as its subject.  I also like the way the poem moves, shifting nimbly as it embraces a grab bag of material including little film scenarios (invented and borrowed), miniature scripts for porn films and sex fantasies, word play, jokes, double entendres, tiny domestic scenes, and much much more.  As also fits the subject, the poem is having a very good time.

To see the complete original poem, you can go to
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/237-more-reasons-to-have-sex/5805819
If you are curious about which poet wrote what, andy’s part appears alone in Ernesta, in the Style of the Flamenco (forthcoming from Marsh Hawk Press, 2010).

-- Patricia Carlin