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I enjoyed Jim Cummins' and Denise Duhamel's comments, as I've enjoyed their poetry over the years. It's a pleasure to be in their company. I want to approach this subject from a different angle.
What is erotic in poems? For some readers, graphic language and a bawdy directness, indicating sexual experience and lack of inhibition are appealing. If a woman writer is intrepid enough to place "cock" and "cunt" in her poems, you might think approvingly, no shrinking violet, this one! She is tough, she is brazen, she is "now." She doesn't cater to the old dream of beauty, and she's titillating besides. Maybe this is even a mandate: Pity the postmodern woman writer who doesn't put 'cunt' in her poems!
My poem "On Not Using the Word 'Cunt' in a Poem" emerged from considerations along these lines. A writer I know read a poem of mine in a magazine and wrote to me about it. She said that it was a little stately, that I might want to rough it up, sex it up a bit. The poem was not about the body, or sex, or love: it was about an idea, an idea which had to be (painfully) relinquished. It was an abstract and meditative poem, and—I'll admit it—a little stately. But the idea of "sexing it up" nagged at, then galvanized, me, especially since I am grumpy about the contemporary convention that women use graphic language to prove they are free from convention. In a torrent of language and attitudinizing, I wrote the poem, "On Not Using the Word 'Cunt' . . . almost as it appears. Though tonally close to anger in parts, the poem was a riot to compose: one of those experiences in which you, the writer, are intoxicated by the flood of language, mind sparking, tongue racing . . .
I wanted to explain that, in some cases, to rough it up/sex it up might be the equivalent of showing 't and a'—the same ole same ole, catering to new gender mandates, like "a burlesque romp/by someone who would rather keep her dress." Is a contemporary reader so distractable/skeptical that she/he needs to be flashed at every few lines? Must women writers continue to be subjected to the old polarities of prim and proper (old-fashioned) versus naughty and bawdy (postmodern)? Can't a woman writer be abstract and meditative by choice without losing authority? (Isn't that, in fact, a little more taboo these days?)
There is erotic engagement between writer and reader of another kind, as the body of words, so to speak, tempts and fascinates by drawing the reader into cerebration, excitements of the mind. I think of the language play and tonal revelations Emily Dickinson gives her readers that make each of us feel as if she speaks to us alone. Her poems are eternally charged. And what about the seductive possibilities of sound? A writer can seduce if she/he means to give pleasure, as Wallace Stevens can (to me), no matter how abstract he seems at times. We can submit as that music—whether discordant, harmonious, or composed of scales in between—guides the imagination to more "jocular procreations."
I think of that smarmy marvel of a tongue, the serpent in Paradise Lost, so flattering and seductive to Eve. If we are not so innocent, we can engage in conversations that are more than merely graphic or flattering. Consider the linguistic possibilities of a longer discourse between Eve and her tempter—not resulting in teeth ripping skin—yet; both speakers rising in words of excitement, wit, and suggestiveness; both voices rippling with inflection.
Lisa Williams
*The above is not a response to the blog before mine that I've just read, and which I think is remarkable.
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Pictured above: from "Beauty and the Beast" (Cocteau)