David Lehman was kind enough to include one of my poems in his Best American Erotic Poems anthology. And then he was kind enough to ask me to blog here.
I have my vices. I drink and I smoke and I eat fried foods.
But the truth of the matter is, I don’t generally consider myself a writer of erotic poems, nor do I tend to blog. It makes nervous. Hell, they both make me nervous (erotic poems and blogs). I mean, my parents might read my “erotic” poem in the anthology, and then they also might read this very blog entry. (Damn you, Internet!) Still, my parents may be more “erotic” minded than I am. I remember being 10 years old and scowling down at a newspaper advertisement that displayed the image of a woman’s deep cleavage (along with her head) and declaring it “gross.”
“That’s not gross,” my father replied, annoyed. “It’s beautiful.”
Erotic poems are supposed to lusty and fun. Scratch that: they are lusty and fun. So I begin to feel like a bit of a party pooper when I think that certain poems are perhaps too explicit. I prefer sex in poems to be conveyed by what T.S. Eliot termed as the “objective correlative.” I don’t think most people would consider Eliot erotic, and maybe I simply empathize with his terrified regard of the “Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / [But in the lamplight downed with light brown hair!]” It’s the sheer mammalian (hairy) aspect of it all that makes me want to wipe down the surfaces of my apartment with Clorox Wipes. And so is it that I simply like for my poems to be sanitary?
They (my poems) are not sanitary, of course. (They wouldn’t be poems if they were.) They may not be graphic, and they may not have folks rucking up against one another in the privacy of barnyard shacks . . . but things happen in them. I guess I just prefer to convey physical intimacy through metaphor. I like the sex in my poems to be implied. I like for the sex in my poems to be the kind of sex that's equally part of the mind. -- CM
Comments