 Fluids: The Dumbing Down Of The Erotic Poem ....................................................................................................... ..................................... Where are the psalmists today? I don't mean mealy-mouthed religious afficionados, I mean writers who can turn out something as deeply affecting as "The Song of Solomon" which is as erotic a poem as can be found. "My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock." What I find online is mostly snickering back alley braggadocio about the writer's own desirability. I see plenty of recounted exploits and graphic descriptions along the lines of "what I'd do, baby, if I were with you", but they lack the one thing essential for real erotica and that is an inherent sense of reverence, the essentially mysterious movement of the erotic impulse itself. I mean the absolute tongue-tied-ness in the presence of the total "otherness" of the beloved that stirs, if it can speak at all, something more like music than anything else when in the grip of arousal. Those times when we can merely hum with being alive, and almost inarticulately so, so that what emerges are words describing what is more joy than ooze. Genuine erotica is graphic about the flow of feeling, but almost never about the sexual acts themselves or the cataloging of body parts, and how they couple and spew. That is more in the realm of diary, where a personal pornography might be acceptable, but there is nothing lovely or memorable or even erotic about a show of erectile scorecards, or how much labial wetness one experienced-- or its smell-- or how many panties were soaked. That is junior high school notebook scribbling, and it stirs nothing, save prurience. There is no music whatsoever: there's exhibitionistic flash, but certainly no art. There's thrum and thump, though no different than a 'Quarter Show" would render. If you happen to to enter one of the roped-off forum sections of a poetry board that's reserved for the erotic outpourings of its members, you'll find a litany of four-letter words, sexual innuendo, and a hedonistic version of private journaling. What you will not discover is eroticism itself. Our contemporary and technical age has rooted out romanticism altogether in a tell-all enviroment that results finally in boredom, or a game of trumping the most outrageous thing that happens to appear. Romanticism is not synonymous with flowery verse. That's merely bad poetry. Romanticism is something that skirts the edges of reality- it's in the 'feeling realm'- never the biological, clinical or crass. "Love is a stranger and speaks a strange language," wrote Rumi... Indeed it is--and something tells me it's not the language of the street. I don't know if we'll ever recover what we've lost. Granted, there aren't many 'Solomons' or D.H. Lawrences, but for too many blogging fools who think their pages too 'hot to trot', I say we need feelings rather than facts. Like the depiction of Bernini's 'St. Teresa in Ecstasy' above, we need a marriage of the spiritual and the physical. We are badly in need of an infusion of mysticism and magic in our view of the sexually poetic, or we're very much in danger of becoming adolescent neophytes recounting what happened in the alley on Saturday night- told as a listing of who did what to whom, but missing what it is we long for- in a voice we barely know because it's so foreign to our ears. And that 'wordless' ground is where real poetry, erotic poetry- begins: as a flowering we cannot even name, yet long so to describe. Main Page |
