Instructions.
Audre Lorde in her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” writes “This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with the joy in which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate, those aspects in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventional expected, nor the merely safe.” She goes on to say “recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.” So how do we steer clear of the erotic ghetto? How can the erotic infuse the rest of our lives—our actions? How refuse to “settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventional expected, nor the merely safe?”
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We seek instruction for the things most our own. How to breath, walk, fuck. The sex or erotic instruction book sells technique and proposes to tell you secrets that are actually open and available to all. A quick tour through a nearby chain bookstore: 269 Amazing Sex Tips for Men; Striptease Kit: Everything You Need to Take It Off; The Lowdown on Going Down; Lube Job, A Winners Guide to Great Maintenance Sex; Miss Finishing School for Boys Who Want to be Girls; How to get Beautiful Women into Bed, Ride ‘em Cowgirl: Sex Position Secrets for Better Bucking.
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Instruction books, while entertaining and pleasurable, tend more toward a narrowing of the imagination and possibility—back to the erotic ghetto. Erotic books and sex manuals offer rules and instructions. Movies instruct on the screen. In Don Patterson’s collection of reflections and aphorisms The Book of Shadows he says: “Anal Sex has one serious advantage: there are few cinematic precedents that instruct either party how they should look.”
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But perhaps the poet, using the very exacting forms of instruction or advice, can pursue a highly pleasurable and erotic undertaking. In his great poem “Directive” Robert Frost writes:
"The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you / Who only has at heart your getting lost."
These two lines seem a great piece of erotic instruction, yet most instruction is not about getting lost but its reverse. The erotic is both: being lost and being found. Instruction poems can be very erotic and playful. Octavio Paz tells us “The agent that provokes both the erotic act and the poetic act is imagination. “ I think now of the famous instruction: "Am returning in three days. Don’t wash."
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The poet can subvert a form that feels overly proscriptive by taking the literal and instructive and making it suggestive, reconfiguring rules into realms of possibilities, using the highly erotic modes of instruction: recipe, precise attention to language, ritual, and mastery toward opening not closure.
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Do you have a favorite instruction or advice poem?
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OVIDICE
How do I satisfy my partner? With hands palms up—to heaven, begging pardon
How do I maintain an erection? When savage Frenzy dries her tears again.
How can I tell if my partner is faking? By a huge boar, that served Diana’s ends--
What and where is the G-spot? Is in the grip of chance, of sudden shifts:
Is it OK to watch porn? Magpies the mocking dwellers in the woods.
--Catherine Bowman
from the archives; first posted February 11, 2008.
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