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POETS
(4/20/92 or 5/31/92)
Is there a dearth of
good poetry now?
I don't really know. (Delany makes the
Probably I can't know... point in one of the
essays in "The Jewel-
Hinged Jaw" that the
day has long since
passed when any one
person could claim
to be knowledgeable
about published poetry.
There's too much of it.)
I've surrounded myself here
with a few stacks of poetry
I've been flipping through off
and on, trying to see if
there's anything of obvious
goodness to point to.
One thing that's impressed me lately is
that there are interesting things
happening out in the world of the San
Francisco S&M lesbians.
You may have heard about Susie Bright,
the former editor of "On Our Backs" and
author of "Susie Sexperts Lesbian Sex
World"... the people at "On Our Backs"
have been fighting against the rigid
70's style feminists (sometimes called
"militant vanilas"), essentially
fighting for their right to play around
with domination games, leather, dildos,
etc without being accused of being Bad
Feminists.
A few years ago there was some
heavy controversy arising from
attempts at holding S&M fashion
shows at women's conferences.
(and as far as I can tell, the
"militant vanillas" have lost,
and feminists like Dworkin and
MacKinnon are now considered
extremists far from the
mainstream of feminism).
((this rectpara seems redundant with
material near the end
of CORRECT))
Anyway, this culture has produced some things
like the book I have in front of me _Dogs in
Lingerie_ by Danielle Willis. The cover
features the author posing in various shiny
black vinyl outfits, so in many ways this work
is packaged and sold like rock and roll: the
image of the artist is an important part of
the effect.
From "Pigbaby":
They say I'm strange and I wish I were
but every time I've gone to the cemetery and
laid my head on the earth
listening for muffled breathing and
the stirring of limbs
I've heard nothing MONSTERS
but beetles
Another book, slimmer but similarly packaged from
the Zeitgeist Press, "Where's My Wife" by Jennifer
Blowdryer. This is from "Why White People Are
Quaint":
This thrills me. It's been obvious for some time now
that white people are on the decline, just like the
British Empire once was. To go from being on the
decline, the dullest, least relevant, whiniest, out-of-
touchiest; to being quaint, is more than I hoped to
occur in my own humble generation.
Once you're quaint, which my husband, baby and I
will be, you can be sought after for meaning. Like
people go to New Mexico and buy goods from
overweight American Indians who have to coolly play up
to their customers, a constantly flip flopping seller/buyer
game.
Some things from the _High Risk_ anthology.
Pat Califia's "Heroin":
you wrap the narrow belt
you used to cinch up your own forearm
around my neck and
pull it tight as you
fuck me from behind
my face turns into a ceramic mask
I cannot breathe but
oh God I come I go
swimming fast underwater
like a crocodile after carrion or a mate
and I understand what you say about
how it makes you mean when you do a lot of it
it is the gift that heroin brings
to make you capable of doing
whatever you must
to get more of it
And the opening line of "Butch" by Jane Delyn:
She was so ugly I found her attractive, though of course
I didn't want anybody to see me with her.
"Black Russian" a song by a local band named X-Tal:
You and me, we belong together
Like Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky
We can talk about our endless pain
And the failure of our ideology
Spill your guts all over a canvas
And from my exile I'll fire off another tract
We walk a thin line between faith and fate
But right now I'd rather not talk about _that_, so...
Pour me another Black Russian
And put off the serious part of the discussion
It's my downfall, it's my poison
It's my platform, it's my position
So: is any of this "great"? Maybe yes, maybe no.
These people don't really have any deep underlying
grasp of how the world works, so they're no where near
the level of, say, Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and
Hell" (and maybe not even that of Ginsberg's "Howl").
At their worst they're just paintings on a black velvet
underground. But at their best they have an
uncompromising will to honesty (which they sometimes
confuse with pessimism). They're trying hard to speak
the truth about their own experience (even though it
sometimes seems to degenerate into a contest to see who
can be the most degenerate...) and I think it works by
the standards of today, if not of eternity.
And does it really need to work for an eternity?
An obssession with "immortal" art may be besides
the point...
Science Fiction, for example, may be more like
technical literature or perhaps newspaper writing, than
a typical entry into a Norton's Anthology of whatever.
While it lives, it performs a certain function, and
once it's filed away as history, perhaps it can perform
a different function, but that isn't and shouldn't be
the point of doing it in the first place.
THISNIGHT
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