Let’s Talk About the Midnight Ramble

As a participant to Furious Flower Poetry Conference at James Madison University, I had to read my poetry (easy to do, sort of) and be interviewed. Well, reading along with poets I deeply admire and who I have admired for many years is not easy, but it was deeply satisfying. Remica L. Bingham-Risher, Mendi Obadike, A.Van Jordan, Tyehimba Jess, Camille Dungy, and Jericho Brown, who the night before was “blaming it on the boogie”—HE CAN DANCE—were all wonderful to hear, and as that list shows the range of topics and poetic approaches was different. The past couple of weeks have provided me with opportunities unexpected and anxieties much greater than they should have been. But it is all good.

There are times when I as a single woman feel a bit flummoxed by the mother-talk, since many younger women poets I know are moms. But then I’ve been around long enough to remember when it was unusual for a woman poet to be a mom and poet w/out great sacrifice. In some ways, women poets are working out different ways to express in their feminity, so that motherhood or lack thereof does not privilege the female speaker—things have really changed over the four decades I’ve lived up north, working on being a poet and writer and person of some success. Those changes have occurred because of the difficult work that feminism has wrought—no matter the wave: first, second, whatever. The feminine is, of course, a contested term, but somehow sisters are working a great many things out, despite every effort to bend our bodies, minds and spirits to ways alien to health, critical inquiry and education, and open exploration of faith, spirit, vision. Oppression is a curious thing, the oppressor always assumes his or her ideas are superior and need no critique, even when the results of said oppression often makes life a living hell, and not just for women. So I think of Salt n Pepa’s "Let Talk About Sex," which seems almost back to the future.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about sexual pleasure as voiced by women. How women create or expand the language of desire. When I was at VCCA, I read three poems that thrilled my audience: “Son Cubano” and “Tributary” from Painkiller and a new poem that features the figure of a man with a black feather tattoo. And I remember reading “Tributary” at BAM Café in a program produced by Tai Allen and how the audience gasped—was it the poem, my age? Or simply that talking about sex from the point of view of pleasures of both eye and touch continues to surprise? These poems of course revel in lust, desire, the male body, and of course, the poems play with language.

Tributary

between nipple and the cock’s split tip,

melanin fleshes a deeper, darker brown

pleasure and genesis at play

nappy hairs circle and re-circle

your skin’s sweat to taste my mouth

seeks all your earth bound beauty

torso and groin                                   Oh tributary

splash

While my focus in Painkiller was not only on lust, it was truly fun to read a serious poetry that does. I finally read proxy by R. Erica Doyle and, well, talk about a book length poem that takes lust and desire from her very lesbian perspective and makes it HOT HOT HOT and smart, smart, smart. There is no topic that cannot find itself in a great poem and it struck me that my women poet friends, gay and straight, know how to make great poems based on desire, sex, lust, you name it, women poets have done it in print on the page in fragments—see Sappho.

So in the month when the crescent moon pierces streaky or fluffy clouds; when hawks circle farmlands and stables; when everybody goes back to school, let’s talk about sex. I can’t share all of the work that friends sent me, but I so enjoyed those that were sent and from the comments from other poets who said things like I ought to create something and soon. I hope they do. There needs to be a space that allows us to claim and declare those noisy, juicy, laughing voices that we have. We need our mirth. But often, we find ourselves at sea when expressing those things that satisfy us—whether it is lingering Puritanism, perfectionism, or fear—or we may be at the cusp of finding those ways to name what is simply going on. Pleasures given and received make many of us anxious—ours is a patriarchal culture, and the policing of women’s bodies and the ways we communicate in the public square remains complex and oppressive. But women are risk takers, adventurous thinkers and, well, sometimes you just have to talk about the fun despite the anxiety.

Etta James’s wordless commentary on lust—that “feeling uneasy” is explored in proxy and it is almost impossible to excerpt—so I would simply suggest you get yourself a copy of Doyle’s book and prepare yourself for wild language ride. But she is not alone.

Kelle Groom, Alicia Ostriker, Monica Hand, Margo Berdeshevsky sophisticated slut, Shelagh Patterson, Jennifer Bartlett, Lynne Thompson, Allison Hedge Coke, who has a lovely poem, “Summer Fruit” in her forthcoming book, Streaming, Lydia Cortes's Whose Place is another must read, and Marilyn Nelson, are younger and older; gay and straight; ethnically different and they are bold writers about sex. And there are so many other poets who wanted to send something or write something. I think I have an anthology in the making.

I can't quote them all so I’ll focus on a few here, but I loved “Opals” by Groom from her collection, Underwater City, which opens with the lines: “In the black lake/I swam out to him.” The persona in the poem has great agency and the poem ends: “he moved me/down, a blue/shadow, bones”—the brevity of the lines recall orgasmic breaths.

A very different tone is explored in Shelagh Patterson’s, a young African American lesbian writer who knows how to take the talk and walk it. She starts “The Best Lesbian Poem Ever” with cinematic language, and continues:

The say, 940 hours of film would be sped up
to three minutes in which would unfold the spring existence
of the flowers, perhaps ending with looping the image of
the petals falling open, falling open, open.
Also, the whole movie would be edited in common time.
Every third beat would flash a still of two women in bed
which would work as the heartbeat of the film
so three quarters of the film would be these flowers unfolding
braiding with the fourth quarter unfolding in stills shown every
third beat the story of a night of fucking.
If I were to send you the best lesbian poem ever,
it would continue on with another image of opening,
perhaps like the smell of coffee in the morning
slipping down the hall from the kitchen to the bed,
opening like bricks falling from the fortress wall
of pueblo ruins, opening like breath
blown over an empty beer bottle,
opening like my body opens and beats for you

While flowers are often used as metaphor for female genitalia—makes sense, you know—Shelagh puts her edge on this, using filmmaking as metaphor and then moving from image making to love making effortlessly. But as a bi-racial American lesbian, she shoulders those burdens of history that women of color carry (One that Lynne Thompson takes on in her poem, “The House of Many Pleasures” in Beg No Pardon). Patterson is clearly up to the task of unpacking that baggage. Plus, she turns her own body into a heart beat in that simile. Wow.

A great and sweet surprise was a series of poems from Marilyn Nelson, who is one our finest and most formal of poets. You ask poets for their stuff and, well, you can be surprised. Here’s her take on the monthly ups and downs of the young, the lusty, the married and the still looking around. Aquarius that I am, I decided to feature her “February” from these Pin Up Poems and I defy anyone to not smile, hell laugh along with these lovers:

February

How beautiful your feet in boots,
your thighs in faded jeans,
your biceps in that flannel shirt,
your forearms’ sweaty sheen.

I watch you from my living room
as you unload your truck:
you reach and bend, and through my wind-
dow, I am passion-struck.

Your body is a dinner bell
that makes me salivate.
I’m starving for a taste
of you. May I fellate?

Ah Marilyn, I didn’t know that “fellate” was a word. I have so enjoyed getting these poems and learning new stuff.

Cait Johnson is a poet and performer whose work flows from her spirituality focused on the Great Mother and nature. This opening stanza from her lyric, “Seed Pollen,” uses a conceit with great skill and shows her enjoyment of the male body.

green the lake-edge heaped with thick seed pollen
thick life finding soil wet swamp seed fertile Nile-green Nile sweet Isis
living thick sweet oh everywhere possible everywhere new
rumpled sheets of seed cotton sheets rumpled on the lake
your stubble pricking up through skin a field of frost

While the previous poems speak to sexual pleasures desired and found no matter the gender, Monica Hand creates one that explores a young woman’s learning to love and please her own body.

The girl who was a horse

I once loved a girl who was a horse.
She’d let me ride her all night,
never got tired of my thighs

gripping her belly or my coarse
hands around her delicate neck.
She was always slippery wet

when we reached peaks of desire.
But my heart wandered, lusted for
another pony with a fancy

bridle and saddle. Now, no bare back
sun lit horizons, no wild headlong
rush into kaleidoscopes.

She’s gone. The girl I loved who was
a horse, gallops without me.

Women grown were once girls finding how/why their vaginas did what they did. We shed blood and then we no longer shed blood monthly. We move in a world that grabs at our breasts, our hips without our permission. A world that demands we use our fertility or not use our fertility. We are told that our bodies are unclean, that the clitoris should be removed; that men are the only ones who should lead in the courtly dance. We fight each day for our autonomy. We fight to claim our pleasures, to ride that horse, to swim that lake, to be a heartbeat. We deserve a better world where sex and sexuality is seen through a prism of pleasures given and received in joy and mutual benefit. But I know that’s a long, long way from now.

But poets create language that allows us to start the future now. We really do. At Furious Flower conference, when Rita Dove was reading “Shakespeare Says,” while James Brandon Lewis played saxophone and Tyehimba Jess wailed on his harmonica in what could only be called The Thomas Sayers Ellis’ version of a Midnight Ramble—that public space as a place for deep sensuality and joy was in absolute display. Our bodies are to be touched, our voices are to be heard, our vision should be expressed. Our joy and fear should be shared. Community flows from ideas, values, desires. Poets make those communities, one word/line, stanza/poem presented, contested, learned from, at a time. Because wildflowers grow where they grow.